Book Review: “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Hello there!

In a way to get me ready for fall and of course, Halloween, I wanted to find something that would reflect my mood and I thought my favorite thrillers. Now, I am not a very big fan of horror despite my love for vampires, witches and werewolves, but I do enjoy a good psychological thriller here and there.

I thought it was Victoria Helen Stone’s Jane Doe that got me interested in this genre, but then I started to remember when I was in high school, and I took two separate classes for each semester and the first was Novels where my interest in the genre was tested as we read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Helter Skelter by Curt Gentry and Vincent Bugliosi. However, it wasn’t until I went into Short Stories that I was introduced to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic The Yellow Wall–Paper and this really made me realize that this was only the beginning.

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A woman and her husband rent a summer house, but what should be a restful getaway turns into a suffocating psychological battle. This chilling account of postpartum depression and a husband’s controlling behavior in the guise of treatment will leave you breathless. 

taken from Goodreads.

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When I finally decided that I would re-read this story, I did it for a specfic reasons: I didn’t exactly remember how it ended, all I could figure out was that it creeped me out. Fast forward, I wasn’t wrong with my initial rememberance but things that wouldn’t make sense to me at that time of the first read; I knew of very little history about how women were treated in that timeframe, so by the time I had went back to it, I had the knowledge to back everything up in my brain.

Our main character Jane is forced to stay indoors and recover from a fit of “nervousness” as she calls it, and if the word “baby” didn’t turn up in a sentence later, we wouldn’t know it’s actually name as we call it postpartum depression. For her and other women of that time, it had another name completely “hysteria” and it wasn’t the best diagnosis for a woman as there is evidence (and lots of it!) towards how husbands, sons, brothers, and doctors put various women and girls in asylums for their overwhelming feelings in the 19th Century.

“It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.”

Jane is unique though as her husband is a physician and he seems to love her enough, to support her in this condition at home. So, she is forced to recover in the master bedroom of their rental mansion, where it has decaying yellow wallpaper everywhere. Jane absolutely hates it. I understand her frustrations about it though, as I had purchased a pillow and sheet set that showed the color yellow to be as bright as the sun, but then we unwrapped it and found that the pillowcase fits the description to a T, but the sheet itself does not. It is so light that if nobody knew I had a brown mattress underneath, they certainly would as soon as they walked into my room… Anywho, like one does when they cannot explore freely, Jane starts to notice various things like the odd patterns and the disturbing figure that seems to appear at night.

Despite its small size, it definitely packs a punch worthy of a regular novel. I mean, as much as I love Frankenstein, my drive towards this book was stronger, and that’s saying something!

For anyone out there who is not too interested in horror, I highly suggest giving this story a shot before the end of the month. Although, if you feel comfortable waiting until after the Halloween festivities then by all means wait it out, but trust me when I say, you may end up enjoying it more than you think and want more like it afterwards, so as a nice warning, be sure to prepare yourselves!

Have you read Charlotte’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” before? If your answer is yes, how did you come across it? I’d also like to know what you thought about it the first time you read it. Please tell me everything in the comments below!

Free Write | The Ghosts Of Lord Byron’s Past Regrets

Hello!

So, a couple of weeks ago I was scrolling through Twitter and I don’t really follow a lot of writing accounts, although I have days were I want to go on a follow spree but I have to stop myself in my thoughts because I hardly saw this in the chaos of my timeline! The one account I do follow is called Magic Realism Bot. When I first started reading the various prompts, I realized there are a lot of fantasy and sci-fi but mid-2019, they started asking for other subject suggestions and I think that was my main reason why I haven’t unfollowed in the last few months or so!

After we left for my nephew’s party on the 13th, I fell asleep and when I got up I saw this writing prompt and was immediately inspired to write, but I chose to wait it out a bit to collect my mind because honestly I was fully awake when I saw it. Before I start telling you my story, I want to mention that I haven’t written anything since Christmas so I hope you can forgive me for the many, many mistakes you’ll probably see below. I also hope you enjoy it as well!

