mistressofmuses

Quick picture of Berry Mad, lurking in the corner of her plant pot.

On Tuesday, we had a few errands to run, but spent most of the day at Hudson Gardens.

It was a little early, though it's been so warm it didn't feel like it should be, ha. They hadn't yet planted their annuals or put out any of the water plants, but there was still plenty to see, and it was a very nice day to walk around.


Crabapple blossoms against the sky.

Sixteen more pictures:

Lily of the valley.


A bushtit. They are so remarkably tiny, and the name remains so unfortunate!


Potentilla.


Honeybee on an allium.


Wild roses.


An iris.


Speedwell.


More irises.


Lilacs, which smelled wonderful.


These roses were such an intense red that my phone camera didn't want to believe it existed, ha.


Only a few of the flowers had this kind of yellow variegation, but it was neat.

We stopped and had a fancy coffee and split a pastry (banana bread) from the coffee shop down along the bike trail. Always nice.


The bee hives are more accessible again! Still behind their usual fence, of course, but last year they were trying to reestablish some of the grass and groundcover, so a lot of the grounds were off limits, including the view of the hives.

We'd been hoping for frogs, but alas. Mom and Taylor heard a lot of frogsong up in the mountains a few days before (on a Mother's Day hike), but nothing at the gardens, alas.

However...


There were so many tadpoles! Future frogs!

We took another break at the far end of the gardens, and split a can of boba tea. It was delicious, but had a couple silly things on the can:


Shack well! Precipitation may occur!

We spent a long time just sitting in the "cascades" area, listening to the water and talking. It was a lovely afternoon.


Across the 'mountain stream', a family of geese scrambling up the banks. They were so cute! And hungry. We watched the little goslings just going to town on some of the plants over there, haha.


I liked that there was grass and some small plants growing out of the top of one of the logs. I also rather liked the reflection of the trees.

After the gardens, we also stopped by Barnes and Noble. I had a couple of gift cards from Christmas and my birthday, and I was wanting to get Overgrowth, the new Mira Grant book.


Obviously, I found a few more books than that, as always.

Five Ways to Forgiveness was one of the Ursula K Le Guin books that wasn't included in that humble bundle of her work, so it'd been on my list. The other four books were on a "buy one, get one 50% off" horror table. I picked out A House With Good Bones, because I've heard good things about it, and Blood On Her Tongue because it sounds interesting and I was tempted by the cool cover design. (The bloody effect on the pages!) Alex picked out The Last House on Needless Street and The Reformatory, because those sounded the best to him. We'll add them to our shared TBR list, ha.

A third month in a row of reading six books! *confetti*

This month I read:

Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt
Horror (subgenres: haunted house, political, queer) - ebook novel
4*/5

Three best friends go together to spend the night in a haunted house. One of them never leaves. The two that do are both scarred—physically, mentally, and emotionally—by the trauma they remember the other inflicting on them.
Years later, Alice, a trans woman, is still unable to escape the haunting that has followed her ever since. She tries to continue with her life, with drink, drugs, and questionable friendships. Ila, once Alice's best friend, has instead thrown herself into the UK's TERF movement as an attempt to cope with her own remembered trauma.
The house itself is still there. It is waiting, and it is endlessly hungry. And it wants both of them to come back. To come "home."

My thoughts, some minor spoilers, and serious content warnings:

*It was hard to rate this one, because generally my ratings are a measure of subjective enjoyment, not necessarily an attempt at measuring objective quality. I thought this was a very good book, and I do not regret reading it at all, but I have a hard time saying it was truly an enjoyable read, per se. ("Enjoyment" might be more of a 3, but it feels unfair to rate the book a 3 because I thought it was better than that implies.) At the same time, I was never reluctant to continue reading it. To the contrary, I was finding little five-minute gaps in my day to get through another page or two.
The author states up front that this is a book about trauma and about fascism. It is very much about those, and it is not subtle about them. It features a lot of bigotry (as one might expect, given the two primary themes), including sexism, racism, antisemitism, and especially transphobia. A lot of it is cultural and external, some of it is internalized. There is also a lot of assault, physical and sexual, including a fairly graphic rape scene. It's also often very deliberately grotesque. It's an intense read, and I thought it was very good. But like I can't quite say it was "enjoyable," I'd have a hard time saying I recommend it, because it deals with some really dark stuff.

The story does interesting things with perspective. The chapters rotate their focus. Alice's perspective starts in super close first person, sometimes bordering on stream of consciousness for her. Ila's is in omniscient third, focused on her and what she's doing, but more distant and going off on tangents about other characters and situations and past or future events that she is not aware of. These perspectives blur as the book goes on, in a way that I thought was really interesting to read. The house also has perspective chapters, which were both horrifying and engaging.
I know more about a few of the internet communities that get mentioned in the book than I sometimes wish I did, and I can tell the author does too.
The house is a personification of Britain's inherent fascistic roots, how it is an evil that can never be sated, that will sometimes promise safety that is always a lie, that will warp and destroy everything it touches to turn them into some twisted form of its ideal, how it corrupts everyone who comes in contact with it as it encourages them to give in to their worst impulses and cruelest thoughts... That sure is fascism! It's a very real horror!
This is the first book (or any piece of media) for a long while that's infiltrated my dreams. The first or second night I read some of it, I had a very horror-tinged dream that Alice showed up in.
As far as successfully doing what it set out to do, I think the book absolutely achieved it. It was maybe a little too intense for me at times, but I'm glad I read it.

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
Fantasy - physical novel
5/5

The unicorn has lived alone in her wood forever, an immortal creature with no real concern for the passage of time. Then she overhears a hunter claim that she is the last unicorn; all others have vanished from the world. She sets off on a quest of her own to find out whether this is true, and to try and find the others if she can. Eventually she is pointed toward King Haggard's kingdom, a barren wasteland, where it is said The Red Bull took the other unicorns. She is aided on her quest by Schmendrick the Magician, whose powers are sometimes questionable, and Molly Grue, a disillusioned woman glad to finally find something that feels worthwhile.

My (apparently extensive) thoughts, some spoilers

I think this is technically a reread, but only very technically... I think I read it as a child, but mostly I remember attempting to read it and not finishing it, and can't remember with 100% certainty whether I eventually succeeded or not. The film was a favorite of mine as a young, unicorn-obsessed child, and the book is an important one to Taylor, so I've wanted to read it for some time again anyway.
I do spoil some plot points, but like... the book is from the 60s and the animated film adaptation is from the 80s, so... kind of hard to feel like I'm spoiling much!
It is hard to imagine more of a tonal whiplash from Tell Me I'm Worthless to this.
I will say, the animated film is an excellent adaptation. A lot of the scenes and dialogue are taken completely word for word from the book. (My younger sibling said something to the effect of "the only downside of reading the book is that I am not *hearing* Christopher Lee deliver Haggard's lines," and they are right! Lee is so fucking good as Haggard.) There are a few things the book includes that the film does not, like the town of Hagsgate, and the curse on both the town and on Haggard himself. The book also has more detail about Schmendrick and his arc.
Hagsgate gives us some pretty depressingly relevant banger lines such as the cursed townsfolk opting not to have Schmendrick try to remove the curse on them for "If it were lifted we might not become poor again, but we would no longer grow steadily richer, and that would be just as bad" after *just* telling him that they should be pitied for how sad their wealth made them, as they'd never allowed themselves to enjoy it for fear of when they would lose it. Well if that ain't a real world fucking attitude problem...
And the whole situation with Schmendrick, and the fact that he's been made immortal until he becomes a true wizard, makes him a little more morally grey and a little more of a... not quite foil, but provides a connection with the unicorn, straddling immortality and mortality that way. It also means that in the movie we miss out on the story of how his mentor once turned a unicorn into a human man, and having the unicorn be utterly horrified by that. ("Foreshadowing is a literary device...")
Part of what makes Taylor love this book as much as they do is that it's got some serious trans vibes. These are vibes/choices to interpret it that way rather than truly overt, but some of it... yeah, I see it very much! One of the main themes is about who you are vs. how you are perceived, with particular emphasis on when the entire world perceives you as something other than you are, and that it can be a rare thing to find someone who can accurately see you. There's also the very literal theme of being forced into a form that isn't truly who or what you are, and how that can be a horror. Taylor has been doing an intermittent reread liveblog, noting scenes or lines that feel trans to them, and I don't know that I saw *all* of the scenes the same way, but... the interpretation also doesn't feel at all like a reach to me. (And I'll also say that for what it's worth, Peter S. Beagle has always been a trans ally from all I have heard, as well as my occasional exposure to his social media presence, which is nicer than I can say for some once-beloved childhood authors.)
I enjoyed the prose a lot more than I remembered. It's got a bunch of fun imagery and humor. There are some individual lines that I wish I'd bookmarked as I went, because some were really good.
Another thing that felt a lot more present in the book, and may have simply been something I understood less well as a kid, was how much of a tragedy the unicorn's time as Lady Amalthea is presented as. I knew that it was sad for her to be trapped in human form, and I knew that part of the fear was that she was becoming mortal in more than just her appearance, and I of course wanted her to change back... but the book hit home a lot more fully just how tragic it is for her to lose herself so completely (and especially for her entire self and history and perspective and quest to all be lost solely in service to a love story, even or especially as that love story is someone else's idea of "happily ever after.") It also pushes that theme of losing yourself a little more, because they acknowledge that she could be happy with this ending as well... but only because she would forget everything that made her a unicorn, and therefore be unaware of the loss. (Which I can also see as suiting that trans read of the whole thing, or a general "closeted queer" sort of narrative.)
I complained recently about stories that are self-aware in a way that makes it feel like they're trying to trash their genre or insult the genre as protection against the audience doing so. This is an example of self-awareness that I feel does it well. Schmendrick points out that they're in a fairy tale, and they have to follow fairy tale rules, because that's how these things happen... crucially, except the unicorn, because while he believes the rest of them to be characters and archetypes that must follow their roles, he believes her to be real... Until she's transformed, and then she must fulfill the fairy tale role of the princess. Then later Schmendrick uses the same awareness to (secretly/subtly) force Lir to remember that he is a hero, and he must behave as a hero, even if he sacrifices his own happiness for it.
I also forgot a bit how bittersweet the ending is. It's a bit more so in the book than the film, as in the book it's made obvious that Lir could become just like Haggard if he is not careful, though there is plenty of hope that he will not.

Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire
Wayward Children book 5
Fantasy (background f/f) - physical novella
5/5

In Christopher's bedroom at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, a door appears. Through it comes former student Jack—trapped in her twin sister Jill's body—and Alexis, Jack's twice-resurrected girlfriend/fiancee. Jack had previously returned through her door to her home in The Moors, the horror-tinged world she and her sister had been welcomed to as children. She brought Jill's body to The Moors with her, after [redacted spoiler for book one]. The plan had always been to resurrect Jill, except having already died, Jill would no longer be capable of becoming a vampire, which had been her fondest desire. Infuriated by this, Jill and her vampire master forced Jack to swap the twins' bodies, so that Jill could inhabit Jack's body (which had never died) to become her master's true vampire daughter... even if it throws off the balance of power in The Moors.
Jack, trapped in Jill's body, enlists the help of her friends from the school—Kade, Christopher, and Sumi, plus new student Cora—to come with to help save herself and the world she calls home.

My thoughts, some spoilers for the series as a whole:

I really enjoy The Moors as a setting: just all the classic horror settings squished together. Forbidding castle with a vampire terrorizing the local village? Check! Mad scientists holed up in windmills, harnessing the power of lightning in ways that defy conventional laws of nature? Check! Towns full of slightly-inhuman cultists worshiping monstrously unknowable gods below the sea? Check! The setting and the chance to play all of those sorts of horror tropes straight is just a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed that we got to come back to this world.
Jack and Jill's story, in Down Among the Sticks and Bones and Every Heart a Doorway is one I find compelling and sad, and seeing that arc to its (in many ways tragic) conclusion is satisfying. The sorrow of having tried your best for someone else, in some cases to your own detriment, and having those efforts ignored or dismissed or belittled is one I think a lot of people are familiar with, even if not on quite the scale of these events.
I liked getting to see the students from the school interact more fully with a world that isn't "our" world, but also isn't "theirs." It felt more... dynamic, maybe, this time than it did in Beneath the Sugar Sky. Christopher with Bones and Cora being called by The Drowned Gods were really fun and enjoyable ways of seeing these characters getting to do things in a setting that isn't *quite* right for them.
It hasn't been a hidden theme up until this point, and Kade has outright stated that his world expected him to live and die for them right up until he was no longer what they wanted (when it turned out he was a prince, not a princess) and they cast him aside... but this time it was Sumi who brought up that the worlds select children to become their heroes, then treat them as utterly expendable. It's surprising to get it from the candyland nonsense girl, though it probably shouldn't be, considering the real danger in her world and the fact that she herself did die! Some of the worlds perhaps don't fit that pattern, like Nancy's world (despite being an underworld) and maybe Christopher's (despite being all skeletons all the time). But many of the worlds do seem to do exactly that, even if those children desperately long to return to them. I guess it's sort of an expression of that tension between children enjoying reading about characters their own age put in life and death situations, saving the world or vanquishing evil, and the adults who read those stories and are horrified at children being in those situations at all, and see it as a failure of all the adults who allowed it to happen.

Boys in the Valley by Philip Fracassi
Horror (subgenres: religious, possession) - ebook novel
3.5/5

Peter has been at the St. Vincent's orphanage for most of his young life, after his parents died in a murder-suicide. He's coming up on a decision about where he wants his life to go: to leave the orphanage and try to have a life with a girl who lives on a neighboring homestead, or stay and finish his training to become a priest.
Right as winter hits, the sheriff comes to the orphanage with a dying prisoner—the sheriff's own brother, caught committing unspeakable acts of brutality and child sacrifice. But something seems wrong with the man, something inhuman and evil... and after his death, it seems like something is suddenly wrong with some of the boys...

My thoughts, minor spoilers:

While I've certainly watched a lot of horror movies about demonic possession, I haven't ever read a novel about it. I did enjoy it! There are ways in which getting the interiority of the characters really makes it a more immediate horror than something like a film does. At the same time, the writing itself felt fairly cinematic, in that it was easy to picture most of the events, and I had a mental movie to watch as I read.
One thing I mildly struggled with was trying to keep track of the characters. It wasn't too difficult, but there are something like 30+ kids, plus a handful of adults. Not all of the orphans are named or get any specific attention, but there are enough that do that I wasn't always able to remember which was which. Most of them were pretty well distinguished with something that made them unique, and it didn't ever cause true confusion within the story, but I feel like there were probably some specifics I'd forgotten about the individuals, or certain kids I got mixed up with each other. Occasionally a mild annoyance, especially when trying to remember which kids were on which "side" of the conflict. But overall I'd say the book handled a huge cast well (even if some of them are just there to be cannon fodder.)
The description, the tension, the dread and fear are all really excellently portrayed. It's a lot of horror and a lot of people die in horrific ways! (There is no "infant immortality" here.) It was definitely a page-turner for me. The chapters are short, and it's super easy to just keep reading, because the tension was always so high.
However, I feel like there were ways in which I wish the book had done more. This is, as always, possibly a mark of the difference between expectation and product: just because I expected or wanted the book to go somewhere it didn't doesn't mean the book was a failure, but it did mildly disappoint me in a couple of ways.
1 - There were a couple times where things were told more than shown, in a way I found frustrating. Overall the book does not shy away from showing: there are gruesomely detailed deaths and descriptions of the demon-possessed, conflicted inner narratives, terrible abuses that are described in detail... It made it feel that much more obvious when something did fall on the "tell" side. The perspective changes a lot throughout the book, following different characters, but the only one to get first-person narration is Peter, and he's the one with the biggest character conflict outside of the direct plot, so he's more the protagonist than any of the other characters. He says multiple times that he feels like there's some sort of darkness within him, some terrible aspect of himself he can't confront, things to that effect... but we never really see or feel that. While he struggles with whether he wants to become a priest or marry his sort-of-sweetheart Grace, he isn't struggling with any evil or harmful desires/impulses that we see... he just says he is sometimes, without any specifics. (Maybe this was supposed to be him talking about confronting the trauma of witnessing his parents' deaths, but that seemed like something he thought about and remembered freely, not something he struggled to confront, or bore any guilt over?) And the book does examine conflicted characters: Brother Johnson, the indentured convict, is mostly horrible, but we get the glimpses of his thoughts about sometimes wishing he could protect the boys, being concerned for them when they suffer, even when he enacts petty cruelties (or is directed to do so) against them as well. So it felt weird that our "main" character claims to have some big soul-deep conflict that we just... don't see. Particularly with demons preying on many of the other children, it seemed like it was setting up some conflict over the fate of his soul, or providing something for the demons to seize on... but no.
2 - It's set up a few times that the priests themselves are not necessarily paragons of good and holy behavior, that while the demonic forces are horrific and truly evil, some of the priests themselves can also be unnecessarily cruel, taking sadistic delight in chances to inflict "righteous" punishments, in a few cases having even led to children dying. David (one of the other older teens) talks about how Father Poole would beat him, still thinks about the scarring he has from it, and tells Peter that the orphanage is his idea of hell... But I feel like the book never really does much with that. It's acknowledged, but shallowly. The "good" priest and the "bad" priest get basically the same narrative treatment, with neither being more or less able to confront/resist/withstand the demonic forces. There's never really any grappling with what it means that cruelty within the framework of the church exists and does real harm, yet is not in any way condemned (literally or narratively.) It doesn't complicate anything about the good vs. evil struggle: God is always good, and the demons are unequivocally evil... and even when "good" "holy" men abuse those in their care, that is not a conflict with the idea that they are on the side of Good. There was a parallel between Brother Johnson being unable to resist demonic commands he was given once he gave them his soul, and David at one point feeling unable to resist doing what Poole told him to, even when he wanted to. I wanted that to go somewhere! It didn't!
(And of course it's obvious that in the real world there are many people in religious positions who do terrible things. And in real life, and fiction in general, and this book specifically, people are not all good or all bad, because people are complex; you can't necessarily split people into one category or the other. But in a work of fiction that makes the existence of good and evil a very literal, obvious, known thing as opposed to a matter of faith... I wanted it to matter. Which is also also one of my biggest problems with Christianity in general: that being saved and believing in Jesus is what makes you Good, regardless of your previous or ongoing actions. The book is just following that framework, and I shouldn't be surprised, but I still have beef with that. I guess it's better that the book acknowledged it at all, rather than having all the priests be undeniably good people and ignoring the question entirely.) 
Ultimately, I think this might feel very different to someone who is religious. (Or is a believer in some sense.) That part is very much a me thing, in that I don't find the power of God vanquishing evil particularly compelling or affirming, nor do I find the idea of converting or devoting oneself to that religion an inspiring character arc. I can enjoy it as fiction, but I imagine someone who believes in it in a very real way would feel more strongly about it, ha.

