Vanilla Moon Books

Era o vreme, acum nu foarte mulți ani, în care orice îmi era groază de venirea menstruației. Pe lângă durerile aproape insuportabile de dinainte să primesc diagnosticul și tratamentul pentru endometrioză, mai era și inconveniența produselor menstruale de unică folosință. Cu tampoanele nu m-am înțeles niciodată prea bine, dar le-am folosit o perioadă în facultate când aveam fluxul atât de mare că îmi trebuia protecție dublă ca să nu fie vreun accident în laboratoarele de trei ore de chimie analitică, neavând timp să îmi iau pauză.

Probabil cele mai folosite sunt absorbantele clasice. Nu știu cum sunteți voi, dar eu spre finalul menstruației, deja sunt sătulă de ele, mai ales dacă nu am grijă de care folosesc - iritații, alergii sau sensibilitate din cauza parfumurilor lor, disconfort de la materialele sintetice, amintirea constantă că sunt „la ciclu” etc.

Avem și alte opțiuni?

Am cochetat de mult timp cu alternativele, iar dintre toate mă atrage cel mai mult lenjeria intimă reutilizabilă. Toamna trecută am adăugat în rutina mea menstruală prima pereche de chiloți mentruali, ca un experiment, cu rezultate bune, astfel încât acum sunt mândra posesoare a două perechi de astfel de chiloți menstruali reutilizabili, pe care îi folosesc în paralel cu absorbantele clasice, ca o bine-meritată pauză.

Aspectul cel mai atrăgător pentru mine la acest tip de lenjerie menstruală este, cu siguranță, confortul. Chiloții pentru menstruație se simt ca orice pereche de chiloți obișnuită, sunt foarte comozi, astfel încât am scăpat atât de iritația inghinală pe care o aveam de la aripioarele absorbantelor, cât și de mâncărimile/alergia de la parfum și materialele sintetice din produsele clasice de unică folosință.

Prima dată când am folosit chiloții menstruali, am fost temătoare că voi avea scurgeri și că mă voi păta, dar acest lucru a fost cât se poate de departe de adevăr. Pentru zilele cu flux maxim, am folosit chiloții menstruali cu absorbție ridicată pe o perioadă de 12 ore înainte de a-i schimba, strict din motive igienice, deoarece încă mai aveau puterea de a absorbi dacă ar fi fost nevoie.

Aspecte practice

Când le spun prietenelor despre chiloții menstruali, sunt două întrebări care răsar mai des.

Cum se spală?

Sigur că nu îi vom pune direct în mașina de spălat, dar este suficient să îi clătim bine în chiuvetă cu apă rece și apoi pot fi spălați cu restul hainelor noastre, cu apă rece și de preferat fără balsam sau înălbitori. Nu îi puneți la uscătorul de rufe!

Ce costuri implică?

Chiar dacă la prima vedere este un cost ridicat, trebuie să luăm în calcul prețul produselor de unică folosință și faptul că lenjeria menstruală reutilizabilă poate face parte din garderoba noastră 2 ani sau mai mult, dacă o îngrijim corespunzător. Dacă faci un calcul pe hârtie, vei constata că este mai economic să folosești chiloții menstruali.

Experiența mea - concluzii

Mi-aș fi dorit să știu de mai mult timp de această alternativă la clasicele absorbante și tampoane. Chiar dacă nu voi trece complet la a folosi exclusiv chiloți menstruali în viitorul apropiat, pot spune că îi folosesc din ce în ce mai des și cu mai multă încredere.

Sunt cea mai comodă variantă pentru mine, iar când îi port, aproape că uit că sunt la menstruație. Mă simt liberă, lipsită de iritații și jenă, fără să mai aud constant foșnetul absorbantelor pe sub hainele subțiri de vară. Nu mă mai gândesc dacă m-am foit prea mult și mi-a alunecat absorbantul sau când m-am verificat ultima dată la toaletă pentru a vedea dacă e cazul să mă schimb.

