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Sixteen-year-old Hilda has thought she was living with a mental illness for most of her life, but all of that changes when she meets Tyler, who claims to be einherjar, one of Viking god Odin’s warriors.
Can Hilda prevent the world from suffering its catastrophic fate once Ragnarök has begun?
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You can’t hurry love. You also can’t cultivate it over successive manipulations of the timeline. After inventing a time machine, Nigel and Daniel dance a tango through time as they vie for Paula’s affections.
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Heddy is Sad is an excellent book for educating children, youth, parents, friends, and caregivers how to recognize when someone is suffering with depression and how to support a loved one in need.
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All too often, we focus on the negatives that come with a diagnosis of ADHD. It’s time that changed, and we begin to focus on the positives. Harry has a lot of Energy is an amazing book for helping children, youth, parents, and caregivers who have first-hand experience with ADHD to see the positives to this unique condition.
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Astraphobia, an extreme fear of thunderstorms, can be debilitating at times. Most children outgrow their fear of storms, but until that happens, every dark cloud can cause anxiety and fear. Luna is Afraid of Storms is a great book to help children come to terms with their own fears or unease when it comes to storms alongside Luna as she does the same.
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Reading a book in and of itself is a great way to stay occupied, but Luna has Nothing to do will spark your child’s imagination, suggesting wonderfully fun ideas he or she can do to stave off boredom while staying inside.
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Addison Haney is released from a psychiatric ward having suffered amnesia after an unknown traumatic event and embarks on a quest to figure out who she was. Rather than come together, her life begins to unravel. Addison suffers from a strange photo sensitivity to the sun, her boyfriend, Piers, is never around during the day, and Percival, the local club owner, seems to know more than he’s letting on. If that’s not bad enough, people around her start to die horrible, bloody deaths.
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No sooner has Bethany beat the Carrington Pulitzer Revelation Chronicles Online Extended Playpack game than Agents Quinto and Nimoy show up on her doorstep (because that’s not weird). Their offer: serve her government by finding stolen and hidden secrets in the game.
Comma Gain?
Punctuation rules are confusing, particularly those surrounding commas, semi-colons, and dashes. In this post, I tackle the comma: when to use it, and how much is too much.
The Oxford Comma
The Oxford Comma refers to the comma used to separate items in a list, particularly before the “and”. The perfect example of this is
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oxford-comma
While common sense can help to sort out problems such as this one, when the reader must pause to engage critical thinking skills to sort this out, it pulls them from the narrative and spoils the experience.
Commas and Conjunctions
Use a comma before a conjunction with two independent clauses, but not when there is only one independent clause. For example:
Two independent clauses: I want to eat, and I want to sleep. [Both clauses on either side of the conjunction can stand alone as their own sentences.]
One independent clause: I want to eat and sleep. [Only “I want to eat” can stand on its own as an independent clause.]
Semicolons vs. Commas
In a long list, where there are already commas, use semicolons to separate items in a list:
Once Upon A Time has several subplots going: Rumplestiltskin and Belle, who also double as Beauty and the Beast; Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, which serves as the segue into the Land of Untold Stories arc; and The Dr. Whale/Dr. Frankenstein connection, which may wind up saving Storybrook from evil, once again.
Semicolons are also used to separate two independent, yet related clauses (without a conjunction):
Some fans might say that Rumplestiltskin is the quintessential villain; the Evil Queen comes in a close second.
With the exception of the list rule, a semicolon should never be used in place of a comma, or a colon, for that matter. Note: see example above for proper colon use (or the start of this sentence). In general, a colon denotes a list to follow.
Commas After Conjunctions
Commas should NEVER be used after conjunctions (this is one of my pet peeves). Though we often pause after conjunctions like “and”, it is not correct to put a comma there. Consider my horrible example from above:
I want to eat and, if I can ever find the time, I want to sleep.
If you were to read this aloud, it might sound right, but it’s grammatically incorrect. Per the rule above, the comma should come before the “and”.
I want to eat, and if I can ever find the time, I want to sleep.
This is correct as the phrase “and if I can ever find the time” is an aside. See note below regarding the use of commas and asides.
Is it ever okay to break the rules?
Sometimes, in dialogue, it is okay to break the rules. For example, in I Was, Am, Will Be Alice, Pete, Alice’s boyfriend, asks:
Could I see, like, dinosaurs, or travel to see how mankind evolves a couple a thousand years from now?
Though technically, this isn’t exactly rule breaking, as it is correct to put commas around an aside in a sentence (giving additional information without which the sentence is still an independent clause), “like” is more of a speech habit than an aside, but the commas work in this context.
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