mistressofmuses

Welcome to my journal!

My journal is primarily a personal one, posting about the various things that interest me, as well as the things that happen in daily life.

I live in Colorado with my partner, Alex (whom I met on Livejournal, originally!)

I try to frequently share pictures when I've gone on hikes or other fun places. The doing things tag is probably the most comprehensive tag for these posts, but hiking will narrow it down to just hikes, and pictures will broaden it to anything that felt pic-worthy, even if it was just a quick walk in the neighborhood, or a garden, or a pet being cute.

My pets are another frequent topic of posts and pictures. Currently I have four: Belladonna, an almost-four year old pit bull; Summer "Berry Mad" Refresher, a young Woodhouse's toad, and Guava Splash Electrolyte, a young chorus frog; and currently (as of January 2026) have Clickbait, a broad-winged katydid, who has more than doubled his life-expectancy! Cyanide, our elderly pit bull, sadly passed away in June of last year. He is still sorely missed. Guest-star pets include Jaspurr (a cat) and Ripley (a garter snake), who belong to my mom and younger sibling.

I also post about writing fairly often, which is mostly lumped under the writing tag. I have a post here collecting summaries and links to all the fics I have shared. While I haven't completed any new works in a couple years, I am still slowly working on things.

I am pretty firmly in the "hobby" writing camp; it isn't something I do professionally, nor am I likely to try to. Sometimes there's that vague temptation, but then I remember how awful the rest of publishing sounds, haha. Most of what I've written is fanfiction, but am trying to start devoting more time and energy to my original works as well. I'm not certain how or if I will share the original works, but I'd like to actually at least get them written.

Fandom-wise, I've nearly exclusively written Kingdom Hearts AUs focused on the "Destiny Trio"/SoRiKai OT3. (I haven't played a Kingdom Hearts game in more than a decade, and don't have the systems required for any of the newer ones, but I imprinted on the characters and just never stopped liking them!) I also wrote one Silent Hill fic that I'm quite proud of. Those two fandoms are a bit of a 180 from each other, I realize, haha.

Other fandoms that I'm more of a lurker in include: Zero Escape (999/Virtue's Last Reward/Zero Time Dilemma), Captive Prince, Newsflesh, other Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant series, Murderbot, Final Fantasy XIV, and I'm sure plenty of others I'm just failing to remember at the moment. Nothing has really grabbed onto me in a way that just won't let go in many years, though I still hope that someday something else will.

The last couple of years I've been trying to do more reading, and so that is also something I often post about. My preferred genres are fantasy, science fiction, horror, and romance, especially when any of the above are queer. I do try to post reviews of the books I read. You can also see my reading on LibraryThing.

I also watch a lot of horror movies. (Good horror is great, and bad horror is hilarious, so it tends to be win/win to pick some mediocre streaming offerings.) I used to have a blog reviewing horror movies, but despite a decade+ of intentions, I never got back around to continuing that.

I do still miss the heyday of Livejournal as a primary form of social media, and I know that Dreamwidth probably won't ever have that kind of critical mass... but I love that Dreamwidth is here, and I love that there are still people to connect with on a "slower" and more personal, long-form site.

Feel free to add me or comment below if you want to say hi! I'm always happy to find new friends.

All of my recent-ish work can be found at

mistressofmuses and also

mistressofmuses. I also post my fic to

musefic here on Dreamwidth.

( Fandom - Kingdom Hearts: )

( Fandom - Silent Hill: )

Current Mood: happy
Current Location: my apartment

Over the Garden Wall sticker this week, since it's a very important part of the season for me. :) (This one is by Sunset Road, again.)

My physical "I Voted" sticker. (The Blucifer one is the digital one after it's received.)

And a Dia de los Muertos Altar Card from the Butterfly Pavilion. (Alex and I each filled one out and left it on their ofrenda.)

This was a great week. I took basically the whole week off for Halloween (rather than fight for time off during the "traditional" holidays, I take this time, which I'm generally more excited about, anyway.) Unlike the time I took off over the summer, it feels much more like I actually got to do all the things I was hoping to. I spent time with Taylor, ALex and I went out and did multiple fun things. I did a decent amount of reading (though I'm less happy that I fell behind on reviews.) I did almost everything I'd wanted to leading up to Halloween, the weather cooperated beautifully, and I even managed a few responsible things, too.

And my reading for the week. (Harrow the Ninth and Cold Eternity originally had the same color, so had to swap one. Then there's an awful lot of pink and red for the rest of the week, which wasn't a planned color scheme, haha.)

October Devotional:

25: I wore Halloween socks again, and listened to Silent Hill videos in the background at work
26: Spent time with Taylor
27: I made a flower crown for Bella, and Alex and I got the seasonal "black cat" frappuchinos
28: I got a pumpkin chai, we did a photoshoot for Bella in her sugar skull dress and flower crown, and we voted!
29: We drove around to look at some Halloween decorations, and went to the Botanic Gardens "Ghosts in the Gardens" tour
30: We went to the Butterfly Pavilion for their annual spider exhibit, filled out memorial cards for the ofrenda
31: Halloween! We took Bella to a costume contest, went to a local distillery (and had a seasonal cocktail), watched Over the Garden Wall, and I painted a little coffin-shaped box.

Goals for the week:

I hung out with Taylor
I finished reading Cold Eternity
We did not set up the Halloween tree... I guess it'll be a Halloween-themed Christmas tree again
I did make Bella's flower crown
I painted my little coffin box
We did not go to the Halloween club night; Alex wasn't feeling up to it
I worked on my reading page a very tiny bit
I read Mister Magic
We went to the Butterfly Pavilion
We did not go to the Dia de Muertos art exhibit; too hard to find parking, and kind of ran out of energy
We did go on the Botanic Gardens ghost tour
We watched Over the Garden Wall
I cleaned the frog and toad ponds
I watered my plants
We went and got crickets
I caught up some on DW, but am still behind
We voted!
I finished out my October Devotional
We took Bella to the pet store's costume contest
We went to the distillery's Halloween event for a little while

Tracked habits:

Work - 1/7 - I had to work on Sunday, but took the rest of the week off
Household Maintenance - 4/7
Physical Activity - 6/7
Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 0/7
Non-fiction Writing - 1/7 - over 1000 words
Meta Work - 2/7
Personal Writing - 4/7
Other Creative Things - 5/7
Reading - 7/7 - I finished Cold Eternity, read Mister Magic, the short story "Old Glory", and started The Reformatory; as an ebook side-read I started Escaping the Friendzone; Taylor and I finished Harrow the Ninth and started A Divided Duty.
Attention to Media - 6/7 - Sunday I had Silent Hill videos in the background at work; Tuesday had news and game videos int he background; Wednesday game and explore videos in the background; Thursday we watched a short movie about the history of the Botanic Gardens (built over part of what was once the city cemetery) as part of the ghost tour; Friday had game, debunk, and paranormal videos in the background; Saturday we watched Over the Garden Wall.
Video Games - 0/7
Social Interaction - 7/7

Total words written: 1421 about my piss ghost haunting, ha

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: my apartment

I keep calling these posts writing “goals,” but they’ve been pretty light on real goals for a while, haha.

Still feeling a bit… wistful, I suppose, that NaNoWriMo is no longer a thing. It was a pretty good string of years in which NaNo was a big deal for me every November! (Often in sort of rule-bending ways, like just getting 50k words onto an existing WIP, or splitting the effort over a few projects, but still.)
I know that NaNo mostly deserved to die off when it did, with all the different issues it had, but I do still miss what it once was, and I wish it had stayed as the good thing it used to be.
And of course I know that I still could just choose to write 50k, or 25k, or 10k or whatever if I wanted to! A self-imposed goal just still isn’t the same as the sort of energy that came with NaNo.
There are still some copycat or alternative events that have been organized, but none ever really quite clicked or worked for me. Alas.

That said… I am glad that I don’t have that pressure this year. I don’t think I’ve got the time or energy for 50k in a month right now. While it does feel like I’m at least climbing out of the hole of burnout, I’m afraid that sort of a push would send me slipping right back in. (Which is just one of the more nebulous problems with NaNo, even before the more serious and specific issues came up. Those sorts of bursts of productivity are unsustainable in the long term (for most people), and it really is a lot.) I am happier with things like

getyourwordsout, where it’s a year-long goal that can be a lot slower and steadier… but again, the energy and the push to just write-write-write, to find ways to prioritize that writing, even if it was just for a month… that was kind of nice.

Right now one of the biggest writing-adjacent things (at least for fic writers) is the fairly unprecedented AO3 outage. The site went down, and restoration is estimated to be at least 2 - 4 weeks out, which feels like a wild timeframe. (We don’t have many specifics, except that it was a security issue, and further updates will come as they exist.)

At first, it was sort of… at least mildly funny how widespread the reactions were. Lots of lamentation, some memeing and joking. Some dunking on other sites trying to capitalize on it (fuck off, Wattpad!)

Genuinely, I really liked seeing people looking for alternate fic hosting sites, because it’s good for people to know that other options exist! AO3 is one of (if not the) biggest archives, but it isn’t the only one! There are people who have built their own archives off of AO3’s basic architecture, and there are plenty of people who host their own fic on personal websites, as well as archives that come from very different sides of fandom as a whole. There are options, and it was actually very nice to see people rallying around some of them! (I in general think that a lot of people would be better off finding more niche or focused archives. I love AO3, and the OTW as a whole, but the downside of maximum inclusion is that it means it will rarely be the perfect fit for what any one individual specifically wants. Smaller archives don’t have to function to some degree for everyone, and can therefore be a lot more tailored to at least their target audience.)

SquidgeWorld (where I do also have my fic posted) was inundated with thousands of new accounts! Unfortunately, it also introduced some new issues to the site that hadn’t be prevalent before, like commission scams. Walter (the site owner) is very keen to crack down mercilessly on anyone who is scamming in fic comments, but it still sucks that it’s happening at all. (And I know at least one of my friends here was a target.)
I know that Squidge was also then down for a few days after a routine downtime and update became less routine than hoped, but as far as I know it’s now back up. A few features are paused while the site copes with the increased traffic, but overall I’m really happy that more people are finding the site!

There are also a lot of challenges and events cropping up to write more fic during the downtime, both to share now, and to have a bunch to post once AO3 is back up. That’s also been nice to see!

…But now some of the “what to do while AO3 is down” vibes have soured.

Cut for length, but lots of rambling about fic culture:

Over the last couple of days (though the most rancid discourse seems to be on Twitter, so I’m glad to only be getting mostly second-hand accounts,) there’s been a lot of shitty behavior. There are a lot of people posting google drive links to all their downloaded fic for people to take… but without any permission or even acknowledgement of the authors. (AO3 explicitly allows downloading for personal use, and it’s not super uncommon for people to offer one-to-one sharing of a specific work someone is looking for… but posting a huge dump of other people’s fic publicly is very different.)

When authors have asked for their fic to be removed, or just for people not to do that in general (because it’s rude to share other people’s work without permission!) a lot of the response has been downright nasty toward the authors. That it’s somehow entitled for them to want to be in control of their own work, that if they say they’re sad to see their work being passed around by people who have no interest in actually talking to or acknowledging the writers, then they’re being entitled and don’t “deserve” direct interaction.
It’s extra frustrating to see this attitude of “how dare you want us to treat you, content creator, as a person; shut up and write more, or else fuck off entirely” from some of the very same people who are wailing about how they simply don’t know how to live without AO3. So you’ll “die” without all this fic available to you, but your attitude toward the people who actually did the work is “fuck you?”

It feels very much like more of the same tension that already exists in current fandom: writers are often looking for community and interaction, while too many readers just want an endless stream of content. I am also aware that this isn’t actually new—authors have complained forever that interaction is too low—but it definitely feels worse in the era of infinite scroll, infinite content social media like tiktok or insta.
Writing (when not just having AI spew something for you) takes so much time and energy and effort. This is true of fanfic as well as original works, and I do find it frustrating at how often fanfic is still dismissed as something inherently unserious and silly and easy and a time-waster. It is not “entitled” to want your effort acknowledged. No, authors are not “owed” comments, and no one is “obligated” to provide the type of comment/interaction/attention that an author wants… but just because no one has to provide that, it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to want it or to be disappointed when it’s lacking. Even as a long-time lurker of many sites, I do think it’s rude to benefit from literally millions of available works and to never even click the “kudos” button. Rudeness is not a sin, I get all the arguments about bad days and no spoons and social awkwardness, and I’m not saying that everyone who fails to comment should be shunned or somehow kicked out of fandom. (Though clicking the “I liked this” button is about as low-effort as possible, so I don’t think there’s much of an argument for that being “too much”…)
But when it happens in aggregate, when there is an audience that claims to love these works, who has the energy to post about how upset they are that the archive is down, to lament when a specific author takes down their works or stops posting, or to whinge elsewhere when updates are “too slow”… the energy exists for that, yet all these people apparently only don’t have the energy when it comes to telling an author that they like the fic… it does start to feel pointless.

Yes, yes, “write for yourself.” But as is often then said: I do write for myself; I post it to share with my community. If I just want to write for myself, then there’s no reason for it to leave my computer.

(Yes, I do know that there are some actually very entitled assholeish writers out there. Ones who still try to hold updates hostage for a certain number of comments, ones who complain that the comments they get aren’t “good enough” because they’re too short, etc., to say nothing of the ones involved in mega-wank nonsense. There are also ones who just seem wildly out of touch as they get caught up in a numbers game, where they complain about “only” getting x comments on their most recent fic, when that’s like… more than I’ve gotten on my entire body of work combined. The existence of those people doesn’t change the point.)