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Cărțile pe care le-am citit și le prezint în acest clip sunt:

🌙 De ce fierbe copilul in mamaliga - Aglaja Veteranyi - pe care am tot văzut-o recomandată într-o vreme și își merită toate laudele. Este autobiografică, autoarea era copil când părinții au plecat din România comunistă și practic a crescut în lumea periculoasă a circului, lipsită de educație și iubire. E plină de metafore și foarte emoționantă, mai ales interviul de la final cu autoarea, despre care am aflat că s-a sinucis în 2002.

🌙 A Magic Steeped in Poison - Judy I. Lin

🌙 A Venom Dark and Sweet - Judy I. Lin - duologia lui Judy I. Lin e un fantasy pentru tineri (plăcerea mea vinovată) inspirat de mitologia Chinei și arta ceaiului. Au fost foarte fain descrise elementele de magie, cum așa-numiții shennong-shi, prin tehnicile de preparare a ceaiului și cunoașterea plantelor putea vindeca, citi gânduri/amintiri, spori puterea/reflexele etc. ale persoanei cu care împărtășeau o ceașcă de ceai. Are acel tipar în care personajul principal (Ning) participă la o competiție pentru un post foarte râvnit la curte, dar, de fapt, este prinsă la mijloc în jocuri ale puterii pe care nu le înțelege și, in the end, soarta țării e în mâinile ei.

🌙 Intalniri in vacanta - Emily Henry - e genul acela de carte ușoară, perfectă de luat la plajă sau oriunde în vacanță, dacă vă plac romance-urile. Mi se pare că execută perfect tiparul de friends-to-lovers, ceea ce e rar.

🌙 I Left The House Today! - Cassandra Calin - recomand să o urmăriți pe social media, e o artistă româncă stabilită în Canada, iar comics-urile ei sunt foarte relatable, mai ales pentru fete/femei.

🌙 Dincolo de stele - Kristin Hannah

🌙 Actioneaza si gandeste ca Harry Potter - Carla Schiappa-Burdet

🌙 Profetul - Kahlil Gibran - o carte clasică pe care am amânat-o prea mult timp, aveam cumva senzația că e doar pentru oameni foarte religioși, dar nu e cazul. E genul de carte pe care o iei de pe raft și o deschizi când ai nevoie de sprijin emoțional și cuvinte de încurajare/înțelepciune.

🌙 Magia ordinii - Marie Kondo - e ok și serialul de pe Netflix la partea vizuală a sfaturilor (de exemplu: cum să împăturești sau să aranjezi eficient lucrurile mai dificile), dar cartea în sine e un imbold perfect să te apuci, în sfârșit, să pui ordine în lucruri.

🌙 Anihilare - Jeff Vandermeer - din nou, am aflat de ea acum câțiva ani când am văzut filmul pe Netflix. E un SF plin de mister, o arie abandonată și carantinată, protagoniștii sunt 4 femei fără nume, care și-au lăsat identitățile în urmă pentru a explora Aria X. Se întâmplă o grămadă de întorsături de situație, nu mai știi ce să crezi, are un vibe post-apocaliptic care te ține până la final.

Foloste link-ul meu de inscriere pentru primele 60 de zile gratuite pe Scribd.

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Of Blood and Light

C. Monk

Publication date: April 30th 2023

Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Romance

Arthurian legend, bodice-ripping, and capybaras: welcome to Thule.

A girl with a secret . . .
In the back of an ambulance, River Greer counts each breath her little sister takes until the final one: Sage’s body is giving up, ravaged by a mysterious illness. The late-night rush to the ER, however, turns into a surreal nightmare when River is abducted and ferried across the universe to the fabled Thule: a world beyond worlds, where Victorian mores collide with magic and Arthurian legend.

. . . meets a knight on a mission to save his world.
There, his grace Hadrian Landevale of Caid is fighting losing battles of his own: to recover Isolde, his runaway wife, and against the blight that threatens the ichor, the source of all life on Thule. To add insult to injury, the captured fugitive Thule pathfinders just brought back from Earth is not his duchess but an eerie doppelgänger.
When it becomes clear that someone on Thule will go to any length to silence River, Hadrian offers his protection to this enchanting, obstinate stranger . . . whose secrets might be the key to saving Thule’s most precious treasure: the light in its blood.

