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Canadians have a vast lexicon of phrases they use to diminish accidents and their negative consequences. We acknowledge that “accidents will happen,” and remind ourselves that there’s “no use crying over spilled milk.” In fact, we’ve become so good at minimizing these seemingly random, unpredictable incidents that they now seem commonplace: we tend to view […]
Hi folks, this month there is no series. These topics all stand alone. It's my birthday month and I want to dig deep and be more. Here's one thing I've been thinking about. Welcome to my meandering.
I cringe every time I hear the dreaded words: I'm a Type A personality -- high achiever, driven, worker, leader, competitive. Man, if you need the most cookies, take them. On my worst days, I'm a type D and on my better days I am a Type C. I lack assertiveness. Type As are always apologizing for being Type As even though they are thrilled by their achievements and are determined to achieve more. Uh, this is not humility. Here's the deal Type As, every personality type has a downside.
Don't think this a Type A bashing post. Type As are getting the most cookies, so chill. Type Bs don't care if they have any cookies or not. Type Cs would like cookies but are too shy to ask. And Type D, those folks needs therapy, drugs and understanding. But I digress, back to Type As. They are missing out some good stuff. I was with a friend at a yogurt shop nodding knowingly about not being a type A. We both have felt that "odd person out" feeling about not being Type A.
We were laughing about typical Type A stuff. They think that everyone wants to be them and are sold are on the idea that you must be positive and have it all together 24/7. The rest of us types cringe, continue to play Candy Crush, enjoy the frozen yogurt, and wander off topic by discussing the hotness of actor Robert Vaughn from the old TV show Man from U.N.C.L.E. vs hotness of David McCallum, who is now a nice old man on a show call NCIS. This would drive type As crazy...but we were happy as clams. That's right, not stressed, not organized, and totally chill. YAY!
So how does personality play into my life: I would like a writing cookie, but if it means I can't smell the roses, do my own thing, and daydream days away, no cookies for me. I also need lots of time to read books, enjoy good conversations, and afternoons poolside. In kindergarten, Mrs. Crabtree impressed on me the importance of being yourself. She believed that every child would shine and made sure that every student in her class had a moment to do so. Overall she taught me that life is about our relationships and nothing else.
You are needed. We are all needed. So "Not Type As" take a deep breath. It is okay.
I will be back next week with more.
Here is a doodle.
And finally
A quote for your pocket.
Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it. Bruce Lee
0 Comments on Not Type A as of 8/15/2015 6:45:00 PM
This revision layer does not require you to cut all descriptions of clothes, hair, and accoutrements. Rather, it asks you to take a fresh look at your descriptions and decide if they are meaningful and powerful rather than bland and boring.
The best way to do that is to look at each character individually and each instance in which you have described them.
1. Save a copy of your draft as “Character Description (insert character Name)” and delete everything but the sections that deal with that character (keeping chapter references). It is critical that you revise at this level for your protagonist, antagonist, love interest. If you want to be thorough, do it for your secondary characters as well. Walk-ons deserve a brief look, but not necessarily a file.
If you prefer, you can peruse a printed version of your manuscript and highlight or circle the descriptions of each character separately. You could mark them with different colored ink or stick-on tabs.
The important part is that you start at the becinning of the story and read through that character looking for continuity mistakes, character definition, and consistency.
2. Have you described the character as he enters the story?
3. Have other characters described this character?
4. Are your descriptions meaningful and original or full of clichés and weak adjectives? Have you repeated the same descriptive information over and over?
5. Are there instances of dissonance or change?
6. Do words and actions illustrate the character? Do they play against type? Are you promoting stereotypes?
7. Is your point of view character’s description of someone accurate or inaccurate due to his personality, past history, or current situation? Does his opinion change?
8. Have you used clichés or purple prose?
9. Have you made changes in one area and forgotten to change them in the rest (hair and eye color, history, clothing choices).
10. Have you changed their name? Make certain it is changed everywhere! Make certain it is spelled the same everywhere.
11. Have you given them so many nicknames, terms of endearment, or shortened names that it becomes confusing?
It helps to have a character profile nearby when revising for each character listing their visual appearance, quirks, speech style, personal style etc.
You can create your own profiles or utilize the ones provided in Story Building Blocks: Build A Cast Workbook (which also include personality traits).
