Hanorah Words

Only I write tolerable romance. When I was in my late teens, I went through a romance novel phase. I call it a phase because it didn't last long, only a year or two and now I only read romance novels when my grandma gives them to me and I don't have that much else to read.  I think I just got sick of the formula to be honest. Some of the stories weren't so formulaic, but read the same romance author more than once and you're lucky if you don't feel like you're looking at the exact same novel with the names changed. Thank you, if I want that stuff, I'll read Harry Potter  fanfiction. At least then, the characters' names don't change, but the plots generally do. However, there is one author of romance novels that I could never give up ever in my life. I really like her six books... well, the four of the six that I've read.  I even have a favorite. I am a Jane Austen fan.  Now, there are several different types of Jane Austen fans. It dep

Soap Opera Fairy Tales! So... last year, there were two new shows available to watch on two big channels that heavily featured fairy tales as part of their plot.  The first one I heard of and saw commercials for was Grimm  which was created by the some of the people who helped write Buffy the Vampire Slayer  and Angel .  In fact, it sort of looked like a detective show (a la Angel ) about a person from a long line of monster hunters (a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer ).  It wasn't too far off the mark from what was promised and I figured I'd like it more than the other  fairy tale-based TV show that was also being made that year. That other show turned out to be Once Upon a Time...  or as my friend and I call it OUaT or as I think I'll call it from now on... OUT.  Seems fitting for some reason. So, OUT is a fantasy-drama series created by the guys who created  TRON:Legacy  and Lost , Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz.  It's about a town, Storybrooke, Maine where all

When I was a little girl, I watched this movie called A Little Princess .  You probably read that in my post about blue people.  Besides sparking my interest in the idea that a person's skin color could be blue, it also sparked my interest in India.  To my young mind, India became this magical place with old statues, monkeys that ate out of your hand, demons, blue people, gods that walked on earth, and the ability of animals to give their life force to humans.  My brain was captivated for a time. Then, I got distracted by school, life, France, and just everything else.  Mostly because we did a project on India and I found out that most of the things I thought existed in India were... very wrong. And the food tasted funny.  I was a very self-centered child. Then, as a teenager, I picked up books by Christopher Pike.  He was a young adult horror author of the 80s and early 90s. I mostly got his books from the library, thrift stores, and used book stores.  While a friend and I co

One of us is only in your head. So, I was hanging out with my friend Cynthia and her new boyfriend last night when we all decided to hunker down and watch the TV miniseries Battlestar Galactica.  Now, I had seen it before... years ago. I came in on the tale-end of that show. I started watching mid-season three and I couldn't stop even though I'd never seen most of the other episodes.  I learned the highlights from looking the series up on Wikipedia.com every time I came up with something I didn't exactly understand.  I also looked at the TVtropes page and anything else I could get my hands on to explain what I was missing, catching up on the old episodes when they were on TV. Unfortunately, the show had one fatal flaw: it suffered from the same problems as Lost and Heroes .  For every question you were meant to ask... there just weren't that many answers.  Even the series finale has you asking yourself what in the nine hells you just watched and why should you ca

So... while I'm crazy about The Matter of Britain (or part of it), I have one other point that really, really makes me happy when I see it used in new ways in books and movies.  Yup, it's Greek Mythology.  Now, a lot of people just look at Greek Mythology and go, "Those crazy pagans..." others look at it and think, "Such nice and interesting archetypes..." I look at Greek Mythology and I think, "WOW! Look at all the stories! This shit is crazy awesome! What if you applied the story of Artemis and Orion to a modern setting? Or Zeus and his philandering ways to Victorian England?  Or what if Jesus was a child of Zeus? Wouldn't that be awesome ?" Yeah... I get really excited by Greek Mythology. Don't get me wrong, I get the whole archetype thing too. Sometimes I want to use archetypes mined from Greek Mythology in stories, like do a story about Muses reborn or something. I think it'd be really neat.  But the meat  of Greek Mythology

I like mythology.  I like stories that have been around for ages to the point where they've become part of the human consciousness for certain cultures.  One of my favorites that has always sparked my imagination is the Arthurian myths and legends which, with the stories of other legendary kings of Britain is know as "The Matter of Britain".  Ever since I was little and I saw Disney's The Sword in the Stone , I've loved  the stories of King Arthur, his knights of the round table, Guinevere and Lancelot, and the fall of Camelot.  The magic, the mystery, the possibility that there is some truth in the story... it all fascinates and absorbs me.  However, the Sword in the Stone  just piqued my interest a little bit. In fact, I was disappointed by the way it quite suddenly ended  without a further by-your-leave.  You don't even see the way things go after Arthur becomes king! How silly is that?  That's not the whole story ! So, I read up on the legends. I ev

Why isn't his hair red? Did they run out of dye? Did they use it all on Tamzin Merchant? What happened? I have a confession to make. I got Netflix. And I've been catching up on all the shows on it that I never really got to watch due to time, not having the channel they were on, or general disinterest. The Tudors, a historical drama written by Michael Hirst and aired on Showtime between 2007 and 2010, is one of them.  Now, I will warn you, I'm a bit of a British history buff.  My knowledge is generally related to the royal families, more specifically to the Plantagenet dynasty that ruled between 1154 and 1485.  However, that did not make me enjoy the show any less.  I understand with historically based things that they can't always stick to history as it happened because what happened isn't usually as dramatic as people would like. Is every day of your life a whirlwind of adventure?  Does Barack Obama do something exciting every day? George Bush?  Clin

So, recently I rewatched Dollhouse, a series created by Joss Whedon aired on Fox between 2009 and 2010.  I had watched the original run of the first season and stopped midway through the second season because life got a tad bit hectic and I didn't really have time for it.  I remember having mixed feelings about it when it originally aired because supposedly feminist Joss Whedon created a show about people who are brainwashed into essentially being the perfect whores.  For some reason that didn't sit well with me, what do you think? The story itself is a bit  deeper than that because it's Joss Whedon and he's pretty good about adding depth and layers to stories though I think this one had the most depth which made it difficult for the average audience to really latch onto and love it.  In another person's hands they could've probably handled it better to get the audience to connect with the story more , but so much of the story would've been sacrificed t

When I was younger, I had a problem that largely isolated me from my friends.  I hated romantic comedies.  This was particularly troublesome as I grew up during the late 90s/early 2000s when teen romantic comedies or "teen movies" were in their hey-dey. Jawebreaker , Never Been Kissed , 10 Things I Hate About You , Whatever It Takes , Loser , Roadtrip , Get Over It , the American Pie series, A Walk To Remember , Crossroads , She's All That , Josie and the Pussycats , Halloweentown , Save the Last Dance , Center Stage , Honey , Romeo + Juliet , Titanic , Drive Me Crazy , Crazy/Beautiful , What a Girl Wants , The Notebook ... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera... At first, it was okay.  You know, an occasional romantic comedy film to spice up our usually horror movie fair.  I loved horror films.  I especially liked ones based around ghosts, the supernatural, or vampires.  I could not understand how someone could want to watch those things and then bits of... satin, heart-s