Bernadette Benda

1.

If I see Peter Pan misquoted as saying “to live will be an awfully big adventure” one more time I will actually go banana balls.

The quote is incorrect and entirely loses the spirit of the moment and the spirit of Peter Pan himself. The correct version is, “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”

Don’t believe me? Here it is in print:

Big difference, huh? Because the real quote is about Peter Pan being afraid and laughing in the face of death. Yes, the quote is a bit more morbid than the sanitized version, but….well, there it is. Take it up with J.M. Barrie. But for pete’s sake please down misquote things (I’m not really sure who I’m even addressing this to. It’s just that this error was brought to my attention again the other day while I was googling “fairy tale quotes” and this popped up on some random Pinterest board.)

Oh and I have another misquote to mention. There are a lot of quotes from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland that are attributed to Lewis Carroll. Like….no??? Those aren’t from the book????

(One day I will actually write a whole thing on this quote)

2.

Bits of ice were in the street like crushed pieces of glass.

3.

I have a small collection of movie ticket stubs (yes, yes you are getting this story after all).

I found them when I was going through my bi-yearly effort to purge and organize things. My oldest stub is from 2012, The Hobbit: An Unexpected journey. That was almost ten years ago. (The Hobbit came out almost ten years ago???? I’m not crying you’re crying). I went to see Avengers: Age of Ultron three times in one month. Most of the stubs are from The Hobbit movies and superhero movies. I have a The Last Jedi stub that reminds me of when my mom and I went and afterwards stepped out into a blizzard.

I miss going to the movies. Stupid Covid. There just are certain movies that are better seen on the big screen.

4.

My first draft of Red Heart, Ice Mountain is set to blow past 140k words and that will be the longest book I’ve ever written. Why does it have to be so long this is going to be the most painful book to edit.

Why why why why WHY.

But as much as I hope I finish quickly so that editing doesn’t become even more of a nightmare, I’m also….sad.

I’ve been working on this draft for over three months now, which is the longest I’ve spent on a draft for a while (at least it feels that way). I’ve also been prepping this story for over a year, and it has consumed a large part of my imagination. And now that the end of story is drawing near I just…feel bummed out.

I don’t want to say goodbye to the characters and the story and the drama…but then of course I’m really not because eventually I’ll get around editing and there will probably come a day when I never want to lay eyes on the manuscript or think about it ever again. So I guess everything works out alright in the end.

But there’s also that nagging feeling of: did the story accomplish all I wanted it to? Did I included all the things I wanted to? Again, those questions can be answered and fixed during editing, but still.

The good thing is, I have the ending all planned out and I love it so there’s that. So though I’m not going to like ending the book, the end I will like.

I also really want to move on to editing a different project. So….motivation.

5.

I just ate cheesecake at 10 am. I love being an adult.

(until you mention taxes. Then I rescind that statement)