Posted by Miriam on April 16th, 2009
The website Smart Girls Know is sponsoring a Double-Daring book giveway. Just leave a comment with your definition of what it means to be daring, do it by Tuesday April 21st, and you’re in the running.
Daring escape for the day, from “The Double-Daring Girl’s Guide to Getting Out of Trouble”:
8. Quicksand. In horror movies, one step and you are sucked forever into a milky morass. The good news is that most quicksand pits don’t look anything like the movies, nor are they as deadly. Your body is less dense than quicksand, which means that you can float in it. Relax (well, try to relax). Use slow, small motions to get on your back. Once you’re floating, move yourself slowly to the edge of the pit and carefully hoist yourself onto firmer ground. In the movies and especially in the cartoons, there’s a low-hanging branch for you to grab and pull yourself out. In real life, make the best with whatever’s nearby.
Posted by Miriam on April 13th, 2009
“A pack of dogs” everyone knows, but what about these?
- A blessing of unicorns
- A convocation of eagles
- A gang of elk
- An intrusion of cockroaches
- An ostentation of peacocks
- A doom of dragons
- A troop of kangaroos
- A nursery of raccoons
From The Double-Daring Book for Girls, “Collective Nouns about Animals,” page 31.
Posted by Miriam on April 9th, 2009
You see, it’s not just the perfect book for recession times because of all the projects that can be done with cheap and available paper, it’s the perfect book because you can get it for free!
Here’s another give away. Go to The Sought After, a beautiful blog about being an adult adoptee, written by a poet and writing professor. The deadline for telling a good wilderness story and being entered into the free-book drawing is late on Friday, April 10.
There’s some fun backstory here: the writer of this blog is an intrepid wilderness orienteer who helped me with some crucial information for the camping chapter in Double-Daring. Click over to The Sought After to find out what that was.
You’ll be glad you did, and you’ll get a chuckle, too.
–Miriam
Posted by Miriam on April 3rd, 2009
When the adventures are done and you’re reading tweets, the Daring Girls can be followed at @DaringGirlsBook. Our tweets are filled with fun facts and blips from The Double-Daring Book for Girls.
This morning we tweeted about Cricket (the game, not the insect), and this afternoon we revealed a list of synonyms for the word Foolish, for those of you still thinking about April Fool’s Day.
Posted by Miriam on March 30th, 2009
Double-Daring has a chapter on Courage. Courage is a theme throughout the book, as it is such a key part of leading a daring life. As we wrote, we found courage everywhere, whether in those fantastic American cowgirls we researched, or in Raven Wilkinson, a black dancer who braved hostile southern audiences in the 1950’s south, or in any girl stepping out of her comfort zone for a moment to learn something new, like how to swim, or try out for a new sport, or do a flipturn in the pool.
The Courage chapter has lots of quotes to inspire us all. Here’s one from artist and painter Vincent Van Gogh:
“If you hear a voice within you say ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.”
And another, from Little Women author Louisa May Alcott:
“I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.”
And finally, from author Eudora Welty: “All serious daring starts from within.”
Bon courage!