And now, here is the prompt:

“You wake up and realize you have turned into Lord Byron.”

Setting is Greece in 1824, Byron is very sick and slowly dying; he’s laying in a makeshift bed in his army’s camp alone. He is hallucinating after the bloodletting operations went unsuccessful for the second time. 

“Where–where am I?”

“I should be with my mates.. on the grassy lands and making plans to attack our enemies.”

The hero, poet, soldier, womanizer is under strict orders to stay in his tent by his doctors. He thought the need to pray at first his illness appeared but he feared that God wouldn’t listen to his selfish cries. As sweat continued to pull down across his face and pain in his stomach became too much to ignore as time went on, he was without a clock or any of his exclusive pleasures to hide away from the shame inside. The longer the blood sat in his body, the more poison would spread and race to his heart. It would be its final resting place to infect and then he would be at peace, or at least he hoped he would.

Before this was to happen, he stirred in his bed covered in the now soaked blankets to keep warm, and closed his eyes reluctantly and fell into a deep sleep. He had hoped it wouldn’t be his last.

Suddenly the faint sounds of children giggling around him. A little girl playing with a long red ribbon, she’s running away from him with a smile across her face. “Wait, come back Augusta! I need you!” he shouted in his empty room. He never opened his eyes, hoping the girl would return if she knew he was asleep, instead the space became quiet again.

Bryon shifted in his bed again, this time turning on his left side, away from the slightly open flap of the tent and away from the curious eyes that would sometimes pear inside to see the non-flamboyant man withering in hell. Unbeknownst himself, he lifted his left arm to make room for the rest of his body and splitting the fresh stitches in the corner of his elbow. He was already experiencing strong pains, one more to add to the endless lists didn’t bother him.

“Oh yes, my Lord.” a seductive voice of an unknown woman appeared in the opposite corner. She was alone with him, enjoying each other’s company very much. A smirk emerged on his face in front of the vivid mirror in front of them. George saw himself in a glance and saw himself kissing a brunette maiden. He liked every hue as long as he was in control, that’s all he asked in their time together. This woman was different though. He knew she was adventurous but nothing could prepare him for the game she wanted to play.

“How about we take this off? Hmm?” He quietly spoke into her ear, and the slight nod reassured he could do anything he wanted with her.

She stood from the chair of the desk and furiously pulled his hands to her back but he continued the kissing on her neck. His fingers worked the way down the tight corset in her middle section of her body. After unlacing the last string away from the rough exterior, he tossed it to the floor. Now she was able to undress by herself now and this meant his hands could explore and wander around her body freely. Once every last garment was off, she turned attention back to him, but something was wrong.

A minute ago, the man was young and incredibly healthy. Now she stood in front of him in disgust. He looked as though they had just finished having sex as he was sweaty but the major difference was he looked miserable. He tried his best to keep standing but a sharp pain his stomach only grew worse and he couldn’t control his rage like she was the cause of it.

She wasn’t though.

The memory of having slept with Mary Shelley stayed playing over and over in his thoughts even after their little affair ended several years before. He remembered every feature, as she was quite the beauty back then as was he at the time too. He knew she was the woman in front of him. He looked down at his weakling body and thought of their ghost stories they read at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland. Could she picture him as her monster? Is this how she created him? Using the body of an worthless man like him right now?

As he tried to approach her one last time, the image of her naked body and the gold rimmed mirror on the wall behind her began fading away. The more steps he made, the quicker the reverie collapsed on itself. Colors of Mary ran through each other and created another landscape. This time the memories were harder to ignore because now he was in a field. He tried to focus on the ground and wondered if he was standing in the middle of a battlefield. The only thing that tore away from this notion was the piercing cry of a child. George squat down but this time not from the lingering pain he suffered.

The child was still screaming, but he had trouble concertating on the source behind it. And then, he yelled out, “Ada!” hoping that if it was in fact Ada in trouble, she would cry out for him again.