(Also, yes: I’m aware I haven’t posted anything in more than two years. I know not to expect a lot of active readership, and I treasure the occasional kudos email I’d get. I’m too embarrassed by the fact that I’m not writing fic to respond to any of the comments I have gotten in the last few years (not many, but a few), which probably means I’m part of the problem. It’s only very recently that I’ve started reading fic again at all, even very sporadically, and I could be better about commenting, too!)

There are a fair number of authors saying that they plan to stop sharing new work, or even plan to remove their fic once AO3 is back up, because they’re so discouraged by this broad reaction. It’s been made fairly explicit by some of these assholes that they consider the writers themselves to be disposable, because all they care about is the content. (Yet another frustrating manifestation of yet another ongoing fandom tension: treating fictional characters as more important than actual people.)
I can’t fault authors for feeling the desire to remove their works, though I hope that it’s current hurt talking, and that most do not end up doing so. It is a loss when people decide to leave, and removes a lot of the chance to build the community we’d rather have. I don’t want to cede fandom spaces to the people who do want it to be a content mill.

At the same time… it is overall discouraging. I’m not actively writing fic, even if I miss it and wish I had the fannish urge. But like with the omnipresent frustration of AI, it’s a sort of toxic background radiation that isn’t helping. I’m all about doing things out of spite… but it does feel a little pointless. If I do ever get the fannish urge to write fic again, is it worth sharing? Is it worth the hassle of posting? Or is it better to just keep it to myself?

But perhaps I should make a little more of an effort to read fic (though my TBR is taking up a lot of my time), and I should provide more comments when I do.

So all of that word vomit out of the way… what is my current writing plan?

Not much!

Like with last month, I don’t feel like I have a lot of time to turn towards fiction writing. I’m less behind on my reviews for October, but still have a few to write, so that’s really my most concrete goal at the moment.

I’m running out of time to get through the TBR that I hoped to for the year: I’ve still got 13 books I wanted to read (not including any co-reads or side-reads), plus an additional six that I sort of made peace with having to punt to next year. I want to get through as many as possible, so that’s a lot of my free time already spoken for. (I’m also very behind on the art page I try to do for my reading, and that also is running out of time to get caught up.)

As I’d mentioned previously, I also don’t want to be “behind” when I get to the end of the year. I don’t want to still be working on the reviews for December well into January; I want a clean break! I’ve done better with keeping up on it this month, though not perfectly. For November and December, I want to be very on top of writing up the reviews as immediately as I can, so that’s really the primary thing that I want to focus on in terms of writing.

I’ve got a bit of the mentality that “once I get through the end of 2026, I’ll have a chance to do more, maybe write more fiction again”… except time management rears its ugly head again.

I am starting to think of next year’s plans, and I am looking at my constantly growing TBR list, and wanting to figure out how to read even more. (While still knowing that damn, this really is a ten-year plan.) But as I look to push more in that direction, I realize that means that I don’t really have that breathing room. If I’m going to push to read that much more (and write up reviews of that much more!), then I’m not going to miraculously wind up with more extra free time for the fiction writing that I miss doing.

Right now… the reading is feeling more rewarding than the writing (due in part to the things discussed above, and partially just due to my own headspace.) Still, I may need to temper some of those reading goals in order to leave myself room for more of the writing, should the desire be there.

…I do actually still have some writing ideas that I’m actively interested in, at least some iddy snippets that I would like to get written down.

I had gotten better at limiting my doomscrolling, but it’s started to creep back in more than I want, so I’ll try to limit that and see if I can eke out a little more time for things that way.

So my writing goals for November:
- Finish my reviews for last month (two and a half to go)
- Try to be mindful of my social media time, limit the unintentional scrolling and do more rewarding and intentional things with that time
- Stay on top of reviewing what I do read this month
- On days where I do wind up with more free time, maybe let myself write up a little bit of fiction, as a treat.

^ And all of the above feels a bit like whistling past the graveyard, as I try desperately not to think about my worry about the midterm elections.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: my apartment

Random pictures I took in October!

Split into a few categories:

Insects (and similar)!

Adorable little ladybug on a work walk.

Five more bugs:

On October 01 we had a work event to go to, and this enormous grasshopper was chilling on a milkweed pod outside the bar. It's so big!

While my pictures on a later date in the xeriscape garden were better, I did see a Common Buckeye butterfly earlier in the month on a walk. I tried very hard to get good pictures, but my luck wasn't great, haha. Still a cool one to see, because I don't, often.

Love those eye spots!

Apparently millipedes have some sort of migration, because for a span of a few days, there were tons of them on the bridge I cross on my walk. I carried some across each day, just because I felt so bad for the poor things, potentially getting squished or getting baked in the sun.

Caterpillar on the move!

Fall color (on one tree):

*These pictures weren't taken from the same angle, so it's not a nice "progression" series, but all the pictures are of the same tree.

October 04 was when I first really noticed the red creeping in at the top.

Four more pictures:

October 09, already a lot more color!

October 11, not much different than the 9th, but such a nice contrast against the bright blue sky.

October 23, very pretty.

October 24, against a much greyer sky.

Other!

We had Mandated Corporate Fun at work, where each location had to decorate a pumpkin. We decorated ours like a gumball machine. Much gluing of pom-poms, haha. I'm pretty proud of the little coin/door contraption I designed, because minus the foil, it was all just made of stuff from my desk, haha.

On October 27th we also had a ton of fog. Apparently it was really thick in the early morning hours, but even though I was up by 7:00 that morning (I was at mom and Taylor's and Jaspurr Demands Breakfast), it had mostly burned off. There was still a really thick band along the foothills, which was cool looking.

Nine more random pictures:

This was the fog that morning around 4:30 at our apartment. Alex woke up in the middle of the night and took a picture and sent it to me, haha.

One day on my walk, someone had left some painted rocks along the path. They were cute!

Little mushrooms!

A nice Halloween display. They have tiny flamingos! We were looking for some big elaborate displays for Bella to look at (we like exposing her to weird things, just for desensitization purposes) but she didn't care about any of this stuff, haha. Even the inflatables and animatronics that were moving. (She politely watched one that had a ghost that moved up and down, but really did not care.)

A pretty mural on a building.

Yesterday we did go to the distillery to check out their Halloween goth prom thing. It was cute! It was pretty quiet when we went, but started to pick up a bit. (We did not end up going to the club night; Alex was hurting and we had a lot of busy days over the last week.)

But we got some fancy drinks! Alex got an espresso martini, and I got a seasonal apple cocktail, which was delicious.

It us. (Finally, one of us got to wear our "Goth as Fuck" (in the style of "Queer as Folk") shirts, haha.)

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

AKA Goth Christmas, AKA my favorite.

My Halloween season has been lovely so far, even if it still feels like it's over too soon. Pictures from the stuff we've done will be forthcoming... eventually.

This morning, I woke up to about the most perfect Halloween morning possible:

I took these pictures around 9:00, and thought "wow, glad I didn't sleep through all the fog!" (A few days ago there was a really thick fog event in the early morning, but by the time I was up at 7:00 that morning it was all but gone.)

And then less than half an hour later, the view had changed to:

So no, I didn't miss it, haha. But very excellent spoopy Halloween vibes, 10/10.

We do theoretically have a pretty busy day to send off the holiday!
One of the local pet stores has a dog costume contest, so we're going to dress Bella up in her planchette/ouija board costume and stop by.
A local distillery is doing a "goth prom," (though we're on the fence about that one. Is it For The Goths, or for the normies to pretend to be goth? We might find out!)
Then there is a launch of a club night in a new-old venue tonight as well. (The same place used to be a goth venue, though that was before I was going out and doing things. It's changed hands several times since, and now the newest owners are reopening it and want to do at least a few gothy events again.)
It is also critical to me that I watch Over the Garden Wall today.

In honor of the holiday, I want to share the most paranormal event that ever happened to me. It's also deeply, deeply stupid.

I generally consider myself a skeptic. There's a meme I've seen on tumblr that's Mulder's "I Want to Believe" poster, but with additional text added on that says "But I'm not desperate." And that pretty well sums it up: I want to believe, and find a lot of paranormal things fascinating and fun and enjoyable, but I usually remain unconvinced.

I have had a handful of spooky experiences (repeatedly seeing a woman walking between rooms in my childhood home when there was no one there; thinking I saw or felt a cat in my college apartment even though we had no cat; Alex and I walking through a cemetery, turning to each other at almost the exact same moment and saying "this feels crushingly sad right now," and only later finding that it was a section of that cemetery reserved in part for suicides; weirdly predictive dreams, like a few months ago, dreaming our bedroom ceiling was leaking, and hours later having a leak in our kitchen ceiling from the apartment above.

While all of those things felt very weird and unexplainable to me, I know that there are potential explanations for all of them. I was a kid with a vivid imagination; I was used to seeing a cat, even if we hadn't ever had one in the apartment; we were walking through a cemetery and could have just psyched ourselves into the feeling, even if it was weird that it happened at the exact same time and didn't feel the same anywhere else; the dream was probably just a bizarre coincidence; etc. (I'm not convinced that those "mundane" explanations are necessarily the true ones, but I recognize that especially from the outside, they can be explained away, and that my own subjective experiences of those things are subjective.)

But we have one (1) occurrence that I just truly can't explain. And it's stupid as hell.

Alex and I moved in to our apartment in October of 2018. It's a very small studio apartment: only really one room, though there's a vertical half-wall between the kitchen side and the bedroom side, and there's a bathroom that attaches to the bedroom side. That's it.

I don't have a date for this, except that it was very soon after we moved in, so in mid October 2018. Possibly relevantly, we were also the first residents of our apartment. The building itself is older, probably intended to be office space, but was functionally abandoned for several decades, and then was remodeled into apartments. In addition to being the first residents of our unit, we were among the first to move in at all; no one else was on our floor for several months.

As far as I recall, this didn't happen, like, the very fist night we stayed in the apartment, but it was probably within the first week or two?

At this point, we hadn't even had a chance to get our stuff out of storage yet, so we were sleeping on the floor, on an air mattress we had borrowed from my mom. It was a smallish air mattress, definitely a bit too small for two adults and Cy, a 65 pound dog, to share, but we did it for a while, until we had a chance to get all our stuff moved.

This night, I had been asleep for a while, but sort of half woke up because I could hear... peeing. The very distinct sound of someone pissing in the toilet. Not running water in the sink, not the toilet running, not the bathtub or the shower or plumbing elsewhere in the building. No. Very specifically, someone pissing into the toilet bowl. It is a fairly unique sound!

I didn't wake up quite all the way, and was faced away from the bathroom toward the window, but did think that it was odd that it was as loud as it was (Alex always closes the door) and also that I hadn't felt Alex get up, since the air mattress tended to sink you onto the floor when the other person balancing it out got up. I sort of chalked the air mattress part to Cy just being enough weight in the middle to balance it out, and just shrugged off the apparently open door. Cy was still right behind me, and he was still asleep, and I fell back asleep shortly after that.

The next morning, Alex said that he'd slept pretty well, despite the air mattress. "But why didn't you close the bathroom door when you got up to pee? That woke me up, haha."

...

Neither of us got up to pee in the middle of the night. Both of us woke up to the very distinctive sound of someone peeing in the toilet. There is zero chance that like... someone broke in and used the bathroom. The door locks, and even if someone had a key, there's a safety latch. And even if that wasn't impossible, Cy would absolutely have reacted to a stranger walking through the room. And again, this was definitely not the sound of something going on with the plumbing or the toilet running or anything like that.

So... we had a piss ghost.

Our joke is that this was some poor guy who died sometime in the preceding decades really needing to pee, and that was his unfinished earthly business. The addition of plumbing has now allowed him to move on to the afterlife. (And as far as we know, he has moved on. We've had no repeats of the piss ghost [unless he's started closing the door, so that it's become utterly unremarkable and fails to wake us.]) We've had a few weird issues with the lights, but with one exception I do just blame on iffy wiring. There was one time when a light came on despite my having just turned it off, on a switch that has an audible and tactile click to turn it off. But perhaps it was caught right between positions, somehow. Either way, I don't think I can blame the piss ghost.

I cannot begin to tell you how much I hate that that is my most paranormal personal experience. I want to believe, but...

And sure, I'll take that over some sort of malevolent entity, but... come on. Piss ghost???

Current Mood: happy
Current Location: my apartment

Bella has a cute sugar skull "dress." So I made her a flower crown to go with it. (No, the colors don't match super well, but... oh well.)

The actual construction of the flower crown was a little frustrating, haha. We bought the flowers and some elastic, but mostly I was trying to make it using stuff I already had around, and it was... a so-so process. The flower stems somehow broke our scissors when I tried to trim them. I stabbed myself several times. Getting the dried glue out of the fabric glue bottle in order to access the still liquid glue was a process. The crown fit well, but slid off of Bella's head very quickly. But I don't care, it was cute, haha.

(And yes, we were a day late for the true Dia de Muertos for pets, which is October 27th. But I did make the crown on the 27th.)

Bella was a very good sport and put up with me taking her picture for quite a while. (Eventually she did start to get bored, but she is also extremely tolerant of this sort of nonsense, haha.)

Pretty princess Bella, haha.

Ten more pictures of my dog:

She looks very "no thoughts; head empty" here, but frankly, this dog has too many thoughts.

This one of Alex adjusting her crown made me laugh.

Slorp outtake.

Bonus pelicans. There were SO MANY pelicans on the very reduced lake. This is the closest cluster of them, but there was a second group of about 12 or 15, and then another one across the lake that was at least 30. SO MANY.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: my apartment

I voted! (Alex and I filled out our ballots yesterday and dropped them off. Got confirmation today that they had been counted.)