Does marijuana produce an amotivational syndrome? Whether the amotivational syndrome exists or not is still controversial; there are still too few poorly controlled small studies that don't allow a definitive answer. Most people who use marijuana don't develop this syndrome.
Throughout history, some people have chosen to take huge risks. What can we learn from their experiences?
Extreme activities, such as polar exploration, deep-sea diving, mountaineering, space faring, and long-distance sailing, create extraordinary physical and psychological demands. The physical risks, such as freezing, drowning, suffocating or starving, are usually obvious. But the psychological pressures are what make extreme environments truly daunting.
The ability to deal with fear and anxiety is, of course, essential. But people in extremes may endure days or weeks of monotony between the moments of terror. Solo adventurers face loneliness and the risk of psychological breakdown, while those whose mission involves long-term confinement with a small group may experience stressful interpersonal conflict. All of that is on top of the physical hardships like sleep deprivation, pain, hunger, and squalor.
What can the rest of us learn from those hardy individuals who survive and thrive in extreme places? We believe there are many psychological lessons from hard places that can help us all in everyday life. They include the following.
Cultivate focus.
Focus – the ability to pay attention to the right things and ignore all distractions, for as long as it takes – is a fundamental skill. Laser-like concentration is obviously essential during hazardous moves on a rock face or a spacewalk. Focus also helps when enduring prolonged hardship, such as on punishing polar treks. A good strategy for dealing with hardship is to focus tightly on the next bite-sized action rather than dwelling on the entire daunting mission.
The ability to focus attention is a much-underestimated skill in everyday life. It helps you get things done and tolerate discomfort. And it is rewarding: when someone is utterly absorbed in a demanding and stretching activity, they experience a satisfying psychological state called ‘flow’ (or being ‘in the zone’). A person in flow feels in control, forgets everyday anxieties, and tends to perform well at the task in hand. The good news is that we can all become better at focusing our attention. One scientifically-proven method is through the regular practice of meditation.
Value ‘knowhow’
Focus helps when tackling difficult tasks, but you also need expertise – high levels of skills and knowledge – to perform those tasks well. Expertise underpins effective planning and preparation and enables informed and measured judgements about risks. In high-risk situations experts make more accurate decisions than novices, who may become paralysed with indecision or take rapid, panicky actions that make things worse.
Expertise also helps people in extreme environments to manage stress. Stress occurs when the demands on you exceed your actual or perceived capacity to cope. An effective way of reducing stress, in everyday life as well as extremes, is by increasing your ability to cope by developing high levels of skills and experience.
Developing expertise requires hard work and persistence. But it’s worth the investment – the dividends include better assessment of risk, better decision-making, and less vulnerability to stress.
Getting enough sleep is often difficult in extreme environments, where the physical demands can deprive people of sleep, disrupt their circadian rhythms, or both.
Bad sleep has a range of adverse effects on mental and physical wellbeing, including impairing alertness, judgment, memory, decision-making, and mood. Unsurprisingly, it makes people much more likely to have accidents.
Many of us are chronically sleep deprived in everyday life: we go to bed late, get up early, and experience low-quality sleep in between. Most of us would feel better if we slept more and slept better. So don’t feel guilty about spending more time in bed.
Experts in extreme environments often make use of tactical napping. Research has shown that napping is an effective way of alleviating the adverse consequences of bad sleep. It’s also enjoyable.
Be tolerant and tolerable.
Adventures in extreme environments often require small groups of people to be trapped together for months at a time. Even the best of friends can get on each other’s nerves under such circumstances. Social conflict can build rapidly over petty issues. Groups split apart, individuals are ostracised, and simmering tensions may even explode into violence.
When forming a team for an extreme mission, as much emphasis should be placed on team members’ interpersonal skills as on their specialist skills or physical capability. Research shows that team-building exercises – though often mocked – can be an effective way of enhancing teamwork.
Effective teams are alert to mounting tensions. Individuals keep the little annoyances in perspective and respect others’ need for privacy. To survive and thrive in demanding situations, people must learn to be tolerant and tolerable. The same is true in everyday life.
Cultivate resilience
Extreme environments are dangerous places where people endure great hardship. They may suffer terrifying accidents or watch others die. Such experiences can be traumatic and, in some cases, cause long-term damage to mental health.
But this is by no means inevitable. Research has shown that many individuals emerge from extreme experiences with greater resilience and a better understanding of their own strengths. By coping with life-threatening situations, they become more self-confident and more appreciative of life.
