The State of Grace

Product Information

Fifteen-year-old Grace has Asperger’s; she looks at the world differently to those around her. She’s happiest around her best friend, Anna, and her horse Mabel, but when everything around her starts to change, Grace struggles to adjust. Thanks so much for taking the time to read the post and leave a comment! I gotta tell you, I am perennially surprised and delighted by how many SoG fans discover this modest tribute to that cult crime classic and take the initiative to express their appreciation for it here. I watched it once again over St. Paddy’s three months ago, and my admiration for it only deepens with each successive viewing. Her relationship with her best friend also felt realistic. The friend, Anna, is described as the kind of person who is friends with everyone. She also helps Grace with some social stuff, e.g., interpreting ambiguous text messages. Although not universal, this is a common real-life friendship pattern I’ve seen described in non-fiction. Grace also mentions some reasons why Anna is friends with her: she makes Anna laugh and they have shared interests in fandom. This lets us see their friendship is not one-sided.

The focus on Grace’s experience also carries through in what’s made obvious to the reader and what isn’t. For example, there’s something going on with the mother’s new friend being a bad influence, and it wasn’t clear what was going on until Grace learned more later. This is a refreshing change from portrayals where an autistic character’s social difficulties are shown by their failing to understand something made so clear to the reader that the character seems to be ignoring obvious truths. Apart from the above issues, Grace’s relationships with others were portrayed well. Her mother felt like a realistic mixed character, someone who messes up but also works to do better. She doesn’t always understand Grace’s perspective, but plays a supportive role; Grace says her mother “might make me want to scream sometimes, but she is good at recognizing when I’ve hit the wall and keeping me from losing it” (37). We'd meet, and she would realize she'd been in love with me her whole life because I was her LITERAL DREAM MAN-Bullet

Blog Archive

Please note that the road to our bed & breakfast is along a 2km gravel road. Along this road, you will pass by an informal settlement. We understand that the setting may appear precarious at first sight, but we assure you that it is a safe and accessible route for any type of vehicle. While the 2km gravel road may give a rustic feel to your journey, rest assured that once you arrive at our bed & breakfast, you will be greeted by a peaceful and inviting environment.

Franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Game of Thrones have systematically trained audiences to try to “outsmart the narrative,” an engagement strategy I studied in “In the Multiverse of Madness: How Media Mega-Franchises Make Us Their Obedient Servants, Part 1.” Any discussion about those movies must be preceded with a caveat: No spoilers. Right. Dr. Horrible was creative, experimental, entertaining, and met with overwhelmingly positive reception! (That said, I haven’t seen it in fifteen years, so I can’t offer an assessment of its moral imagination.) If I’m Joss Whedon at the height of my power and influence (before things went to shit for him), I’d much rather work outside the system than be an indentured servant to it! That’s what George Lucas did so enviably in the 1970s: He bought his independence from Hollywood. Also per Wikipedia: I can certainly appreciate the frustrations you experienced on the production. I worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood for over a decade — I was never produced, though I developed projects for actor/producer Ice Cube and Lights Out producer Lawrence Grey, among others — but ultimately grew battle-weary from all the capricious egos that so often stood in the way of anything getting done in that town. (All the “rules” changed after the 2008 WGA strike, and selling specs and setting up features, as I’m sure you’re aware, became infinitely more challenging.) I don’t mind creative collaboration and compromise — I welcome it— but not at the expense of eventually getting something produced. So, I’ve transitioned from screenwriter to author/blogger, and I am enjoying the creative freedom and fulfillment that’s afforded me. Grace’s descriptions are given in ways that autistic readers will connect with, and with enough detail (as far as I can tell) for neurotypical readers to understand what it can be like to be autistic while having to deal with the demands of ordinary life—a careful and impressive balance. Despite the occasional spin-off or crossover, though, things were generally singular. One-offs. I remember seeing Star Wars in a theater with wooden floors when I was eleven. . . . I was completely enraptured; time stopped for the duration of that film, and that feeling of total immersion is what I live for. But it didn’t occur to me to want, let alone expect, more. Properties getting extended and rebranded and rebirthed and then extended again — for a lot of my life, that was the exception, not the rule.

lenguaje ofensivo, sexual, discriminatorio, amenazante, que incite al odio o de contenido violento; What stood out to me most from this post was the perception you had of why your friend moved away. While we often do gain clarity with time, we also have this tendency to always interpret our previous “selves” from any age through the lens of our current-self. We berate ourselves for things we did when we were kids, thinking we should have known better; or we give our child-self too much credit, as if he/she knew things then that weren’t actually understood for many years later. At any stage in life, we can only be who we were, only know what we knew—in terms of both experience and cognitive ability. Many times, people wind up carrying guilt for a lifetime over why their then-self did such-and-such or didn’t see such-and-such, etc. But we truly weren’t ourselves.