K C

CALL DOWN THE HAWK from the air; 

 Let him be hooded or caged 

 Till the yellow eye has grown mild, 

 For larder and spit are bare, 

 The old cook enraged,         

 The scullion gone wild 

Free Graphic Novels (DC, Marvel, Image, etc), Music, TV shows, and music on HOOPLA.

Free music that you can KEEP on FREEGAL

I work in the largest library system in my state (17 branches in total).

I use it not only for ebooks, but movies as well.

Other FREE resources to check with your library for are:

Freegal Music (download and keep music, including current music)

Hoopla Digital (borrow ebooks, e-audiobooks, e-graphic novels, stream movies)

Kanopy (stream movies; also available on Roku!)

Axis360 (usually hot or just released ebooks)

If you don’t have a library card…

GET ONE!

If someone says libraries are a thing of the past…

BOOP THEM IN THE NOSE WITH YOUR KINDLE!

Don’t discount libraries as “quiet” places. 

THEY ARE ALIVE!!!

THEY ARE LOUD!!!

(Sound is very much required on this one.)

Sometimes food is so darn tasty you gotta sing its praises.

AWOOOOO! 

Forgot a word in Spanish, while speaking Spanish to me, but remembered it in English. Became weirdly quiet as they seemed to lose their entire sense of identity.

Used a literal translation of a Russian idiomatic expression while speaking English. He actually does this quite regularly, because he somehow genuinely forgets which idioms belong to which language. It usually takes a minute of everyone staring at him in confused silence before he says “….Ah….. that must be a Russian one then….”

Had to count backwards for something. Could not count backwards in English. Counted backwards in French under her breath until she got to the number she needed, and then translated it into English.

Meant to inform her (French) parents that bread in America is baked with a lot of preservatives. Her brain was still halfway in English Mode so she used the word “préservatifes.” Ended up shocking her parents with the knowledge that apparently, bread in America is full of condoms.

Defined a slang term for me……. with another slang term. In the same language. Which I do not speak.

Was talking to both me and his mother in English when his mother had to revert to Russian to ask him a question about a word. He said “I don’t know” and turned to me and asked “Is there an English equivalent for Нумизматический?” and it took him a solid minute to realize there was no way I would be able to answer that. Meanwhile his mom quietly chuckled behind his back.

Said an expression in English but with Spanish grammar, which turned “How stressful!” into “What stressing!”

Maggie Stiefvater recently posted about YA as a genre:

I did a poll last year on my readers’ ages. I got 10k responses. Overwhelmingly they were 18 and up, with the vast majority in the 18-35 range. From a professional writer’s side of the table, I write stories that will please my existing reader base, and my readers are aging. They began reading me in high school and kept reading me. So I age up, up, up — until one could argue I’ve been writing adult books for years now.

But also, I write for me. Stories that intrigue me. Stories that are about questions I’m grappling with, or situations I’ve lived through, or themes I want to live with for a year. And I’m getting older. I began publishing YA when I was 25.

That means I was processing my young adult years. I wrote for myself, which is to say, I was also writing for other young people. However, as I get older, if I still write for myself, without considering my audience … I keep writing for the person I am processing.

If I want to write for teens, I will need to add in a conscious filter to be sure I’m writing a YA story. Because otherwise, guess who loves my books? 18-35 year olds. SHOCKING

YA is no longer an age range, it’s a philosophy, it’s a promise of a certain kind of character-driven story, and that’s why readers come to it no matter what age they are. We [need to] find another way to label them so we understand that these books embody that immediate, close POV, progressive, genre-combining power that draws readers to YA now, without taking teen shelfspace.

I say this at every event I do these days: YA is changing! It’s not fiction for teenagers anymore, because older people read it too. There needs to be a distinction between ‘teen’ and ‘YA’ fiction. We’re in a place where books get criticised for having characters who ‘act like children’, in a book for children, about children, because there are so many books about early-twenties characters in the YA section, that it skews what the genre should be.

A significant subset of YA books are in that genre because there’s no other category where young writers can publish the kinds of books they want to write, without calling it YA. This is really frustrating, because it limits the type of books I can write.

I write characters, not age-ranges. I would write the same protagonist in the same way if they were 17 or 21 – because I’m writing a character who I want to write and read about, who I can relate to, who experiences the world in the way that a 26-year-old like me does now. But there’s currently an upper limit on the age I can give that character, because if they were a few years old, what genre would it be – adult sci-fi? That’s not where my readers are. That’s not where readers who are looking for the kind of books that I am writing are going.