Resilience is a common quality in everyday life. We tend to underestimate our own ability to cope with stress, and overestimate its adverse consequences. Some stress is good for us and we should not try to avoid it completely.
Featured image credit: Mount Everest, by tpsdave. Public Domain via Pixabay.
So when Made by Raffi written by Craig Pomranz, illustrated by Margaret Chamberlain (@madgiemadge) appeared in my hands for the first time I sat up and noticed; it’s about a boy who feels he doesn’t quite fit in, for instead of football, his passion is knitting and sewing.
Although he’s a curious and generous kid, he feels sidelined at school. Unlike most of his classmates, he doesn’t like noise and rough play. But thanks to a supportive teacher he discovers a new passion – making his own clothes. When it is time for the school play could this new skill help him gain the respect of his peers? Without giving the game away, the ending is upbeat, but also authentic. This isn’t a sugar-coated story. (For the really interesting background to the story, take a look at this article).
This book deserves to be in every school and read in every family for a whole plethora of reasons. It’s bold, tackling gender issues that many adults might skirt around: I love Pomranz daring to use the word “girly“, and it certainly helped us talk about how being a girl interested in ‘boys’ things’ is often more accepted by society than a boy interested in ‘girls’ things’. It’s big hearted; not just the warm, loving family Raffi is part of, but also his supportive school. It shows all sorts of children playing together, with different skin colours and different physical abilities, as well as different interests. It’s a joyously inclusive book, which tackles big themes gently and playfully.
Margaret Chamberlain’s illustrations are delightful. She uses colour very cleverly to portray moods and to mirror how much more interesting – indeed colourful – the world is for a diverse range of characters; wouldn’t the world be a dull grey place if we all liked only the same things?
A book about loneliness, respect, difference, and learning to trust your instincts even when it means you don’t follow the crowd, Made by Raffi is a vital, delightful and unusual book I urge you to share.
M and J were recently shown how to knit by their Grandma, and reading Made by Raffi offered the ideal opportunity to practice their recently acquired skills. (Here are some Youtube tutorials we found helpful to refresh our memories of what Granny had taught us: Casting on, knit stitch, casting off.
Having a ball of wool with lots of different colours on it was an effective tool in motivating the kids; each child would knit one or two colours and then hand the needles and ball over to the other. It gave them easy targets to aim for, and I’m sure this is partly why they completed a long scarf far more quickly than I was expecting.
Whilst knitting we’ve been listening to:
Lots of songs by Raffi (an Egyptian-born Canadian singer-songwriter who creates great kid-friendly music), – here’s a whole playlist on youtube.
Letting the kids embellish their own clothing. I found this the easiest/most satisfying way to let the kids have a go at making something themselves – they chose buttons they liked and sewed them onto a couple of pieces of clothing. Simple sewing but with a relatively big (and ‘real’) result.
Making a cloak as described in the story. Alternatively, if you can find a department store selling off curtain samples (eg in John Lewis or House of Fraser), you can pick up pretty much prepared cloaks – all you need to do is add something (eg a large hook and eye) so you can have the cloak safely stay on your shoulders as you zoom around wearing it.
If in a school or a library setting, making a display with images of clothes designed by men (Galliano, Versace, Gaultier for example, cut out from glossy magazines) and as the centre pieces place Made by Raffi and The Boy in the Dress by David Walliams. Whilst not for primary school kids, I’d also encourage you to read Boys Don’t Knit by T.S.Easton, a hilarious take on a teenage boy who loves to knit. Ben Fletcher and Raffi would definitely like to meet each other!
Other picture /illustrated books which feature knitting include:
Yay! We’re big fans of crochet round the shelf, but I never realised there were so many fiction books for littlies featuring knitting. Thanks for the heads-up!
Julie Grasso said, on 7/2/2014 12:19:00 AM
You know, I couldn’t think of one book. This looks wonderful, and that list of knitting books, my granny would have been so amazed by them. Thanks so much for sharing them with us.
Catherine said, on 7/2/2014 12:45:00 AM
What a great list of knitting books. One of our favourite knitting stories is The Best Jumper by Lynne Garner & Sarah Gill.
Read this book and you’ll find answers to questions such as “Are brains actually necessary?”, “Why do we rub sore bits of our body better?”, “What is more dangerous – sleep deprivation or food deprivation?” and “Is it always better to concentrate when you’ve got to make an important decision?”.
