mistressofmuses

And we're a fourth of the way through the year! How did that happen?

So, as I've said before, this year got off to a rough start. I had fairly little motivation or inspiration on writing as it was when the year started... and then I got appendicitis. Then the post-surgery medical stuff managed to be more stressful than the surgery itself was. And I lost two friends, both suddenly and unexpectedly. It was a tough and miserable start to the year, and did not leave me with an abundance of creative energy, or really much desire to chase that energy in any way.

March was certainly an improvement over January and February! Still not entirely great, mostly in terms of "the world feels like it's falling down and this is awful," but on the smaller scale it's been less immediately terrible.

For better or worse... that improvement still hasn't translated itself into writing motivation. I have been doing a lot of both reading and, in the last couple weeks, gaming, which has been scratching the "thinking about things" itch for me. I'm thinking more about the canon things I'm consuming than inventing my own things to rotate in my brain. (Though I wouldn't say that it's turned into fannish thinking, like it's not pushing me toward writing fic or anything, but that's also okay.)

I am hoping that the increased media consumption is going to ultimately translate to some writing inspiration. Historically, that has been the greatest source of interest in writing for me, whether directly in terms of fanfic or less directly inspiring a "what if..." that spirals into something new. It hasn't quite done so yet, but it still feels good for right now.

I did try to look at the next section of the outline I've been doing, and I balked really hard, ha. So I need to push through that, and figure out for sure whether I'm just reluctant about it, or if there's a flaw in the outline up to this point that's causing the struggle.

The issue of limited time does remain part of the problem, one which isn't really aided by the increase in reading/gaming. Still tragically the case that I cannot progress on the various things I plan to write, and cannot make it to the "have written" stage, without... doing the writing. That said... I'm actually pretty happy with how I've been spending my time, even though it hasn't been on fiction writing. I've been able to be a bit more intentional about how I'm spending my time, with fewer long instances of aimless social media scrolling (not none, but fewer!)

To be fair also, I have been writing a fair amount, reasonably steadily, for a week or so. It's just been on "non-fiction" writing, as I've been trying to write up reviews of the books I read last month. I have definitely discovered that I can't really do both in the same night, because I just don't have time. I suppose I could try to be more on top of the review-writing, so that it's more spread out throughout the month instead of all clustered at the end.

My goals for March were:

- Reorient myself in my WIP outline (as it had been a long time since I worked on it.)
- Work on the WIP outline (even a very tiny amount.)

How did that go?

- I did reorient myself in the WIP outline! I reread what I had, which did give me a fairly clear view of the project up to the point I had gotten to.
- And I did work on the WIP outline a very little bit! It wasn't a whole lot, but I got through another step in the outline I'm trying to do.

My goals for April
- Do the next section of the WIP outline

Still a low bar, but low bars feel like about what I'm able to clear right now, haha. Like I said, I'm a bit reluctant to get through this part, and expect it may take a while once I do, so hopefully that's a reasonable goal for me to get done in a month.

Well, my January got more interesting than I'd hoped.

I started the year without really having much of a goal in mind for the year, much less for what I planned to do month to month, and I floundered a bit on what would be a reasonable expectation for January.

Eventually I settled on:
- I wanted to get back to working on the outline for my current WIP

With a fairly optimistic stretch goal of:
- Finishing that WIP outline

How did that go?

Weeeeell... I did get back - if barely! - to working on the WIP. I think I even managed two days in a row!
And then my appendix tried to kill me. That...certainly derailed my plans a bit.

I haven't been feeling particularly creative since all the health stuff. Even the super easy daydreaming parts have been pretty much nil. This week - already halfway into the month - is really the first time I've even sort of felt capable of considering working on anything, though I haven't yet. I am a bit dismayed by that lack of interest, though I know I shouldn't be. It's not surprising that stress impacts my desire to do stuff, and that was certainly a lot of stress. Still, I don't like that feeling (or lack of feeling about it), and I don't know when my motivation or enthusiasm will return. (I already wasn't feeling a whole lot of it, but it's still noticeable how much less I have at the moment.)

I do hope to work on it at least a little bit this month, but my ambitions are pretty low.

What I hope to do in February:

Unfortunately, I'm basically just copy-pasting last month's goals:
- Resume working on the WIP outline
- (As nice as it would be to finish it, I really do not think that is at all likely.)