Breaking the Rules by Jen Katemi
M/M/F romance/erotica - ebook novella
2.5/5

Stacie is doing everything she can to get a fresh start. Shunned by her previous community after her now ex-husband's affair, she is starting over in a new town, setting up her new business, and enjoying the fact that no one knows who she is. Then her car breaks down on her way home, where she is luckily rescued by two very handsome men. It seems nearly meant to be: James and Teale are both handy mechanics and happen to be her neighbors, and she's extremely attracted to both of them. The three share a wonderfully hot night together, but that's all it can be: Stacey moved specifically to allow herself a "normal" life, away from gossip and judgement. There's no way she can allow herself to be openly part of a non-conventional relationship... no matter how much she wants it.

My thoughts:

It's possible I'm being too harsh on this one, as it pretty clearly telegraphed what type of story it is, and it's not the story's fault that I wish it was something a little different. The story is subtitled a "forbidden menage romance," so I shouldn't be surprised, but it still leaned way too hard on "gasp, this is so wrong and weird and dirty and scandalous!" for me. I'm into poly romance. Poly relationships are real things that exist, (and while not now, I've been in multiple poly relationships in the past!) and it feels mildly icky when it's treated as that particular kind of weird. (Which is also a matter of really subtle differences sometimes. Angsting over the dynamics or feasibility of a poly relationship, or wondering if the connection exists outside of sex, or worrying about the reactions of family/friends/community can be just fine, and a part of what I like! This was just leaning too hard into the "ooh, it's so bizarre and badwrong" angle for me.
It was also a little weird about James and Teale being bi... though not in the scandalous badwrong way, at least. The two have a long-term involvement with each other, but almost exclusively use this to have threesomes with women... which isn't like, wrong, or anything, but it came across a bit like the threesomes were what defined their bisexuality, as well as pushing a little too hard that while the two of them will sometimes sleep together, and all their flings with women are portrayed as casual, they couldn't ever be in a relationship with just each other because they aren't gay. (And yeah, this is probably supposed to be romantic "centering the female character, who is intended as the one the reader is most sympathetic to" thing, but it came across as an unfortunately common stereotype that rubbed me the wrong way.)
It was also a little too porn-logic for me at the very start. (I expected smut! I was here for the smut! Just... Man, no warm-up, haha.) Maybe it's my kinda ace-ness, but I have never thought about my own anatomy during non-sex activities as much as these characters do. I know it's a genre standard, but damn. Also, while I know this is a novella that's trying to keep the pace snappy, having the main character worrying about whether she's about to get serial-murdered when the guys pull over on the road after her car breaks down, then immediately thinking in detail about how turned on she is by them before she even speaks to them was a jarring dissonance I just couldn't quite get past. (Maybe it was meant to be funny, but it just came across as weird to me.) Stacey also kept thinking things like how she should find it impossible to find two men attractive at the same time, which seems weird, too. This isn't even a "how can I have romantic feelings for two people at once", it's just "how can I find two different people physically attractive?" which doesn't seem like the sort of leap that most people have that hard a time with. 
The sex itself was fine, though if I remember there were a couple euphemisms or descriptions that made me make a face, haha.
The arc is basically exactly what it says on the tin: hot threesome -> regretful rejection due to a desire to be seen as "normal" -> everyone is angsty and sad and angry about it -> reconsideration of priorities -> gesture of reconciliation -> HEA. It's fine if not groundbreaking, and I was happy for the characters to get that HEA and all. The plot all comes after the whole "hot threesome" thing, so it sort of felt like an afterthought? The meet-cute and immediate sexing it up take up almost 70% of the novella, with all of the time apart and sad about it and then reconciling happening in less than 20%. (A full 10% of the novella is a preview of the next book in the series.) 
The 2.5 feels a little low, because it wasn't BAD for a pretty what-it-says-on-the-tin story, and it wasn't unreadable or anything. I'll read a dozen of this kind of story rather than some AI generated slop, and I can see this appealing to someone who isn't me. The vibes just didn't work for me. The search for poly romance that does suit my preferences continues.

Installment Immortality by Seanan McGuire
Incryptid book 14
Urban fantasy - physical novel
4/5

As a ghost, Mary Dunlavy isn't supposed to be able to die again. After being caught in the blast of a bomb her family set in the Covenant's training center, she got about as close as it's possible for a ghost to come. Six months later, the anima mundi has put Mary back together, allowing her to return home to her family and her babysitting duties... but the anima mundi also has a job for her. Mary isn't terribly keen on working for a divinity again, not after her time working for the Crossroads, but it's not like she can say no. The Covenant knows that there was a ghost involved in the attack on them, and they're taking their revenge by capturing every spirit they can find along the east coast, locking them away, and torturing them. With her charges Elsie and Arthur in tow, Mary is headed to the east coast on a mission to stop the Covenant's attack, before the ghosts they're torturing become dangerous weapons in their own right.

My thoughts, minor spoilers:

This book did not have a slot assigned on my TBR list, but was one that I knew I would let jump the line as soon as it was released.
This was a fun entry in the series! It was nice to get a bit of Elsie and Arthur, two characters that have always been more side characters than mains to this point. (As well as getting to see a bit more completely what is Up with Arthur post accidental brainwipe. Definitely wondering how that's going to play out!)
I really enjoyed getting to see more ghosts of varying types. (That was one of my favorite parts of the Ghost Roads trilogy, which is set in this same universe.) I particularly enjoyed the "what happens when a Covenant member turns into the thing they were supposed to destroy" bit... but was sorry we never got to see things play out between the ghost and her brother. (I was actually really pulling for him to get to be an ongoing character, but alas.) The potential for more ghosts in the series (per Mary's assignment) is something I look forward to, and I like the idea of the set roles that ghosts get in the afterlife being a little more changeable than we've been led to believe. (Which we've already seen with Mary herself, and obviously Rose... but it's fun to see more of it. A White Lady just shrugging off the whole vengeance thing because she's got a garden to tend is delightful.)
This book also ramped up the gore factor a bit. Like, there've always been some nasty deaths and injuries and such... but there are a few pretty gruesome bits of this one! Couldn't have happened to nicer folks, though.
I was admittedly feeling a bit emotionally raw due to other life stuff, but the bit about the ghost boy meeting the ghosts of dogs that haunt the animal shelter made me cry, haha.

This is the first of the series with a new publisher (having moved from DAW to Tor.) My strongest hope (except for "I hope the series continues in a supportive environment and that the author is happy with the move") was that maybe Tor would have better copyediting. I was really disappointed with how many typos and errors there were in the last few books, especially as they moved to a more expensive trade format.
Unfortunately... still enough to notice. I only remember two errors that really yanked me out of the book, but I still find it unfortunate to come across them. One was a wrong name in an action tag. (Elsie was grabbing a spirit jar, but the text said Mary was doing so, which for various reasons did not make sense.) The other was the word "protein" when I am pretty sure they were going for "protean".
I think this is something I just have to get over, but it really does bother me. I get that there are a lot of factors that go into this, in terms of what publishers do and don't do, how little time and money they allocate for people to do the copyediting, etc. I mostly shrug off errors that creep into self-pub books, or of course things like fanfic, unless it reaches the point of making it hard to read or understand... but part of what I expect from a mainstream published book is a professional level of polish. Of course typos and stuff still slip in, and that's been the case forever, and I find it fairly easy to ignore most of them... but sometimes they do jump out and it frustrates me every time.

I am currently in the middle of three books:
Space for Growth, a sci-fi romance. This one was meant to be my brain candy side-read, but I'm letting it be the main read instead. Back to my regularly-scheduled TBR after this!
Lord of Souls with Alex
Aftermarket Afterlife with Taylor

Let's see how April goes!

After a brief break, I have now read Part 5 of Never Say You Can't Survive by Charlie Jane Anders.

