THIS BLOG HAS MOVED

You can find my new and improved site here:

Thea van Diepen

(if I sent you here, my apologies. I'm still working on fixing all my links)

The Something Exciting is Now Here!

I was going to have a brand-new website all ready for today, with this week's blog post on it and everything.

Unfortunately, finishing it up is taking much longer than I thought it would, which means this website (and the new post) will be appearing sometime this weekend, and most likely tomorrow (Friday). I'll tweet about it and everything but, if you're the kind of person who manually checks this site for new posts, then I will reserve a space on here for you to let you know when the new site is available.

The new site is done, complete with this week's blog post!

*waves pom-poms, throws confetti*

You can go to it here:
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[The new home of Expected Aberrations!]

I can't wait for you guys to see the new site! It's quite attractive, if I do say so myself. :)

Video: So, You Wanna Make a Language?

On May 29th of last year, I did a webinar/workshop/thing on making up languages. It went really well, and it got recorded, which means I can share it with you all right here. I didn't put it up right away, though, because Google wanted my cell number before it would let me put up a video that was longer than 15 minutes onto Youtube, and I wanted to find an alternative to doing that.

Since I originally did the event on Vokle, I checked there today (finally) and discovered that there was an embed code for my video.

Well. That was easy.

*rolls eyes*

*shrugs*

I hope you enjoy and, if you have any questions, leave me a comment and I'll answer them as best as I can! :)

What Amateur Linguists Do For Fun

So, today I was totally going to write something serious and important or something, but then I got very distracted by playing around with a font I made yesterday. You see, yourfonts.com had a thing going on yesterday whereby you could make a font from your handwriting for free if you had the coupon code... and I had the coupon code.

The unfortunate thing is that I didn't have any time to immediately play with said font, because homework was eating my life (thankfully, I can say without sarcasm that it was the funnest homework I've ever done, because I got to try deciphering Chinese characters and figuring out which English words several Japanese loan words came from based on what they sound like. This may not sound like your cup of tea, but it is totally mine \o/), which meant that I didn't have time to play with it until today.

Today's Post Has Been Postponed...

...today got eaten by homework. I will put up the post tomorrow, and it will be awesome. *crosses fingers*

Also, I'm thinking that I should just change my posting day to Thursday anyways, because I've got this evening class on Wednesdays now and it's really been cramping my style here. Yes. I have decided. From now on, I'll be posting on Thursdays and it will be wonderful. *crosses fingers*

Anyways. See you all tomorrow!

In Which Thea is Not Exactly a Feminist

My younger brother and sister (and probably my parents) get a little tired of me pointing out the overwhelming number of male main characters in movies, and the lack of a realistic sample of female main characters in books.

I know my sister didn't like it when, after we watched the trailers just before the Hobbit, I pointed out that not one of them portrayed a movie with a female main character. This wasn't a comment on the apparent quality or creativity of the movies (because we were both pleasantly surprised with the apparent originality of Oblivion, and can't wait to see it). This wasn't to say that those movies were somehow evil for all having male leads. All I was saying was that every single one had a male lead.

You know what you say with the main character of your story? You show through who they are, the things they do, the values they hold, the change(s) they undergo, and the consequences at the end of it all what makes a person important, what makes them worth thinking about. And, whatever you say, if you say it often enough, without any notable challenge or alternative, people tend to believe it.

Surviving a Lifetime of Shyness

When I was really, really little (like, younger than four), my parents took me to Sunday School for the first time. I went in the room, saw the group of kids, freaked out internally, and hid under a table. This happened for a few weeks, my mom dropping me off, me hiding under the table, her coming back and getting me. I wasn't hysterical, I just was frightened of all these kids that I didn't know. Well, after a while of watching all these kids doing fun things, and getting bored with the table, I finally got out and joined them.

2012: The Year the World Didn't End

I've seen several people reflecting on their blogs about what went well/not so well the past year, and I rather liked that idea. It seems a more productive thing to take a moment to see where you've been and then organically growing from there than it is to just decide where to go next. Context allows us to see more clearly what's needed, and can give us ideas for how those needs can be met. At the very least, context is great for picking up new vocabulary. :)

What went well this year?
1) My writing. I finally proved to myself that I can finish things, not only by finishing the first drafts of several short stories (via Written Arpeggios), but also by self-publishing my anthology. On top of that, I completed the first draft of a novel for the first time ever this summer. How much I enjoyed doing all these things has only confirmed to me that I love writing. :D

In Which Thea Memes

Looks like I've been tagged for a meme. Well, that makes it sound far more serendipitous than it really was.

Mike Duran, a writer who I greatly respect, and whose blog I read regularly, got tagged with this meme. I loved the idea behind it and really wanted to be tagged by someone at some point.

A few days later, D Jordan Redhawk, a friend from an online writing community called Forward Motion, said on Facebook that she'd been tagged for this meme and asked if anyone wanted to be tagged by her (thank you very much for doing that! :D). I said yes.

Which is a very short story to say that, once you know what you want, and if you pay attention, you have the ability to take advantage of the opportunities that come your way. :)

I take it back: The whole thing really was wonderfully serendipitous, which is pretty cool.

I Never, Ever Thought I'd Do This... part 2

Part 1 is here.

If a majority can exert influence simply by sheer number, then what is it about minority groups that allows them to influence others? What is their power? According to Moscovici, the power of a minority lies in its consistency (Moscovici, Lage, & Naffrechoux, 1969). In a variant of the study mentioned earlier, the confederates were instructed to sometimes say the slide was green, and other times say that it was green. As a result of this inconsistency on the part of the minority, less participants ended up agreeing with the minority than those in the original study. From this, Moscovici concluded that the power of a minority lies in its consistency.