Goodreads / Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Kobo

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“I have a lot more questions than you,” I murmur, tracking the movements of a pair of lone figures across the lawn. A man in farm clothes and a woman wearing some sort of maid outfit carry buckets and packages from a carriage stationed on a gravel path. They mill around, seemingly unbothered by the fractured moon and massive misty planet looming over their heads.

By the time the two strangers disappear, I realize Hadrian is still supporting me, one arm curled over the front of my torso while the other rests around my waist. I cautiously pry myself from his hold. He lets go and takes a step back, allowing some salutary distance between us. “What is this place?”

“Thule,” he reasserts.

“I heard you the first time, but that’s not what I’m asking.” I stagger away from the windows, unable to tear my gaze from the foreign sky outside. “Are we in space?”

One of his eyebrows rises a fraction. “Miss Greer, everything is, by essence, in space.”

“Are we in space elsewhere than on Earth? Like . . . how far?” I urge, desperate for tangible facts to hold on to as I plummet down this rabbit hole.

He motions to the evil chair he used to trap me earlier. “You seem quite overtaxed; would you like to take a seat?”

I shake my head to signal I’m never sitting in that thing again. “How far?”

“We’re approximately two hundred and ninety light-years away from Earth.”

A tremor snakes up my legs; I grip one of the bedposts for support. “How is that . . . No. No. It’s not possible.”

“The paths connect our worlds, as they have since the very first breath of time. The Dekwenn Tīrr, through which Eliud ferried you, is one such path. That is how you came to be here.”

“But it only took a second!” I shriek, the chaos of my thoughts coalescing into something cold and dark. Was it truly a second, or have I been asleep in that bright void for years and lost everything?

“Time and space are quite altered within the paths,” he notes.

“What do you mean? How long have I been here?”

He pulls a gold pocket watch from his waistcoat, flicks it open, and checks the dial. “Slightly over six hours.”

My initial rush of relief becomes a leaden sensation in the pit of my stomach as I recall the twisted physics of Miller’s planet in Interstellar—where severe time dilation caused by a neighboring black hole turns every hour into seven years.

“How long has it been on Earth?” Please let it not be forty-two years. Please.

A crease forms between his eyebrows. “The same amount of time, one should expect.”

“Exactly the same? So six hours? A quarter of a day?”

“A tenth, rather,” he corrects. Seeing my face scrunch in confusion, then panic, he adds, “While I’ve never had the privilege of visiting Earth, it is my understanding that solar days there are quite short.”

One-tenth . . . I whip my neurons into action and do the math, the room spinning around me as I process this new level of weird. “Sixty hours. Your solar days last sixty hours.”

“Indeed. It is past midday—” He checks his watch again. “Precisely thirty-two o’clock.”

“Give or take a light-year.”

“As I’ve already explained to you, the rules of time and space do not apply within the paths. Nothing does, in truth,” he adds, like an afterthought.

The room is warm, but I’m trembling, freezing. “I can’t be here. Please let me go home. Take me back through one of those paths!”

The lines bracketing his mouth deepening as he turns to face me once more. “I cannot.”

His earlier conversation with Eliud rings back in my ears: under arrest for the illegal crossing of an unregistered path . . . crimes for which even the wife of a knight must be held accountable.

“You can’t because it’s forbidden even to you.”

A single nod from him. “All paths have been strictly regulated for centuries. Only pathfinders are permitted to cross them freely. Thule’s legislation on the matter is enforced with the greatest severity.”

Centuries. That might explain why Thule hasn’t yet caught up with Earth’s latest fashion and tech and, instead, appears suspended in this weird Victorian bubble. “How severe are we talking?”

“Death.”

Visit camillamonk.com for signed books, updates on upcoming titles, free reads, and giveaways.

