Illiteracy, Red Stairs, And A New Hashtag

Hello, chaps and chapesses! I wanted to pop in for a few reasons. First and foremost is to let you know that yes, I have been writing and yes, it is going well and the reason I've been so incognito on the blog is that our home wifi is null and void and has been for the past two months and by the time I get to Starbucks or another wifi'd place, work for my food + fashion blog has stacked up so much, all my time is spent playing catch-up for that. So this is going to be a fun post because I have twenty minutes to cover a multitude of sins and I'm going to go at it at a running pace.

Teaching:

Tuesday, September 8th, was International Literacy Day! It baffles me to think there are, by some accounts, 757 million adults in the world who cannot read. When I stop to consider how different my life...heck...how different I would be had I never learned to read, it it almost too much to handle. As the primary teacher of two little girls, one of whom is on that precarious brinking of reading-but-not-quite, I feel like I'm up close and personal with the subject of literacy and "can we read," or "can we not read." The following infographic (brought to my attention by Grammarly) gives you a little more insight into the problem if illiteracy and where the highest problem-areas are.

Please don't take for the granted the fact that you can read and write and all the worlds that have opened up to you because of it. And if you ever get the chance to teach a child to read...do it. It brings the subject into such a different point of view!

Reading:

I'm working through Cocktail Hour by P.G. Wodehouse as well as slowly tromping through the rest of Schindler's List (it's so heart-rending I find I can only take very small doses), and reading through (over breakfast each morning) Julia Child's Mastering The Art of French Cooking. I heard this past weekend that Rooglewood Press is officially and permanently offering one of its author's stories as a free download, and Hayden Wand's The Wulver's Rose (from their Five Enchanted Roses collection) as chosen as the featured title! So definitely go download that and see if it tempts you into buying the whole collection.

September has also been a great month for another friend of mine, author Rachelle Rea, whose second novel, The Sound of Silver, Whitefire Press releases on October 15th! She's been busy all month sending out e-ARC copies to fellow authors and I just know it will be as huge a success as the first title.

Writing:

My untitled Sleeping Beauty story. I'm still not sure whether I will enter Rooglewood's Spindles contest with this story, but I am writing it to that end. If the story wants to stretch itself and get bigger than the allotted word-count, I'm not going to cramp it and make it fit. I have a good feeling about this story and if it wants to become a full novel (though I'm not saying it will) I want to give it its freedom. Also, Cottleston Pie, which is being conducted on paper, has been locked in my trunk for two weeks. But it is so much almost finished I keep forgetting I need to actually do the deed.

Just now, as they mounted the red stairs again, the Queen weighed the cost of asking the one question to which she already guessed the answer: “When our sweet Mariechen died, did you swear to never again love anyone, even her mother?" But, as always, she hesitated. Already so strained, what might honesty add to the turmoil? No, far better to accept the coolness in place of warmer emotions and, philosopher-like, remark that the weather was pleasant enough to require only a light wrap. She placed her arm in his, reminded him of their evening engagements and, at the door to his study, parted from him with a sensation like frostbite pulsing in her throat

Changing:

The hashtag for #wordplaywednesday! I know I've trained all of you to hashtag your weekly posts with that, but apparently we share it with something entirely different. So from now on, #wednesdaywordshare is the name of the game, okay? If you think of it, please share the news around so that we can all get grouped up again! :)

I will be back as soon as I can with a full snippets post, but I wanted to pop in while in the presence of wifi and say that I hadn't died, rotted, or abandoned ship. The Inkpen Authoress is still alive. Somewhat more stressed, busy, and wifi-deprived than of yore, but as full of words as she ever has been. Cheers, darlings!