“Papa!” Ada returned the signal. The picture of his little girl flourished inside of him. He ran towards the direction she appeared to be in; all the while even more memories and of course overwhelming regrets sat inside his heart. He knew he had to save her. He tried to run faster but he would run out of breath and was forced to stop in his tracks. Ada never stopped shouting for him, nor did he in trying to catch up to her.

After running for a couple minutes, he saw a small child with lightly brown curls and dressed in the simplest dress. The ribbon in his first vision was attached to her hair in a beautiful bow and as he walked towards her, he soon realized this was not what it seemed at all.

He knew she was going to vanish like Mary had in the last flash of torture, this time he wouldn’t let it happen without speaking to her one last time.

“Ada!” Byron debating to walk closer to her, worrying that it would speed up the dreamscape again. “Come here sweetheart. Come over to me please.” He reached his arms out to her but she didn’t budge.

“Why didn’t you love me, Papa?” She spoke to him, never breaking eye contact with him. He was trapped in her gaze and it wasn’t like the moment he had Mary, as that was  pure pleasure to him. This was a burden he longed to forget when he was alone.

“I do love you, my darling daughter.” Byron said to her as he fell to his knees. “You are mine. You always will be…” The pain in his body raptured inside and it was greater than any pain he experienced before. He just couldn’t tell if it was his heart braking or the infection finally hitting its destination, either way he knew his heart was dying.

“I love you Papa!” Ada said with a small wave and then suddenly the look on her face turned to black and Byron snapped out of his dreams. He grunted as he shot up in his bed and tried to turn away to the large bottle of bourbon and spilled out of the bed and landed hard on the dead grass underneath him.

He knew this was the end but he was angry at himself and the memories.

He never got to tell his daughter how much he loved her too. Even though he was obsessed with his booze, war and women. Nothing could take away the love he felt for his sweet daughter. Tears flew down his cheeks along with the sweat that never stopped when he fell down. He was in pain, emotionally, mentally, and physically. He hoped to live to write to Ada about how much she meant to him truly but it wasn’t to be.

George growled into the Earth, and spoke out loud for the last time. “…I love you…”

 What do you think of this story? 

Top 40 Halloween Baby Names!

Howdy!

It is finally October, so it is perfectly fine for me to talk about this subject out loud, but let’s be honest, I’ve been talking about fall since the beginning of summer! When it comes to this post in general, I’ve had to keep it hidden so people wouldn’t think I was that kook-y, but my family members knew its appearance was coming soon.

This will be in the same format as my post about the possible names of The Duke and Duchess of Sussex could name their little one. Unfortunately, I was somewhat wrong with my picks but I did get one part right, their baby boy is named after Prince Harry, just not with a name that I expected at the time, but now I really like it and everything fits well, as it’s both American and British worthy! Anyways, I will talk about eight different names from both sexes and explain why I believe each one could work for all seasons!

I think I might have went a little overzealous with this picture, but in my defense, I had a lot more names that I could have included but I decided that would be too much for me. A lot of these names are full-on Halloween themed, whereas some are not, and they are very subtle to the point where you can hide the meaning behind it. I wanted to respect everybody’s point of view with the ones I’ve selected.

Now, as I’ve successfully put this banner on here, and considering how careful I was on how everybody was straight from top to bottom, I have already found a mistake. If I hadn’t put four fairly large sections I would actually attempt to fix it, but there’s nothing I can do so if you spot it, please have a little laugh on me!

Here are the 16 names that I thought deserved a little loving, and maybe they’ll be an inspiration to you and your partner to give to your newly witch or goblin.

Abigail Rose – I think the name “Abigail” is a beautiful name. It is a very timeless, but if you are familiar with the account of the Salem Witch Trails in the 1600’s, then you might remember that one of the first people to accuse a person for being a witch was a young girl by the name of Abigail Williams. Whether or not you believe in witchcraft or if she was making it up, the name is a beautiful example of having a spooky disguise as it is still classy and elegant but there’s this little hint of history within it too.