I do appreciate that in addition to the regular sticker, there's a different digital sticker for once it's counted, and even more so that it's our beloved Blucifer.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

Last Tuesday was the day I went to go get my Covid and Flu shots. After that, we decided to go on a fairly easy walk, and so we headed back to the xeriscape garden. :) I'm very glad we did! While it was definitely the end of the blooming season for most things in the garden, the things that were still going had a lot of butterflies. :)

We got to see an absolutely stunning monarch! Absolutely beautiful. It also stuck around for quite a while (the flowers must have been delicious, ha) so we got to watch it and get many pictures.

Very pretty painted lady.

A buckeye. Despite being a "common buckeye," they aren't particularly common for me to see! I really like them, though. I think they have such a striking pattern. :)

Fifteen more pictures:

Another of one of the buckeyes. There were a few flying around.

A very cute little bee. (Not a typical honeybee, but not sure what kind.)

The ambush bugs defy my attempts to get pictures. But this one had a very tasty fly snack!

Blues (the butterfly species, not just the color) are not terribly cooperative photography subjects either, but at least it's obviously a butterfly!

Another of the painted lady.

Little shield bug.

Moth, peeking through the flowers.

A few more of the monarch, who was quite cooperative:

Cute honeybee with pollen saddlebags.

And this is the garden with a few nice climbing rocks for Bella, lol:

(Outtake from getting pictures of Bella, but it made me laugh.)

Milkweed seeds!

And just some nice fall colors. We don't get a lot of red, so I'm always happy to see some, ha.

I feel like this one looks like Bella posing for a school picture, haha.

Current Mood: okay
Current Location: my apartment

Halloween themed this week! The purple pen on the tracker is not actually as blue as it looks. The book is a sticker from Sunset Roads, and the spiderweb washi tape I've had kicking around for several years.

This was a pretty good week, minus the sadness of one of the mantises dying. Work was fine, and spending a couple days helping with the corporate-mandated-fun pumpkin decorating was a genuinely nice break from the usual routine. I also took a day off post-vaccine, and having that extra time was good (even if I was disappointed that about all I managed to do was rest.) The walks we took earlier in the week were beautiful, with pretty perfect weather. I'm happy with my reading, and that thus far I've stayed on top of my reviews for the month. The Spirits and Spirits event (while unfortunately on our only really cold night of the week...) was fun, and a nice conclusion to the week, and preemptive start to my spooky season time off. (Even though I had work the next day.)

And here's my reading for the week! I kind of gave up on having an ebook side-read, because my main reads were ebooks, so I just read them instead.

October Devotional:

18: I took two walks at work in the extra-nice weather, and had some Silent Hill videos in the background
19: I set up this tracker (the most Halloween-themed), had a pumpkin chai, and we took a nice fall walk
20: I got my Covid and flu shots! Then we took a really nice walk in the xeriscape garden and saw so many butterflies
21: I took this day off post-shots, had another pumpkin chai, and received some lovely Halloween cards from my aunt and from boujee_redneck <3
22: I rescued a bizarre number of millipedes from the bridge on my walk, and worked on decorating the work pumpkin
23: We finished the work pumpkin, and I had a pumpkin malt
24: We went to the Spirits and Spirits event at the Four Mile Historical Park

Goals for the week:

I did read When the Wolf Comes Home
I worked on my reviews
We went to Spirits and Spirits
I picked up my ballot
I made progress toward getting caught up on DW
I worked on my reading page
I continued my October Devotional
I got my Covid and flu shots
I helped Alex with model show prep (even though I couldn't get that day off)
I set up a new notebook
I did not paint my little Halloween box
I did not make Bella's flower crown (to go with her sugar skull dress...)
I did not set up our Halloween tree
I coordinated the plan for staying at my mom's/her watching Bella for a day
I started reading Cold Eternity
I set up new mantis cages

Tracked habits:

Work - 4/7 - I took Wednesday off post-vax
Household Maintenance - 5/7
Physical Activity - 6/7
Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 0/7
Non-fiction Writing - 2/7 - both over 500 words
Meta Work - 4/7
Personal Writing - 5/7
Other Creative Things - 4/7
Reading - 7/7 - I read When the Wolf Comes Home and started Cold Eternity; Alex and I read a bit of Little Eve
Attention to Media - 6/7 - Sunday I had Silent Hill videos on in the background at work, and we watched a book review then game videos later; Tuesday and Wednesday had various stuff on in the background; Thursday had game videos in the background; Friday had debunk videos in the background; Saturday we watched the silent film The Unknown while we were at the Spirits and Spirits event.
Video Games - 0/7
Social Interaction - 7/7

Total words written: 1632 on reviews

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

The weather was really nice this week (of course, up until tomorrow, when we have actual plans!)

On Monday, we did go for a walk around Pelican Pond after running a few errands. No actual pelicans, but we did see a lot of other birds.

There was a mass murder of crows hanging around the lake! They had a lot to say.

Nicely "glowing" gold leaves.

Four more pictures:

A cute downy woodpecker.

A magpie landed right outside the coop and was taunting the chickens.

Looking at a few other nice trees, over the absolute sea of completely dry cattails. (Usually this is a pond...)

More crows!

Definitely a really nice day to go out, so I was glad we had a chance to, even if it wasn't a particularly remote or intense hike.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

An autumn ghost! (This sticker was a freebie I got at Pride, I think.)

This was a pretty good week, minus some bad things happening with a coworker (his wife's health.) I did enjoy my days off, and it was nice to get to spend time outside after what felt like too long. I got a decent amount of reading done, and have even gotten fairly on top of reviews. I made progress on some ongoing stuff, like DW comments and my reading page, though I've still got more to do to fully catch up. My October Devotional has been nice, though the month still has disappeared far too quickly! Generally pleased with the week.

And my reading for the week!

October Devotional:

11: I took an extra walk in the beautiful weather, listened to music, and Alex sent me a very cute fall-themed picture of Bella.
12: We took a hike in the mountains and saw some nice fall colors.
13: I got a pumpkin chai, and we took a walk in the park looking for insects.
14: I had hot chocolate and a cookie at work, then later took a long bath to spend extra time reading.
15: Enjoyed the really pleasant fall scent on my walk... until it was taken over by the smell of a controlled burn.
16: My manager gave me a Halloween slap bracelet, haha. I also had a pumpkin malt. I spent some time on LibraryThing's Halloween scavenger hunt.
17: Found the new mantis and got her set up in a new habitat.

Goals for the week:

I read A Divided Duty
I finished reading Behold Her
I worked on my reviews
I worked on my reading page
I did not pick up my ballot
I did not paint the little coffin box
I did buy us Spirits and Spirits tickets
I mostly got caught up on DW
I continued my October Devotional
I put my laundry away
I did not put up our Halloween tree
We did do things outside!
I sort of cleaned up my table. Partially.
We did go get crickets
I watered my plants
I started reading When the Wolf Comes Home
I set up the new mantis habitat

Tracked habits:

Work - 5/7
Household Maintenance - 4/7, with one additional day of kind of working on something
Physical Activity - 6/7
Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 0/7
Non-fiction Writing - 3/7 - two days of over 1000 words, one day of over 500
Meta Work - 4/7
Personal Writing - 6/7
Other Creative Things - 6/7
Reading - 7/7 - I finished A Divided Duty and started When the Wolf Comes Home; as a side-read, I finished Behold Her, but haven't started another. Alex and I read some of Little Eve.
Attention to Media - 7/7 - Sunday we watched a storm chase, then part of a football game, then game videos in the background, while I listened to music; Monday we watched an episode of Carrie, then some game and debunk videos; Tuesday was more debunk and game videos; Wednesday was an episode of Carrie and then explore and game videos; Thursday was an episode of Carrie, then part of a football game, then some game videos; Friday we watched the last episode of Carrie, then explore and game videos; Saturday was a mix of explore, paranormal, game videos, and news in the background.
Video Games - 0/7
Social Interaction - 7/7

Total words written: 3352 on reviews

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

I did the responsible thing today and got my flu and covid shots.

I took some advice from

umadoshi (and roundabout from Denise) and pre-dosed with some antihistimine (I used generic Claratin/loratadine, since Benadryl tends to knock me out.) It does seem to have helped! I am very tired, even after a long nap, have a headache, and had a bout of chills when I was falling asleep earlier. I'm a little achey in general, and my arm is the expected level of soreness. BUT it's not as severe as I was expecting, given my previous reactions and what I'd heard about this year's. (However, if I AM still feeling a little off, I'm going to call out from work tomorrow; mom and Taylor said they both really felt it on day two.)

The pharmacist was nice - chatted about my mothman shirt and general cryptid and spooky happenings. She had a gentle touch, though the flu one still burn-aches on the way in, ha.

I had the intention of doing Social Responsibility Part 2 today as well, getting my ballot filled out. I didn't make it quite that far, but that one will be happening soon.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: my apartment

Last Tuesday was a very nice day, so while we didn't have a ton of time or energy, we did decide to go on a quick walk through a park, looking for some late-season bugs. (There was some vague hope of finding a late-season mantis or katydid before the freeze later in the week was likely to kill some of them off... but no luck. Though I did end up finding the tiny native mantis on Saturday, despite that being post-freeze.) While there was no luck on the bigger bugs we were hoping for, we did see quite a few others:

A bee!

A very cute little ladybug.

Seven more pictures:

Not super sharp, but an ambush bug.

More bees!

A ladybug pupa!

A many-spotted ladybug, maybe hunkering down to hibernate on the oak leaf.

I couldn't get a very good picture, but all those little sort of sparkly looking dots? Those are lacewing eggs! They're little eggs on the end of a thread attached to the branch. I think this is only the second time I've seen them "in the wild."

Not a bug, but the remains of what was probably a very cool mushroom.

There were lots of these little webs at the ends of tall branches or stalks of grass. They've been effective little bug traps, obviously! (Well fed tiny spiders.)

Nothing super rare or wildly exciting, but it was nice to be outside for a while and look at the local bugs. The drought definitely seems to have changed some of what we have around (certainly fewer than I've been used to seeing in the last couple years) but glad to see at least a few still thriving. It's noticeable on the plants, too: the crabapples and the oaks have no fruit or acorns, respectively. A little disconcerting.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: my apartment

Today while I was on one of my walks at work, I found a tiny mantis. I was surprised to see her, because we did get our first official freeze a few days ago (not much below freezing, but enough to kill things off.)

I put her in a water bottle for an hour or so and brought her home.

She may have thoughts on the accommodations, but I don't think they're appreciative ones.

This picture makes her look deceptively large. She is actually only about an inch long. Very small! But she is full-grown.

Hopefully this house is more to her liking than the water bottle was.

As far as I can tell, this is a "ground mantis" (specifically an "agile ground mantis" or "minor ground mantid," which are interchangeable names for the species. Unlike poor late Heretic, this girl is a native species!

Though like most of the mantises we have here, they're expected to only live into early- or mid-fall, so it's not likely that she has very long left. She's still pretty feisty, though! She also ate a few fruit flies after we got her set up in her new habitat.

I don't know how long we'll have her, but we'll try to keep her in fruit fly filled luxury for the last bit of her life. It's already been fun to watch her hunt, ha.

Apocrypha, the giant rainforest mantis, is still doing quite well! (Originally her name was going to be "Drop Bear," as she's an Australian species, and that's an Australian cryptid. But Alex said that he didn't feel like the name was right for her, so we went with my original suggestion, Apocrypha.)

Today I added some additional plants to her habitat (ones that were originally in Heretic's setup,) and we fed her some more fruit flies. She chowed down on a bunch!

She's definitely getting bigger, though she has not molted again yet, and is eating a lot faster than she used to!

Here she is, with a fresh snack. (And more nearby.)

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: my apartment

On Monday, Alex wanted to go look for rocks. We found one sort of vague listing for some national forest land that allows for personal collection, so we wandered out to a trailhead...

We did not find much in the way of rocks, but it was a nice little hike!

Look, mountains!

We were past the peak of the aspens (though it seemed like with the drought, a lot of trees have just dropped their leaves without much color), but there were a few that were still very pretty!

Six more pictures:

There were a lot of small pine trees. Very cute.

By contrast, this one is a very dead tree, but I thought it was interesting that it still had all its pine cones attached.

Tent caterpillars!

I like the occasional splashes of gold from the aspens in the pines.

Very tiny blue spruce.

And of course, if there is a rock, Bella would like to stand on it.

It was nice to get out on a bit of a hike, even though I kind of wimped out before too terribly long. It was a lot of uphill. Maybe we'll figure out a more specific spot to go for interesting rocks some other day, but at least we did go out and do something while the weather is still good.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

Heretic passed away.

Alex found him back on August 03, at which point he was already an adult. European mantises typically live about two to three months once they reach adulthood... and he hit basically just under the two and a half mark since we found him (plus however long he'd had before,) so right around the expected average. I know that sometimes captivity can extend their lifespans by a month or two, and I was hopeful that we'd have him at least until November... but unfortunately not.

He was a cool little dude to have around and to watch! I'm glad he got to spend a couple months in relative mantid luxury, with crickets periodically delivered, and a serious lack of anything predatory.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

More October spooky month theme, with some crows and a crystal ball. This is another sticker by Glitterpunk.

This week started pretty rough. I was sick and it sucked, I had to cancel plans with Taylor over it, and just couldn't do much. I still ended up feeling like the week was reasonably productive by the end. I did get a lot of reviews written, even if that was later into the month than I was hoping. I did a decent amount of reading, though it's never as much as I hope I'm going to do. I did get a few more things done, and I feel a little less overwhelmed by how behind I am. (Of course, now I need to not let that relief make me slack off and get back to where it is overwhelming again, ha.)

And my reading for the week!