C. Monk grew up in a Franco-American family and rose to dubious fame with a romantic suspense series starring an OCD-ridden hitman and a wide array of strange and occasionally angry animals. These days she shares her writing time between high-octane adventures in the same vein and fantasy, her secret love (but with weird animals, too.)

In another life, she lived in Paris and Tokyo, and spent ten years in advertising, building rickety websites for M&A boutiques and hedge funds. All of that somehow landed her in Montréal, where she keeps a close watch on the squirrels and complains on a daily basis about the egregious number of Tim Hortons.

Website / Goodreads / Instagram

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Starseer

Katya Hernández

Publication date: April 22nd 2023

Genres: Fantasy, LGBTQ+, Young Adult

A fate traced by the stars…

Fifteen-year-old Etar can see the future in the stars—a rare skill even among magicians. But while other Starseers before him have become the stuff of legend, Etar has never predicted anything more exciting than the weather. Orphaned at age five and living under his uncle’s disapproving gaze, he yearns to prove his worth.

Disaster strikes when, in defiance of his uncle’s orders, Etar breaks into the Starseeing Dome—an ancient structure built to potentiate the powers of Starseers. Aided by the Dome, the stars send Etar a vision of ironclad warships destroying Skalland, the tiny island he calls home.

Hunted by a bloodthirsty admiral who seeks to enslave his newly awakened powers, Etar will have to fight to protect his friends while grappling with his past, his out-of-control magic, and a budding friendship turning into something more.

Goodreads / Amazon

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Etar didn’t have time to process any of what Hans had said before he went back to the hallway to let someone in—and whatever Etar had been expecting, it was nothing like the man that walked in.

The stranger walked with a step so light Etar could barely hear it on the floorboards of his room. His long black hair caught light like flowing water, and his eyes were distant in a deep, wistful way, blue and luminous even under this morning’s gray light. He wore a black silken tunic embroidered with the most marvelous iridescent threads. Starbursts, suns, and moons, all decorated with tiny gemstones, crowded every corner of the fabric. Etar couldn’t help staring at his jewel-decked hands. He had long, delicate fingers, as though made for minute tasks like building watches.

As soon as Hans closed the door, the man bowed, a gesture Etar had never received from anyone. “Starseer,” he said, soft and reverent.

Panic rose in Etar’s chest. How did this man know he was a Starseer? “Um. Hello?” he said, his mind struggling for coherent thought.

“It is such a great honor to finally meet you. I have been looking for you far and wide.”

Etar couldn’t parse the words from this man’s mouth, so he gaped instead of replying. His eyes pivoted from him to Hans in search of explanations, but Hans only fell back into a corner of the room.

“My name is Áehd, and I am an alchemist,” the man said.

An alchemist. A trade Etar only knew through books. To his knowledge, there had been alchemists and magicians in this castle long ago, but his uncle had expelled them all.

Etar supposed he should introduce himself, but he was too stunned to act properly. “How do you know I’m a Starseer?” he blurted out. No formal salutation. No bowing to receive his guest. It showed so glaringly that he hadn’t been raised as a royal.

The alchemist offered a gracious little laugh and pulled something out from between the folds of his tunic. When he opened his hand, a butterfly flew out of it.

At first, Etar thought it was a real butterfly because of how dainty its legs were and how its wings broke light, but on closer inspection, it was made of metal and colored crystals. It emanated a soft, bluish glow from under its belly.

“My constructs respond to energy, and no energy is more attractive to them than that of a Starseer,” Áehd said.

The butterfly kissed Etar’s face, making him flinch when it came close to his eyes, but he was afraid of breaking it if he flapped it away. Its glow intensified whenever it grazed his skin, and Etar could feel warmth wherever it alighted. After a while, the alchemist caged it in his fingers and put it away in his tunic.

The butterfly dredged out a memory of one such toy Etar had since childhood but which no longer possessed this butterfly’s agency.

Katya is a writer, illustrator, and graphic designer who lives with her partner, two cats, and two dogs in sunny El Salvador.

Her cats are her harshest critics, but she loves them all the same.