One of the things I was trying to figure out at the start of the year was what a reasonable pace and goal really is for me, if I don't want to push to make writing take up more of my time than I feel I have to give to it... I don't feel like I have any better idea! I also haven't been putting much time toward anything, so that doesn't help. Hopefully I'll start feeling a little more capable of doing things before too long.

Final month of 2025! Somehow!

As I've said basically every month, 2025 has not been a good year for me in terms of writing. I surpassed my official goal of writing 75000 words, but relatively little of that has been fiction writing. More of it has been on things like book reviews, which I do consider to be writing, but certainly aren't the creative writing that I'd hoped to do. Over the last couple of months I've at least made some progress on some projects (and to be fair, I got at least a bit of one worked on earlier in the year as well), but definitely nothing even sort of moving toward completion. At this point, about the best hope I have is to try and set myself up for better success in 2026.

My goals for November were:
- Continue my outline for my current WIP
- Start outlining a fic project

And well... I did continue the WIP outline, but am in the middle of the process, not even close to done. I definitely didn't get to the fic project at all.

I will say that at least I feel pretty good for the moment about the outlining. It really has helped me sort out a few things, especially in terms of character motivation that I thought I had nailed down, and then I discovered some interesting aspects that hadn't occurred to me until I was working on the outlining steps. I'm side-eying it a little, because while the outlining process said that would happen, I didn't quite believe it, and now it feels like witchcraft, haha.

So my goals for December are... try again to do what I meant to in November.
- Finish outlining the current WIP
- Perhaps start outlining the Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity fic

Tentative goals for into 2026:
- Finish outlining the WFM fic
- Outline the second original WIP
- Revise the intro for the first original WIP
- Write the first draft of the first original WIP
- Revise the intro of the WFM fic
- Write the first draft of part one of the WFM fic

I created a sort of "master plan" for how to possibly move between projects, with the hope of having different things at different stages of completion, so that I could also switch between different types of work. I'm right now at step five, and the above takes me to step eleven... of about fifty that I'd outlined, haha. At least I've got enough to keep me going for quite a while.

I'm still considering what my real "goals" will be for next year. It really might just come down to "keep moving along the list of steps," but I haven't yet decided if there's a particular place along that list that I want to reach or not. I'd hoped this year to get something completed and shared (if possible), but didn't get there. Do I want to try and get something completed next year, or just bounce between more projects? Trying to decide, ha.

I do hope that 2026 will be a better year for writing, whatever "better" looks like. To be honest, even if I keep up the extremely slow (but at least not nothing) pace of the last few months I'll be happier.

I think I've pretty much given up on having anything written—at least to a completed state—this year. It's been a rough year for creative writing for me. I have written some stuff, and I even surpassed my 75000 word goal, but it's been on more meta stuff like this, where I'm planning, or on reviews of the books I've been reading. It is stuff that I count as "writing," but isn't the fiction writing I ostensibly enjoy doing.

World... stuff... certainly isn't getting any better, or inspiring much more creativity. Even so, while I don't think I will get any projects to completion any time soon, my hope right now is to get more of the planning done so that I will be in a better spot to actually get some of that writing done eventually. (Even if that's next year.)

My goals for September were:
- Look into Bluesky and the writing community there
- Figure out what I wanted my "next steps" to be (what process do I want to go through for the potential projects I may work on?)
- Pick a WIP to start on
- Start collecting images from sites like Unsplash, for future use in moodboards, covers, etc.

And how did I do on those?
- Well, I did look into Bluesky a bit, and there do seem to be a lot of writers there. I found multiple good curated feeds for writing topics, but I feel like I don't have a good understanding on how to jump from passively scrolling those feeds to actually engaging with them (much less how to be included in them.)
Unfortunately, bsky then fairly promptly shit the bed with some frustratingly broad content restrictions that will be forthcoming. I'm not particularly concerned that anything I would be posting would fall under the restricted content, but it's sort of a "principle of the thing" issue. Way too often, opening the door to these types of restrictions means that the allowed content will forever be whim to "but the board/high-profile users/advertisers/payment processors/whiny babies offsite think something is icky." Even more often, those restrictions will be used to target specific users, even if it's a massive stretch to do so. I remember strikethrough on LiveJournal. So now I feel a lot less excited to invest time and energy into trying to build a community on a site that I don't trust the moderation policies of.

