Twilight fans in need of a new fix

WARNING! THESE LINKS CONTAIN SPOILERS. ONLY CLICK ON THEM IF YOU HAVE READ ALL FOUR BOOKS IN THE SERIES.

If, like me, you have finished all of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series and feel bereft, there is hope.

Stephenie has been working on Midnight Sun, which tells the story of Edward and Bella from Edward's point of view. Unfortunately the draft was illegally leaked on the internet, and so she has put the book on hold for a while.

However, all is not lost. Stephanie decided to release this draft online for all fans to see, knowing that they would otherwise be torn between reading it and obeying the law. She is anxious that people don't view it in the same light as her work:

I'd rather my fans not read this version of Midnight Sun. It was only an incomplete draft; the writing is messy and flawed and full of mistakes. But how do I comment on this violation without driving more people to look for the illegal posting? It has taken me a while to decide how and if I could respond. But to end the confusion, I've decided to make the draft available . This way, my readers don't have to feel they have to make a sacrifice to stay honest. I hope this fragment gives you further insight into Edward's head and adds a new dimension to the Twilight story. That's what inspired me to write it in the first place.

To read the draft click here. It is a pdf file, if it doesn't work look for the Midnight Sun Partial Draft link on Stephenie Meyer's page here.

Only love can break your heart: The Twilight saga

Isabella Swan
Edward Cullen
Jacob Black

To the initiated these names will spark a rush of enthusiasm and outpouring of emotion; to the unknowing they are still just names.

Until this September they were just names I'd vaguely heard about, it was only when term started and 6 different people urged me to read the books that I began to take notice.

I read Twilight last month and immediately fell in love: with the characters, the concept, the setting, the DRAMA. There is something so overblown and luscious about these books that perfectly captures the exquisit feeling of falling in love for the first time.
Except in Bella Swan's case, this first love is more complicated than most, because Edward Cullen, her heart's desire, is in fact. a vampire.

17 year old Bella has moved to the rainy and gloomy tiny town of Forks in Washington State to live with her father Charlie, the town cop. Self conscious and missing the heat of her hometown, Phoenix, Bella is drawn to the other wordly Edward Cullen who is passing as 17 year old student at the high school.
This is the preface from the book:

I'd never given much thought to how I would die -- though I'd had reason enough in the last few months -- but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.

I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly back at me.

Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved. Noble, even. That ought to count for something.

I knew that if I'd never gone to Forks, I wouldn't be facing death now. But, terrified as I was, I couldn't bring myself to regret the decision. When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it's not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end.

The hunter smiled in a friendly way as he sauntered forward to kill me.

A larger extract can be found at the Twilight saga fan site


To say much more would spoil the plot, all I can do is urge you to read Twilight and the other books in the quartet:












Eclipse












Breaking Dawn

Fewer or Less?

Supermarkets have been getting it wrong!

When you queue up with your basket in the "10 items or Less" aisle and look at the sign, you are observing a basic grammatical error.

The sign should read 10 Items or FEWER.

This is because we use "FEWER" for something we can definitely count e.g. "There are fewer than 3 chickens in the coop"

You use LESS when you can't specify the quantity eg "there is less air than before in the tyre".

After pressure from the Campaign for Plain English, Tesco is changing their signs to "Up to 10 Items", thus avoiding annoying people like me complaining about their bad grammar! You can read about it here. If you want more grammar hints, you can visit this lovely clear site.

Guardian Children's fiction prize 2008

The longlist for the Guardian's annual Children Award has been announced. Going to the link here will give you reviews and descriptions of all the books listed. I haven't read any of them yet, but I will be checking some of them out over the summer holidays to read. The ones i like the look of include
The Bog Child by Siobahn Dowd (her earlier book A Swift Pure Cry is one of my favourites),
before i die by Jenny Downham,
Bad Blood (looks spooky!) by Rhiannon Lassiter
and The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

There is a competition open to under 16s . All you have to do is write a review of not more than 200 words on one of the longlisted books and submit it, with an entry form, to the Guardian.

Spelling reform- how do you spell fish? G-H-O-T-I*

In Portugal, the government has voted to change how the language is spelt to make it more logical. All silent letters (the equivalent of our k in 'knight' or the w in 'write') are now banished. Could something like that ever happen here? Guardian columnist Marcel Berlins seems to think it should:

" Many thousands of other English words bear the burden of unpronounced consonants, whose only function is to confuse schoolchildren into even more spelling mistakes than is their custom. For instance, a recent report found that only around half of English 11-year-olds could correctly spell the word doubt. A survey a few years ago concluded (I could have told them and saved them the money) that the more a word was spelled like it was pronounced, the more likely it would be spelled correctly.

There is no reason why we should not copy their example. Instead of bemoaning children's waning spelling aptitudes, and blaming teachers, syllabuses and the malign effect of text messaging, let us put the blame where it belongs: an insane spelling system. I am not suggesting we impose a completely new alphabetical structure on English orthography, as George Bernard Shaw and others have advocated. Shaw's proposed alphabet was a complicated affair, almost impossible to learn. The Portuguese way is more of a tidying up operation, eliminating incongruities and inconsistencies. We could do the same, with the help of a few English profs, and if we ended up with a lot of seudo-sychopaths with soriasis and siatica writing a senario about rathful sychologists rapping reaths rongly - well, at least schoolchildren will be spelling better.

*How do you pronounce the word spelled "ghoti"? The answer is "fish" - the "gh" as in laugh, the "o" as in women, the "ti" as in motion."

If this seems tricky to you, think how tough it must be to learn English as a second language!

Spelling

Spelling has been in the news a lot lately, so to test your skills here is a fiendishly hard quiz.

Shamefully, I only got half of it right, so it is back to the dictionary for me!

Guardian spelling quiz

Another important thing to learn is the correct spellings of homophones(words which sound (phone) the same (homo) but are spelled differently. The BBC has a quiz where you can check your skills

BBC Homophone quiz

Frankenstein

Many of you have enjoyed reading the story of Frankenstein, and now know a bit more about this famous story. The original novel was written in 1816 by an 18 year old Mary Shelley as a result of a story telling contest. The internet has many resources to do with this novel. You can read the original here, or if that is too daunting, a good summary can be seen on this site.

Thomas Edison (who invented the light bulb!) made a short film in 1910 about Frankenstein. Obviously the quality is not that of today's films, but it makes for an interesting 12 minutes!