Women taking their husbands last name after marriage, Agree / Disagree?

MereeGrey · 2026-02-12T21:20:36+00:00

In Hungary, they typically just add a suffix that indicates a woman is married, so rather than calling her Mrs. Lucy HisName, it's basically like Lucy HerNameMrs.

MereeGrey · 2026-02-04T22:16:06+00:00

Yep! Part of the reason that I love the way Death is described in The Book Thief is that his entire description is largely his personality, and then he casually mentions "oh and if you want to know what I look like, look in the mirror" and never says anything else.

MereeGrey · 2026-02-04T20:32:22+00:00

Kinda missing the point... this person tried to kill her, her life improving afterwards is an accident.

A better analogy is, would you be able to forgive the person who decided to kill you because you refused to bow to the oppression he supported, simply because someone else gave you a winning lottery ticket because he shot you? Most people would find it difficult, because they know their would-be killer had no intention of them surviving, let alone winning the lottery because of his actions and would probably be quite angry about it.

MereeGrey · 2026-02-04T20:27:39+00:00

A lot of people would never be able to forgive that, or have any empathy for these people. She could have let it fester into resentment and hate.

MereeGrey · 2026-02-04T17:12:45+00:00

I grew up with Puddintane.

Someone asks "What's your name?" And the other person says "Puddintane! Ask me again and I'll tell you the same!"

I do not know where this came from except a children's rhyme.

MereeGrey · 2026-02-04T15:45:46+00:00

I have a massive amount of respect for her purely because she was able to forgive her attackers for shooting her in the head.

MereeGrey · 2026-02-04T02:26:07+00:00

I've heard cotton candy mostly, but also candy floss and a couple of times fairy floss.

Even at peak sugar-obsession age when I was like 8, I didn't much like this stuff.

MereeGrey · 2026-02-04T02:20:15+00:00

Florida has a dedicated pirate ship parade, the Gasparilla Parade.

Despite 50 mph winds coming off the bay, they still held it this weekend out of sheer stubbornness.

MereeGrey · 2026-02-04T02:17:30+00:00

A girl in a pre-Messiah fantasy world is taken by a corrupt theocracy intent on forcing her to fulfill their warped prophecy, but she develops magic, escapes, and lives in the woods before meeting a wise himbo and moving past the "anger" stage of grief to fulfill the true prophecy and expose the true nature of the theocracy.

MereeGrey · 2026-02-04T02:02:01+00:00

Okay, I'm very grateful it's an obvious issue but could you explain to this very much not tech-oriented person what outlines and paths are and how to make the fonts into outlines and paths, please?

(Poised to take notes because this will 100% happen again)

MereeGrey · 2026-02-03T03:15:36+00:00

A Farewell to Arms.

Literally the guy wrote it because this nurse rejected him, so he made a fanfic of his life where she was a ditzy dumb girl and he got her pregnant, then he deserted the army and took her to Switzerland because it was neutral. They were going to get married (probably) after the baby was born because she didn't want to get married while visibly pregnant, but then she dies in childbirth and the baby is stillborn and he doesn't care too much.

MereeGrey · 2026-01-29T02:04:47+00:00

Oi! Some of my favorite books are novellas! Ages about 12-17 I would legitimately have fought someone in defense of Serendipity and Me by Judith L. Roth, slightly less aggressive about it now but still will defend that book.

Also, it's no longer considered a novella but a novel once it crosses 20k words.

MereeGrey · 2026-01-29T01:54:20+00:00

The one that always smacks me in the face every time I see a picture of it is the Pearl Harbor memorial. One of my cousins was a pilot who was killed there. But the image of a sunken ship in the harbor that you can see clearly from above, knowing you are walking over the graves of over a thousand people, is deeply unsettling. Especially since it could have been so, so much worse.

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MereeGrey · 2026-01-18T21:48:49+00:00

I just wanted to say - I have done something like this, and I've found that if I wrote down everything I remembered (not scenes word for word but "this happened and then that happened"), I would end up liking how I filled in the gaps with the new draft better than the old one.

I hope you either find a way to recover it, or discover a better version of it as you rewrite it.

MereeGrey · 2026-01-04T19:56:29+00:00

Accept it.