And for my "October Devotional":

October 04: I stopped to look at the current color-change of the leaves on my walk
October 05: Bella wore a cute sugar-skull bowtie when we went out
October 06: Bought some cute Halloween things: a towel and a couple little dishes. Alex bought and surprised me with a fluffy Halloween blanket and an adorable plush.
October 07: While it was still a very warm day, I tried to really appreciate the pleasant breeze.
October 08: I spent a little while taking pictures of a butterfly I don't see very often.
October 09: Someone painted some rocks and left them along the path, and they were very cute.
October 10: I sorted through my pics from the concert a couple weeks ago (which would very much have been itself a candidate for the devotional, but it wasn't October yet, ha.)

Goals for the week:

We did pay rent
I paid car insurance
I read Thirteen Storeys
I started A Divided Duty ~~once I finally paid ransom to UPS for it~~ (but forgot to check it off)
I continued reading Behold Her
I caught up on my reviews from last month
I continued working on getting caught up on DW, though not there yet
I did put my laundry away
I sorted through those concert pics
I did not work on my reading page
We did clean up for our annual bug inspection (the third this year. It's not annual; it means someone has bugs.)
I continued my October Devotional
We picked up the truck box from my mom's garage
I did pick up my book from UPS (twice in a row they did not even attempt delivery, but just said "oops, sorry we missed you!" despite us being home, despite having a call box at the door if they need it unlocked, and despite having a parcel locker as a third option. They were going to return it to sender if they "missed" us again, so my only other option was to pay an additional fee for them to hold it at a pickup location. Very frustrating and feels like extortion.)
I did not put the second batch of laundry away
I did go to work early on Saturday, because my coworker was out sick

Tracked habits:

Work - 5/7 - despite feeling like ass, I did not have to call out
Household Maintenance - 4/7
Physical Activity - 4/7, with two additional days of not-quite-nothing
Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 0/7
Non-fiction Writing - 7/7 - (!) five days of over 1000 words, two days of over 500
Meta Work - 4/7
Personal Writing - 5/7
Other Creative Things - 1/7
Reading - 7/7 - I read Thirteen Storeys and started A Divided Duty; for my side-read, I continued Behold Her; Alex and I read some of Little Eve.
Attention to Media - 7/7 - Sunday, had some youtube on in the background at work; Monday had debunk and game videos in the background; Tuesday had debunk, game, and exploration videos on; Wednesday we watched an episode of Carrie, then some debunking videos; Thursday watched an episode of Carrie, then book review, paranormal, and game videos; Friday we watched the third episode of Carrie, then debunk and game videos; Saturday I had some youtube on in the background, then later we watched some paranormal and exploration videos.
Video Games - 0/7
Social Interaction - 6/7

Total words written: 7832 on reviews and writing goals

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: my apartment

Man, I dragged my ass on getting pics posted, ha. (I blame getting sick, but still.)

We went to a concert!

It's been a while!

We pre-gamed pretty hard, so I was also very pleasantly buzzed the whole time. Since I so rarely drink, that also felt like a bit of a novelty.

I know we've been to the Federal before, but I don't remember for what show. It's been a chunk of years, though.

My arm was still very much freshly healing, so we had to stand pretty much all the way to one side. I didn't want to risk getting slammed into. Still a decent spot, though sorry to Alex we couldn't be right up at the stage like he usually prefers.

Originally there were supposed to be two openers. (The other was Dead Animal Assembly Plant, but they had to drop out of a few dates due to a family emergency. I'm not familiar with them, but I hope everything resolved and is going all right.)

The opener that we did have was Ludovico Technique. Also a band I am not familiar with! I recall seeing their name on lineups before, but hadn't seen them. There also weren't any songs that I strongly recognized (no "oh shit, this is them?" or anything) but I liked them, and bought an album. Good goth-industrial sound and vibes, as anticipated.

Three more pics of Ludovico Technique:

I do love the ringwraiths on bass.

And then Combichrist!

We have been to a lot of Combichrist shows. This was a good one!

We got a couple of the classic crowd-pleasers pretty early, which felt surprising. "Blut Royale" came early on, and "Get Your Body Beat" was maybe around the 2/3 point. Excellent to dance to live.

A lot of my favorites off the new album got played, too: I'm particularly fond of "RISE," "Feraline," "Only Here For a Good Time," and "Second Endings (We Have Been Here Before)." I was glad to hear pretty much all the ones I'd hoped to.

Seven more pictures:

The final encore was "WTF Is Wrong With You People" (hey! you! What the fuck is wrong with you!?) which was set over footage of Dump, which was fitting.

It was good to get to go out. It has been a while! I don't think we've done anything (music/concert/club related, at least) since the festival over the summer. It does make me wish we were going out more (though there has been intense ~drama~ in the local scene over the last month or so.) I miss it, even if I don't miss the "going out five nights a week" of a decade+ ago. We tentatively agreed to try and do one Thing a month, whether that's a concert or a club night or some other thing (like Bright Nights, though that means we technically did two things for September, ha.) We'll see if we manage to stick to that!

Current Mood: fine
Current Location: my apartment

Look at the little autumn princess! Hahaha.

This FastCAT ran all weekend, as many of them do. Bella ran on Friday, took Saturday off, and then ran again today!

The beaft between runs.

Her times were really similar to her runs on Friday. 10.96 and 11:28. (The Friday times were slightly better, but all very close. I'm glad to see her times improving just a bit again.)

The winner!

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: my apartment

In September, I read more books! Ten of them! (Plus a bonus short story.) Now, part of this was due to managing to finish both of the in-progress books I was reading with Taylor (plus the bonus short story) in one of our hangout sessions. But even without those, it was better than August, which felt slow on the reading front to me.

(September also somehow feels very long, while October has already gone very fast… Looking at the books from early September, it feels like that was forever ago.)

(The covers of these books are fine. They give the right vibe.)
Fair’s Point by Melissa Scott
Book 4 of Astreiant
2014
Fantasy/Mystery - m/m - ebook novel
3.5/5

Nicolas Rathe and Philip Eslingen have settled comfortably into their relationship, but things in the city of Astreiant are not quite so settled. A writer, known for covering the city’s annual dog races, vanishes shortly before the races are set to begin. A worker from one of the training kennels similarly disappears. City officials start requiring prohibitive fees as ‘guarantees’ for those who wish to take bets on the races, creating discord between citizens and the points who are meant to enforce those new rules. Then a series of impossible thefts begins to plague those in Fair’s Point, where silver—and only silver—vanishes from guarded rooms and locked strongboxes. Meanwhile, the son of a prominent family dies after accruing a tremendous amount of debt, and his wealthy sister refuses to cover the debts. His possessions are seized and distributed to those he owed, including Eslingen. He receives a dog, young and unraced, but promising, and Eslingen decides to enter the dog in the upcoming races. This gives Rathe some inside information, despite having been forbidden to investigate, as Fair’s Point is outside of his jurisdiction. It also means that Eslingen could be in harm’s way if they can’t find who has been targeting the district and the races.

My thoughts, some spoilers:

This was another of the Pride storybundle ebooks. The bundle also included the previous book in this series, though I have not read the first two.

I did enjoy this one, and I think slightly more than I enjoyed Point of Dreams. This one seemed to address some of the issues I had with that one.

Good things:
This time around, while still very PG, it did feel like Rathe and Eslingen (not “Eslington” as I kept saying/thinking it was…oops) were actually in a relationship with each other. Part of this is also that their roles in the story were more entangled; they often go do their own things, but then still meet up to share information about their respective doings, rather than feeling like two completely separate parallel stories. I also liked the tension within their relationship, with Eslingen realizing that he misses aspects of being a soldier, and is a little jealous of a lot of what Rathe does in his role as a point.

While the worldbuilding is still extensive and quite layered, this book felt less bogged down by infodumps. It’s still a fleshed out society, and I still enjoyed a lot of the somewhat subtle ways the worldbuilding is shown in the writing (the matriarchal/matrilineal society having feminine pronouns as the default, and the very constant attention paid to astrology as a driving force of life, for instance.)

I liked the dogs! Eslingen’s dog, Sunshine, is quite cute. I do like that they’re just… dogs. Not magical or anything, just dogs. It was also quite charming to read in the author’s note at the start about how two people on Livejournal had won (via charitable donation) cameos for their pets as two of the rival dogs, haha. Nostalgic!

Neutral things:
I did find the convergence of all the plot threads into the ultimate conflict to be quite satisfying… but it felt like it came a little early. (Or at least most of how it all fit together started to be quite obvious early on.) It wasn’t a bad thing, but a large chunk of the book was less of a whodunnit and more of a we-know-who-but-how-do-we-prove-theydunnit. It was still satisfying, but there weren’t really any surprises. I was glad that this time all the culprits were at least characters who had shown up in the book previously.

I’m still not wild about the fact that it’s a story about fantasy cops. The policing force is in some ways part of what feels the most similar to the real world. Still, I know that a mostly aspirational fantasy (though with some “bad cops,” too) of how a policing force could work isn’t inherently bad. I’m not sure I love Eslingen’s desire to do something that feels useful is basically being channeled into “and now there’s going to be a separate force of super-cops that he might join.” This is definitely a me hangup, though it doesn’t ruin my enjoyment of the work.

Less good:
I still struggled with the number of named characters. So many people get introduced by name, as if the reader should be as familiar with them as the protagonists are. This is sometimes very good for making the world feel fully-realized, because of course the protagonists know lots of people! But for the reading experience, it’s sometimes very frustrating to have characters who show up for one page or one bit of dialogue being given the same ‘weight’ as characters who impact the plot. And again, a stylistic choice I simply dislike, but many characters are still referred to sometimes by first name and sometimes by last name, not for plot reasons (like different characters using different levels of familiarity/different contexts/etc.), but seemingly randomly. Multiple times this again led to me not realizing or remembering that two different names were the same character until later in the story, which led to some confusion. I could have kept a list of character names and notes about who they were, but I frankly didn’t want to.

[Spoilers, though not completely specific, in this next paragraph:]
As I said, I did like the way all the different plot threads came together, but part of the explanation fell a little flat for me. We’re told “this thing, specifically, is super extra impossible to do with magic, because For Reasons it’s just extra incompatible with the forces required to make it work.” This leads to some furthering of the mystery, as everyone tries to figure out how the impossible thing happened without magic… Then the answer is just “Well, it was exactly the magic that we said it couldn’t be, because some guy just figured out how to do it. Even though it’s impossible. But don’t worry, it’ll be back to actually impossible soon.” Deus ex astrological occurrence is feasible for the setting, but being told “this specific thing is impossible” only for it to be “actually it was that specific thing, psych” was a little frustrating.

Overall, I did enjoy this one! While I don’t consider the first two books, or the fifth and sixth, to be priorities on my wishlist, I also wouldn’t turn down the chance to read others in this series, so it’s possible I’ll return to them at some point.

(This cover is fine if a bit bland, except that again, apparently this cover artist has been known to plagiarize, which is very uncool.)
The Long Game by Rachel Reid
Book 6 of Game Changers
2024
M/M Romance (subgenre: hockey romance) - ebook novel
4.5/5

Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander have successfully hidden their relationship with each other for more than a decade. They’ve maintained successful careers, Shane leading his team to multiple Stanley Cups, and Ilya has maintained his status as one of the best players in the league, despite being on a less-successful team. The two have continued their mutual charity work, while still being apparent rivals. The plan has always been to retire and then live their lives together openly, but the years of secrecy have started to wear, especially on Ilya. Shane has the support of his parents and a couple of his friends, but Ilya feels increasingly isolated by the inability to share aspects of his life with anyone. He’s aware that there are real risks to them coming out, but it’s starting to seem riskier not to.

My thoughts:

I really liked this one again.

This is the first (so far only) book in the series to return to a previous couple. Sometimes that’s a bit of a hard sell for me in something that’s pretty strictly romance (as opposed to a different genre that has romantic elements), just because once the couple is together, it often ends up feeling a bit contrived to try and structure another romance-genre story around them. I thought this one did very well, as it was very much a continuation of the relationship that was established in Heated Rivalry, with genuine problems that they needed to address, rather than anything contrived. There was no weird reset to the relationship, or backslide in terms of seriousness, while also not being a retread of the identical beats or patterns from before. These are the same characters, but they’re older, and it shows.

The book does deal pretty heavily with Ilya’s depression. I think it’s handled well. He does go to therapy, and to me it didn’t come off as preachy. (There have been a few books where the depressed character seeking therapy is treated sort of as the endpoint, or as Something That Must Be Done in a moral imperative way. It didn’t rub me the wrong way here the way it sometimes does!) I also appreciate that while a lot of Ilya’s problems are situational, those situations improving does not resolve everything; it’s very realistic in that yes, life circumstances can make depression worse and more difficult to handle… but the depression may still be there even when everything is externally “good.”

Ilya and Shane are very different people (despite also having so much in common, and that commonality being foundational to why they’re connected to each other.) Those differences feel very real, and are also very much a source of friction between them, in a way that comes across as completely believable. Shane likes being very disciplined (as exemplified by his food restrictions: it’s never explicitly called an eating disorder, but it is extremely disordered eating), and feeling a sense of accomplishment and reward for it. So yeah, it makes sense that for him, hiding the relationship isn’t nearly as much of a hardship: he feels accomplished for succeeding in hiding it, and the excitement of some marathon reunion sex sort of helps to ingrain the pattern as a good (or at least tolerable) one.

I did want to strangle Shane several times for being thoughtless and selfish… but I also appreciated that I never doubted that Shane and Ilya both loved each other. That’s sometimes a struggle for me in a romance: when it reaches a certain point of frustration with one or more of the characters, it tips me over into the “I wish you would break up” camp. I never stopped feeling like it was a relationship worth the characters fighting for.
At times the feelings of not being on the same page with your partner were very painful. It was relatable; I’ve been in a relationship that felt full of one-sided consideration. It was a bit cathartic to see a relationship survive those feelings!