Daphne Grace – You might not think of this as a Halloween-ish type of name, but I do. I grew up watching the Scooby-doo cartoons and out of all of the names featured on the show, this was my only favorite. I have never liked the nickname Freddie for Frederick so that is why I didn’t include it on the boys side either. Since the show was created in the late 1960’s, it still has that hippie flare that some people might enjoy.

Ingrid Alexandra – This one was inspired the character Ingrid from Witches Of East End and yes, that was one of the reasons why I also put Freya on there too, but there was a character on The Originals with that same name, but they were all witches on their shows. The other reason why I chose to use it here was because everytime I think or hear of the name Ingrid, I immediately think of the color green. I would love to read up on auras and what they mean, especially if they can appear on words or baby names, because this happens a lot and I’m always at a loss to explain the reasoning for it.

Marnie Olivia – I actually worked on the banner above back in spring, but I had switch it out purely because I forgot to put “Marnie” on the list! I think it is an important name to this post because nobody would know it was a Halloween inspired name unless they have all of the Halloweentown films growing up! I have added “Agatha” to the girl’s side too, but I think this is a quirky name to give a little girl for the witch-y vibes!

Nercissa Louise – It was so difficult not to include a whole bunch of Harry Potter characters into this post, so I was very proud with the amount that ended up making it! I really love the name Nercissa, but I’m not really sure why though. A part of me thinks it’s because it feels like a classic but has this dark flare about it too.

Prudence Alice – Now when I went to include this one to my list, I figured people would think I put it on there because of my obsession with The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, but it’s not. I generally loved it as “Prue” on the original Charmed series. I always envied her power on the show too! This is another really old name too, it actually dates back to the 1600’s, around of the time of the Salem Witch Trails!

Selene Brooke – I’ve known about this name for a long time because before my dad brought home Oliver, we had a cat named Selene. She was originally my Aunt Laurie’s but somehow she gave her to us. Selene was mostly an outside cat. She was very shy and very pretty! I remember being bitten a couple of times after trying to get close to her. After a few months, we think she took off because we never saw her again. I think my mom tried to hold off a few days before making that announcement because she really loved her!

It would be a long time before I hear the name again, but for different circumstances; this time it came from the Underworld films! I still love the name as it sounds really dark and mysterious 

Wilhelmina Amalia – Now, you might not associate this one with fall or Halloween at first, but I found out late in 2018 that the name Wilhelmina was one of the characters in a little animation show on Boomerang called “Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz”. She is the Wicked Witch Of The East’s niece that basically wants to finish what her aunt started. The TV show is cute, but I think I loved the name better!

Now that we have the girl side done, we can move on to talk about the boy names that I have picked out for you. I had a lot more word names for this part because I just haven’t been inspired to use them for the girls yet. They all just sound masculine to me, but you could still use them for girls too, so don’t go with what I tell you because these are my opinions too.

Alchemy Paul – The boys were pretty easy as I have always loved adding a more spooky flare to their names compared to the girls. I wasn’t too keen on this one at first, but I think once I figured out it is apart of both the historical and science worlds, it makes me love it a lot more. It even reminds me of my papaw too!

Byron William – If you love Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and John William Polidori’s The Vampyre,you really need to take a closer look on what inspired both of these works. The story goes that Lord Byron brought a big group of novelists to stay in a villa and share stories. He even challenged to create the scariest story they could write and this is the beginning of history. So, if you enjoy the English name Byron but want to give it some spooky flare, here you go!

Harvest Roy – A lot of people are loving this name lately! However, the only way I’ve seen it used as a girl name. I have never loved it for a girl, everything about it makes me think of a guy! It might have something to do with football, tagliatelle parties, beer always coming into my head when I say it out, but I just love it this way. I would also only use it with smaller middle names too! 

Jasper Augustus – Out of all the Twilight names that I had in my original list, this was my ultimate favorite of the bunch! Jasper and Carlyle were my favorites on the movies, but I think Jasper is both classic and cool at the same time! 

