So Your Character is From The United Arab Emirates ... Featuring Nada @ Africanaah's Book Blog

It's time for this week's So Your Character is ... Post! This is a weekly segment where I interview lovely volunteers from around the world to give you a firsthand account of being a citizen of their respective country or having a disability. I'm hoping to encourage international diversity, break stereotypes, and give writers a crash course on how to write a character from these different places on our planet. If you haven't checked out last week's  So Your Character is from Malaysia ... be sure to hop on over there and give it a read!

Disclaimer: The content below may be culturally shocking to some. Each of these posts is as uncensored as possible to preserve the authenticity of the cultures of each of the interviewees.

(None of the Images are Mine)

Writing Lessons from Movies: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

In recent years, The Hunchback of Notre Dame has made it into my top favorite Disney films. I didn't watch the film all the way through until my teens because my parents weren't too crazy about the song "Hellfire," but ironically that's become my favorite Disney villain song. After visiting the actual Notre Dame in Paris, a few years back I was so enraptured by how the animators captured the reverence and beauty you feel when walking into that spectacular cathedral. I actually heard the song "The Bells of Notre Dame" the entire time while touring the building. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a Disney masterpiece and here's why!

Warning: Spoilers

A Book Review of Glass Sword by Victoria Aveyard

Buy from Amazon!

Mare Barrow's blood is red—the color of common folk—but her Silver ability, the power to control lightning, has turned her into a weapon that the royal court tries to control. The crown calls her an impossibility, a fake, but as she makes her escape from Maven, the prince—the friend—who betrayed her, Mare uncovers something startling: she is not the only one of her kind.

Pursued by Maven, now a vindictive king, Mare sets out to find and recruit other Red-and-Silver fighters to join in the struggle against her oppressors. But Mare finds herself on a deadly path, at risk of becoming exactly the kind of monster she is trying to defeat. Will she shatter under the weight of the lives that are the cost of rebellion? Or have treachery and betrayal hardened her forever?

Series: Red Queen (Book 2)
Genre: YA Fantasy
Publisher: HarperTeen (February 9, 2016)
Page Count: 464 Pages

After reading and enjoying the first book, I knew I just had to get a hold of the sequel!

So Your Character is From Malaysia ... Featuring Anna @ A Tsp & Naadhira @ Legenbooksdary

It's time for this week's So Your Character is ... Post! This is a weekly segment where I interview lovely volunteers from around the world to give you a firsthand account of being a citizen of their respective country or having a disability. I'm hoping to encourage international diversity, break stereotypes, and give writers a crash course on how to write a character from these different places on our planet. If you haven't checked out last week's  So Your Character is from Sweden ... be sure to hop on over there and give it a read!

It's the first So Your Character Is ... post of the year! Whoo hoo! I'm so happy to have these ladies on the blog! I had the pleasure of meeting Anna in person at Realm Makers 2017. She flew all the way from Malaysia to Reno to attend the conference!

Disclaimer: The content below may be culturally shocking to some. Each of these posts are as uncensored as possible to preserve the authenticity of the cultures of each of the interviewees.

(None of the Images are Mine)

The Significance of Food in Stories

Food can be an easily overlooked detail in stories, especially in books when we don't have to physically show what the characters are eating. We can get away with generic words like pastry, meat, vegetable, and fruit, but food can add so much more detail to a story. Now you don't need to go all Bryan Jaques on your story and describe every dish in elaborate detail to the point if you were a little woodland creature you could copycat his recipes just from reading a paragraph of prose, but taking the time to think about your storyworld's food and how it affects the characters can add another layer to your story.

Goals for 2018

I'm back, peeps! I didn't plan on doing this post, but I've seen a bunch of people doing goals posts and so I kinda want to do one, so I am. I covered some of these things in my Monthly Summary/Year End post, but I tried to keep my points brief or else that post will be more monstrous than it already is, so I'm dedicating my first post of the year to the goals I have for the year.