When she’s not writing or drawing the fantasy worlds that live in her head, she’s cosplaying as the creepiest monsters from all her favorite horror movies.

Website / Goodreads / Facebook / Twitter / Instagram

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Witches & Walk-In’s
Tammy Tyree
(A Castle Point Witch Series, #1)
Publication date: April 28th 2023
Genres: Adult, Paranormal

Betty Burke has just awakened from a long coma, but there’s a problem; she’s not Betty.

Whip-smart Hypnotherapist Alexandra Heale leads a double life. A natural-born witch, she lives under a death sentence, with a cauldron full of secrets.

When she tries to help Betty; a woman possessed by a traumatized spirit, Alex finds herself under attack – and in danger of being exposed.

Against her better judgment, she enlists the help of Deputy Sheriff Blake Sheraton, a man she’s sworn to hate, with dark secrets of his own – if only he could keep her secrets and ignore his pledge to uphold an evil law.

The paranormal world of demons & spirits is about to descend on peaceful Castle Point, and only one witch can stop the unthinkable.

Even if it costs her life.

Goodreads / Amazon

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Betty

The cool air tickled my arms. Tiny hairs rose with the gooseflesh. Small mounds of pimpled thermometers popped up over my arms, chest, and neck.

I heard a beeping sound, faint at first, then slowly it became louder and closer. The scent of cleanser assaulted me, harsh and chemical.

My eyes stayed firmly shut as if glued at the seam, or tiny weights held the lids down. My breath came in rhythmic, even bursts.

What was that in my mouth? My tongue wiggled and slammed against the hard plastic. I couldn’t taste anything other than stale, rotting breath, but I could tell something was firmly lodged in my mouth.

What the hell was it?

Why was it there?

I forced my eyes open a fraction. Moonlight filtered through the splintered cracks of my heavy lids and shattered against my eyes. Too bright! I closed them again, only long enough for my tongue to push up against the plastic in my mouth.

I could feel it now, not just in my mouth, but going down my throat. A swell of panic ran from my toes to my nose. I wanted to gag.

Spurred by the beeping beside me, louder now, my eyes flew open. I tried to sit up. I couldn’t move. I laid back against the softness of what must be a bed and peered around the room.

A hospital room.

I felt a heaviness as if underwater, the weight of my arms, legs, and chest making it difficult to see or breathe. The scent of cleanser pierced the back of my nose as I tried to breathe.

What was that thing in my mouth and down my throat? I forced my eyes to open wider, but they burned and felt gritty like someone had sprinkled fine sand under the lids. I blinked several times to clear the grit. My eyes took a while to adjust.

I looked down and saw a tube coming out of my mouth. My heart rate sped up. The beeping beside me kept pace as it beat faster and faster.

Why did I wake up in a hospital?

Was I in an accident?

The beeping sped up again, fast enough to send a wail of high-pitched signals through my room and into the adjoining hallway.

The large door burst open, startling me, which made the beeping speed up yet again. A nurse with short dark hair, dark-circled eyes, wearing pink scrubs with multicolored cartoon puppies on her shirt rushed in.

“Betty! Oh my god, she’s awake!” she practically screamed, to whom I couldn’t imagine. I assumed she was talking about me, however, as she leaped to the beeping machine and pressed a button to stop the noise.

Much better.

But… Betty?

Was that my name?

Demons, witches and ghosts - oh my!

Tammy (she/her) writes about what she knows - ghosts, hauntings, entities, witches, demonology and the paranormal!

A Clinical Hypnotherapist, Tammy infuses; tales from her actual case files of demonic possession and entity attachment with her knowledge of ancient demonic lore and witchcraft into artfully woven fiction and memoir.

Her upcoming 'Castle Point Witch Series' is due to release in early 2023 and promises to be full of paranormal goodness.

Her memoir 'Dead Men Still Snore' is a page-turning, award-winning true story of love, loss and channelling her husband's messages from the other side.

Visit https://tammytyree.com/ for more info about Tammy, her work and to receive updates for future books!

Happy reading!

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