Sort of on that note: I saw some complaints prior to reading this book that it read like grovel-fic. (Specifically the kind of fanfic, though it’s a common enough romance trope in original published work, where one partner is done terribly wrong by the other, and the partner who did the harm spends a good portion of the story groveling; having to make it up to the wronged party to atone and prove their worthiness and apology and love, to “earn” back the love of the partner they took for granted.) Every once in a while, I can go for a good grovel, haha, but overall it’s not a favorite trope of mine. I was a little worried about having heard that was the tone of this book. I disagree that it was the tone, ha. Yes, there’s an element of apology after realizing you hurt someone you love… but that’s not groveling. It’s more like “realistic consequence, and changing your own behavior once you realize that you unknowingly hurt someone.”

I did enjoy getting to see a lot of overlapping timeline with Role Model for Ilya. While it wasn’t contradictory, it was really interesting to see it from a different side. In Role Model, Ilya seemed very confident, and like an excellent team captain to the Centaurs. Here, he’s actually quite insecure in his captaincy, feeling like he’s fallen short of what he should be, and having to really try to be a social part of the team. He’s actually quite full of doubts and worries, even when he comes across as very self-assured when he talks to Troy (largely because Troy has so many of his own insecurities!)

The Centaurs are definitely a very aspirational view of what a hockey team could be, and in this book they feel far more like an outlier. (I think I said before that this series has a pretty aspirational view of hockey as a whole, because we have players on multiple teams, and we want to like all of them; the shitty players and teams and higher-ups felt more like the exception.) This time around it feels a lot more like the the Centaurs are atypical in their openmindedness and care for each other, compared to the more toxic culture surrounding them. I don’t mind that they’re maybe a bit unrealistically great, but I think it’s worthwhile that it is shown to not really be the way the whole sport is. This is certainly a divergence from the real world of the sport, but it seems a bit more grounded than the early books did.

I liked that there was a reversal of fortunes toward the end, not so much for “grovel” reasons as just the contrast it provides. After a whole book of Ilya feeling isolated, while Shane has support from family and a couple friends, they experience the reverse after they’re outed. Ilya’s team and friends are very supportive, and he gains a lot of the connection and understanding he’d been missing. Shane still has the original friends and family… but gains very little, as his team almost all turn on him. They were happy to be connected to the success he helped lead them to for years… but when they lose, they’re immediately willing to throw Shane under the bus and accuse him of deliberately throwing the game. It’s really shitty for Shane, but I think it’s meaningful to see the difference between people who want to know you for you and people who want to be around you because of what you do for them.

I’m glad that we got to return to see more of Shane and Ilya, and I did really enjoy this book. This one does feel like a pretty comfortable conclusion to the series, with closure for most of our prominent characters, and a sense of where they want to go next in terms of improving the culture of the sport. While this feels like a decent conclusion. I do look forward to the next (final?) one coming out next year.

(I very much like this one, incorporating the roses and the vultures.)
A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher
2023
Horror (subgenres: southern gothic, haunted house, occult) - background m/f - physical novel - read with Taylor
5/5

When archeoentomologist Samantha’s upcoming project is put on hold, she takes the opportunity for a slightly extended visit to her mother. Arriving at her childhood home in North Carolina, Sam quickly discovers that something isn’t right about the house… and something isn’t right with her mother. Her mom has always been prone to some anxiety, but now it seems to rule her life, even to the point of fear. Stranger still, many of her mom’s choices—from her interior decoration to a new insistence on prayer before meals—seem reminiscent of Gran Mae, Sam’s late, tyrannical grandmother who used to own the house. Sam’s visit is plagued with mildly strange occurrences, like infesting ladybugs and bouts of sleep paralysis, but she’s sure it all has a rational explanation. Gran Mae always insisted on everything in the family being ‘nice and normal,’ but when Sam begins to look into family history, she discovers dark, occult roots that she never anticipated.

My thoughts, mild spoilers:

I really loved this the first time, and at the time wanted both Taylor and Alex to read it, haha. Well, I did make Taylor do so! And I still loved it the second time around.

I still found Sam extremely relatable. Anthropology? Entomology? Frustrations with cataloguing preserved insect collections? She’s just like me, for real! (I wish her career was one I’d managed to actually go for, honestly.)
Her dry humor is still very fun and makes her a really enjoyable character to spend the story with. (The bit about “my phone assured me it had an excellent relationship with the wifi. I tried to load a page and it informed me it wasn’t that kind of a relationship” still cracked me up, and has indeed entered my mental lexicon every time I’m struggling with an internet connection.)
A scene that I didn’t mention last time, but also found very relatable (though not in a funny way) was where she was talking to Gail, one of her mom’s neighbors, who confronts Sam about her disbelief about her mom’s experiences in the house. Her mom believes something strange, even paranormal, is happening, and Sam doesn’t believe her. Gail confronts her as an anthropologist, asking if she’d have a similar level of skepticism toward someone else’s beliefs, or if it’s specifically because it’s her mom in question. A very familiar tension for me, between “I believe in the reality of experiences that I do not share” and “but I am also very much a skeptic.”

I still love one of the creepiest symptoms of the house’s wrongness being the ecological dead zone of the gardens. The roses are perfect… but nothing else lives there.

I did mention last time that Alex and I once came across a black vulture roosting in the vestibule of an abandoned Pentecostal church out in Maryland, and how that was my peak Southern Gothic experience… So I do love a story that so heavily features black vultures.

The story starts with a much more subtle type of creepy, before going pretty hard into much weirder territory, but I enjoy both aspects. I also enjoy the broader themes about what it means to cling to the past, what it means to hold your expectations for someone higher than their actual reality, whether an imagined “ideal past” or “perfectly normal family” are things that can exist or even should. Another thing I had mentioned before, but still really like, was having an archeologist, someone who genuinely studies and wants to learn from the past, contrasted with the attitude of someone who clings to an impossible, largely imagined, romanticized version of the past.

Tiny “small world” sidenote: T. Kingfisher thanked Foxfeather, a vulture rescuer/rehabber, in the acknowledgments for assistance with research. I hadn’t noticed it the first time, but hey, I’ve bought stuff from them before, haha. (They’ve done a few backerkit campaigns called “Visionary Vultures” with bird-themed art, raising funds for conservation efforts. The really pretty geometric magpie sticker I started my current habit tracker off with was one of their designs.)

I really enjoyed this one, and am glad to have reread it already. I think it’s still one of my favorite reads of the year.

(I really like the covers for these editions. Perfectly weird distortions.)
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer
Book 4 of The Southern Reach
2024
Science fiction/horror (subgenre: ecological, psychological, alien) - physical novel - read with Taylor
5/5

Even before Area X, the Forgotten Coast has been the target of strange happenings and shadowy investigation.
Prior to Area X’s appearance, there was a scientific study in a place known as “Dead Town,” meant to be documenting and tracking released alligators. The study goes strange, from bizarre, nonsensical documentation on the part of the scientists, to the unexplained invasion of rabbits who seem to be wearing impossible cameras.
Years later, semi burned-out spy Old Jim is sent to the region, to find out what may have happened during the Dead Town study, and to keep an eye on the actions of the “Seance and Science Brigade,” and their experiments in the old lighthouse. To help him, they also send “Cass,” a fellow spy who has been given the name and appearance of his estranged, vanished daughter. From the start, it seems obvious that the mission is not so straightforward, and he may be involved in far stranger power struggles.
After Area X comes down, The Southern Reach sends a team across the border, to find out what’s happening. Lowry is one member of the team, one of the first to encounter the distortions of the living things left behind in Area X.

My thoughts, some spoilers:

I really do love the Southern Reach series, and it was a delight to get a surprise fourth book. I’m eagerly awaiting the surprise fifth book, which should be out in just about a year.

The different sections of this book are definitely very distinct from each other, but I really like all three and the ways they build on each other.

The first section, about the experiments that get derailed by the rabbits, is the most straightforward horror of the book. And it is deeply creepy in ways that really work for me! There are elements to the horror that the reader is aware of that the characters aren’t (this is pre-Area X, but there are some recognizable phrases that get mentioned…) It’s unsettling, from the rabbits being mysteriously carnivorous, to the cameras that seem to drive people mad, to the ways in which the study is obviously other than what the scientists performing it believe.

The second part, “The False Daughter,” is about Old Jim’s spy mission to the coast, and has horror and sci-fi elements, but is also more of a spy thriller. Of the three sections it’s probably my least favorite (though still excellent) but is also the most important to the rest. The ways in which Central is fucking with Jim are both obvious and less so through the whole thing. At times it’s hard to tell what’s going on (because there are a lot of different factions at play, and a lot of different characters who individually have multiple, sometimes contradictory aims and motives), but in a way that I found enjoyable, not frustrating or confusing.
Fuck Henry, lol.

I was skeptical about the third section before reading it the first time. Lowry, who we know from previous books, is the sole survivor of the first expedition, and he wasn’t a beloved character to me, haha, so I wasn’t sure how I felt about him as a first-person narrator.
If you’ve seen anything about this book, there’s a decent chance that it was people upset about the number of “fucks” dropped, and they are almost all dropped in this section, following Lowry’s drug-fueled stream-of-consciousness thought process. Honestly… it was delightful to read aloud, as deeply weird as he is as a character. (There’s uh… also some pseudo cannibalism?)

There’s something that I noticed when I read it the first time (largely because I had just reread the original trilogy) and found offputting… and then it is mentioned on-page, though the characters don’t recognize it as significant, and then the book potentially closes with a big chunk of the same. It is a spoiler, so I don’t want to quite say, but it’s definitely a pretty major The Plot Has Thickened/Taken A Turn/We’re Fucked for the series, and I like it. I’m interested to see where it goes.

It’s very hard for me to know what to say about it, because it is pretty tied in with the rest of the series, and a lot of the stuff happening is very strange and hard to explain the significance of. While I loved the original trilogy, and didn’t think it needed further expansion, I really enjoyed there being more!

(The Murderbot covers are always really good.)
Platform Decay by Martha Wells
Book 8 of The Murderbot Diaries
2026
Science fiction - physical novella
4.5/5

Murderbot is sent to a torus—a massive, inhabited artificial ring encircling a dead planet—on a very important retrieval mission: to rescue three members of Mensah’s family, including one of her spouses and one of her children. Corporation Barish-Estranza, either as revenge or for blackmail, kidnapped them as they were traveling. Murderbot finds them in a temporary safehouse… along with Leonide, a Barish-Estranza supervisor, who wants to make a deal. As dangerous as Barish-Estranza can be to its enemies, it can be just as cruel to its own, especially those it has deemed a failure. Leonide wants the safe extraction of some of her own family.
Murderbot’s mission was never going to be easy, but Leonide’s request makes it far more complicated. It has no loyalty to Leonide, but also no desire to allow the corporation to victimize anyone else. It will have to decide how much it’s willing to risk for the sake of strangers, while also protecting its intended clients.

My thoughts, vague spoilers:

Yay, new Murderbot! I wish I hadn’t overestimated my ability to make it through the TBR quite so badly, and had gotten to read it a little closer to when it came out, but I finally made it!

As always, I really liked it.

I really liked the setting for this book. The massive artificial ring with all the themed districts would probably have charmed me as much as it did Murderbot’s human charges, even if it hated them, ha.
The setting as a whole is something I really like about the series, and I don’t think I’ve really talked about that much. I like a far-future setting that has a deep history… that’s also very far-future. It’s not that sci-fi doesn’t often incorporate long histories, because that’s basically a genre staple, but the particular vibe of it in Murderbot really works for me. Remembering their personal history is part of Preservation’s whole thing, obviously. In some cases, that sense of history ends up quite sad, like in this book. The torus itself is full of all the different districts, a lot of which have historical markers explaining the original uses for the space and how it’s been repurposed… and also has sweeping views of the planet it circles. A completely dead planet, stripped of its resources so thoroughly that there’s just nothing left, even as the torus built around it remains active and populated.

Another thing that the whole series does a good job of is finding new ways to test Murderbot. (I mean, this is often the point of fiction, and making your characters go through it!) But as I’ve said before, I really like characters who have to actively choose what kind of person they want to be, and this is one of the most obvious circumstances where Murderbot has to do that. Its whole arc from before the series starts is obviously about self-determination. But in this one (keeping it moderately vague), as it decides what to do about the secondary rescue mission it’s been given, it realizes that it could lie. It could lie to the humans it’s with about the situation, and could also alter its own memory to align with that lie, so that it would absolve itself of responsibility. It also realizes how that would probably not be a good thing for it to do, morally and in terms of what sort of person (not human, but person) that it wants to be.

It’s also, as always, very funny. Murderbot’s periodic “emotion checks” throughout are excellent. Its rant about the availability (lack thereof) of public transportation in a supposedly civilized place was terribly relatable.

This story, next to Fugitive Telemetry is probably the most standalone of the novellas. It was really enjoyable to get to see Murderbot on another fairly contained mission, and getting to see it excel at what it’s most meant to do: protecting people and fending off threats.

I am very intrigued by the potential implications of the governor module hack spreading.

Excellent as always!

(I like how bold this cover is. It’s super recognizable and distinctive.)
Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones
2016
Horror (subgenre: werewolf, coming of age) - m/f - ebook novel
4/5

The boy was born a werewolf… probably. He won’t know for sure until he shifts… or doesn’t. Orphaned at birth, he’s raised by his werewolf aunt and uncle, the other two triplets to his late human mother. To be werewolves is to be outsiders, never staying long in one school, job, city, or even state. Constantly on the run, making ends meet by quasi-legal and outright illegal means, their sense of somewhat atypical family is really all they have. That, and their pride at being werewolves, something the boy longs for… and secretly fears he’ll never truly have.