In ten years, will I be writing YA? I think I’ll be writing the same kind of books, but they won’t be called YA anymore. There will be a new category that makes more sense of the chaotic jumble of books being marketed at some nebulous demographic none of us quite understand. The genre is in huge flux right now, which is incredibly exciting from a writing perspective – we’re shaping the literary landscape into what we want it to be.

I don’t have an answer to this – I just wanted to share some of my thoughts here, and Maggie’s, who consistently tweets about this in a thoughtful way that makes me think. Maggie also mentioned some books she loves which are adult but embody the tone of what we currently think of as YA genre (….for now.)

Another observation: I’ve actually read two adult novels in the past year’s time that are classified as adult and felt like YA (philosophically, tonally. They were All the Birds in the Sky, by @charliejane and The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by @natasha_pulley. They belong roundly in adult, but I think they’re also what adult YA readers are looking for when they come to YA. I think …

This was a huge eye-opening moment for me, because a few of these are my favourite books, and this is why I love them. So I thought I’d share some other books which feel like YA, but are shelved as Adult fiction (but I hugely recommend The Watchmaker of Filigree Street too.)

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers – Becky Chambers never fail to make my heart brim with love for humans and her wonderful visions of aliens. Her books always offer such unique and optimistic looks on difficult issues like gender, social equality, racism and hope. I wouldn’t mind living in her future, which isn’t something I say often about science fiction.

The Gloaming by Kirsty Logan – Magic and fairy tales, families and death, stone and water and bones. The writing is so poetic and easy to read, and I swallowed it up.

Havemercy by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett – A fantasy world of mechanic dragons and their hyper-masculine riders, and the magicians they team up with. Delicious indulgent fun.

Glamourist Histories series by Mary Robinette Kowal  – Magical regency romp around the world with magic and science and the boundary between the two.

A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland – An old man is trapped in prison, accused of witchcraft. An old man who has spent his life learning how to tell stories, and manipulate perceptions. An old man who will do anything to get free. An old man, who single-handedley manages to take down an entire government from a prison cell…..

Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho – This is the perfect mix of the magical regency London of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Georgette Heyer’s shamelessly trope-filled romances, and the charm and relationship dynamics of Sabriel. The whole book make me squirm with delight – from the UNICORNS to GIANT FURIOUS MERMAIDS to the CLOUD FLYING. Just – I want to tell you about every scene, because every scene is a delight. If you’re looking for more diverse fantasy, then this is the place to look.

so you know how everyone has a story

you know

like the story

like if you’re at a party and someone turns to you and says, tell the story

and you know exactly what they mean

the story

well 

i have a story

and not unlike most good stories, it involves three key components:

barack obama

pre-2008 reebok sneakers 

and the absolute earth-shattering horror you can only feel after making the worst mistake of your life 

so here we go

it all began eight years ago

(i was a gangly child then) 

and barack obama came to town

(when i was a young girl)

(my father took me out into the city)

(to see the president of the united states, obama) 

(barack obama)

except it wasn’t the city but where my parents worked 

and my mother was hired to take pictures of obama shaking the hands of others

(rich people)

(ceo’s) 

(people who didn’t wear reeboks to meet the president)

so i skipped school to see obama

(naturally) 

(but my teacher was a republican so it still counted as an absence) 

and the adventure begun

but as i soon learned

most of the adventure was waiting in a large room with my mother and some secret service men for roughly eight hours 

because there is no timing with obama

(barack obama)

no one can know when obama is supposed to be there

(barack obama)

there is no, like, obama warning system

(barack)

it’s just that one second he’s not there

and the next second

he’s there

(barack obama)

so it was eight hours

and i remember nothing from those eight hours except for when one of the secret service men tried to talk to me

‘how are your studies,’ he said

how’s school, he probably meant

but i didn’t understand at the time

i was a gangly child

i was scared

he was tall

(i cried)

and then all of a sudden

(about eight hours into the eight hours)

he was there

(barack obama)

he was beauty 

he was grace

he was

(barack obama)

he walked into the room

he wasn’t wearing reeboks 

(i noticed)