- I did figure out a sort of next steps plan. I've tried for a while to figure out a way to work on multiple WIPs at once, ideally having different works at different stages of completion, to give myself some variety. (If I was excited about a new project, I could plan it; I could work on writing the first draft of something; if writing brain wasn't working, then I could have something ready for editing, etc.) I floundered when trying to figure out how to get the things to those different stages, because the hypothetical plans always seemed to wind up with lots of things stuck in the same stage. Now I think I did come up with a reasonable "plan" of sorts, by thinking of "types" of projects rather than specific WIPs.
In the short term, it does mean doing like, four planning documents, and then three outlines in a row, but I do think that after that, it'll be easy to keep the projects staggered.

- I decided on one of my WIPs to start with! It's one of the original ones, so it'll wind up on the pen name account. After that, my intent is to poke at the Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity fic (because either it needs to happen or needs to get shelved); then a different original project (maybe the one I wimped out on the draft of earlier this year); then a shorter fic project.

- I did do one unsplash dig, but haven't made it into a habit or anything.

In addition to that:

- I did get the self-intro for the first WIP done! This is just the quick intro that's designed to make sure I can orient myself in the general vibes that I want for the project, and a reminder of all the bits I want to be sure to include.

My goals for October:
- Be a little more consistent with my writing-devoted accounts. It's easy to ignore that for a bit and then realize I haven't even touched those logins for weeks. If it really isn't beneficial to me, I certainly don't have to keep using those accounts, but I want a chance to talk about my stuff without feeling too uncomfortably "seen," haha.
- Get my Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity intro completed
- Get my intro to [Original Project #2] written
- Get my intro for the Alice Isn't Dead/Sparrow Hill Road written

My goals for November and beyond:
- Finish those intros, if I don't do it in October
- Get outlines started (or even done??) for [Original Project #1], Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity, and [Original Project #2]

As I mentioned above, my current goal is to get to a point where next year I might actually be in a better spot to really work on some of my fiction writing. For now, I'll try to do what I can to get the planning portions done so that it feels like something I'm more ready to do.

I am well aware that the new year is an utterly arbitrary designation, but it is a culturally significant one. And having some sort of "deadline" sometimes helps.

This year has not been great for writing. That really started to get to me around the end of June/beginning of July, ending up moving from frustration to a sort of apathy regarding writing in general. I'd reached a point where I didn't really enjoy anything about the process: I wasn't having fun planning things, I wasn't inspired by any of the things I'd been trying to work on, the actual writing felt like a miserable grind, and I wasn't even struggling through enough to create anything that I was happy about in the end.

I trimmed back my expectations for what to do in July pretty significantly, hoping that maybe focusing on some media intake or other things would start to make me feel a bit better about writing in general, if this was primarily a case of burnout.

Mixed success!

The goals I'd set for myself in July were:

- Finish the current WIP's chapter
- Finish snowflake part 3 for the Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity fic
- Take a break until something else feels exciting

How that went:
- I didn't work on the WIP
- I didn't work on the snowflake outline
- I *did* mostly take a break

Tangent that I promise feels relevant: I basically never experience much of an effect from caffeine, though I drink it fairly frequently, whether as coffee or tea or as energy drinks. Despite rarely noticing an effect, I always *hope* it'll wake me up at work, and the primary effect it does have when I do notice it is a slight improvement in my ability to focus. (Common ADHD self-medication usage.)
I was solo at work one weekend day mid-month, and I bought myself an energy drink in the hopes of focusing better while on my own for a long stretch. For some reason, the caffeine actually hit me, and gave me a burst of energy and focus (bordering on anxiety, but not actually ever quite tipping over badly.) I immediately turned that focus toward the entirely wrong thing: the desire to plan out a bunch of potential writing under a pseudonym.

Not gonna lie, the focused enthusiasm was a pretty enjoyable experience. It's been a really long time!

While that caffeine-fueled excitement wore off pretty fast (and I really do not know why it happened in the first place), part of that core idea seems solid to me. Writing under a name that isn't actually connected to my own has some appeal. One of the many issues I've had is the inability to get out of my own way, or ultimately becoming paralyzed over thinking that something I'm writing feels a little too personally revealing, or a bit too catered to my id... Not having to tie that writing to me as a person might be a bit freeing, haha.