(Only semi-related, but I noticed that Taylor has this author's All the Birds in the Sky on one of their TBR shelves. I haven't read any of her works besides this one, but it felt like a cute coincidence.)

Chapter 22 is about finding and cultivating your voice as a writer.

On voice:

This is something I could stand to cultivate a little bit more. I feel like my general writing style, such as it is, shows my early influence. I read a lot of Mercedes Lackey as a teenager, haha. In general, I feel like my writing isn't terribly flashy, but is more the type that's designed to be relatively unnoticeable, so that the content takes center stage as opposed to the style.

But also... I have been very reluctant to really try for much "style." I don't think I can really blame this one on specific bad advice (the way I've attributed some of my struggles to baggage from early exposure to Mary Sue Litmus Tests and such), so it may just be a general symptom of lack of confidence. I feel very reluctant to "go for" any sort of flourish-y description, for fear that it will land badly.

Then again, I followed some writing snark comms in ye olde LJ days, and one of the things mocked most brutally was "purple prose." And while there are some egregious examples out there, and I've cringed at plenty at various times... I also saw a lot of stuff torn apart for including any amount of description or imagery. Perhaps this is another thing I took to heart a bit too thoroughly!

I don't think I'm ever destined for a particularly poetic style, but it probably would be worthwhile for me to at least give it a try to see if I can find a style that incorporates a little more in the way of imagery and such.

Chapter 23 is about the narrator of your story, and the importance of both POV and tone.

On narration:

This is another of those things that I'm very familiar with as a reader, but go back and forth on how confident I am in harnessing it deliberately as a writer. 

Everything I write obviously has its narrator, and its general POV and vibe to the story. And I have worked in different stories to cultivate those fairly specifically. I wanted (and I hope achieved!) very different tones between "All Strange Wonders" (the Kingdom Hearts/Howl's Moving Castle mashup, with a mostly-light, romantic fantasy tone) and "Outbreak" (the Silent Hill fic about a supernatural illness.) Even so, I feel like some of it is the sort of "learning by osmosis" rather than deliberate action on my part. I have done those things on purpose, but by trying to do the things that "feel" right, rather than a formal understanding? If that makes sense?

I appreciate the suggestion to think of tone as a venn diagram, where you have all the different moods that the story encompasses, and how they all overlap with each other. The overlap may be the meatier aspect of the story, or that overlap may allow you to shift in a really meaningful or impactful way toward one single mood for a time.

Also appreciated the shoutout to The Fifth Season's second person narration, because agreed, it is so effective when it crops up. (Fuck, I want to reread that trilogy, but no I will be strong and minimize my rereading until I get through more of the things I haven't read yet...)

It was also funny, because as I was thinking about one of the examples (how two very different narrators may describe a castle, and what that description would tell you to expect of the story's tone), and was considering how describing the same series of events from the perspective of very different narrators would be a fun writing exercise... and then that was a writing exercise she suggested later in the chapter, haha. (Though her suggestion went more in-depth than my thoughts did, lol.)

Chapter 24 is about the structure of your story, and how you use time.

On structure:

This is something that I feel like I haven't really considered in much depth. As with the stuff I talked about above, yes, I do make choices about what things I want to focus on vs. what things I plan to skip past and summarize with just a few sentences, but it feels like something I don't plan for so much. 

One of my fics I like best (the Silent Hill one) has prose chapters about different characters' experiences alternating with epistolary chapters detailing one character's report on the events, which is probably the strongest example of something I wrote where the structure matters a lot to the story.

She mentions NK Jemisin again, and man, not to keep bringing it up, but The Fifth Season (and the Broken Earth trilogy as a whole) really did do great shit with the passage of time and breaking the story into multiple timelines. Witch King by Martha Wells did a good job of two separate timelines that I really enjoyed recently, too.

In general, I really love stories that fuck with time in some fashion. Both the Zero Escape series and the AI: The Somnium Files series come to mind for some of my favorite examples... and though those are both video game series (by the same director), they are also *visual novels*, which means they get some of those same advantages that prose can offer that this chapter talks about.

This is a way in which I feel like my writing does tend toward being quite straightforward. As much as I love it as a reader, I don't tend to do much to mess with the timeline in my stories. I tend to want to write chronologically and tell the story itself chronologically. I wonder if this is something I should try to break away from?

Chapter 25 talks about emotion in the work, specifically...

On empathy and irony:

She talks about both of these being frequent strong points in writing, both the ability to look at a bigger picture and the flaws and hypocrisies within it, and the ability to empathize with all sorts of different characters, whether they initially seem sympathetic or not.

The easier of the two for me is empathy. That is something I value deeply as a reader and as a writer, and want to do my best to cultivate in fiction and in real life. She points out that a good bit of succeeding at this with written works does come down again to the strength of your character and their POV and how well you get into their head and perspective... which is again where I end up struggling, and am trying hard to get past some baggage around. I struggle with trying to preempt criticism and make my characters likeable, and prevent them from doing or thinking anything "bad" or that would make people dislike them. Of course, that tends to make them flat and bland and again, it's the "sanded into a shapeless blob" problem.

I'll say this is something my current read (The Luminous Dead) has done really well. The perspective character has gone through bouts of anger and paranoia, has made good and bad decisions, and I've enjoyed all of it! Trying to keep in mind that my characters are also allowed to make bad choices and be wrong about things.

I have a harder time with the irony side. I'm actually not 100% sure I understand her idea of what using irony well is. The one example she gave was from a piece of media I'm not familiar with.

I agree with a lot of the individual points made, like not letting your use of humor undercut your characters or story (which is one of the reasons I think my knee-jerk reaction is to say I don't like humor in writing, when actually I often really do! Just not when it seems like getting in the "funny/quirky/clever quip" was prioritized at the expense of the story or the characters.) 

She also points out how the concept of irony as a whole has been sort of warped in recent years by things like "ironic racism" or "ironic sexism." She also points out the frequent attitude that irony is almost a sort of nihilism, where it's just deciding that nothing really matters or has any real meaning to it. 

I think this is my general issue with it as a whole, because so much out there feels "irony-poisoned." I am frustrated by people who refuse to allow themselves any glimpse of sincerity, as audiences who refuse to engage with a work genuinely, but especially as creators that refuse to engage as well. There are so many works that go out of their way to undercut themselves, like they're trying to do it before the audience can, or that feel like they're trying to mock the genre that they're a part of. Sure, sometimes it IS funny to have a character in a horror story be aware that they're making a terrible character-in-a-horror-story mistake, or a character in a fantasy story to acknowledge fairy tale tropes. Self-aware stories can be really good! But too often it instead comes across as sneering about "yes, of course genre fiction is stupid, so can you believe the stupid genre stuff that's happening? Ugh, it's so lame, am I right?" That is usually what I expect from something that's intended to be ironic, so I again have that knee-jerk negative reaction to it.

It leaves me feeling better equipped in terms of what NOT to do than what TO do. I'll let it keep turning over in my head.

Chapter 26 is the final chapter, about the importance of writing the story that only you can tell.

On self:

This one is a bit tricky, because to an extent it feels like everything could only be written by the person who writes it. Even the sort of bland or derivative stuff... the person who wrote it is the only one who would write it exactly like that. The same plot bunny could be executed completely differently by any number of different writers!

But I also get it. Writing something to chase a trend (when it's something you don't care about otherwise), or because you think it's what you should write, or because you're trying to mimic something else too completely, is all likely to not be your best or most unique or meaningful work. Projects that you have personal investment and connection to really do seem to have something extra to them.

I appreciate the encouragement to not try and force yourself into following a too-specific outline format. (She calls it mad-libs style structure.) 

There's a lot of stuff out there, like Save the Cat, that really do have the "exactly x% of the way through, on page #y, this specific event must happen" advice/commands. I know that has its utility, and for a couple years I was trying in vain to unlock some foolproof way to outline that somehow works for every project, and does basically just let me fill in the blanks and have a workable story to start writing. I used seven point outlining for a few projects, and at least for one it lined up really well, and helped me to avoid massive issues with pacing in the middle!

But now I've been struggling with a few of my more recent projects because the various events don't line up at the "correct" points where climaxes or setbacks or whatnot are "supposed" to happen. I kept trying to make the story fit the outline structure by removing bits or shuffling them around... and it kept making the story feel worse. So fuck it, lol.

(Though it does make me think some about deliberately formulaic writing, like a lot of the romance ebook series and such. The quantity demanded by the almighty algorithm means that having a formula to fall back on is about the only way to produce it, and it is about writing to a market that wants more of the same sorts of stories that don't deviate too drastically from expectations. And even before it was the sea of kindle unlimited series, it was true of category romance, which produced new books following the same general sets of tropes every month. I don't feel like these books, even if they are sometimes of iffy quality, somehow don't count as books, or that I don't believe any of the authors cared about their work... but it also definitely doesn't feel so much like "only this one person could have told this story.")

I also do wonder what she might have said (in this chapter or others) if generative AI for writing had been the issue that it is now, because "write the thing that only you can" is very much the opposite of "have chat GPT spit out the writing for you." (And maybe she has shared thoughts on AI! I haven't looked.)

