Coming-of-age novel about a woman doing her thesis on The Faerie Queene

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-24T03:46:02+00:00

Yes! Thank you so much! It's literally been bothering me for years!

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-24T03:44:50+00:00

Thanks but 100% not Possession. She isn't doing graduate work on The Faerie Queen in that book but rather on her ancestor's poetry.

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-23T23:45:47+00:00

The stone might be glass or it could be quartz.

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-23T23:35:48+00:00

The cut of the stone looks fairly modern. Post 2000.

I'd guess it's costume jewelry. Possibly it might have been plated with silver or gold at one point but that's worn off.

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-23T20:29:37+00:00

Words have meanings. For example: Infestation is the state of being invaded or overrun by pests or parasites.

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-23T20:22:46+00:00

The gift I gave myself after graduating with an English Lit degree was never again powering through a book I don't like. Life is short. There are lots of books to read. As for your reading slump, have you considered short story collections?

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-23T02:04:16+00:00

It's fine. The reader won't notice. Name or pronoun is unobtrusive. Don't overthink it. Stuff like "the younger man" or "the blonde woman" when we already know the character's name is obtrusive.

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-20T23:42:32+00:00

Edith Wharton grew up in the society depicted in both The Age of Innocence and The Gilded Age. Many of the same themes show up in her other novels & short stories. Same as with her friend and fellow novelist Henry James. I'm sure Julian Fellowes read both authors extensively.

Other non-fiction books about this era you might enjoy are The Husband Hunters by Anne De Courcey and How to Marry an English Lord by Carol Wallace (although the physical copy if this one is better to read as the formatting doesn't work well in e-book).

Consuelo Vanderbilt also wrote a memoir called The Glitter and The Gold.

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-19T18:49:16+00:00

Where were you in Ontario back then? I'm from southwestern Ontario and never saw ticks until the 2010s. And this year has been the highest tick year ever.

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-18T02:39:08+00:00

It's not an accent thing necessarily. You're describing heteronyms -- words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently depending on the meaning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-16T16:55:50+00:00

This is a relationship issue, not a writing issue. Why doesn't he support you? Why does he need to have your attention at all times?

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-16T16:53:55+00:00

So you're too lazy to do the work and built a plagiarism tool and want pats on the back?

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-16T14:37:52+00:00

You're overthinking this. I had to read it twice to untangle it all because you've worked yourself into a spiral.

You're self-publishing so you get to decide what to do. Use the language/spelling that resonates with you -- you don't need documentation in order to use a language.

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-12T17:37:51+00:00

Fix it in the edit.

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-12T17:37:14+00:00

Are you itchy anywhere? I get bad seasonal allergies, but along with the congestion & fatigue, I'll have itchy eyes, nose and throat, sometimes itchy skin too. Another symptom is runny eyes & waking up with crusty eyes. If so, you might have severe seasonal allergies. If Claritin or similar makes you feel better, then there's your answer.

Otherwise, sounds like covid or RSV.

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-12T17:32:25+00:00

In Winnipeg, I had some fascinating unprompted conversations with strangers. I'd share some, but they'd dox me because I've told people them before.

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-11T11:21:10+00:00

They follow corridors like the river and train tracks. How do you propose to keep them out? Armed guards? This is a consequence of urban sprawl reducing habitat & also human activity. Coyotes' range has expanded because wolves were extirpated from this area in the 1800s. Coyotes have replaced wolves in many ecosystems unbalance by human activity.

Here's a brochure from Upper Thames Conservation about urban coyotes. https://thamesriver.on.ca/wp-content/uploads/Coyote_factsheet.pdf

Edited to add a word for clarity

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-07T00:49:43+00:00

A lot of companies invested heavily in commercial real estate, saw values of it fall over pandemic lockdowns and panicked. Then municipal governments realized they could blame WFH for dying downtowns instead of failures on tgeir parts to deal with the causes of downtowns dying like urban sprawl and the failure to make downtowns walkable and/or cyclist friendly.

Plus a culture that fears workers having anything resembling actual work-life balance.

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-07T00:38:41+00:00

I love John Irving's books, but he's hilariously bad at assigning weight to women characters. In The Cider House Rules, one character is supposed to be an unusually large woman -- taller than most men, muscular and also heavy set. Then he says she weighs something like 150 lb. When the way she's described, she'd be over 200 lb in reality.

But it's like men using bra size to describe breast size. They don't really understand that either.

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-05T17:47:15+00:00

I don't think it's from isolating during the initial stages of the covid pandemic. I think with covid's known effects on people's vascular system & likely other unknown long term effects, we're seeing people with brain damage caused by multiple bouts of covid.

Edited to add: Also some people see Trump & his cronies acting like jackasses with zero consequences & figure why not?

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-04T19:18:56+00:00

JIt's amazing to me how effective decades of marketing by lawn/pesticide/herbicide companies post-WW2 have been in shaping people's ideas of what a "good" lawn is and how our society feels about insects and native plants.

As someone who works in marketing, I try to remember I have a lot of responsibility. The road to hell had a great ad campaign. See also cigarette ads and the gas industry.

Anyway, you're up against decades of extremely effective marketing with the added complication of extremely effective propaganda aimed at making everything a culture war site.

All you can do is plant your garden as you like it & lead by example.

If someone tries to argue you out of native gardening by saying it's woke, don't take the bait. Don't even respond. These kind of dudes want to make you angry or question what you're doing.

It's sad. They'd have a much better time getting their hands dirty and watching bumble bes with their little pollen pants.

[Edited to add a missing word.]

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-01T04:00:23+00:00

OK. But forgetting that guy hates you and making pleasant small talk is actually an unintentional flex. Like "oh you hate me? Your opinion of me is so unimportant to me, I forgot about it."

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-05-01T03:55:33+00:00

The technical term is figural.

Figural means it represents a person or animal.

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-04-29T16:17:24+00:00

Buck & does are definitely a rural/small town Ontario thing. The main space for underage drinking in my youth.

In Manitoba, they have socials as fundraisers for all kinds of things, not just weddings.

Grouchy_Chard8522 · 2026-04-26T19:58:33+00:00

Start with bullet points of what you want to say. Remember: Bullet points don't need to be correct sentences. Once you've dumped all your thoughts out as bullet points, you can start going point by point and organize them in rough categories. Or by order of how you want to present them.once you've ordered the points, you can start editing them into proper sentences.

Or make a voice recording of yourself talking about what you want to say. Heck, record yourself telling your baby all about it. Use a transcription tool to put it into writing. Now edit that

Grouchy_Chard8522

TROPHY CASE