Another Edition of What Has Interested Me Lately

My brain has been very resistant to developing a full-bodied blog post so far this week, so I thought I’d share a few miscellaneous paragraphs about things that have recently taken up sojourn in the fiction-oriented portion of my mind. Hopefully by Friday I’ll have had time to write something more complete!

The Alice Quest isn’t a recent addition, but it has been occupying a large space of thought. I’ve been reading books about the Edwardian era and the Chicago area and am on the lookout for more; Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House has been fascinating so far. (Hull-House was a settlement house in Chicago that opened in 1889 – it helped immigrants.) I’m listening to period music on YouTube and perusing old photos and fashion plates on Pinterest. I’m in the part of The Alice Quest where my characters are seeing the old house Alice Prescott disappeared from … such fun!

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After hearing that several friends were fans of the BBC TV show Doctor Who, I wanted to see what it was all about. We watched the first series starring Christopher Eccleston, and while I didn’t like parts of it, overall it was a pretty entertaining ride. The Doctor was my favorite aspect … quirky characters always win out, don’t they? Although I didn’t care for his assistant, Rose, or for most of the alien-outer-space plots, I was certainly left amazed at the wild, powerful imagination of the show’s writers and developers.

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Another, older BBC show we had been watching I’m now anxious to get back to: the more down-to-earth All Creatures Great and Small, an adaptation of James Herriot’s veterinary memoirs in Yorkshire. It has rather endearing characters, not to mention animals, and was very relaxing.

 

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My mom has been reading Little Women for the first time! That’s one of my favorite books, and seeing as I read it when I was around 12, I and it are due for another rendezvous. My 95-year-old grandma remembers reading it when she was 10 or 11. Truly, a story that lasts and has found a place on many favorites-shelves!

Lastly, something that may prove practical: This is a dialect quiz I took that asks you 25 questions about your vocabulary and pronunciation; at the end it locates your origin to any three major American cities. It’s pretty accurate – it pinpointed my dad’s hometown to Grand Rapids, MI, and two other nearby cities. He was born in Grand Rapids! It narrowed my mom’s down to a city right outside Chicago – she was born in a Chicago suburb. I fooled it, however. It pinned me as being from either Madison, Milwaukee, or Minneapolis. Perhaps the fact that I borrow some dialect from the south, way more from my parents’ origins in the north, and formed some on my own through paying attention to the news, accounts for this. : ) I also found the list where the questions were taken from on a different site; clicking on a question here will take you to a map of the U.S. that shows where certain words or phrases are used in people’s everyday lingo. I found this helpful because I wanted to know what words my characters from different parts of the country would use. Unfortunately, when I was looking it up for this post I couldn't find it ... but, if you're interested in that sort of thing, it's out there. (I sure hope I can find it again.) Dialect is certainly an interesting study!

Feel free to comment about anything at all that I mentioned today!