This section is also about how the act of writing and finding your own stories can help you know yourself better. And it's true that looking back at older stories (or even just the ideas for stories that I didn't ever write, but spent time thinking about) remind me of who I was at the time. Looking at the things I'm focusing on now will probably make me feel similarly in the future. And as she said about her own writing, there's an aspect of future projects being about the person she wants to be.

(On one of my bad teenage fanfics, a friend said something like "this definitely sounds like you wrote it!" It was meant positively, I'm fairly sure, but it has haunted me for almost two decades now. What did she mean by that? lol. Was it the word choice? Something about the plot? I don't know!)

Though now there's a part of me trying to decide if anything of mine is truly a story only I could write, because I'm not sure I believe that any of it is unique enough for it to be the case. I think it was supposed to be encouraging advice, but instead I'm just anxious about it, haha.

BUT. I'm gonna try. The book as a whole has reminded me of many of the things I haven't always thought about enough, and reminded me of some of the places where I'm still carrying some baggage that I need to figure out how to put down. I'm not 100% convinced that it's worth it to try and go for it on writing through The Times We're Living Through, because I'm still not convinced there is a "through." But I also know that doomerism isn't helpful, and like I said before when bumping up against a loved one's doomer feelings... Worst case, I spend some time reading books and writing stories before everything collapses completely and I die. Best case... we come out the other side (somehow) and I still spent time reading and writing and have something to show for the time.

Now we're into part three of Never Say You Can't Survive.

Chapter 12 starts this section off discussing anger.

On anger:

There are several different aspects of anger that this chapter talks about: channeling your own anger into motivation, putting it into the story you're telling, using it to connect to other powerful emotions, finding out what makes a character angry...

The author touches on this, but anger is a thing I have a hard time with. Being angry about things was definitely not an encouraged emotion at any time in my life, ha. At least not expressing that anger. It's been pretty well drilled into me from childhood that no matter how angry I am, I should always be calm and collected, because anything that appears angry will be immediately discounted as irrational. I'm not good at dealing with anger, mine or anyone else's, frankly.

But I am... really fucking angry. Often. Especially now. At *gestures toward everything.*

It's a good point made in the chapter about how channeling your anger into your writing doesn't necessarily mean writing about what makes you angry directly, or even focusing on a fictional scenario that inspires similar feelings. Anger can push you to write any sort of tone or scene. An example she gives is anger making you want to protect the things you care about, so you can use your own anger to fuel a scene that's actually just about the love and caring you want to make room for, no hint of the anger on-page. 

(This feels applicable to my own experiences with writing. I haven't always deliberately channeled anger into my work, but I can see ways in which focusing on the positives I want for the story - characters finding people who love and understand them, triumphing over whatever evil they're facing - it comes from a place of anger at feeling like those things are being denied.)

There's another bit about finding anger inspirational: writing about characters standing up to injustice being an inspiring thing, reminding the writer and/or reader of how people can make a difference and fight back against the evils of the world.

Struggling more with this bit, again. I don't know how to get through my general cynicism to feel that as "inspirational" instead of "deeply demoralizing because it doesn't work that way in real life."

Chapter 13 is about the importance of the relationships between your characters.

On relationships:

The author mentioned that it sort of unlocked things for her when she realized that she writes about relationships as a central aspect of her stories, rather than characters in isolation.

Big "me too!" reading that, haha.

It really is often some aspect of a relationship - for my stories, it's usually romantic, though hopefully with more layers to it as well - that creates that one scene that makes me want to tell the story as a whole. It's about the vibe, when something finally clicks between them that feels worthwhile. (It doesn't *have* to be romantic, of course, but I usually have at least a romantic b-plot.)

That's what tends to stick out the most for me in works that I most enjoy as well. I love good worldbuilding and fun plots... but it's often something about the way the characters themselves interact that really sticks things in my brain.

There are perfectly excellent exceptions out there, but in general that's the thing that grabs me.

Chapter 14 is titled "One Easy Way to Feel Better About the World," and it is about making your characters want something.

On wanting:

The thesis here is that allowing your characters to want things (whether those are good, achievable things, or impossible terrible ideas) can remind you that it's okay for you to want things in your life, too.

She's definitely right about how hard it can be to want things when everything is terrible. (She calls everything being awful "trash fondue," and that feels pretty accurate right now.) It feels small and petty and selfish to want things when things are in general so bad, when they may only get worse, when other people are in so much danger and suffering as well...

She's also right about how an awful lot of people (anyone marginalized in any way, in particular) are often already told that their wants and desires don't really matter, or that they should be quiet about them.
I agree that making characters desperately want something is one of the best ways to make them interesting and make a reader invested. (And is a good reminder for me as I try to NOT sand my characters down into nothing. Make them want, and make that guide their actions, rather than stumbling blandly from plot point to plot point.)

So this falls into... I'll try. Again with my cynicism and struggle with the world as it is right now... but I'll try! And maybe it will make me feel better, too.

Chapter 15 is about revising, and turning shallow emotion into deeper real emotions.

On emotion:

Couldn't agree more with this one! This is one of the things I find the most frustrating (though it at least seems to be a common complaint!) I'll have a super rich, detailed scene planned out in my head. Sometimes I've gone over this scene dozens of times in my head, as a daydream, when I'm falling asleep, when I'm actively trying to plan out story beats. It's super emotional and cool and well articulated, and every little detail has been accounted for... and then it's on the page and... oh no, what is this flat, terrible stick figure scene??
(One of my favorite relatable writer memes is about this. An image of Starry Night captioned "the scene in your head" and then a silly, blocky MS-Paint redraw of Starry Night captioned "the scene when you write it.")

So this chapter is about revising as a method of getting from that too-flat version to the richer, more viscerally emotional scene you've been envisioning.

She suggests three things to address this: The set up, drilling down into the specific details of the scene, and making sure that the character's specific buttons are being pushed. Set up is kind of like when talking about endings, where you go back and make sure that everything leading up to this point is setting it up properly. Details of the scene is looking into the small things that your character takes notice of or thinks about, which may or may not be directly related to the big Thing that's happening, but can hopefully make the scene itself feel richer and more grounded, as well as being realistic to how people tend to experience Big Emotions. Pushing character buttons is again about making sure the characters themselves have a nice strong foundation as to who they are, and why this thing impacts them so specifically and in what ways. It came with the helpful reminder to not be afraid of pushing your character's buttons.

All of this is good stuff, and is absolutely part of what I think I should be mindful of when going through the rewriting process. Especially the "don't be afraid to push your character's buttons." This is again, another symptom of the "sanding characters down to shapeless blobs" problem... but I am often afraid - or at least really reluctant - to needle at my characters, especially when it comes down to interpersonal interactions, and doubly when it's between a romantic pairing. Still fighting against the bad faith crit that I took far too much to heart, trying to ensure that relationships I wanted to be positive and supportive don't have any "toxic" conflict... which in the eyes of that bad-faith no-nuance crit is any conflict.

So. Good chapter, good things to keep track of!

Chapter 16 closes out part three with "Twelve Ways to Keep the Fun of Writing Alive"

On the 12 things:

Definitely a topic worth thinking about. I've struggled a lot on and off with continuing to enjoy writing. While I've always come back to it, I have often gone through patches where I got super burned out and just... couldn't find any reason that it seemed like a good idea to keep going.

1 - Rewards. Talks about rewarding yourself for successful writing sessions, but also on redefining what those sessions might look like. Sometimes it's better to focus on how a session felt rather than how many words you got. (Now, I do mostly track my wordcounts, but I try to give myself ways to track other necessary work, too. While I don't think I'll change wordcount being the primary measurement, I have encountered the downsides as well, when it comes to pushing overmuch for quantity even at the expense of quality on some sessions.)

2 - Make up stories. Have fun with low-stakes opportunities to make up stories just for fun. This... would probably be a good idea to try, though I'm also a bit scared to try, haha. I mentioned before how I feel like I don't have a wellspring of ideas to draw on, so it feels wrong to "waste" creative energy on ideas I don't intend to do anything with, but maybe it'd be a good thing to attempt.

3 - Cheat on your current project (jump between multiple different things to not get bogged down.) Noooo, my one weakness. This is the one thing that I feel categorically incapable of doing. I have tried to work on multiple things at once and it tends to just overwhelm me/burn me out/destroy my enthusiasm or inspiration for both projects, and make me not want to work on any of it. At the same time, this is what I'm trying to find a way to do! I want to try and bounce between projects... but in practice, it's always made me unhappy. I'm working on it!

4 - Community! Nooooo, my other weakness because there's actually more than one. I am a part of several online writing communities, and I should really try to start actually participating in them. And I do post completed fanfic to AO3 and such, and treasure when people like or comment on it... but it's up to them to decide if they want to read it or not. The idea of sharing excerpts with a group (not all of whom are necessarily interested in my thing specifically, and didn't choose to read it), especially a real-life group, gives me hives. I think I'd rather just not write.