Marius Bernhardt – When I went about creating this list, I wanted to make sure I represented all of the Halloween-y movies as I could so that I had a wide array of names to pull from, so thankfully I’ve been trying to watch the ones of Anne Rice’s books. There were plenty to use in this post, but one that I really liked the most was Marius. It is such a mysterious name but you could easily use “Mars” for a nickname though!

Poe Lafayette – There is no chance in hell am I leaving out the King of Halloween literature: Edgar Allen Poe. I thought his first and middle names were too common to be on here, but Poe is a great way to honor him. I would definitely use it as a first name, but I think it could work anywhere you want to put it. 

Wolf Travis – A part of me wanted to use “Wolfgang” for the list, but I thought it would be too much. Personally, I love that way but using “Wolf” as a nickname. I love older names compared some of the popular trends. Whatever way you prefer, I think it is a strong name for this time of the year. 

Viktor Campbell – I wasn’t going to use multiple names for the same book or movie, but the more I started picking out ones I wanted to talk about on this section, I quickly became aware that I wasn’t going to get by with it. This name is featured on the Underworld series with this spelling, but I like it with the original “Victor” for the creator of the monster on Frankenstein. It is a very serious name but I like it that way!

We are finally done with this post. This is my final baby names post for the year, or at least we’ll see! I might find another tag or talk about my favorite names of the year, but we’ll see what happens in the meantime!

How did you like all of the names above? If you were able to use any of them for a baby or maybe a pet, which one(s) would you use?

Tune Tuesday | Switzerland ’17

Howdy!

Today is the last day for Tune Tuesday! I hope you have enjoy this year’s worldwide lineup. I find it very fun to end it on a new country to the lineup: Switzerland! If you’re wondering why I’m not adding USA onto the list, that’s because I have something pretty fun brewing right now so you’ll have to be on the look out for that soon.

Back in February I was watching a special on our PBS channel and it was about the creations of some of the scariest stories to come out of England in the 1800’s. Mary Shelley and her husband Percy along with her stepsister Claire plus Lord Bryon and John William Polidori stayed in a villa by Lake Genova in Switzerland. The weather was awful so they had to spend their days and nights indoors, to pass time they told stories and poems. Lord Bryon basically told them all to write the scariest story they can come up with and thus Mary Shelley created parts of the first draft of “Frankenstein” while Polidori began working on his first story “Vampyre” which would be about the modern vampire of the day.

I thought it was very neat for an hour show. It’s always stayed there in the depths of my brain so I kind of told myself early on that I needed to create a Tune Tuesday of Switzerland so I could tell you about it. Now back to the music!

I had to have some help with finding some Swiss music so I put out a tweet that I was looking for anybody to help me out and I actually found a blogger who is a native of Switzerland. Solange gave me a whole list of different music which I thought was very nice and I’m hoping that’ll help me out the next time I do this! She suggested I look into a duo as I’ve gathered, they’re called Dabu Fantastic and they seem to do pop/ubran music in their native tongue which I love! They kind of remind me of a Swiss version of The Chainsmokers and I mean that in the nicest way. They’re pretty good!

The other one she gave me was a female singer Stefanie Heinzmann, like Dabu Fantastic I am not familiar with her, but there are some differences with her as she tends to have an indie-pop sound like Zella Day and Ingrid Michaelson. As I’ve managed to find on Spotify, she does her music in English and has a wonderful voice!

Are there any other music acts from Switzerland that you think I should look into? Let me know!

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DIY: Hallow-Sicles!

Today I am back with my second DIY post for this month! If you haven’t seen last week’s post, it was called “Candy Corn Banner” and you can check out the instructions on how to make your own banner!

This craft, we got started on it the same day we did the banner. Despite the fact that we were both losing energy, we were both positive and very creative that we thought we’d end up finishing both projects in one day! I still think it was accomplishment that we were able to get the first steps completed and the day I came back to her house we finished the rest of it and made a few more characters!

