|
The last few years have been interesting, to put it mildly. A series of events, frustrating struggles, and worrisome symptoms put me on a path of self-discovery that has been helpful in understanding much of my life and why I struggle with certain things. Overall, it has been helpful, but it hasn’t been easy.  I have already spoken at length about being diagnosed with autism at 38 following a burnout severe enough to cause a “regression.” I have talked about increasing issues with being able to speak, and sometimes even write, which drove me to visit doctors, receive specialist referrals, and undergo numerous tests that found a Chiari malformation and hEDS without giving answers about the cause of my communication difficulties. As it turns out, all we can really do is eliminate any physical causes of the symptoms and then take our best guess at what is going on based on similarities to others with similar experiences.
0 Comments
The “Not So Berry” challenge for the Sims 4 created by LilSimsie and AlwaySimming inspired this one. It has a similar structure, but I have tried to make it completely different at the same time. Like the “Not So Berry” challenge, you have a backstory and several goals for each generation. Also, the generation heirs embody a specific color somewhere on the light/color spectrum. I decided to start with black, as the absence of color, and go through the visible light spectrum until the challenge finishes with white, a combination of all colors in the visible light spectrum. I wasn’t entirely sure where brown was supposed to fall, so I placed it just after black since that’s where it seemed to fit the best.  The gen two heir of my own play through and their siblings doing homework after school. I think I'll avoid the usual end-of-year and new year posts. I seem to end up jinxing myself by writing about hopes and plans for the coming year.
As you probably guessed based on that opening paragraph, 2021 ended up being another rough year. It is the main reason I haven't posted here since January, and I have been almost as inactive on social media as a whole. The issues with non-speaking episodes and aphasia I mentioned last year continued to worsen until writing anything became difficult enough to force my departure from freelancing by the end of April. I received a neurologist referral before the end of 2020, but there were no appointments available until March. That started an almost year-long bout of visits, imaging, bloodwork, trials of different medications, and visits with even more specialists. Anyone who has been here for a while knows I'm not big on making resolutions for each new year. 2021 is no different in that regard; however, after the train wreck that was 2020, I do want to take the occasion to try and get things back on track.  The addition of Gumball to the family was perhaps one of the best parts of 2020. I began looking into the autism hashtags on Twitter in late 2018 and early 2019 between beginning to suspect I might be autistic and before seeking a diagnosis. Like most social media sites, Twitter uses algorithms to determine what to show you, even from the people you follow. So an interesting thing happened as I broadened my searches from just writing related topics to autism and ADHD.
Tweets and hashtags related to the own voices movement, most specifically those related to authors with autism and ADHD, began popping up in my feed. Before then, I hadn’t heard of such a thing. Today’s lesson covers a very simple form of figurative language. An onomatopoeia is a word that sounds like its meaning.
Examples would include words such as boom, bang, crunch, clatter, crackle, hiss, and buzz. Comic books and comic strips have made use of enough onomatopoeia it has become rather cliche. Who hasn’t seen a panel of a superhero punching a villain with a big “pow” written out in colorful bubble letters? In a manner of speaking, many of the paintings and literary masterpieces we consider classics are fan works.
Shakespeare is well known for taking the work of other writers and improving upon it when crafting his plays. When you get right down to it, what are Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno but fan fiction written about the Bible? Many of the earlier novelists took inspiration from each other’s work, often borrowing heavily from one another. Aside from portraits, what are the subjects of most of the famous Renaissance paintings we learned about in school? They either featured Bible scenes or scenes from Greek or Roman mythology. Alliteration is one of the less obvious forms of figurative language. It is much more about impact rather than the image produced, so it can be easy to overlook.
What exactly is alliteration? Alliterative text uses the repetition of initial consonant sounds for effect, which is to say, the author uses words that start with the same letter, or same consonant sound, in a row to make a phrase stand out. Tongue twisters are almost always alliterative. Sally sells sea shells by the sea shore. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Being both a homeschool family and a bunch of creatives, it’s no wonder summer is a busy time for the lot of us when it comes to our personal projects. During the break the kids and I all take advantage of the extra time to pour a few more hours each day into the creative pursuits we work on throughout the year. So it also tends to be a time of skill growth as well.
This is always a good thing, though both girls have found it to also be a tad frustrating. You see, they have a talent for more visual arts than me, and both have been progressing quickly. This is developmentally normal given their ages and the leaps in fine motor control and abilities to understand and think through complex sequences. However, this becomes a bit of a problem when working on large scope projects such as the comic series one is writing and the animation and game design the other is pursuing. By the time they finish a leg of the project, the art they are producing no longer looks like what they did at the beginning. It's the fifth Tuesday of the month, so it's time for a Blast from the Past post. The one I picked this time was part of a 30 day blogging challenge I did back in 2012. I've learned a lot about myself since then, and some things have changed. So I thought I'd have a bit of fun with it and point out where I was way off base with a few things and whatnot.
New comments will be written in green. Everything else is from the original post from January 7, 2012. |
A. B. England is a novelist, all around geek, avid crafter, and the home-schooling mother of two.
She is an autistic creator with a love of mythology, fantasy, and all flavors of science fiction. SubscribeCategories
All
Work QueYekara Series Book 2 Prewriting/Outlining 20% The Icarus Project Rough Draft Progress 77384 / 75000 Myth & Science Collection Planning Stages 38% Supers Collection
Planning Stages 23% Icarus Series Book 2 Sketched w/ Some Drafting Icarus Collection
Sketched Yekara Series Book 3
Sketched Myth & Science Collection 2
Intent Only at this Time Icarus Trilogy Book 3
Sketched Supers Collection 2
Intent Only at this Time Yekara Series Book 4
Sketched |