Wil Wheaton responds to a 13 year old girl's question about being bullied

I wish someone had said this to me back when I was 13:

Back when I was in school, there had been no school shootings yet. Bullying was okay. Even teachers got in on it (either actively or by looking the other way). Only once did a teacher ever try to stop me from being bullied, and when she was ignored, she gave up.

There was no Internet. Talk about being cut off, being trapped with all these people who hated you and made sure you didn't go a minute without knowing it.

Sometimes I wonder what I would have been like now if I hadn't been bullied every single school day. I couldn't walk from one classroom to another without being pushed, teased, jabbed with thumbtacks and pencils, and other such abuses (the words were by far worse than any physical thing). It started in kindergarten (kindergarten! Because of the kind of lunch I had brought -- jelly and cream cheese on graham crackers, the other kids said it looked like worms) and it never stopped from there. Sometime in college it started slowing down. I think my junior year of college was the first year I had with no teasing.

It makes me bitter now, for so many reasons. No one should have to go through that. To think that positive things, like me liking to read and enjoying learning, only made it worse.

I often think I should be able to just 'shake it off' and forget about it. I was a kid, they were kids, I'm an adult now. It's not that easy though.

Edit: I had intended this to be a positive post, sharing that nice video. The subject of bullying seems to always send me in darker directions though.

Novels and fanfic

Looks like the option to include fanfic in my 50 book per year effort passed. Since that's the case, I decided I needed to check the wordcount and make sure this fic I'm reading really is novel length.

How many words does the average novel have? Unsurprisingly there is no one answer, but from wiki: ...lists novels as typically being between 100,000 and 175,000 words,[6] while National Novel Writing Month requires its novels to be at least 50,000 words.

Average on Google seems to be 30K-40K for YA, and 60K+ for adult novel.

The fic I'm reading, Force Over Distance is 404,600 words. I boggle! Also, I'm amused: I didn't want to read it at home this weekend, because it's good for a "between work tasks" brain refresher/reward and so I didn't want to finish it at home, but I'm only on chapter 12 of 71 chapters, so I didn't have to worry about that! I should have checked the chapter count sooner, haha.

Once more, I'm so surprised and touched and honored that people write this much for free! This is so well-written (both story-wise and technically), it could easily be published as a four books!

Book #14: Loki's Wolves

Loki's Wolves by K. L. Armstrong
(Book received free for review from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.)
Rating: 2/disliked (1-5/hated-loved)

There are young adult books that are good for both adult readers and for kids.
There are young adult books that are only good for young readers.

I can't give a book a bad rating because it falls into the latter category. I suspect young kids would enjoy this book series, though it didn't work for me (I gave up at the halfway point).

Loki's Wolves is set in the modern world, but in it Norse myths are real. The gods have died, but their children live on. Ragnarok (the final battle between Midgar the world-eating snake and the heroes) is on the horizon and one of each of the gods' children must team up to stop it.

The main characters in this first book are Thor's kid, Loki's kid, and a girl who as of the halfway point we hadn't found out who she was a child of (if any god, but she turned into a fish at one point, so it's quite likely that she's the great great great grandchild of one of the gods or of a trout).

The kids' first task was to find the rest of the children of the gods. Oh, and the adults are secretly against them because we think the end of the world would be a good thing -- since governments are corrupt, we want all life on earth to be destroyed so things can start over. I missed that memo.

My problem with the story (and why it might be good for young kids) is that there were no real (bad) consequences for their actions. In the last scene I read, the three kids were fighting a troll. In Loki's Wolves, trolls are basically walking, living piles of rocks (who masquerade as parts of Mount Rushmore during the day -- as a eyebrow, mustache, whatever). The kids have only one superpower each: The Thor kid can shoot power from his fist, Loki's kid is a werewolf, and the girl turned into a fish once. As the fight goes on, kids are "thrown across the clearing" (twice), get punched by a walking pile of rocks, get kicked twice by one (described as feeling like a "sledgehammer" hit him in the side), etc. But from every one of those "injuries", the kids stood up without a single effect. If one were hit twice in the side with a sledgehammer, ribs should be broken! At the very least! There is no indication before this that they don't feel pain or heal superfast or anything; one of them is a boxer, so if that kind of thing happened, it should have been discovered before this point.

So, if parents want to protect their kid from that kind of thing, this would be a great book series for them. Also, kids might not notice the lack of injuries, so they'd probably enjoy this just for the story.