5 - Find a routine. Yes! This has been helpful... er, mostly. I haven't really been able to carve out the time as something super special or distinct (in a shared one-room apartment it's hard to carve out much space.) But I have tried to at least sort of get a routine together, where the time between finishing other stuff (sim game, dinner, DW, etc.) and taking the dogs out for their final trip of the night, is time that is just devoted to writing. It's mostly worked! Unfortunately, if any of the other stuff gets derailed or takes longer (if I'm making a longer DW post, I have a lot to catch up on with friends, there's something else I need to do at home, we had to run an errand, etc.) then the writing is usually what ends up getting steamrolled. I may need to still find new ways to prioritize.

6 - Make time to read. Can confirm, this has helped, or at least I think so. I have spent multiple years struggling to find time to read, and I've often not even tried to carve out more time, because it would specifically cut into my writing time. Trying to make more time for reading this year (granted, only a month so far) has led to MORE writing, not less. (Again, data for a single month only, but promising so far.)

7 - Reread something of your own that you like. I haven't done this for a morale boost, though I have gone back to reread things, because hey, I wrote them because they were a story I wanted to have exist. I like reading stories! So I have done this, though I don't know if I have any short little bits that I'm especially proud of.

8 - Change how you write (typing vs. hand writing vs. dictation etc.) I ostensibly have a notebook that I carry with me specifically to make sure that I can always write if the fancy takes me. It helps at work, because writing in a notebook doesn't seem as sus as long unbroken strings of typing, ha. And it means while waiting for an appointment or in the car, I'm free to jot down notes that occur to me. In practice... I don't do a lot of actual writing in it. I do a lot of planning, and a lot of daily "what I intend to do" things, but little actual writing. I should try to do more, but I'm very afraid of it being spied on at some point. And since I only want to work on one thing at a time, I don't like having two different continuities of scenes to deal with. But I should try to push through, because it was helpful in the past.

9 - Leave things that are broken, and just move on: you really will figure out how to sort it out later. Eeeeh... I remain unconvinced. It sounds solid, I want to believe it! Sometimes I have left "uh, somehow they get to point B with xyz" and that is fine. But this comes paired with the "eat your dessert first"/"write the bits you're most excited for first" advice. This advice has very strongly NOT worked for me. If I write all the cool bits that I'm excited for, I have approximately zero motivation to try and do the connecting bits that do not excite me. And when those cool bits are all I have written, but they also feel flatter than I want them to (per the earlier discussion about revising as a chance to layer in the important emotions), then it seems like even the cool bits aren't good, and the idea as a whole should go in the trash.

10 - Write random bits, even if they don't have a place yet/ever. She talks about having a separate "dump file" where snippets of dialogue or random scenes go. This is something I have very often done, and it is definitely worthwhile! This is also as close as I let myself get to writing the cool bits first - if there's some really strong image or line of dialogue that I love for it, I put it here to wait its turn.

11 - Keep brainstorming. She mentions not taking your work too seriously, and remembering that all of it can be considered temporary and changeable. (Not that the work isn't serious, but that you don't have to treat your outline as if it were carved in stone, or be overly precious about what you've written or planned.) A good thing to keep in mind, especially if a cool new idea comes to you but contradicts the original plan in some way. It's worth letting yourself explore.

12 - It's okay to feel crappy about your writing. This does feel contradictory to the "keep it fun" advice, which she acknowledges, but I like her point. Treat it like a point of curiosity and try to troubleshoot the problem. Is it general burnout? Is it dissatisfaction with the project? Is it something in your non-writing life getting in the way? Etc. I think back to last year when I had months-long block that wouldn't let me write much of anything... and ultimately really did figure out that I was mostly feeling guilty for having fallen behind on my part in editing a friend's project. The longer it took, the worse I felt, and the more anxious I was about acknowledging it at all... but it felt deeply wrong to try and focus on my own stuff when I was holding her up. Once I bit the bullet on that one and got caught up with her stuff, and profusely apologized for how long I'd let it take, I was able to start thinking about my things again.

And now we're into Part Four!

Chapter 17 is about how writing is inherently political.

On writing politics:

I feel like I'm not sure what to say about this chapter... I just sort of feel like "yup! Correct!" Though I think I was in a poor mindset when I read this chapter, and felt uncharitably cranky toward it.

I absolutely agree that yes, writing is political, because there are always assumptions and biases in place from you as the author, how the issues within the work interact with the current world (and I like the point about how the same story may feel very different depending on what is going on in the world at the time), what you're expecting based on genre and intended audience, etc.

It does talk about the risks of clumsy metaphor, which is a good reminder, and how it's often a good idea to complicate the tropes and metaphors you decide to utilize. Simplistic "this is an obvious stand-in for real world group x" tends to feel shallow and insulting when it's poorly thought out and lacks depth. Making it more complicated can make it more about the actual situations and characters you're writing about (with similarities to real life situations) instead, which can actually make it matter more.

I understand and agree with the idea that everything is inherently going to be political, and I even agree about how important it is to see reflected in the things we write and read... And she talks again about the inspiration to be found in seeing the struggles and triumphs of very real-seeming characters dealing with their own situations. I know that this is true, and is one of the things I genuinely love about fiction! It's part of why I read, if not always why I write (though sometimes that, too.) 

Right now that just still feels... exhausting. Trying to reflect the important politics of the disaster world we're in right now just feels... pointless. I don't think that it is pointless, it just feels pointless. 

(I'm trying to think about like... the fact it's important to me to see fiction that treats queer characters and relationships well, even if politically it feels terrifying right now in the real world to be queer and to care about so many queer loved ones who are also terrified. It's important to me to see, it's something I actively seek in what I read, and it's important to me to include in any of the writing I do... but when it comes to doing the writing, it also feels like a pointless thing that can never be enough to matter.)

Frustratingly, I think I might just be too pessimistic right now for the hopeful messages to reach me, even though I'm trying.

I realized a few things regarding my reading:
- If I wait to write up what I thought of the books at the end of the year, I will not remember the early ones very well.
- I said I was going to try and read 25 books this year, but that would barely put a dent in my TBR list, so I'm pushing to do a lot more!
- I have so far succeeded far more than I thought I would, considering my usual reading pace over the last couple years.

This month, I read six books! :)

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
4.5/5 - Fantasy (background m/m romance) - physical novel
A government worker (for a somewhat comically bureaucratic fantasy-semi-UK government) is sent to investigate an orphanage that houses magical children. He is tasked with determining whether the orphanage is safe, for the children or for the world, considering that some of the children are considered extremely dangerous... including the antichrist.

My thoughts:

I think I gave this one a 5/5 when I read it before, and I think it's because I read it at very much the right time. I read it the first time in 2021, on the trip down to see my grandmother (which would ultimately be the last time I saw her in person,) right after my aunt had taken her to live in New Mexico. We were worried about her health, and the world still cared about how bad covid was, but there was at least an undercurrent of hope to the world, like things might be getting better. Vaccinations had become possible, things were improving politically... It was a good time to read about a character who wanted to do well ultimately deciding to rebel individually against an unfair system in order to protect and help people he loved.
It's a deeply hopeful story, and a sweet one of found family and finding love later in life. It's a fun sort of alternate history/alternate universe setting, set in an unspecified time period, but I'd guess sort of 1960s or 70s ish. It even ultimately overcomes my usual dislike of child characters!
This time it took me longer to really enjoy the early character interactions, and I feel like I wasn't quite as charmed by them all, but the second half of the book still flew by for me.

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
4.5/5 - Fantasy - physical novella
Nancy has returned to our world from her time in an alternative world she knew as The Halls of the Dead. Her family wants her to return to being the "normal" girl they had before, while she longs to return through the door that led her to the place she most belonged. She is instead sent to a boarding school entirely full of returned children, children who went through some sort of portal to another world, but have since come back. Then murders start to happen.

My (really brief) thoughts:

This is a fun concept, and one that certainly appeals to me. I always wondered how the protagonists of portal fantasies were supposed to return to mundane life afterwards. Also, points for making Nancy's world (which sounds kind of awful to me personally) still seem completely understandably compelling to her.

The Infernal City by Greg Keyes
4/5 - Fantasy - physical novel - read with Alex
An Elder Scrolls tie-in
A mysterious floating island appears, causing mass death and chaos everywhere it visits. Annaïg has accidentally wound up on the island, and is swept into the bizarrely cut-throat world of the island's kitchens, where servants endlessly labor to create appealing meals, often including souls as an ingredient, for the island's unseen upper class. She has called on the empire's prince, Attrebus, to help save the empire from the island... but he narrowly escapes a plot on his own life, and discovers that perhaps his heroic reputation is not as iron-clad as he believed.

My thoughts:

This was a fun book. Alex really loves Skyrim (though I do, too), and so while this was set more post-Oblivion, I bought it for him in the hopes he'd enjoy it. It's fun to get lore a bit differently, to explore areas like Black Marsh, to have Khajit and Argonian characters... I wouldn't say it's astoundingly revolutionary storytelling, but I found the characters and settings fun, and to me at least nothing felt like it was retreading the games, but added fun new explorations of a pretty extensive world.