My thoughts, vague spoilers:

This was a good one!

The werewolves are absolutely… I wouldn’t even say allegory, so much as are something of a stand-in for real-world marginalized communities. I’m paraphrasing, but there is a point where the boy says that perhaps they wouldn’t have to live the way they do if the world wasn’t forcing them to. There are a lot of very obvious parallels to being homeless or undocumented or any other identity that is inherently criminalized.

I do love the structure of the book. There are longer chapters that are telling more of the chronological story of the boy growing up, but they alternate with shorter sort of vignette chapters that serve as snapshots of his life. The long chapters are in a traditional first person view, while the short ones have the boy referring to himself in the third person as different things, based on the event of the chapter. “The vampire” in a chapter where that’s his Halloween costume; “the criminal” in a chapter where he gets in trouble at school; “the villager” in a chapter where his uncle, referencing classic monster movies, splits people into either werewolves or villagers, and gives the boy a hard time for not being a confirmed werewolf. I think that these chapters were really interesting, both because they are often interesting snapshots, but also because it shows the boy’s general lack of strong self-conception. He’s never named in the text at all. He struggles with who and what he is. He never had a chance to know his mother, and being a werewolf is the most important part of his aunt Libby and uncle Darren’s identity, an identity that he longs to share, but fears that he won’t. All the short bits where he’s “the criminal” or “the mechanic” or “the biologist” show him thinking of himself based on how others view him or on his actions at the moment… and I think it’s very interesting. It’s both sort of cute imaginative play and a lack of stable self. I liked it.

The book does a great job of making being a werewolf seem utterly horrifying and awful (it’s often steeped in tragedy and loss), while also making it feel understandable that the werewolves sometimes love it, and that the boy wants to be one. It’s sometimes terrible, but it is still special. There are also a lot of ways that some of the worst aspects of being a werewolf are self-inflicted, something that’s sometimes very obvious and very frustrating, and sometimes just tragic.

Part of what defines their lives is a sense of isolation… but eventually it’s revealed that it didn’t have to be that way. There are other werewolves (and people who know werewolves) who have knowledge to prevent some of the terrible things they’ve always thought inevitable. In a lot of ways, that just compounds the tragedy that the whole family has experienced.

The characters do all sort of tread the line between likable and unlikable. I enjoy that for the most part, but at times it wears a bit on my sympathy. Though again, I think that’s the point! And is also part of that broader point about marginalized communities… the things that happen to them don’t cease to be horrible just because they’re happening to people that are sometimes unpalatable.

If you struggle with animals dying (including an awful lot of dogs), then this may not be the book for you. Also a content warning for domestic violence.

(I think this is a good cover. Good threatening, spooky, evil house vibes, dwarfing the much smaller family.)
The Spite House by Johnny Compton
2023
Horror (subgenres: haunted house, paranormal, curse, family) - ebook novel - read with Alex
4/5

Eric and his daughters, Dess and Stacy, are on the run. After an inexplicable event chases them away from their life in Maryland, they’re traveling to Eric’s family home in Odessa, TX, with only vague plans for some kind of stability this may offer them. Needing to stay entirely off the radar, Eric takes under-the-table jobs to support them. Then he finds a job listing that sounds far too good to be true: an eccentric, wealthy woman asking someone to spend time living in a particular “spite house,” to record their experiences in the search for proof of the paranormal. The payment is beyond generous if they complete their time in the house, regardless of their findings. It truly does seem too perfect for their situation, and Eric accepts the job when it’s offered.
It doesn’t take long for strange things to start happening in the house. The spite house has far more history than Eric and his daughters are aware of, a history deeply tied to the land and the family that owns it. What waits there is far more dangerous than cold spots and unexplained noises.

My thoughts:

I still really enjoyed this one! I read it for the first time last year, and then Alex and I read it this year.

The good things:
I still enjoy the setting. A “spite house,” a house built out of spite, architecturally awful and inconvenient, but intended to upset someone else, is a fantastic horror setting. It makes everything offputting and strange even before any hint of the paranormal starts in.

The general theme of secrets is good. There are good secrets, bad secrets, secrets kept to protect someone else, secrets kept only to protect yourself, secrets intended solely to provide leverage or power over someone else… It means that every character is an unreliable narrator.

Another key theme relates to cycles of abuse and trauma, how tragedy can lead to hatred and revenge, how that just creates more of the same, how it often comes back to spite. In some cases these cycles can be broken, sometimes the attempts to break them end up being what tragically perpetuates them, and sometimes the cost is extreme. Tied in with that is also the element of privilege and marginalization. Eric, Dess, and Stacy are black, while Eunice (the wealthy benefactor) is white. Eunice considers herself to be extremely progressive, and in some ways she genuinely is, but that doesn’t make her any less willing to manipulate and use Eric when it suits her ends. Her manipulation isn’t limited to them, but she very easily justifies it to herself as she leverages her social and financial power. She convinces herself that she’s doing favors for everyone else, and fully believes that writing a bigger check at the end will justify anything.

The meh things:
While I enjoyed the book still, I did actually revise my rating down from my original 4.5 to a 4. Still quite good, but a few of the flaws bothered me more this time.

The one I mentioned before was that I thought the book had too many different perspectives. I liked alternating between different ones, since as I said, everyone is keeping their own secrets. Getting different pieces of information based on whose perspective we’re in shows how much they’re hiding, and lets us get a more complete picture of what’s going on. That said, there are so many perspectives (at least twelve, I think? Maybe more?) that it sort of dilutes the effect a bit. A few of them didn’t really add anything completely unique, or felt a little redundant. Some of the sort of “surprising” perspectives we get would have also felt a bit more significant if there were fewer overall.

Along with that, the thing that ultimately made me change my rating was that too many characters state their own thoughts, feelings, and motives way too directly. I don’t recall being bothered by that the last time, but this time it stood out a lot. The characters are all narrating from their own perspectives, with their own secrets and lies that they’re telling and their own personal goals, and I like the friction that causes between what we see in their perspectives and what other characters see and are aware of by contrast. Except that subtlety was undercut by characters so frequently stating directly how they felt about something, or why they felt that way, or why they were choosing to lie about something. That’s not always a terrible thing, but when it was super constant, it started to feel grating this time around.

Still a very good book, and I’m glad it got a reread.

(I like the colors chosen for this one. The symbol on the robot’s chest seems to be a sort of logo for the author.)
So You Want to Be a Robot by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor
2024 (originally 2017; one additional story added to the second edition)
Various genres (fantasy, sci-fi, a little horror) - Various relationships (f/nb, m/nb, nb/nb, f/f, m/m, m/f) - ebook short story collection
3.5/5 (my average rating for the stories in this collection was a rounded 3.6; my individual ratings ranged from a 2.5 to a 4.5)

Assorted speculative fiction stories, most about queerness and identity.

(This was part of the Pride StoryBundle)

This is Not a Wardrobe Door
Fantasy (portal fantasy) - f/nb
3/5

Ellie’s childhood best friend, Zera, lives on the other side of her closet door. Passing through the door gave her access to a world of constant magic and wonder… until the door stopped working. Ellie (later Ell) never forgets, longing for the friend they’ve been cut off from. Zera goes on a quest of her own, through the magical world, to find the Gatekeeper, and restore the door between worlds.

My thoughts:

This was a cute story! The author says they wrote it out of anger at C. S. Lewis and the way that Susan was cut off from Narnia, as well as that feeling of… well, if I did get to go to a portal fantasy world, how would I cope with having to leave it?

This is basically the conceit of the whole Wayward Children series, and it was hard for me not to think about it a little similarly.

This story has a nice vibe of getting to recapture something from your childhood, of finding it in a new way, even as you’ve grown up and become a new person.

Tomorrow When We See the Sun
Sci-fi - past m/nb, or perhaps nb/nb
3.5/5

Mere serves the Sun Lords as executioner, putting traitors and rebels to death for the entertainment of their courts. It can’t fully remember its own past, and it isn’t allowed to make any sort of lasting connections. When it is woken from stasis to be rescued (and functionally made an exile), it learns more about its creation, and the memories that have been taken from it.

My thoughts:

This one is very tragic in tone, though not without at least a sense of bittersweet hope. It took me a bit to get into it, but I did end up quite enjoying it. It’s certainly an interesting example of a dystopia that appears utopian. The Sun Lords have won their galactic conquest, and everything looks and feels extremely clean and simple and civilized… and the whole thing is built on cruelties, both vast (the destruction of entire worlds) and petty (the torture of individuals to fit them into a designated role.)

The Sorcerer’s Unattainable Gardens
Fantasy (fairy tale elements) - nb/nb
4/5

A sorcerer and a shadow once fell in love, until a past deal the sorcerer made with a demon forced them apart. Now the sorcerer lives behind a circle of six near-impossible to traverse fences, circling six impossible gardens, all of which spell certain death for anyone who tries to cross them.

My thoughts, spoilers:

I liked this one! It’s mainly in second person, which gives it a very instructional, fairy tale feel, as it explains to “you” how you could solve the impossible tasks required to cross the gardens. It’s ultimately a sweet fantasy love story, where the shadow has solved the impossible riddles to return to its love and undo the demon’s deal.

The Android’s Prehistoric Menagerie
Sci-fi (post-apocalyptic)
4/5

After an apocalyptic event destroys humankind, android EX-702 finally awakens in the ruins. Here it discovers new—or rather, very old—life, in the form of dinosaurs, have begun to populate. It does its best to protect some of the deinonychus young, taking on a parental role toward them as it teaches them language and mechanics. As it continues to search for what may be left of its human creators, its own existence may be put in jeopardy.

My thoughts, major spoilers:

This was another fun one!
Who doesn’t love a fun story about robots and dinosaurs and mythological creatures at the same time? And super intelligent raptor babies learning robotics are cute and I love them.
It is a spoiler, but the thing that puts EX-702 in danger is that it uncovers a message from its creator that includes a self-destruct clause. That if it can’t find evidence of extant human life, then it must shut down permanently. This was intended to be a kindness, so that the android would not be condemned to a solitary existence on a destroyed planet… but instead threatens to take it away from a very intentional life and family that it has built. And obviously that’s the intent of the story, about life (and sentience, and culture, etc.) beyond humanity having value, and the blindness or short-sightedness of humankind assuming those things are unique (or will always be unique) to us.

For Want of a Heart
Fantasy/sci-fi - f/f
3/5

Jordan is trapped, serving as a bartender to work off her debt to the Summer Lady, a debt that keeps growing, and is suddenly being called due. Mirdonna, the Winter Lady, offers her an out. Mirdonna has plans of her own: she wants to fix the world, to use a secret machine built in her laboratory to remake human nature, to remove all desire and capability for violence. But the power the machine requires will require sacrifice.

My thoughts, some spoilers:

I do love me some villainy! And this is very much a supervillain story, if given at least a bit of “cool motive, still murder” justification. A world without violence and hatred, assured world peace… yup, great! Sacrificing a certain number of people to do so, and removing free will from the entirety of the population to do so? Maybe not that great!
This was written for an anthology focused on queer villainy, and I can definitely get behind that as a theme. I also like that the villainy isn’t glossed over; if it were anonymous sacrifices, then it could feel more easily justified for “the greater good.” That could still be the case, but the final sacrifice requires a very specific and cruel betrayal, and that makes it much harder to just overlook.

I do think that the genre blend was a little weird, and didn’t completely work for me (even though I usually love sci-fi/fantasy hybrids.) The summer queen running a bar with cider made from fae apples and who will transform those who can’t pay their debts into animal pets… really didn’t feel like it meshed with the “I’m building a superweapon in my supervillain lair to show them all!” plot. I like both, but they felt too disconnected.

Once I, Rose
Fantasy (contemporary, fairy tale elements) - ambiguous, but probably f/f
3.5/5

A misdirected curse turns the protagonist into a rose, endlessly reincarnated as such, unable to communicate. They track their lives and deaths as a flower, while remembering the woman they were taken away from.

My thoughts:

This one is pretty short, but it’s an interesting conceit. While it’s not really portrayed as much of a horror story, it is a pretty horrific thing to have happen - to be reincarnated as something inanimate, but to retain awareness. It’s definitely a much more humorous tone though, and some of the different lives and deaths that the protagonist recounts are quite funny.

Where Monsters Dance
Fantasy (fairy tale elements) - f/f; transfemme love interest
3.5/5

Red always had Monster, her imaginary friend, with her as a child. Monster was with her all through the traumas of an abusive childhood, until she sent it away. When her girlfriend is kidnapped and taken into the woods, Red goes to find and save her from a far worse sort of monster.

My thoughts, spoilers:

This one is very much about trauma and grief and the things that can steal from you.

While Red continually reiterates that the story isn’t a fairy tale, it clearly is very much a fairy tale structure in a lot of ways. (A girl named Red, following a trail of thread into a forest, where a wolf takes her to a court of magical creatures…) It also feels very Neverending Story, with a fantasy world slowly being destroyed.

A lot of the visuals in this story are really cool. The descriptions of the fantasy court and the monsters themselves are very imaginative.

There’s also very much a wish-fulfillment/satisfaction of revenge vibe to it. Red was traumatized and abused by a very awful, very human man. Getting revenge against him when he’s become a much bigger fantasy-scale villain is extremely satisfying, and I can certainly see the appeal of.

A Survival Guide for When You’re Trapped in a Black Hole
Fantasy (sort of) - m/m
3/5

When his dog, Sasha, dies, Antonio doesn’t know how to tell anyone. When the shadow of a dog appears in the house to speak to him, he doesn’t know how to treat her.

My thoughts:

This one was a surprisingly hard read. It made me cry!