Again, I found this one on Pinterest but unlike the banner where it was just one link, people make crafts with Popsicle sticks all the time so there’s a mass quantities of them all over the site! However, I will include the one that gave me the idea to help you out, but everything was really simple!

What you will need for this:

• Popsicle sticks
• Paint
• Glue
• Paintbrushes
• Paper Plates
• Napkins

Most that we used for these guys my nana already had in her “craft drawer” and yes, she has one of those and it’s glorious! Anyways, in the original link they used only five sticks for the characters but I honestly can’t create a whole face in that amount of room so we upped the number to eleven sticks. We lined the sticks side-by-side to make a little fence.

After we figured that out and counted multiple times to make sure we had the right amount of sticks we got started on getting them to stay together. We used a glittery Elmer’s glue that kept drying up on us everytime we tried to use it. My poor nana had so much trouble that she ended up having to take off the cap and actually paint on the glue on the sticks! Surprisingly, that worked a lot better than we thought it would!

We ended up stopping on the project to finish the banner, so I can’t exactly tell you how long it took for it to dry completely, but it wasn’t that long! I want to say less than five minutes!

I wanted to really give myself room to be creative considering my nana was the one who had to do the beginning steps. So I decided to draw out the characters on a pieces of paper, I made a vampire, Frankenstein, witch, ghost, etc. I just wanted an outline of what I wanted on these canvases. I had my nana measure out the fences and they came out to be 4×1/2 by 4×1/2 and then I had my dad take those measurements and make me four squares on my ole sketch pad.

When I went to actually draw anything, everything literally went to hell. I am an artist, but I’ve sort of been in retirement for the last 4 or 5 years and apparently parts of me like the status and when I started to draw out a witch, I basically tore myself down.. It was awful! Anyways, I had to find a new way to go about this so I treated it like I was coloring as that doesn’t bother me as much! And I started coloring a witch, and somehow I made what looks like a cross between a warlock and a Frankenstein monster!

The next day I went back to my nana’s and added another DIY “experiment” to this project! I went on Pinterest to find a way to make homemade paints and I found one, but I will not deny, it is a pain in the butt because you only get the recipe. There’s nothing about getting the lumps out or how long to let it rest. So that part became the actual “experiment” but it was sort of a success! The day after my dad bought us some new paints so we no longer had to use the homemade paint, which is the reason why I’m not including the recipe in this post!

To finish our pumpkins, we didn’t necessarily know what would be easier for us to do as far as the faces went, so she drew out the eyes and nose on hers but I had to figure out a mouth and I went with the standard buck teeth; she did pretty good with this and I ended up doing the same thing but did my eyes differently. She also wanted to add “hair” onto her pumpkin. She originally was going to glue orange yarn, but we both thought it was too much orange so she used a last bit of black glitter for the hair and now he’s very cute!

I decided to do two more, well at least get started on two others. After I finished my Jack O’ Lantern, that I’ve named “Jackie” I moved on to my next character! I still wanted to try for a witch so I painted a fence in a limeade green and while I let it dry I painted another fence white. For this fence, I decided to go freehand or in this case, “freefoot” and didn’t make an outline of the face. I made the mouth first and then worked my way up! It looked so cute, I was very proud of myself by the end of it!

I let it dry before I moved onto the next stage, which was doing the iris of the eyes. After that, I realized that I didn’t have enough room for the cap and I made a last minute decision to make it a Frankenstein monster, so I made a small hairline and luckily I had the ends of the sticks on the back showing so I painted those areas in black and lastly I added a lavender pupil so he still looked silly, unlike the scary monster I had pictured into my mind! His name is “Frankie” if you wanted to know!

We officially finished the craft the next day, but I felt if I added any more onto this post, nobody would want to read it. So that’s why I’ve decided to stop here! If you would like to see any others, go check out my Facebook page! I posted some sneak peeks!

Hope you all have enjoyed these posts! 🙂

What do you think of our fence characters? Who is your favorite?

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