 
Somewhere Beyond the Sea by TJ Klune
4/5 - Fantasy (background m/m romance) - physical novel
A year or so after The House in the Cerulean Sea, there's been some uproar in the government about the mistreatment of magical people by the agencies in charge of them. Unfortunately, a regressive faction has started to seize power, and is particularly targeting the orphanage on Marsyas Island, and its headmaster, sending a new representative to report on them.

My thoughts:

If I originally read The House in the Cerulean Sea at the very much right time, I feel like I read this at the... wrong right time. I wanted to read something that would feel hopeful, even in the face of terrible things. While the book wants that, I think I was feeling far too cynical to allow it to work for me.
I struggled with tonal dissonance in the story... much of it is very much a sort of... slapstick children's fantasy. Silly things happen with somewhat cartoony logic, and it's fine! But it's also about a regressive government trying to codify the oppression of an entire class of people, with a lot of deliberate real-world parallels, and characters who have experienced very real actual abuse. (Specifically child abuse!) It's not that serious topics aren't appropriate for children's literature (though I don't think this is really intended as children's literature, despite that sort of being the tone at times), or that you can't have funny lighthearted scenes along with the serious examinations of oppression, but sometimes it felt mismatched.

The ending...

Spoilers:

I can see how it IS an inspirational/aspirational thing. Land being returned to the rightful inhabitants from whom it was stolen, an entire town rising up to protect some of their own, a powerful leader of the group that's being targeted using that power to turn away the bad guys and protect her own...
But I feel really cynical, and so "the only way to effect change is to have all the townsfolk rise up together, even the ones who have until now been hateful and antagonistic, as a united front, and then also you have to have someone who actually has deity-level superpowers and lays claim as a monarch of that land use those powers to force the villains away magically" just makes things feel less hopeful for the real world, because I'm fresh out of unity and magical island goddesses.
(For comparison, the first book's resolution involved a low-level government employee committing quiet espionage and leaking things to the press, which feels comparatively grounded.)
This is me with an uncharitable gripe, though. Like I said, there are much more positive ways to view the ending, and I think it's very much a "me" problem that I just couldn't buy into it as the sort of fantasy that I think it was intended to be. This is a fantasy world, and I should be happy with fantasy solutions.
Also, I think the character of "Jeanine Rowder" being the primary villain of fantasy!UK, presenting herself as a nice, polite, reasonable woman who is actually promoting extremely hateful and regressive ideology is not a SUBTLE reference, but it was one that I still appreciated. (TJ Klune also says in the afterward that his fondest wish is to be the anti-JK Rowling.)

Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
5/5 - Fantasy - physical novella
Book 2 of the Wayward Children, chronologically set before the first book
Jacqueline and Jillian are twins, born to parents who only wanted the idea of perfect children and nothing else. The two girls find a magical staircase that leads them to The Moors, a horror-tinged world of vampire lords, werewolves, sunken gods, and mad science. One twin becomes the apprentice to a mad scientist, the other the ward of the local vampire lord.

My thoughts:

I really enjoyed this one, both for the themes of pushing against the role you've spent your whole childhood being forced into, as well as the juxtaposition between Jack and Jill and the roles they take by choice and what that also does to them. I also love me a good horror setting. Compared to Nancy's described world in the first book, I fully understand the appeal of The Moors, even though it's also a harsh place where people are never really safe. Also, Jack and Jill's parents throughout the early part are just portrayed as so perfectly horrible.

Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott
4/5 - Cyberpunk Sci-fi (background f/f) - physical novel
It's been years since Trouble left the world of online hacking, fleeing when the government passed a restrictive act controlling activities on the net and criminalizing those like Trouble who have a brain implant that allows them greater access to it. She also left her girlfriend, fellow hacker Cerise, behind without a word. Now things are catching up to her, as a new presence on the net has begun causing problems under her name. She and Cerise both need to find this imposter before Trouble herself is forced to take the fall by the government.

My thoughts:

This is a slightly older book, from the 90s. (So not ancient or anything, but it's fun to see the views of tech and what it could be used for from the perspective of earlier internet days.) Cyberpunk as a genre isn't really about trying to "predict the future" and I think it's a mistake to try and view it in that light (and especially when it's treated as a "failure" for not being "accurate.") It's still really fun and a little charming to see a futuristic setting where people are lining up to use what amounts to payphones, the central hub of the net is a three dimensional BBS, and that everyone has to have wired computer/internet/phone connections.
The book is pretty heavy on queer identity as a background theme - Trouble's titular friends are basically her original collective of hackers, who banded together because they were all some flavor of gay/lesbian/bi. No characters who are overtly trans, but there is mention about the ability to play with gender and how you're perceived as being one of the things people enjoy about the net, and one character who presents as male or female at different times to different people when online. Characters euphemistically refer to fellow queers as "family," even if they don't particularly get along, and have a sense of protectiveness for each other, even in conflict. General cultural attitudes are pretty in line with the 90s as well in terms of pretty present homophobia.
I enjoyed a lot of the book, and found it fun to picture the sort of blend of 2-D and 3-D space that the net seemed to be envisioned as. As I said, the sort of retro-futuristic (via a 90s aesthetic) setting where everyone has to frantically find somewhere to plug their equipment in (while also having those wired connections go directly to their brain) was really quite fun and charming.
I wasn't entirely satisfied with the ending, which may be more a function of what I expected vs. what happened, but... I really enjoyed the reveal of Who Was Behind It All. It was satisfying while neither feeling obvious or like a weird twist, and I enjoyed it! The initial conflict and the setting where it happened were really interesting and cool. But after that, I didn't love the conclusion. Part of that may be deliberate, that there aren't easy answers, that the characters themselves will never be able to answer everything they wanted to, but it was a bit of a shame after the build up to that moment. (I don't want to spoil what happened!)
I didn't love the conclusion to Trouble's character arc, though I also didn't hate it. I think it's more that it felt naive in the present day. "I will abandon most of my legally grey activities and work to fix things from within The System." How adorable.

I've started four (!) more books so far:
- Never Say You Can't Survive by Charlie Jane Anders (reading one chapter per day)
- Her Rival Dragon Mate by Arizona Tape (my brain fluff ebook; as much as I am very "down with cringe culture!" I wish romance ebook titles weren't Like That)
- Lord of Souls by Greg Keyes (the sequel to The Infernal City, reading with Alex)
- Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire (the third Wayward Children novella)

I doubt I can hope to maintain this pace for the whole year, but imagine if I could, lol.

I am NOT looking forward to the "arctic blast" we're supposed to get tomorrow. ;-; Sounds like we may have a couple of days where the high temperatures could be below zero. I hate it already! At least the heat is fixed, and we still have the forbidden space heater from my mom. Dreading having to get out to go to work, and dreading the night-time dog outings. Ugh.

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Cy was sick for a couple days early in the week, which wasn't fun. Somehow, for better or worse, he seems to time it for my exact weekend - he's done it a couple times now! At least that means it's not the worst hardship when I have to get up with him several times overnight and end up with only a few hours of sleep, but it sucks that it means I spend a chunk of my weekend napping.

This time was just some sort of stomach trouble. Couldn't keep food down, obviously uncomfortable, wanted to go out more often than usual. It started with an emergency bathroom trip at 5:00 on Monday morning, and then it was pretty clear when it finally stopped for him around 4:00 on Tuesday morning when he stopped grumbling and fell asleep. Glad it ran its course pretty quickly, but man is it not my favorite to stay up all night for it. (Alex sleeps through everything. I always get up a couple times a night to tuck Cy back into his bed, because he's a spoiled monster who wants to be under a blanket and still doesn't like having to sleep on his own bed. Usually I fall right back asleep within ten or so minutes, but if I have to take him outside, I'll be all the way awake, and it's usually a couple hours at least before I can get back to sleep.)
I'm also just always worried that any illness or injury could be The One. He's old, and doesn't bounce back like he used to. (Plus he had the big mystery illness that nearly killed him many years ago, so I'm always afraid the instant there's a Symptom, heh.)

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On a more positive side, writing and reading have been going really well this week! I've actually now finished three books and am working on a fourth! Granted, one of those was one of the ones that was incomplete from last year, and one was a novella, but I'm actually on pace-ish for a much more ambitious total than the original goal of 25. I don't know that I will manage to stay at that pace, but I'm riding the enthusiasm as far as I can.

I already mentioned a tentative plan to alternate novels and Wayward Children novellas, at least until I get through a few of the books that were "high priority" for various reasons. After completing those "high priority" books (Somewhere Beyond the Sea, Never Say You Can't Survive, and Trouble and Her Friends), then my plan is to alternate novel - Wayward Children novella - ebook, all from the TBR list. For the ebooks, I'm starting with the humble bundle of horror books. We'll see how I do once I'm trying to read more serious ebooks, since ebooks have historically been a struggle for me. (I've done well enough with the lighter romancey ebooks, but partially because it's not terribly hard to reorient myself in the story/remember where I left off, and I'm less concerned about forgetting minor details that could be super important. With some of the denser novels, I'm a little more concerned about missing details, but hopeful that I'll maintain my focus!)