It’s been over a year, but I’m clearly still not over Cy. So reading about someone suddenly losing his dog, and not being able to even bring himself to tell his partner about it, and then his dog returning as a ghost because she just wants a goodbye… It killed me.

(And some of it is about the different ways that grief can hit, but him yelling at the ghost dog because he doesn’t think she’s really Sasha also killed me, because I would love for my old dog to come back and say goodbye to me again.)

Even just this brief review made me cry over it again. So… a 3 feels low, for how effecting I did find it, but also… I can’t say I enjoyed it.

Thread
Sci-fi (post-apocalyptic (ish))
2.5/5

The mining unit’s bunker is searched by the entities in control, seeking an anomaly they believe one of the team is in possession of. Those in control have made everything light… but Mara hopes that a piece of darkness will be enough to undermine their control.

My thoughts:

This is kind of a weird one.

In general, I like the core idea: the idea of overwhelming light being oppressive, and dark being a relief. ~~Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers, is that you?~~

But as a whole, I don’t know that I felt quite enough of the world to really get into it. The oppressive Nine that come to the bunker, and the horrors of the promised torture for those they bring to “the House” are definitely terrible and threatening. I fully believe that the powers that be are awful! There was just no broader sense of what was being fought for instead of just what was being fought against. Or maybe I just wanted to know more about what the world itself looked like. I don’t know. Not bad, but I didn’t quite connect with it.

Under Wine-Bright Seas
Fantasy (fairy tale elements) - slight m/m (or arguably m/nb); transmasc protagonist, currently-masc-but-genderqueer maybe-love-interest
4/5

The visitor from the sea comes to the castle. Here he speaks to the fourth princess… and believes him when he tells him that he is a prince, not the princess his family insists he is. The traveler offers to help the prince escape, to a life beneath the water.

My thoughts:

This is a good one. A nice story about finally being seen for who you are, and escaping the life that others have laid out for you.

I like the set up of the protagonist’s relationship with his sisters, who do largely love him as he is. I also like the sea traveler, and the freedom that he represents. There’s certainly some general thematic connection to the sea and corresponding fluidity of expression.

Of Blessed Servitude
Sci-fi/fantasy (post-apocalyptic, weird west, horror elements) - m/m
4.5/5

For protection against other dangers in the Waste, the sunspawn demand periodic sacrifice. Easy enough for the townships to send someone convicted of immorality out to die. Bishop once survived being sacrificed… something all but unheard of. When he finds another Offering, strung up on a cross outside his old township, he wants to at the very least provide him with a merciful death, instead of the torture of being devoured. Grace doesn’t want the mercy of a quick death, not if it means the family he left behind will be punished. Bishops chances of killing this sunspawn are low… but Grace deserves the chance to live.

My thoughts, some spoilers:

I really enjoyed this one!

The religious trauma do be thick with this one, too.

I really like the setting… it’s a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with flora and fauna all basically guaranteed to try and kill you, with technologically advanced cities that are safer, but isolated and unconcerned with everything outside of them. The highly-religious townships have made deals with demons, using this as an additional method of authoritarian control. (The author mentions having been on a Weird West kick at the time, and this definitely feels like it could fit. And reminds me that it’s a subgenre I should read more of.)

This is another story that I’d love to see in a visual medium. Some cool, stylized animation would be amazing.

To the Knife-Cold Stars
Sci-fi (a few fantasy elements) - m/m
3/5

Grace wakes up in the Wire City, having been brought to a surgeon to try and undo some of the damage left by the demon before Bishop saved him. Grace was saved… but the city demands sacrifices of its own: the immense machine below the city, the cityheart, periodically takes children, feeding off their feelings and memories. The most recent victim is the surgeon’s own son. No one can make it far enough down to save them… but Grace has to try, even if it means risking the second chance he’s been given.

My thoughts:

This story picks up fairly quickly after the previous one.

While I’m glad to get more about both Grace and Bishop (and find out more about Grace, since the previous story was mainly Bishop’s), this one doesn’t work for me as well as the previous one did. The setting this time is more of a standard dystopian sci-fi city, maybe vaguely cyberpunk. It’s not a terrible or uninteresting setting, but definitely not as gripping or unique as the wasteland setting of the first story.

I do like the idea of an artificial intelligence feeding off of feelings and memories, things that it itself does not have.

Finding Home
Sci-fi - m/m (background m/f and f/f); transmasc protagonist
4/5

Joseph has spent most of his life traveling between different dimensions with his mother. She knows how to open the doors between realities, and she moves them through every few months or every few years, on an endless quest to find Joseph’s missing father. According to her, they can’t risk staying longer in realities that are clearly not made for them, for fear it will prove fatal. Eventually, Joseph doesn’t want to leave; he wants to build a life for himself, rather than endlessly quest for someone else’s.

My thoughts:

I enjoyed this one a lot!

I’ve certainly seen the sort of… quest through different realities, looking for a loved one story. (I even sort of wrote one!) but it’s interesting to see a near inverse… having a world-hopping power, and realizing that you want to stay. Or two people traveling through the worlds together, and discovering that they want different things.

It’s a unique take on a coming-of-age story, of having to break away (even more fully than usual) from your family in order to make a life of your own.

I liked it.

Winter Bride
Fantasy (some horror elements) - m/f, some f/f
3.5/5

The Winter Lord has taken many brides. They will be used for his and his court’s entertainment until there’s nothing left of them. One of the brides, the sorceress, has found a way to leave, and she wants to take the more unstable girls with her… but someone has to stay behind.

My thoughts:

This one is very much about a very wicked, evil version of the fae. Extremely terrible and cruel! As always in this sort of story, a striking contrast between beauty and cruelty, and the magic being horrifying.

Still a pretty good and fun story. Weighing ideas of what you can give up for the sake of someone else, especially when you know that they’re in greater danger than you.

To the Monsters, With Love
Horror/sci-fi/fantasy - m/f (mostly, but also sort of ambiguous)
4/5

About being in love with the monsters you’re supposed to disdain, about giving them new life and a new happy ending.

My thoughts, sort of spoilers:

I enjoyed this one!

Very relatable… falling in love with the monster, not the hero that defeats them. It’s especially about the classic Universal Monsters - Dracula, Wolfman, Frankenstein’s Monster, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Phantom of the Opera.

Being in love with the monsters, not wanting them to be gone, so going mad-science to bring them back and run away together.

I do relate, and tbh, I’d pay to see a movie filmed in the style of an old monster movie, with the damsel-in-distress heroine flipping it around to resurrect the monsters she’s fallen in love with.

Batteries for Your Doombot5000 Are Not Included
Sci-fi (superheroes/supervillains) - f/f
3/5

After a superhuman conflict ended with Mickie’s girlfriend vanishing, there was no reason to believe she was anything but dead… until a Doombot5000 that Mickie was refurbishing briefly spoke in Claire’s voice. Now Mickie has devoted much of her retirement from supervillainy to finding the few remaining Doombot5000s that were once her robot army. Many were neutralized, but she wants to find the few that are left in hopes of finding further hints of Claire’s consciousness.

My thoughts:

This one is cute. I like stories about the “what happens after a superhero/supervillain career” sort of thing. (I’m still quite partial to Velveteen vs.)

I’m also always a fan of people questing for their lovers.

I feel like this sort of story is also the only place where superheroes (and villains) still get to be kind of silly. Weird themed villains, things unironically referred to as Doombots. Modern superhero stories seem very self-serious, and while I’m usually more of a fan of serious stories, it’s still a bit interesting to see the change. Now the silliness seems only to be present in stories that are doing some sort of subversion, when it used to be sort of the opposite… fairly lighthearted or silly things as the mainstream, with the darker stories being the subversions.

…Or Be Forever Fallen
Fantasy/horror - m/m
4/5

The protagonist, his name stolen, is stalked by a pair of ghosts. The ghost of the raven and the ghost of the wolf come to him, insisting he has a debt to pay. He agrees to pay, for fear of their retribution if he refuses. As they guide him through the forest where they say their bones rest, flashes of memory begin to remind him of an identity that no longer feels like it could have been his.

My thoughts:

This is a pretty dark one, and I did like it, ha.

Very much dark fantasy or the intersection of fantasy and horror. It’s sort of an interesting snapshot of a broader world, similar to some of the other stories (like Of Blessed Servitude) that I liked from the collection.

There’s a lot about grief and regret and the desire for redemption, and what that looks like.

This is also one of the longer stories, if I recall, and it’s a little difficult to say too much about it without spoiling the central plot.

Iron Aria
Fantasy - transmasc protagonist, transfemme side character
4.5/5

Kyru is tormented by dreams of the pain hidden within the mountain and the dam that rise over the valley, threatening to destroy their town. He’s always had the ability to speak to and influence metal, something that serves him well enough as an apprentice smith. When a group of soldiers comes through their small mining town, hoping to address the threat from the dam, Kyru jumps at the chance to accompany them, sure he will be able to help.

My thoughts:

Another of my favorites from the collection.

I like the world and the conflict that’s set up. This is another one that definitely feels like there’s a much broader world beyond the story, but I really enjoy the glimpses that we get.

(What the conflict ends up being reminds me deeply of The Broken Earth, as in a natural force that has grown angry and resentful at being cut off from something it values. Hopefully that’s not too spoilery.)

The ocean sending the zombified corpses of dead sailors at them is very creepy, and I love the vibe of it.

I like Kyru finally getting his identity respected and getting the chance to use his gifts.

What Becomes of the Third-Hearted
Sci-fi/fantasy (post-apocalyptic, surreal) - nb/f; genderqueer/nonbinary protagonist
3.5/5

The world ends, falling away into the surreality and impossibility of dreams. Morgan looks near hopelessly for her wife and daughter, consumed with regret for not being with them when everything came to an end.

My thoughts:

I enjoyed this one. The surreal descriptions of the sorts of dream logic that the world is dissolving into were really interesting and often striking. The cellphone turning into a turtle covered in lorem ipsum text is an image I particularly enjoy, haha.

The specific thing (representative of the bigger fear) that Morgan is struggling with—having deleted the last picture they received of their wife and daughter, just because they were too tired to respond—just guts me. I sort of live in fear of that sort of regret.

This is a short one, but I do really like it and the feeling of it.

The Gentleman of Chaos
Fantasy (dark) - m/m; transmasc protagonist
4/5

The sister to the soon-to-be-king is sent away in secret, to become a bodyguard and assassin who will protect him against all threats to his power. Now known only as “She,” “She” has no choice but to obey the king in everything he demands. The truest threat to him is the mythologized Gentleman of Chaos, a man of many impossible and contradictory motives and abilities.

My thoughts, spoilers:

This is a good one, though again, very dark.

It does two really good language tricks that I enjoyed, but both are inherently spoilers, so… skip if you don’t want to know them.

The first is an ambiguous statement that truly does change meaning once more gets found out. But as I skimmed it again while writing up my thoughts, the original meaning still works perfectly well even once the “real” meaning is revealed.

When She returns to protect the king, it says “Because no one knew how our father died, my brother laid his plans in delicate layers over slow years.” The new king is very paranoid about assassination attempts, and this seems perfectly understandable, if their father’s death was a mystery. When it’s revealed that the current king murdered his father, which She witnessed, that line changes shape a bit, now being as much about fear of being revealed as it is about the fear of the same thing happening to him, but both readings still make sense.

The second is about She. “She” is held captive by a compulsion that She cannot break, forcing obedience to the king. But “She” has never been a name that matters; his name that he calls himself, and that those who love him call him, is Vessai. And since he is not She or a she at all, that allows him to break the compulsion. (Very “no man of woman born” shit, which I always dig.)

I liked this one. I also felt like it was one that was fairly exactly the length it needed to be.

Gray Skies, Red Wings, Blue Lips, Black Hearts
Fantasy (dystopian) - past nb/f; nonbinary side character, transmasc side character
3.5/5

Redcap Kestrel makes a bargain to find a girl’s lost soul. The City where it’s lost is a cutthroat, dangerous place, but so is Redcap Kestrel, ever since she came to the City, falling from the Prosperous Above. It turns out that what stole the girl’s soul may be setting a trap for Redcap Kestrel herself.

My thoughts:

I like this one, but feel like I didn’t connect to it quite as strongly as I wanted to.

I think that unlike some of the stories that are clearly part of a larger world, this one felt like the world around it was almost too large for the story. The things that are hinted at are interesting, and I don’t think they were poorly explained or anything, so much as there’s just so much else surrounding it, so many different aspects of the world and the characters and their pasts, that the story itself is a bit hard to focus on.

The same thing could be said of a few other stories in the collection, like “Of Blessed Servitude” and “…Or Be Forever Fallen,” where the story being told is quite narrow, but the characters have expansive pasts and complicated relationships to the world around them… they just worked for me a bit better. I think that the reveals felt more connected to the story’s plot than this one, where some was connected and some was just sort of exposition from the protagonist’s memory.

It was still a good story, and I think that a longer work set there could work really well.

How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps
Sci-fi - nb/nb (arguably), queerplatonic m/nb and m/m/nb relationship (arguably), background m/m; nonbinary(ish) protagonist, asexual protagonist
4/5

Tesla falls in love with the service robot at their favorite coffee shop, until it’s decommissioned in favor of a newer model. More than just being in love with it, Tesla themself wants to be a robot, something they understand is currently impossible. That doesn’t make it any easier to bear. They, with the help of the man they fake-dated and his real boyfriend, can at least try to rescue the recycled service robot.

My thoughts:

The summary doesn’t really sound like it so much, but this is a story about depression and dysphoria. While Tesla thinks about it in terms of their internal robot self, and self-termination, their suicidal depression (at least largely in part because they cannot physically be what they feel like internally) is very much the central aspect to the story.

