Mental Health Awareness Month: Wrap up + Giveaway

So MHAM has gone by in one exciting and busy blur and I'm so happy with the way everything's gone. I hope everyone has had as much fun doing this as myself and Ula have! There have been so many books read by everyone and some really fascinating posts regarding mental health from authors and bloggers; I'm just so proud of everyone that's taken part and really opened up about the topic. I hope this has helped or made a difference to people in some way and perhaps worked at trying to lower the stigma associated with it. I've provided a linky at the bottom of this post for us all to share our MHAM wrap ups!

INTERVIEW: Louise O'Neill talks Only Ever Yours

Louise O'Neill, author of Only Ever Yours stops by for a quick Q&A on her debut and mental health issues.

Today I'm very excited to share a very heartfelt interview with upcoming author Louise O'Neill.

1. Only Ever Yours deals with some pretty difficult subject matter. Could you tell us a little about it and what inspired you to write about such topics?

Only Ever Yours is set in a world in which women are unable to bear female children. Faced with the inevitable extinction of the human race, the decision is made to create The Schools, closed environments in which girls are bred for their beauty and trained from their creation to be subservient to men. I used this dystopian setting as a tool to explore issues that women face in our culture today, such as the fetishisation of thinness, the idea of the Beauty Myth, and the sexualisation of all women, but young women in particular.

I think the idea for Only Ever Yours was inspired by a summer I spent in India in 2006. I was volunteering in the Shishu Bhavan orphanage in Kolkata, and had noticed that the majority of the orphans were female. While I was still in Kolkata, I randomly came across a book called May you be the Mother of a Hundred Sons by Elisabeth Bumiller, which introduced me to the idea of sex selective abortion and the high rates of mortality amongst female babies in poorer areas of India. It wasn’t until much later, (and after I had taken a module called ‘Catastrophe and Post Apocalyptic Fiction’ at university) that the idea of a feminist dystopian novel started to formulate.

Harry Potter #69

This is a meme hosted by me here at my blog :).The aim of this meme is to share with fellow bloggers a character, spell, chapter, object or quote from the books/ films/ J. K. Rowling herself or anything Potter related! I will be picking a topic within HP for us to focus on each week and then if anyone wants to take part feel free! All I ask is to link back here, to my blog :). There is now a full list of the topics to come in the Harry Potter section of my blog here.

Me, My Anxiety and I

It's always hard to know where to start with a post like this. I don't do many posts that aren't book related in some way so this is a completely new experience for me. If you know me in person, you know I'm not shy to talk about my experiences with anxiety and panic attacks. I'm fairly open about it. I'll talk about it with people in the hope that my experience can help anyone else that has it. This wasn't always the case. I used to be absolutely mortified by it and I felt like I was so weak and useless. I was also prone to a fair amount of self pity - why me? etc. etc. but I think that's only natural. I feel like this is taking on such a formal tone and this wasn't my intention. I think after so many years of essay writing it just comes natural. Anyway, I thought today would be a good day to chat through my experiences of anxiety, how it was for me and the changes I went through. Please bare with me!

My anxiety and panic attacks started towards the end of my first year of university, so June 2010. So that's roughly four years ago. At the time, I had no idea what was going on. I felt sad, shaken up, dizzy, sick, I couldn't breath. I was convinced that there was something seriously wrong with me. This happened on and off for days, weeks, then months. I went to the doctors so many times with complaints and each time they told me I was healthy. I was fine. There was nothing wrong with me. This did nothing to ease my mind. These symptoms didn't stop. I remember sitting in my Introduction to Gender exam and not being able to stop shaking. I sat there, wrote as much as I could for 45 minutes and then pretty much ran out of there and back to my room. I couldn't cope with it and I got such a rubbish mark and didn't complete the exam.

GUEST POST: Eating Disorders in YA

Today we have the lovely Beth from Miss Inga Page to talk to us about Eating Disorders in YA. It's such an amazing post - I hope you enjoy it!

Eating Disorders in Young Adult Fiction

Now, as some of you might know (from me complaining about it on Twitter on, more or less, a daily basis), I am currently in full-blown thesis writing mode for my Master’s degree, where I am writing about representations of anorexia nervosa in Young Adult Fiction.

When I told Leah about this, she very kindly asked me if I would write a post for Mental Health Awareness Month, which is being hosted by both Leah and Ula throughout the month of June. Mental Health Awareness Month is being run with the hope of decreasing some of the stigma attached to mental health issues. So, for the entire month of June, bloggers have been writing posts, reading books and writing reviews, and just generally talking about the topic! You can even find them on Twitter: just search for #MHAMJune! 

MHAM GIVEAWAY: The Creativity Challenge

Today we have a special 'game' for you as part of MHAM June, and it's a creativity challenge! Your task is to make something MHAM related and it can earn you a prize! So what's the deal?

You have differently ranked challenge levels depending on the difficulty of the task. You can pick whichever, or all of them to participate in the game and the giveaway. Post them on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, wherever you want to, and share it with us so we can see what you created!

Level 1 - PHOTOGRAPHY: Take a picture of something that represents MHAM to you. It can be anything as long as it means something MHAM related. A description would be very welcome. (Worth 2 points in Rafflecopter)

Level 2 - POETRY: Write a poem or a haiku about MHAM related topics or the event itself. (Worth 3 points in Rafflecopter)

Level 3 - ACTING: Reenact a scene from a MHAM book, and make a video or post a photo of it. (Worth 5 points in Rafflecopter)

PRIZES

1 WINNER will receive a Voucher for 10 $ off Amazon (INT)
1 WINNER will receive FAR FROM YOU by Tess Sharpe paperback (UK)

RULES
1. You have to do one level of the challenge to participate!
2. You have to accept the prize in 48 hours or we draw another winner.
3. We are not responsible for lost books!
4. We reserve the right to disqualify anyone that is breaking these rules.

Good luck everyone!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Farewell Strange Chemistry & Exhibit A, You Will Be Missed

Today I logged onto Twitter to see it exploding with exclamations about the closing of Strange Chemistry  (YA imprint) and Exhibit A (Crime imprint); two imprints of a much loved publishing company Angry Robot Books. I sat there completely gobsmacked just flicking through the tweets, refusing to believe what I was reading. Unfortunately, it's 100% true. I quickly flicked onto the Angry Robot Books website and this is the updated provided:

As you will be aware, Angry Robot Books has a history of innovation and we continue to go from strength to strength. We’re constantly trying out new concepts and new ideas, and we continue to publish popular and award-winning books. Our YA imprint Strange Chemistry and our crime/mystery imprint Exhibit A have – due mainly to market saturation – unfortunately been unable to carve out their own niches with as much success.
We have therefore made the difficult decision to discontinue Strange Chemistry and Exhibit A, effective immediately, and no further titles will be published from these two imprints.
The core Angry Robot imprint is robust, however, and we plan to increase our output from 2 books a month, to 3. We have no plans to cancel any titles other than those of Strange Chemistry and Exhibit A.