Mike, the headless chicken
You’ll also learn about the chicken called Mike who lived for 18 months after having his head amputated, why it’s better to star gaze using your peripheral vision and why smells can powerfully evoke past memories.
If that’s not enough, whilst reading this book it will seem like you have your own magician in the room; What Goes On in My Head? is packed with activities that explore different aspects of brain behaviour and many of them had us gasping with amazement or trying them again because the illusion or effect was so powerful. For example you can learn how to see inside your own eyes, how to make someone’s arm spontaneously levitate (the myth of telekinesis is debunked, by the way), and why it’s so difficult to draw even a simple image when you look in a mirror.
What Goes On in My Head? is a fascinating, exciting read, packed with curious facts. And as you’d expect with a Dorling Kindersley book, it’s a lovingly produced physical object, rich in images.
If I were to find fault with this beautifully produced book it would the use of Robert Winston as the “celebrity” author. Yes, he’s a household name (at least here in the UK), but he’s not a neuroscientist nor a psychologist (human fertility is is area of expertise). It seems a shame that if you’re going to use a scientist presumably with the idea of giving weight to the content of a book, why not use a scientist who is an expert in the field. Of course the book was written in consultation with a neuroscientist, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, and this leaves me wondering what Robert Winston actually wrote for the book. Additionally, Robert Winston was used as a figure head to promote the sale of a health supplement, the adverts for which were subsequently banned for breaching the ASA guidelines on “substantiation and truthfulness”, so for me personally, the use of his name to add “credibility” to this book backfires a little.
3 Comments on What goes on in my head, last added: 11/30/2011
I’ve so enjoyed your fab posts this week – definitely on a roll!!! And you make such a good point here!!! Why does a good book need an endorsement, especially from someone who is not even “in the field.” I guess because he is more of a brand… they are using his TV character rather than his expertise – really they could have any star up there to help market their book. Excellent point!!!
Zoe said, on 11/30/2011 4:34:00 AM
Thanks Se7en, I’ve had so much fun reviewing the shortlisted books and our whole family have learned lots of amazing things. It’s been a treat! I know Robert Winston has written other books for DK, and I believe one of his official roles here is meant to be engaging the public with science, so I guess that’s partly why he was chosen
choxbox said, on 11/30/2011 9:48:00 AM
We have this book, and yes it is awesome.
Which to choose of the lot?- tough Q!
Re Robert Winston – I guess same reason as why Carol Volderman endorses math books and Richard Hammond for some other titles under DK science books?!
We all have different personalities. We think differently. We like different things. We have different strengths. We have different weaknesses. If we understand our own personalities it makes it easier for us to get along with others. We also need to understand the personalities of others to create effective groups, whether we're at home, on the playground, or on the job.
These videos give you good background information on personalities and communicating with others.
Video #1 - Discover Your Personality Type - Myers-Briggs
Video #2 - Discovering Personalities
Video #3 - No matter what your personality here's - A Guide to Effective Communication
Video #4 - Communication Styles - Getting You Started with Better Communication
Time for Psych 101 - Personality is important in Writing? You BET!
Q 4: How does 'personality' assist in the writing of fiction?
Answer: Personality...and this means A, B, C and all types, figure heavily in fiction and typically the author's own personality comes into play as does the readers for that matter!
A writer has to be somewhat driven and obsessive to stick with it for the duration of what is often called a "checkered" career in such a fickle business, such a roulette wheel business as publishing.
The Reader also must have the 'right stuff' to bring a book to completion--that is a personaltiy that sees a novel through. In other words: Writer endures to the end, flip-side that, reader hopefully endures to the end. I had a teacher who once asked me when I balked at War and Peace in its abridged form, "Are you going to beat that book, or are you going to let it beat you?"
In the depiction of character, personality is the culmination of conditioning, struggle against conditioning, or failure to make that struggle and accepting one's conditioning (we're all brain washed to something as it is the nature of nurture, right?). What motivates a person equals personality.
Comes of having personal goals, and every character, good, bad, ugly and in between must have goals and perhaps a super goal. Characters have run ins with themselves--memories, sensations, images. Flash backs or hallucinations, etc. These form layers in a character's personae.
A character is molded by circumstances or resists them. Either way tensions and conflict can come of a stubborn obsessive compulsive, and the most memorable characters have these traits when they set their eyes on the prize.