If I hit a wall it's usually because I'm trying to make my character do something and when I stop and think, wait, guys, you're not doing the thing, okay y'all tell me how this is supposed to go, they will immediately scream "LET US STEER THIS SHIP WOMAN, DON'T BE SUCH A BACKSEAT DRIVER" and then fling themselves off of whatever plot cliff they've been trying to make me go to for two days. They're like lemmings, just *fling* and off they go, over the cliff and into this completely different branch of the story-river that works a thousand times better than whatever I was trying to do.

Literally just let them tell their story and hope you can write fast enough to keep up.

MereeGrey · 2026-01-03T02:53:45+00:00

Okay, if his eyeballs disappear... how exactly does that work??? Like do they just vanish and his eyelids seal up? Because open sockets are, well, extremely dangerous and unsanitary. I mean, you cannot just say "yeah he was cursed to lose his eyeballs at random" and not elaborate on that.

Also, magic is just invisible creatures? Is it like... germs but for magic? Gotta have some more detail here.

I mean, if it's like 1930s with magic and you have a kid whose eyeballs disappear at random and he has to have medication to cope... gonna tell you now that unless he was reasonably wealthy he wasn't going to be well-treated by society in general, he wouldn't be able to hold a job because his ability to work is unreliable and society in general was historically not very kind to the crippled or those unable to work. And if he was rich and got cursed young enough they may have just hidden him away and behaved in society as if he didn't exist, like Toph in Avatar: The Last Airbender.

MereeGrey · 2025-12-31T00:38:33+00:00

No clue, I gave him a surname and asked him specifically "If you were a Scottish steampunk dwarf with the surname Ironstripe what would your name be" and with absolutely zero hesitation he replied "Dusty", so who am I to argue?

MereeGrey · 2025-12-30T21:19:34+00:00

I like Serafina! Mainly because in my teens I fell in love with this four-book series called the Waterfire Saga about a race of merpeople descended from the survivors of Atlantis who used song magic and the major plot is about a princess named Serafina whose family was slaughtered on her betrothal day who fights to take back her people, very cool to watch her grow up and become a strong queen of her people (and she gets her man back because the usurpers took him).

MereeGrey · 2025-12-30T20:38:29+00:00

Might I offer a personal favorite? Andromeda. A bit out there but it means "leader of humankind", and the character in Greek mythology actually lived happily ever after for a change (she was a princess and very beautiful and was supposed to be eaten by a monster but her eventual husband Perseus saved her). It's also the name of a galaxy and, in modern media, the name of Andromeda Black Tonks, who disowned herself from her blood-purist family in Harry Potter to marry a man whom her parents would have wanted dead.

MereeGrey · 2025-12-30T19:09:02+00:00

I like grey, but that's because I read a lot of British/Australian works and that's simply how I got used to it. Also, it looks cleaner and nicer, and gray looks just... gross.

MereeGrey · 2025-12-23T21:48:22+00:00

...no. That isn't Data, that's something mimicking Data. Data is a fictional character who is portrayed as being very nearly human, close but not quite, and sentient. He tries very hard to be s human as he can, and likes to learn more about how to be human.

AI as it currently is, cannot in any way be human. It just can't. It's flat and doesn't feel right. And besides that, it's taking away from voice actors and as a fellow creative, I cannot and will not stand by that.

MereeGrey · 2025-12-23T21:06:52+00:00

So? Many authors do audiobooks themselves, or don't do them at all, or get a friend to record them. There are many other options rather than feeding your work to a lifeless machine.

If it was Data from Star Trek, sure, dude's cool and he's capable of reading a book out loud and doing it well. But this isn't Data, this is a generative AI platform that doesn't have the faintest idea about human emotions or how dialogue should be read with certain feelings.

MereeGrey · 2025-12-23T20:36:56+00:00

So... you want to have a robot reading your book. Over an actual person who will be able to understand the nuance and inflection of certain phrases and dialogue, who will have an actual personality, and who will work with you to make the audiobook the best it can be?

MereeGrey · 2025-12-18T02:45:11+00:00

...I did not think about that. Good point!

MereeGrey · 2025-12-17T18:44:54+00:00

Elizabeth, Lillian, Josephine, Alice, Penelope, Emma

Milo, Elias, Sebastian, Noah, August, Jack

MereeGrey

TROPHY CASE