48 Hour Book Challenge, last day.

[lady_schrapnell]

Finished Lady Macbeth's Daughter last night, quite late, and went into the next book up instead of trying to write anything then. I'd ordered it as potentially useful for the History Book, and in a way it is, but in another way, not so much.  A slightly odd thing about several of the children's/YA books I've read that are strongly intertextual (in

Comments

[steepholm]

(Seriously? Dickens the character just told the heroine of the book that if he'd known her before writing Little Dorrit, it would have been a better book.)

Wowsers.

[lady_schrapnell]

Yup! The copy I ordered should be here soon for quoting purposes, so you shall have this and others properly.

[asakiyume]

There ought to be a word for that extra-special sort of Mary Sue which is an author claiming to be a better author than some well-known, well-regarded (<--I'm being understated here because I didn't want to write "genius" and get into a whole debate about what "genius" is) writer.

Seriously, let the world decide if you're better than Dickens or Dostoevsky. Don't claim it yourself. It just ... looks bad.

[lady_schrapnell]

Your userpic expresses the feeling exactly! :P

The thing is, I'd be unsurprised if each of the three authors I've mentioned there were shocked to come across this as a description of what they'd done. Which kind of makes me feel horrible for mentioning it in the first place, but how can you not read that into someone's book in which the young Lewis and Tolkien encounter adventures which are undisguised Narnia and Middle-earth?

[asakiyume]

Oh honestly, I so agree about the periods!

"You're not dying, my friend. This is just the extremely awkward way in which we women are designed, a huge pain in the neck and elsewhere, and I'm afraid all it means is that now you must be prepared to stuff rags in your undergarments and wash them out for days, once a month, and oh, you must now also fear pregnancy. Have fun."

[asakiyume]

I did have one friend who used to say, when she had her period, that Erik the Red was visiting her.

[lady_schrapnell]

I was brought up with the Curse, but didn't feel any need to continue it with my two!

[lady_schrapnell]

:) Much, much better version! The bit I've quoted there was compounded by the (slightly older) girl continuing to tell poor Albia she's now also a votaress of Banrigh, appearing to conflate menstruating females and those who follow 'the old ways' in one easy sweep. Maybe that is all it took.