It’s also probably about the ways that certain neurodivergence (not specifically labeled, but probably autism) can make you feel inhuman. While I know that there’s a sort of “ugh, why does autism always get compared to robots and aliens and such” attitude about a lot of spec-fic, but also… sometimes it’s just because it’s relatable, okay?

Tesla’s experiences do feel very real and understandable, even if it’s not a set of experiences I can say I share. (Well… the depression. And the “eh, I’d rather not do this whole “gender” thing,” I suppose.)

That said, it’s a very hopeful story about the ways in which connection and love and the family you make for yourself can help you hold on through what you’re going through.

I really like Jonathan (Tesla’s long-time fake-boyfriend) and his actual new boyfriend Bernardo. I like that they pretty much settle into a relationship with each other with Tesla (and maybe their robot partner) as queerplatonic partners. It’s very sweet.

Overall, I enjoyed this collection!

A lot of the stories remind me a bit of the sorts of ideas that I used to have (back when I was a little less burned out.) I didn’t write many of those, but a lot were this sort of… small piece of a larger world. (I wish that maybe at the time I’d realized that I could just write a short story and try to imply the larger world around it, instead of trying to force it to become something novel-length, when that often didn’t suit the idea itself.)

With the exception of two stories that were about the same characters, the rest are not connected to each other at all, but I like the ways in which there were similar themes that carried through several of them.

A good collection, and I’m glad to have read it.

(I love the covers for the whole trilogy. The owl is a very good one for this book.)
Dead Beat by Leigh Bardugo
Book 3 of the Alex Stern trilogy
2026
Fantasy/Horror (subgenre: occult, demonic, religious, urban fantasy, dark academia) - f/m - physical novel
4.5/5

After a trip to hell and back (very literally), Alex and the other members of Lethe House find themselves responsible for a trickle of demons that have followed them out. One of the princes of hell was able to use Alex to prop the door to hell open, and he very much wants to pull her back for eternity. To close the door permanently, Alex and the others need to find out more about the history of the original four Yale students who walked the gauntlet into hell, and what happened to them after. They will also need to navigate the politics around Lethe, and the ways in which its deliberately failed its mission to police the other societies, as well as what Alex’s power truly means.

My thoughts, vague spoilers:

I enjoyed this one, and it felt like a fitting conclusion to the trilogy!

I again find myself struggling with what to say.

A big theme of this one is disillusionment. It’s come up before, but is very heavy in this one, and very much for all the characters (especially Alex, Darlington, and Dawes, but others as well.) One of the things that I definitely connect with in the books (and that I see as the appeal of dark academia in general, even if I don’t always vibe with the genre), is the desire for/the pull towards secret knowledge. The promise of there being something more, something magical, in the world. I’d be doomed by that same attraction! Most of the main characters, maybe Darlington most of all, were very taken with that promise and allure, and truly believed in what it represented. Within Lethe, there was also a sense of righteousness, of using the secrets for at least some measure of good, preventing the worst excesses of the other societies… And it turns out that it’s largely empty. That righteous mission was just as prone to corruption as everything else, just as easily bought off and manipulated. And that realization and disillusionment hurt!

Alex and Darlington’s relationship still actually works for me, haha.

I like the ultimate resolution. :) It comes with a few really good fuck yous.

There were a couple different “tricks” that I caught as they were happening (“haha, I bet that’s the [redacted] that does [redacted.]”) While getting surprised by those would have been fun, it was also fun to recognize it as they happened and then be right about it.

There is one quite good “well shit” moment leading toward the end, ha.

The bits about the previous group that went through the gauntlet were interesting to get to see.

This book did tread a bit more firmly on the religious themes, but when opening a portal to hell (and hoping to close it again) and dealing with demonic possession and such… I guess I can’t be too terribly upset with that, ha.

It did feel a few times like this book leaned a bit more on… creative perspective swapping. I like that we got to follow different characters, and important things were often happening, so it’s not that I think the perspective changes were bad. But a few too many times there was then a bit of “ah, while you were off doing that, we were off-screen setting up this thing that is now important!” It wasn’t ever fully unbelievable, but a few times it felt a bit too convenient that we’d had resolutions set up off-page. Still generally satisfying, though.

(I think this cover is great. Elle is very cute, haha.)
Maneater by Emily Antoinette
Prequel novella to the Monsters of Moonvale series
2023
Romance (paranormal romance/monster romance) - f/m - ebook novella
4.5/5

After moving to a new city, Shane is trying to establish his PI business and maybe connect with the local paranormal community. He thinks he may have lucked out when he finds a group of fellow witches who welcome him to join them… until he finds out their intention is to summon a succubus. The succubus in question is clearly not happy about the situation, and Shane helps her to leave.
Elle is not pleased to be summoned in the middle of her shift as a dancer, but it certainly isn’t that unusual, all things considered. People tend to make a lot of assumptions about her because of what she is, including that she’ll be into any and all things sexual. It’s a shock when the witch, Shane, helps her to escape the summoning, and doesn’t even want anything in return.
When the two of them decide to keep seeing each other, they both have things to learn about each other.

My thoughts, some spoilers:

(Honestly, this is objectively more of a 4, but I had a good enough time that I’ll give it a 4.5)

This is a “high heat” romance, so there is a lot of on-page sex, and some of it does stray into slightly kinkier territory. But it’s fdom/msub, so I’m into that shit. It’s also quite queer for what’s a “het” romance - the main characters are both bi, and there are some other queer side characters.

I like both Elle and Shane as characters. They’re cute, and their relationship is very cute. Elle, as a succubus, enjoys sex (and needs it in a somewhat obligate way because of what she is), but is very used to that being used as sort of an excuse to treat her as a bit of a kink dispenser, because it’s assumed she’ll be into anything and everything. Even so, she enjoys her job as a dancer, and worries that someone interested in a more serious relationship with her will resent that.
Shane doesn’t resent that at all, and is happy that she enjoys it. In contrast, he’s a virgin who feels awkward and worried that he won’t measure up to Elle’s past experiences… but he always makes that solely his problem, never Elle’s.
(And of course, because this is monsterfucker romance, they fuck about it and have a great time.)

Despite the only real “villains” of the story being the early-story sex cult, the whole thing is very aggressively sex-positive, which is nice. (And is what I expect from this author; it’s part of why I read a lot of her stuff, even when she writes things that I’m not typically that into.) (Theoretically most erotica and romance should be pretty sex-positive, but I’ve also encountered too much that is very shamey about everyone other than the main couple getting it on, or gets very weird about sex as a whole, even if the mains are fucking on page.)

On the downside… this is supposed to be a prequel, set in the 80s, and it never really felt very 80s to me. There are some bits that do: no cell phones, so the struggle of having to call a landline and hoping the person is home, there are some pop culture shoutouts, and Shane running a DnD group. It’s fine, but it’s very much “occasional 80s aesthetic… but definitely not an 80s period piece.”
As a whole, the progressive attitudes toward sex and casual queerness and kink (aspects I like!) felt at-odds with the supposed setting. (Not because kink and queerness weren’t things in the 80s—they very much were—but this very casually has queer and nonbinary characters in a way that was not nearly so normalized.) I can give it a pass, because this is an alternate universe, in which all these paranormal creatures are real, and part of that setting has been explicitly stated to have done away with a lot of gendered terminology (there are male, female, and nonbinary succubi; male, female, and nonbinary witches, etc.) So… I’ll just go with the alternate queernorm 80s universe. This is meant to be quite lighthearted and fluffy, and I appreciate the author making queerness a part of that, even when it’s a f/m (or m/f) couple.

And yes, plenty of the plot hinges on convenience. (Shane running into the sex cult, the sex cult deciding to summon a succubus instead of just… idk, going to talk to her or something.) But again, “something interesting happened” is what stories are made of, and I’m good with that.

Bonus short story:

(I still love this cover, with the swipe of the claws.)
“Bloody Summer” by Carmen Maria Machado
Horror, fantasy/magical realism, epistolary - read with Taylor
5/5

A 2064 academic text in three parts:
- An introduction, discussing the history of 1999’s “Bloody Summer,” when the town of Never-Again, Pennsylvania’s children disappeared, and many of its adults were horrifically killed.
- A study of children’s rhymes and hand-clap games particular to Never-Again.
- An interview with a survivor of the events of the Bloody Summer, for the first time possibly revealing the impossible truth behind the terrifying incident

My thoughts, vague spoilers:

Content warning for implied childhood sexual abuse.

I stand my my assertion that it’s a bit like Weapons if Weapons was good! (Don’t kill me.)

I really did love this story, and I was glad to read it again with Taylor. (Though it felt weird to have my mom listen to me read it, haha.)

The form really works for me, personally. I love a fictional academic text with footnotes. (The footnotes themselves being a mix of citations for real texts and fictional ones.)

I really don’t want to get into full spoiler territory, but the things I love about it are basically the same as what I mentioned last month:
- Tigers. They will eat you! And you might deserve it!
- Horror/fantasy blends, my beloved
- Layers to the horror: yes, there’s horror at the idea of a horrific, unexplained event that caused such widespread death and loss. The worse horror (and much more mundane one) is the horror of being powerless, of being victimized, and having your abuse disregarded and disbelieved.
- I do love creepy children’s rhymes, and I genuinely love the bizarre, creepy aspects of childhood that adults seem to forget or not believe kids do.
(I really love the “Tiger, Tiger” rhyme, which starts like the Blake poem, and quickly diverges:
Tiger, tiger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night.
In the night the children sleep,
Wake to rhythms from the deep.
From what science, and what art,
Speeds the timbre of the heart?
And when the heart begins to beat,
Hands or claws? Paws or feet?
Beds are empty, bodies near,
Children missing, tigers here.)
- I’m all in on revenge narratives.

Reading goals for 2026:
- ~~Read 50 books~~ Done!
- Read 75 books (61/75)
- Read more genre classics (Tolkien, Le Guin, Pratchett) (7/x)
- ~~Re/read The Murderbot Diaries (8/8)~~ Done!
- Read the 2025 Pride ebook bundle (10/14)
- Read some short story collections (5/x)

In October, I have finished two additional books:
- The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward
- Thirteen Storeys by Jonathan Sims

I am currently reading five books:
- A Divided Duty by Seanan McGuire
- Behold Her by Emily Antoinette (my ebook side-read)
- Trade Secrets by Beth Ryan (my other ebook side-read; on hold for October)
- Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (my co-read with Taylor)
- Little Eve by Catriona Ward (my co-read with Alex)

My plans for what to read next:
My intention for October was to go all-in on horror off of the TBR. A Divided Duty gets to be an exception, because I don’t want to wait that long, haha.
- When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy
- The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
- Cold Eternity by S. A. Barnes
- Mister Magic by Kiersten White
- The Ritual by Adam Nevill
- Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez
Along with the October spooky theme, I’m devoting my ebook side-reads to monsterfucker romance, so I’m reading the “Monsters of Moonvale” series by Emily Antoinette. I started a bit early, not knowing how long it’d take me to read, with “Maneater” at the end of September, and am now on to Behold Her.
Next up:
- Love Lights (novella)
- Escaping the Friendzone (novella)
- Afterglow
- A Guide to Ghosting (novella)
- Catching His Eye (novella)

Obviously that is way more than I’m going to get through, so I’ll read as much as I can, and then the rest will go back onto the TBR, and I’ll go back to where I previously was on the TBR, starting with Tehanu, the next Earthsea book.

I still have high hopes that I’ll get through everything I meant to for the year, but it’ll definitely be a struggle. I’ve still got three more Earthsea novels, four more Pride ebooks, and the four Up-and-Under novellas on my “definitely want to finish” list. We’ll see if I can do it!

My terrible TBR is up to 983 books. (In my defense [I have no defense] a good number of the books I bought were already on my wishlist, not just impulse purchases.)

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: my apartment

Bella got to do another FastCAT today!

And her times were great! (...for her!)

10.88 and 11.04 seconds!

I'm pretty delighted that she broke 11 seconds again. It's been a while.

Alex's pictures at the event didn't turn out well - Bella was a bit dayglow, ha.

So here's the beaft at home. (Tail a blur, lol.)

Yay, Bella!

I know Alex's goal was to have her get her FCAT (the highest title for the event) by the end of the year. She miiiiight still do it, but apparently there was an event he'd meant to go to that we missed last month, so it might be a struggle. I think she's running again on Sunday, and then there's a weekend down in Colorado Springs that they might do as well. She might not quite hit it by the end of the year, but if not, she'll probably get it by pretty early 2027!

I think I'm mostly getting over the crud. Still blowing my nose way more than I wish I was, but the cough that started a few days ago has gotten better. I feel pretty much fine, minus still being a bit of a snot factory.

Arm is still healing well! Keeping it covered because it still looks pretty gnarly, and I don't want anything scraping up against it, but relieved that it's doing fine.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: my apartment

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Habit Tracking: Week 44 (October 25 - October 31)

Writing Goals/Calendar: November 2026

Miscellaneous pictures from October

Happy Halloween! (+ my stupidest ghost story)

Wednesday, October 28: Bella photoshoot

Social Responsibilty Part 2

Tuesday, October 20: Fall Colors and Butterflies in the Xeriscape Garden

Habit Tracking: Week 43 (October 18 - October 24)

Monday, October 19: Pelican Pond

Habit Tracking: Week 42 (October 11 - October 17)

Social Responsibilty Part 1

Tuesday, October 13: Bug Walk

A new mantis friend...

Monday, October 12: Cub Creek

RIP Heretic :(

Habit Tracking: Week 41 (October 04 - October 10)

Sunday, September 27: Combichrist show

Bella's pretty FastCAT: Part 2!

Books Read in September

Bella's pretty FastCAT!

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