While the goal I set at the start of the year was to get through 25 books, mixing my TBRs with fluffier ebook fare, that would barely put a dent in the TBR list, so I've set a "stretch" goal of sorts. I'd really like to get through 44 of my TBRs. 40 that I already have, plus the four new releases that I'm most excited for this year (which will jump the line as soon as I get them.) That's just under a book a week, which is not historically a pace I'm good at maintaining by any stretch. Though some are novellas which may go much quicker, others are longer and denser. That also isn't counting any of the fluffier ebooks that I still intend to use as time-fillers, or any of the books I read with Alex or Taylor, which wouldn't be part of that 44 book goal. 

I've also written almost every day for the last week, and while I don't think I'll finish the rough draft of the current WIP, I also can't be mad that I'm moving along at a steady clip.

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I'm trying to decide about participating in NaMoPaiMo next month. (National Model Painting Month.) The woman who organizes it has had a really rough year, and the last couple months have been especially terrible. Her horse died just a few weeks ago, and her family home is in Altadena. While it's still standing for now, she's watched a lot of familiar places burn down. She's still planning on running the event, though. That makes me want to participate, because I want it to feel worth it to her, and it's often a big fun social thing for the hobby, but... I also know that historically, putting my energy toward that means that it is the ONLY creative thing I end up doing. I'm doing so well on my reading and writing goals that I don't want to put those on hold for a month (also knowing that such a long break means I often struggle to reestablish the routine.)

My project from last year - the art deco/stained glass peacock horse - has also done well at a couple of shows (including getting first place in his class from a really well-known artist), which is super flattering, and makes me want to do another. (Alex suggested I do something in reds, since I have blues/greens with the peacock and purple with the wisteria one... maybe roses? I could try and put together a stained glass-ish rose pattern... It's a little tempting to do something really dramatic like a dragon, but it's also relatively common for people to do dramatic resculpts of horses into dragons, and so I'm afraid one that just has a dragon painted on it will look quite basic in comparison, haha.)

I should decide soon, since ideally I'd get whatever I need to prepped before the challenge starts on February 01.

Today was at least less of a miserable slog. Still overly busy with too much to do, and no ability to anything extra, but I did get caught up with the things that I had to punt from yesterday.

Still no news of the instructor who didn't come in this week. It feels just really unlike him, so I'm more worried as time goes by, but also don't know how I'd find out anything.

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I think my original plan today was to figure out my TBR list for this year, because... well, rather than shrinking, it's definitely grown! But I don't think I have quite the brain power for that tonight. Though maybe I can at least start to read something.

I also need to sit down and look at my writing plan again. December was sort of a wash on that front, but we were busy enough with other things that it doesn't bother me too much.

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For the first time in a while it actually feels like winter, and was snowing as I left work. (Though about a mile or so away from my office, there was a very stark line between where it had snowed and where it had not.)

We have a lot of fog, which is a nicely spooky atmospheric setting... ~just like Silent Hill~ I promise to not say every single time but unfortunately it is very cold and it sucks.

They STILL have not fixed our heat. I don't think Alex followed up with them when he was supposed to. Understandable when he was sick. My mom loaned us a space heater, so now I'm afraid he just feels like it isn't urgent because the space heater is nicely efficient. I can call them, but it'll have to wait until Monday. The space heater, plus the fact that we're on an upper floor and heat rises, has kept it from getting too cold, but dammit, they still need to get it fixed!

I don't really do "New Year's Resolutions" so much as just set goals for what I want to do. (I've mentioned before that I realize it's a semantic difference, but still also a real one, I think.) I think I'm softening it even further this time by not even calling them goals; I'm calling them "intentions," lol. This what I intend for 2025.

(And yes, I also do know that the changing of the year is an arbitrary divide, and there's no actual magical change from December 31 of one year to January 01 of the next that necessitates that being the time for change or new habits/goals/etc. However, psychological and cultural influences are real! I will take advantage of them!)

I am not wildly hopeful about 2025, largely because I can foresee this being the start of a miserable, dangerous, disastrous four years (at minimum.) Pushing myself toward productivity, or even just focusing on little minutiae feels kind of pointless to an extent. I saw a post on tumblr (by tumblr user gideonisms) to the effect of resolutions not being about whether you actually keep to them or not; it's about them being a promise to yourself that you're still going to try something new.
In my case, I'm not really attempting anything terribly new, but setting my intentions is a promise to myself that I'm still going to try to make my own life (and sometimes the lives of those around me, hopefully) better. No matter what the landscape of 2025 brings, and no matter how hopeless it feels... I am going to live my life, and I will do my best, for as long as I can, to survive and to do better.

Habit tracking has continued to be useful to me. I enjoy my particular blend of a bullet journal/habit tracker and brief "what I did today" entries. It's been nice to be able to refer back and figure out what date something happened on (because I am chronically terrible at judging or remembering the passage of time.) The only longer-term thing I tracked last year was my reading, which I was happy to have succeeded at last year! I did not, for a second year in a row, use the monthly calendar pages that I'd painstakingly drawn out, so I ditched those for this year. Still planning on keeping track of my reading, and the same twelve habits I've been tracking.

( My intentions for the year: )

20 intentions, which is a few more than usual. The ones I'm probably least certain of are the ones in the "social" category. I don't have an overabundance of unused free time, so I don't know how feasible it is for me to devote more of it to socializing in various spaces... but I also think it's going to only get more important to have some form of social connection. So we'll see if I can figure it out!

As I say every year, I know that the new year is a perfectly arbitrary measure. Time is fake! It's all a social construct! Even so, it's still a useful period of "cultural reset," and it's a convenient time to look at having a sort of clean slate, to reassess things, to decide on a course to focus on.

I tend to do some goal-setting, which feels different (though maybe only semantically) from setting "resolutions." Though as a couple people have pointed out - several on tumblr, galadhir here, as well as others - too often "resolutions" wind up being about working more, or denying ourselves things we enjoy, or pushing harder into the productivity and grind mentality... I'd rather aim to do things that are fun, or that I enjoy. At the very least, I want them to be things that improve my life. Even if they aren't "fun" per se, I want them to be the sorts of things that make my life better, make my environment more enjoyable, are a gift to future-me, etc.

For this year... it looks very much the same as last year, honestly. Last year's goals were sort of a mix in terms of success. I did well at some stuff, some stuff I did not touch, some stuff I tried a bit and then crapped out on. So this year, the aim is mostly "keep doing the good stuff, and try again at the stuff that I didn't manage last year."

I'm still planning to track the same habits on a weekly basis. While I had a couple stretches last year that were a struggle with the tracking, it's still much more valuable to me than it ever is annoying. It helps to keep me on track, to see where my time is going, to set short-term goals. It also helps me to look back and remember things I've done. I have a terrible conception of the passage of time, so it's good to look back and see what I've done! (I also have some emotional blindness when I'm having a rough patch. It's nice to look back and be able to tell that I haven't always felt like crap!)

Much like last year, I've sorted my goals into categories based on the habits I track.

( For 2024... )

Here's to a year that I hope is good, peaceful, and kind to all of us.

Ouch to watching money just sort of hemorrhaging itself away the instant I get paid... All needed stuff, but still. Tires for the truck, groceries, bills...

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Dreading tomorrow at work - first time closing a class with the new set of procedures in place, and I'm not sure how well it'll go. I do have help, which is good. Buuuut it'll probably still be an extremely long day.

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Gotta make it through two more days, then I can go hang out with my sibling! It's their birthday on Tuesday, and they took the week off. (I know they mostly are going to be playing BG3, but we're going to hang out at least for Monday and Tuesday, and maybe Sunday night. Have to figure out if we need to do anything on Monday, or if I am good to go spend the day there.)

I got books for them for their birthday... hopefully they'll be happy with them. Sleep No More by Seanan McGuire, Witch King by Martha Wells, and In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune. Appreciate my restraint, because I did not also buy myself copies of Witch King or In the Lives of Puppets despite wanting them, ha.

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I'm annoyed that my writing attempts for the month have basically completely derailed. The month is only half over, so it's probably not quite time to throw in the towel, but... I'm back to needing to write basically a fic a day to be done by the end of the month, which I know isn't happening.

I speculated in a comment earlier, but I think it is likely my stress from work that's causing at least some of the problems. I just have zero energy or brainpower left when I get home, and attempting to push through doesn't yield anything usable. I don't *mind* pushing through when it at least works. Instead I keep winding up with just... utter word salad, or at best just some really lousy sentences that aren't even close to what I want.

With Taylor's birthday, that's at least two, maybe three days that I definitely won't be working on writing, and I'm trying to weigh the appeal of "just take a break until then" or "do as much as I can before then."

I might go with the break, and see if a few pressure-free days unlocks some of the stuff I'm struggling with. Plus maybe I can get some reading in!