I Never, Ever Thought I'd Do This... part 1

As you all know, I've been working like crazy on this term paper thing. The assignment was to write a section of a chapter for a hypothetical textbook on the subject of social influence (seeing as the class is called Social Influence, this assignment was extremely on topic and reasonable. I just hated the class, which is why writing this darn thing was such a big deal for me). 

Now, as much as I loathed a great deal of things about this paper, I actually ended up having a lot of fun writing it. Not only that, but I realized partway through that the subject matter I was covering would be interesting and informative to you guys (unless you've gone through a psych degree... in which case I'd say just to look at the pictures). And, lo and behold, I found myself submitting this assignment with excitement because I had decided about a thousand words prior that I'd post this paper on here.

My prof may hate it, and I might even get a failing mark on it. I don't care. You may hate it (somehow, I doubt that), and I really don't care about that, either. It has an xkcd comic in it. Nothing can ruin my mood.

Without further ado, my section of a chapter for a hypothetical textbook (part 1):

I just finished a term paper

Like, ten minutes ago.

And I've been working on it this whole past week.

Needless to say, there isn't going to be any post today, but there will be one tomorrow. Here's a sneak peek of what I'm thinking of doing:

Why Make a Book Series Like a TV Show?

Due to an unfortunate spasm of boredom that severely sprained the dignity of several cortices of my brain yesterday, I won't be continuing the series about Adam and Eve. To be entirely honest, I'm not sure why I started it. Ah well. My apologies.

Different Dialects

When a director makes a movie based off of a book, there are always changes made to the story. This is because of one or more of several reasons:

1) Movies and books are fundamentally different formats, and so have to be done in different ways.
2) Two hours isn't enough time to do everything in the book.
3) Whoever was in charge of the movie clearly only read a description of the book and then used the other reasons as excuses for their shoddy work (I'm looking at YOU, makers of Ella Enchanted. *glares*).

No Posts Until December 5th- Fun Stuff in the Mean Time

It's that time of year again. No, not Thanksgiving (I'm Canadian, we already had ours :P :) ). Finals. More accurately, the time before finals when everything is due and I realize that I've been behind on my readings. Again.

There are other things along with that, like the fact that I have an oral exam I need to practise for and a room that is in desperate need of being cleaned, all resulting in a severe lack of time and energy in all areas, which causes my work to be of poorer quality. I don't want to be posting things that are crappy. Therefore, I'm going to wait until things die down before I start back up again.

But, since I won't be posting for two weeks, and I didn't want to leave it at that, I thought I'd give you some interesting material from around the web which you can enjoy at your leisure:

Adam and Eve vs. Science: Setting the Stage

Edited later to add this notice: I'm not going to be continuing with this series. For some reason, my interest in it died a horrible and entirely inexplicable death. It might revive sometime in the future, but it's definitely dead right now. And that is that.


If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I love genetics. You'll also know that I'm a Christian, and that I like to talk about the hard stuff to do with Christianity.

So, naturally, when I read a comment on Facebook where someone gave their reasons for calling the Bible a glorified science fiction book, I knew I had to tackle the subject. And, of course, I decided to pick the biggest, most important, and toughest of the topics listed:

How could the Bible possibly be right about Adam and Eve being the ancestors of all living?

How the Value of Art is Like the Meaning of Life

Dear five year old me,

I discovered the point of art! Remember when you were wondering why you even kept those stickers in your sticker book? Sure, they were pretty, and it was nice to open up the book and look at them, but they didn't do anything for you.

What would happen if you had all the stickers in the world that you loved and then there were no more to gain? You'd have walls and books and bedframes full of stickers, and you wouldn't be happy with them. Once you had them, all you could do with them was look at them sometimes, and what was the gain in looking? What did that do for anything? They couldn't do anything to add value to the world; they would just sit there and look back at you as if to ask:

Does Change Need to Be So Stressful?

I almost didn't write a post tonight, because I'm upset. And I would really love to blame everyone else but myself, but the truth is that I am responsible for my own life.

Before you get too worried, I'll be okay. I'm just not feeling great.

I've been trying to make changes in my life, most notably how I manage my time, and I've discovered that there are two ways of going about that:

Why Do You Want Wealth?

I've been doing a lot of learning about what it takes to make money and how to make it so that becoming successful won't destroy me (because it definitely can -if my character is lacking in the little things, that will only become worse as those same things increase), and one piece of advice I came across was rather awesome and I wanted to share it with you:

Find out why you want to have wealth, write it down, so that you can refer back to it from time to time and use it to keep yourself on track. (paraphrased from Dr. James B. Richards)

Something about that set off fireworks in my brain, so I started writing it out, even the silly-sounding bits, and I decided afterwards that I wanted to share it with you.

Why Do I Want Wealth?

How to Act Wisely Concerning Politics

Ok. First. I have a very hands-off approach to politics. I don't like talking about them, I don't like thinking about them, and I am so very willing to just leave everything to do with politics, arguing, and ridicule up to everyone else, all these people who seem to care so much.

Which doesn't mean that I don't care.

One Night, I Dreamed I Was a Beast

Fear: An unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat. (definition from Google)

This post is brought to you by the theme song 
for book 4 of my fantasy series.

One night, I dreamed I was a beast.