Hello and welcome to the fourth and final installment of Strong Female Characters: May We Read Them. May We Write Them. May We Be Them. Guess what—I saved the best for last.
As I’ve mentioned before, my dad read the The Lord of the Rings books to me at an early age, and I was instantly hooked. There are several storylines and characters that I fell in love with, but none more so than Eowyn, Shieldmaiden of Rohan.
I’ve gotten a lot of questions recently about what the self-publishing process looks like and, while it is a bit different for each person, I thought I’d take a moment to walk you through what it has been like for me, personally.
Hello and welcome to the third installment of Strong Female Characters: May We Read Them. May We Write Them. May We Be Them. Today I will be discussing one of my favorite girls in all of literature—Lucy Pevensie.
I was quite young when I first read the Narnia series, and I fell in love with it instantly. There are so many deep and wonderful themes and moments throughout the books that make it one of my favorite series. As this post is about one specific character, rather than the books themselves, I will resist the urge to fill several pages singing its praises. Suffice it to say, if you haven’t read them, you should.
Hello, and welcome back to Strong Female Characters: May We Read Them. May We Write Them. May We Be Them. In today’s installment I will be discussing Alanna of Trebond. So without further ado…
I’m sure it’s no secret that I have been a life-long lover of books. As I’ve mentioned before, The Lord of the Rings was my first great literary love, and I took a deep dive into fantasy from there. Another series that meant a lot to me when I was younger was The Song of the Lioness Quartet by Tamora Pierce. I picked them up in high school, and I couldn’t put them down.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the kinds of things I would enjoy writing about for the blog (my hypothesis is that if I’m excited about the topics then I’ll post more often) and I decided I’d like to do a series entitled Strong Female Characters: May We Read Them. May We Write Them. May We Be Them. And, at the risk of turning this into an entirely Harry Potter fan blog, I want to start with Ginny Weasley. It makes practical sense to me, since I just finished going through the Harry Potter series again, and her story is fresh in my mind.
Heads up, major spoiler warning, as I will be discussing moments all the way through the end of Deathly Hallows. (I know it’s been 12 years since the final book was released, but I also know there are plenty of people who haven’t read the books yet, and I refuse to ever be the reason any part of this extraordinary story is spoiled for someone.)
As I get closer to the (self)publishing date of my first book, I’ve been thinking a fair bit about the story: where it started, how far it’s come, and all the many pieces of the writing process. Something that makes this story so special to me (other than the fact that I wrote it) is the fact that wrote so much of myself into it.
It’s that time of year again. I wish I could say that the weather has cooled off, the leaves are changing, and the air is filled with the indescribable magic that only autumn can bring. Unfortunately, it is still 80 degrees outside with little reprieve in sight as summer retains its iron grip on October. But there is a different kind of magic in the air, for the time has come for my annual reading of the Harry Potter books.
Last week I finished the first draft of my second book.
That feels incredibly surreal to say, partly because of how long it took me to write my first book. I had the idea for The Key when I was ten years old and scribbled down the first few pages on wide ruled notebook paper in my bedroom. It obviously reads a lot differently now than it did then, but that was when it all started for me. I spent years picking it up and putting it back down again, adding a few pages each time. It wasn’t until I moved to Nashville in 2013 that I finally finished it. The time between the first page and the last was fourteen years.
Today is July 31.
For a lot of people, this will not mean much. To those people, today is just another Tuesday. And perhaps it marks for them the end of July and the knowledge that tomorrow the sun will rise on the month of August, bringing with it the end of summer vacation. Soon (if we are lucky) the weather will begin to cool, summer will slowly fade, and Autumn will greet us with open arms, changing leaves, and pumpkin spiced everything.
While all these things are true, and Autumn is my favorite season by far, that is not what today means for me. Today is July 31, and today is Harry Potter’s birthday.