Skip to main content

Popular posts from this blog

Spoiler-Free Book Review - The Squire's Tales (Gerald Morris)

Okay, so it's technically an entire series, but that's irrelevant. I am reviewing books and it is therefore a book review.  The Squire's Tales , by Gerald Morris, is a series of novels that retell in hilarious fashion the lesser known tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Don't worry, you won't have to hear about the sword in the stone again or anything at all about Arthur's childhood. Because this is where the best part comes in: these stories are told from the perspectives of those that other renditions tend to gloss over, mock or forget entirely. These characters are a squire, (as the title would imply) a page, three women and a knight who is objectively terrible at being a knight. He sings and plays music instead. His name's Dinadan. He's wonderful. Over the ten books in the series, you get seven different characters from whose points of view the stories are told (plus a couple extra in the last book, but that's a spec...

If You're Like Most People...

If you're like most people, you probably don't hate that phrase as much as I do. This is mainly because I overthink things. It's something I do a lot and you will therefore be seeing a lot of it in my contributions to this blog. Actually, come to think of it, overthinking is something pretty much all of us have in common in the Writing Mafia, so you can just expect it all the time from all of us. You're welcome.  Anyway, back to 'If you're like most people...'. This phrase wouldn't bother me if people actually meant it. But they don't. They don't mean 'If you're like most people...', they mean, 'If you're like most people who are like me... ' Because let me tell you something, most people - as in, the majority of the human population of the planet - are living either under the poverty line or hovering dangerously close to it, have minimal education and don't understand this rant or anyone who says that most hate...

Colors

I watched my daughter's sightless eyes close as I pulled her blanket around her tiny body. Even as she drifted into sleep, her smile tried desperately to rid my face of its scowl. The white men had done this to my Amika. They brought the disease that left her weak and blind. They brought the weapons that killed my father. They brought the culture that destroyed mine. They forced me away from everything I knew, they starved my family, they took away my reason to live, they broke my spirit. They left me in this cursed land in a tiny shack with nothing but my blind daughter. I, Malik, can never forgive them. I, Malik, will pay them back. I pulled the new bracelet off her thin little hand. "It feels just like my Cherokee beads, Papa," her innocent voice had said. The African beads from our slave girl Naira did indeed look similar to the Cherokee beads in Amika's hair. I had tried to take them from her earlier, but the confused and hurt look in her blind eyes stop...