Ahab in Moby Dick had a wooden leg for a reason. If he was sound of leg and mind, if he still had both his legs, or if he had no legs and was confined to a wheel chair and could not act on his mad obsession over the whale, or didn't really care to be bothered, it wouldn't be quite the memorable saga it is. It'd be flatline story for sure, for sure....
Ahab would never walk the deck of a ship. Would not be motivated to do so. Would retire.
Nightmare, memory, learned experience, what's in the character's bedrock DNA is at the heart of personality and story. The best authors know how to create full-blown characters fully realized. Characters are multi-layered and complex as in life. Readers today demand far more complexity of character than complexity of storyline.
In other words a character-driven story is at least as important as a plot-driven story, and the best stories are characte fits plotline like a glove stories wherein both are equally important. If you exchanged Ahab's personality for instance for that of Sherlock Holmes, it would change the dynamic of the story as surely as chaning the plot line. Can you imagine Sherlock in Ahab's shoes...errr ahhh pegleg?
Do leave a comment; would love to hear your remarks on this area of Psych for Writers.
I love this blog because if the characters are not interesting I will put the book aside no matter how curious I might be on why the victim was murdered.
I use "Personality Plus" as a guide and the first thing I do is assign the main characters a personality type. Then I flesh out all details - background, etc. That basic personality is a starting point and will influence most of their behavior.
When I write, I use a psychology-for-amateurs-type site that will diagnose your personality disorder for you. All you have to do is fill out a questionnaire and voila! You're a narcissist. Or schizoid.
My first editor couldn't believe one of my villains would act the way he did. Finally, I pretended I was Wally and took the personality disorder test. He was a sociopath. The editor finally caved and let Wally behave like sociopaths behave.
Just for fun, I filled out the questionnaire while pretending to be my ex-husband. And again, while pretending to be my other ex-husband. I diagnosed them both, but I'm not going to share those diagnoses here. :)
Mary Anna Blogging at "It's Like Making Sausage: Sometimes you don't really want to know how books are made...", http://www.maryannaevans.com
Anonymous said, on 5/29/2010 7:34:00 AM
I'm in complete agreement with Rob and Terry too - it's not what happens primarily (plot-crime) but how the characters handle it. In every one of my favorites the characters are what made it on my list of favorite reads.
Hey everyone - great comments all, and I appreciate your remarks. I am a great one for thinking a character needs be run through a "gestalt" in psych terms, a fully-realized character in lit terms. I pretty much LIVE with my characters as I am writing the book which is why I can be hard to live with in the real world!!
Again thanks and keep the cards and letters coming...heheheh. More Psych 101 for writers, readers and their characters to follow next week.
When you're composing on your computer, do you tend to select one font more than another? Sure, Times New Roman is common in the publishing world, but do you long to use other fonts that express your personality?
At times, I do. And some times, I compose in those fonts because it makes sense in my mind. It adds an edge to my writing, especially when writing fiction. It's a visual cue that allows me to see how a character sounds. It's a personality trait that formulates a picture and maps the story arc.
Does a certain font describe your personality? I took a ten-question quiz on the Independent Lens webpage that discusses the history of print.
According to the quiz, I'm Edwardian Script. I believe that's fairly accurate: I'm a true romantic at heart; nothing gets my juices flowing more than flowery, flutterly love.
What font are you? Does it describe your personality?
Follow LuAnn on Twitter @luannschindler .
0 Comments on Fonts and Writing Style as of 1/1/1900
Daniel Nettle is Reader in Psychology at the University of Newcastle. With degrees in both psychology and anthropology he has written on many aspects of human nature. In the excerpt below, from his book Personality: What makes you the way you are, we learn how one might begin to measure personality. Read other OUPblog posts about Nettle here.
“Personality is and does something…It is what lies behind specific acts and within the individual.” -Gordon Allport
It might be conventional to begin with Hippocrates, and his ideas about the four humours, or with some other ancient conception of personality types. I prefer, however, to begin our story with an article published by Sir Francis Galton in The Fortnightly Review for 1884 entitled ‘The Measurement of Character’. Galton is an apt place to begin for a number of reasons. As Charles Darwin’s first cousin, Galton was an early champion of evolution and of the view that evolution is relevant to humans. The way he could think of applying it was filtered through his Victorian preconceptions about society and societies, and so does not seem appropriate to us today. However, his basic intuition that the theory of natural selection would ultimately have to inform our thinking about everything people do has turned out to be correct.