(i began to feel i’d made a mistake)

my mother took pictures of him shaking the hands of others

(rich people)

(ceo’s)

(none of whom were wearing reeboks) 

and at the very end

obama began to leave 

(barack obama)

i was happy enough to have graced his presence

but my parents

my parents were not happy

they needed more

‘mr. obama,’ they called

and they pointed to me

‘of course,’ obama said

(barack obama)

he’s so nice, i thought

and then it hit me

oh no, i thought

oh yes, my parents thought at some point, probably

i’m obama, obama thought, most likely

i was going to meet obama

up close and personal

obama

(barack obama)

the rest was a blur

and the next thing i knew i was there

with obama

(barack obama)

his hand was shaking my hand

his hand was on my hand

(nothing had ever felt so right)

‘so what’s you’re name,’ he asked 

(with obama’s voice)

(because he was obama)

(barack obama)

and i almost forgot but i told him

and he said it correctly even though it’s weird 

(obama said my name)

and we were off to a good start

how was i to know

how was i to know the horrors to come

‘so how old are you,’ he asked then

and that’s when this dream became a nightmare

‘twelve,’ i said

a seemingly innocent answer

but here’s the thing

i was 

thirteen. 

(thirteen)

(13)

(12+1)

(16-3)

(13.0)

(Thirteen.) 

what have i done, i thought

(panic! at the election)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3LGopSVju4

i still don’t know why i did it

did i really forget? 

did i do it for the thrill of the chase?

to see if i could?

maybe

but obama didn’t know

i did it, i thought, i lied

i lied to the president of the united states

i pulled it off

the greatest lie in history

the greatest heist

(i didn’t know what a heist was)

(i was thirteen)

‘oh so you’re in 6th grade then,’ obama said

shit.

i was so close

shit what do i say, i thought

the journey is not over

the nightmare rages on

what do i say

i open my mouth to say, yes

‘no,’ i say

what the fuck, i think 

‘no i’m in 7th grade” 

(because i was)

maybe he won’t know, i thought

but he did.

(obama’s been around the block)

(obama knows what’s up)

‘so you’re ahead of your class, then’ he said

(i wasn’t)

(i failed basic math at least twice by this time)

‘yes,’ i said, just wanting this nightmare to be over

just wanting the lie to end

for obama to call me out on my shit and arrest me

to spend the rest of my youth locked away in prison where i couldn’t hurt anyone any more with my lies

i waited

i waited for arrest

but arrest didn’t come

and that was even worse.

obama trusted me

obama thought i was a good kid

obama thought i was ahead of my class 

(ahead of my class) 

i let him down

i let obama down

(barack obama)

i watched him leave

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYNH1baA_7k

obama, i mouthed out after him

obama i’m sorry

(he trusted me)

why did i do it, you ask

i don’t know

after all these years

i still don’t know

it still haunts me

i still wake up at night, shaking, and i think

i lied to the president of the united states

(twice)

the photographic evidence of my nightmare hangs in my father’s office

i’m smiling through my pain

i’m wearing reeboks

obama is not

(barack obama)

i hope that someday, after obama’s retirement 

we can put this all behind us and start anew 

start fresh

(no more lies)

(no more deceit)

but i’m not naive

i know that we can never really go back

back to the way things were

five seconds after i met him but five seconds before i lied

but i can dream

i can hope

obama

obama i’m sorry

I put together an image set with quotes from @maggie-stiefvater. She made this list originally in response to a question from @rikkari. The post is here.

(Images from X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X.)

a thing happens + two people exchanging money in the back

fourth wall breaking

“give up all your weapons” and that one guy that spends the entire evening taking his weights worth out his pockets

*a terribly loud crash* meowing/ car sirens heard offscreen

alternatively: a terribly loud crash and one of the characters going “oops” in the most casual voice

people completely missing the completely unsubtle, very visible dangerous thing in the room with them

alternatively, people absolutely seeing the completely unsubtle, very visible dangerous thing in the room with them and just not giving a shit

bonus points if it’s a beleaguered minimum wage employee who just goes about their business like “yep same shit as always”

someone pretending they don’t know another character is eavesdropping, only to casually reveal at the end of the scene that they know (*leaving* “tell tom that he can come out now” *tom drops from the ceiling in spy gear, irritated*)

choosing to deal with the villain by just leaving them alone in a room with another character

the “hands go down” trope