there is bravery in being soft

The Sierra Foothills, California

When I was in 2nd grade, my teacher told my mom that I must be "spoiled because I couldn't do anything for myself." When my mom mentioned I was having a hard time learning to read, she responded, "oh! I noticed that and I was so surprised because she's so intelligent—"

In 3rd grade I was diagnosed with dyslexia. I couldn't read Dr. Suess.

In 4th grade I successfully read the first page of the Magician's Nephew, but couldn't get any further.

In 5th grade I was doing 4th grade math, and when I wrote on lined paper, I started in the middle of the page. I also had to study every night for my spelling tests, and the one week my mom was too busy to help me study, I got a D.

6th-8th grade I was reading through the Narnia books.

In 7th grade I went to state's for a Patriot's Pen essay contest.

In 8th grade, I had to drop back to 7th grade math, because Algebra I was too hard, and I was experiencing the onset of OCD.

At some point around here I had to listen to Little Women as an audiobook because I couldn't read it. Tried Jane Austen, same result.

All throughout high school I struggled intensely with math and science. I didn't understand them no matter how hard I tried, so instead I memorized everything I could.

I graduated high school in 2020, suma cum laude.

College was similar, a bunch of books I didn't really grasp. Didn't get a lick of Shakespeare (but I wrote my best paper ever about Ophelia and Cordelia), Dante, Proust, Aristotle, or Henry James, but I paid really close attention to lectures and underlined anything that was important and thus wrote good papers. I did understand (and loved) Dostoevsky, Austen, Waugh, Sophocles, Plato, and others.

I graduated suma cum laude again in December.

The Fall of Gil Galad // Song of Eärendil // Lay of Nimrodel 

I often hear the argument that having major characters die is more realistic than having them always come through unscathed. Of course it is. But I personally don’t want my fiction to necessarily be “realistic” – I want my fiction to be entertaining. For me, that means watching engaging characters I care about get into and out of dangerous predicaments, working and thinking together in order to defeat the bad guys. While some authors (and readers) like the tension of wondering who will live and who will die, I prefer the tension of seeing how the heroes are going to think or work their ways out of each difficult or impossible situation they find themselves in. If I want realism and the deaths of people I care about, I can turn on the news.

Dress

c. 1772-1775

silk, linen, cotton (thread)

England

For the last message - “drums in the deep / we cannot get out” - used fast elvish characters. Ori uses a “trailing scrawl of elf-letters” to deliver the last line: “they are coming.”

This is quite poignant because of the underlying implication that the elvish alphabet is probably faster and clearer to write than native dwarvish, and Ori obviously had it permanently locked and loaded; and further, that it was suitable in someone’s last desperation, their final trailing scrawl.

But it’s also really funny that Ori was like. Shorthand emoji.

For example, a couple years ago, while learning Spanish, I encountered the word for a store, "la tienda." I thought "huh, that's a lot like tener (tiene) - the word for store in Spanish literally corresponds to 'to have/keep'. How interesting!"

False cognates happen all the time, within one language and when comparing two or more languages.

The word "tienda" is NOT actually related to "tener/tiene."

"Tienda" in Spanish means "tent," and it comes from the same Latin root word as the English word "tent." Every Latin-based language, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, and even Romanian, has a similar word.

"Tener/tiene" does mean "have/keep/hold," but it is unrelated to "tienda." "Tener" comes from an entirely different Latin root word.

However, the word "store" is the same in both instances. It refers to a place where items may be kept OR a place where items may be purchased (though the latter is mainly used in North America).

I'm not a linguist, but it's as simple as looking it up with a reputable source. It is so helpful to know root words instead of just guessing!