A second reason for interest in Galton is that it was he who first realized that studies of how characteristics ran in families, and particularly studies of twins, were the key to unlocking the contribution of nature and nurture to human variation. This insight lies behind a whole scientific field, known as behaviour genetics, a field that has flourished since Galton’s time, and whose results we will meet later on.
Finally, Galton is noteworthy because he had a very modern preoccupation with measurement. Galton was obsessed with trying to find practical measures for obscure bits of human behaviour. In 1885, he published a paper in Nature entitled ‘The Measurement of Fidget’. In this he notes, from his own extensive observations, that in a large gathering such as a lecture, audience members fidget around once a minute on average. However, when the lecturer really holds their attention with a point, this rate is diminished by around a half, and moreover, the fidgeting changes. The period of the movements reduces (an enthralled audience member gets their movement over as quickly as possible, whereas a bored one draws it out), and the angle of deviation of the body from the upright…also reduces. Thus a quick index of how bored an audience is at any point in time would be on average how far from vertically upright they were. Galton commends these insights to the reader as promising to give ‘numerical expression to the amount of boredom expressed by the audience generally during the reading of any particular memoir’.
Quirky as this paper is, it is very modern. Many philosophers before Galton had speculated about human traits, but few had seen that none of this was worth the candle-scientifically at any rate-if the traits in question could not be measured. Most of the work in scientific psychology consists in trying to come up with good measures of things, and showing that they are good measures. Indeed, a concern with measurement is precisely what distinguishes ‘academically respectable’ psychology from psychology of other kinds. Galton measured the weights of livestock and aristocrats, the speeds of reaction times, the sizes of heads, the shapes of fingerprints, and many other characteristics. His special contribution to personality theory was that he began to think about how this thing-personality-might be measured, and thus brought within the fold of scientifically studiable entities.
In his 1884 article, he notes the general desirability of measuring personality, and comes up with some suggestions. One is that we look at natural language. Using a thesaurus, he estimates that there are at least 1000 terms describing people’s characters in the English language, but these contain a good deal of redundancy, since many of them are synonyms or antonyms. This casual observation of Galton’s began what is known as lexical work in personality, which analyses the set of descriptive terms occurring in languages as a basis for understanding the ways in which people differ. The assumption is that the semantics of natural language has developed in such a way as to mirror the important differences that exist in the world…
Galton also proposes that people have characteristically different levels of emotional reactivity-again a notion that has turned out to have some mileage in it-and suggests that we could get an index of character by subjecting people to small but impromptu emotional trials, to see how they respond (boo!) The magnitude of their response would tell us about the arousability of their emotions in general, which would be predictively useful when thinking about larger trials they might face in real life. Sir Francis is characteristically bullish about how easy this would be to do. ‘I feel sure that if two or three experimenters were to act zealously and judiciously as secret accomplices, they would soon collect abundant statistics of conduct.’ I feel sure they would, too, but I am less sure that research ethics committees would be pleased.
Finally, Galton notes the desirability of linking these reactions to physiology. If some people are more emotionally arousable than others, then this should show up in changes in heart rate or some other physiological parameters. There were technical limitations to doing this in 1884, but again, it is a very moden idea which prefigures the contemporary interest in linking personality constructs to underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Thus, Galton has already envisioned, at least in principle, many of the methods of modern personality psychology. What is missing from his account is the most common source of personality data today, namely ratings. Much modern personality work is based on people’s self-reported ratings of what they are like, or, more rarely, of what someone else is like. It is a fortunate development for personality psychology that data of this kind have turned out to be quite reliable, since they are the quickest and easiest of data to collect…
…Suffice it to say for current purposes that the central notion of personailty psychology is the trait. A trait is a continuum along which individuals vary. Nervousness might be a trait, for example, or speed of reaction…
0 Comments on Character Matters as of 7/6/2009 3:53:00 PM
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Yay! We’re big fans of crochet round the shelf, but I never realised there were so many fiction books for littlies featuring knitting. Thanks for the heads-up!
You know, I couldn’t think of one book. This looks wonderful, and that list of knitting books, my granny would have been so amazed by them. Thanks so much for sharing them with us.
What a great list of knitting books. One of our favourite knitting stories is The Best Jumper by Lynne Garner & Sarah Gill.