Syd's Thoughts

Yet, why was the Beast so mangled? Savvy looked upon his face and tried to understand. She thought, what could be so awful that happened to him to make him so cruel as to take my from my family? Sadly, the Beast was not offering any answers any time soon.  Over the next few weeks Savvy would sneak out into the castle halls while the Beast was out hunting. She knew better than to try and escape for she had numerous failed attempts at sneaking home. Once, she tied up the sheets from her bed and tried to shimmy down them to the ground from her room, but the sheets came apart and she fell several stories to what she could only assume would be her death when the Beast heard her scream and caught her before she reached the ground.  A couple days later Savvy tried again to flee the castle, this time by foot at night. She started down through the thicket of trees that guarded the castle, but just as she made her way through the trees a pack of wolves began tracking her every move. The...

 I had the wonderful opportunity to listen to the TED talk videos: The danger of a single story  by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Imaginary friends and real-world consequences by Jennifer Barnes.  The danger of a single story was very eye-opening for me. I can see now how stories appear one-sided and we begin to think only in this way. I think the story of Chimamanda's roommate was a very accurate representation of how most American's would view Nigerian people. We have read stories and articles about all of the horrible things in Nigeria, but we have read very little of the good things. Oftentimes we do unintentionally formulate a very narrow viewpoint, and it is sad quite frankly. Our world has never been a simple place, so our thinking must reflect that. We should read stories that are out of our element. We should explore other sides of stories. We should expand our thinking. One thing that stuck out to me in this video was the fact that Chimamanda kept saying "what i...

I loved the Czech readings that I did so much yesterday that I decided to continue reading part B for this second reading assignment!  The biggest difference I noticed in these stories is that there seems to be some on the side notes left by the author to further help the reader understand the story. For example, the first story read  "s o our Francis — that was his name, though really it doesn't matter very much what his name was — took everything he wanted and started off on his travels". I forgot the literary term for what this is called, but I really like the way it is used and will probably do something similar in my semester project. I feel like it adds a little character and makes the author involved in the story.  Anyways, again these stories have quite a bit of dialogue. It also has lots of adjectives which seem to bring the story to life (which I love). I've come to realize that I do not like stories that begin with "once upon a time". I think it i...

Sleep John was fun to read. There were many mythical creatures like dragons and kings and queens. There was also some humor in the story as well when John fell asleep in the cart with wolves. I definitely think this one was my favorite short story out of this entire collection of stories. I think it would be fairly easy to manipulate and make into my own story and I have several ideas started already. I would like to turn the cart from the story into a train. For example John would come across a parked train and hop in and fall asleep. In the train I would put snakes instead of wolves, and then I would change the type of forests that the Queen goes through. I think this story appealed to me so much because it is a spin off of the 12 dancing princesses which I grew up hearing from my grandmother. I even watched the movie that Barbie had some out about it.  I noticed that most of the folktales have lots of dialogue between characters, and they have almost magical qualities like the s...