Unfortunately, the interest in doing that hasn't really made it to the "actually motivated to work on things" stage, beyond a couple short bursts. Time management is still a lot of it, as always. It just feels like there aren't enough hours in the day, and it's almost always the thing that's shuffled to the bottom of the priority list. We've been spending so much more time hiking and things this year, I don't really have time even on my days off. That's not a complaint - I'm delighted not to be wasting the summer weather - but it does mean that time isn't going toward other things. Perhaps once the weather turns?
As always, it is primarily the need to reprioritize things, or make peace with this not being the priority for me right now. It may be the latter: I don't want to do less on my days off, I don't want to cut back on the reading that I'm actually managing, I want to keep posting photos from the stuff we go do even though that's time-consuming too.
If it never gets to become a priority, it's never going to *happen*, and I of course always have the option to reshuffle what I want to be spending my time on, but for now... I want to try to fit it in, but we'll see how much time I can actually carve out for it.

Goals for August:
- get a sort of intro blurb done for the pseudonym
- do some prioritizing and assessment of ideas
- I swear, I've got to get that stupid outline done, this is just silly
- maybe the WIP chapter

We'll see how things go. I'm at least feeling more optimistic about the idea of writing as a whole concept this month, compared to last, haha.

Tiny, silly thing that made me smile at least a bit today:

I have a notebook I bought for myself about 13 or 14 months ago. It's my current "writing notebook" that I take with me in my bag so I can jot things down at any time, with no excuse not to write an idea down. I mostly use it at work. (In actual usage it's more of a journal/to-do list/planning notebook, but at least with a bit of a writing bent.) It's got flowers and mushrooms and bugs on it. It's very cute, colorful, and kind of 'cottagecore', I guess. I bought it because I liked it!

At Christmas, Alex bought me the exact same notebook, because "it looked like something you would like!" ...The same one I'd been carrying around for seven months or so at that point, haha. (To be clear, I was happy with it, because it absolutely *is* something I would like! And now I have a spare!)

Today I got to work, and my manager had bought me... The exact same notebook. I had needed a new one for my work stuff, but figured I'd just get a plain one. She bought it because she knew I liked that size, and it was a cute cover that looked like I'd like it. (She has seen that notebook on my desk at work for over a year.)

Help, I'm predictable. But also it's very funny that I can carry something with me daily, and the people most likely to see it don't remember that... But see it and apparently think of me.

Another month! Again! Somehow!

The year started off really strong in terms of wordcount, but it was mostly on nonfiction sorts of things: reflections on last year, intentions for this one, thoughts on the books I read, etc. It hasn't been so strong in terms of fiction writing. I also realized that I needed to scale back my own expectations.

And how did April go?

My only goals were to outline the Cyberpunk AU, and possibly to try and push through on the current original WIP, which I had stalled out on.

I didn't properly outline the Cyberpunk AU, but I did get a couple thousand words of planning written. I have a weird mix of excitement and apathy toward the project as a whole, and I can't quite figure out what to do with that. It's not the "ugh, I hate this idea, actually" feeling that I had with the Angels and Demons AU that I started and then decided to abandon. I do still *like* the idea... I'm just not wildly excited to work on it, or to struggle through figuring out the pieces that I'm not yet sure how to connect.

Part of that may be that I ran into some scope creep with it... Basically, some characters who weren't the focus of the story as originally envisioned are potentially the ones with the most compelling situation. (A group of functional clones, escaped from the facility that created them.) So... suddenly I have two groups of protagonists, rather than my intended protagonists + supporting characters. I think it'd be a better story if it had some focus on that second group, whether that becomes alternating sections of the story or whether that becomes two stories that are parallel to each other... But that's also not what I set out to write. I want a simple project, not one that almost immediately doubled in size. (And yes, I could ignore that, and just go with the original protagonists... but it kind of feels like that undercuts some of the themes of the story itself in a way I don't care for.)

I did not push through on the other WIP, though I haven't quite conceded. I don't consider it "back burnered" or anything just yet.

Goals for May:
- try again to push through on the WIP
- continue considering the Cyberpunk AU
- look into the snowflake outlining method again; maybe start using it to start an outline for the Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity fic

Goals for June and beyond:
- finish the first draft of the current WIP
- outline the second iddy original story
- start the outline for the WFM fic
- find a fanfic idea that I can actually work on and complete
- second draft of the current WIP

I'm still really frustrated at how little I've done this year, but it just isn't translating to actual progress on any of it. I've tried starting a few different projects between last year and this year, and just lose interest almost immediately. (At least the current WIP I'm stalled in, I made it close to halfway.) I have tried a couple times to push through the disinterest, but haven't "broken through" it on any of them, so it just seems like my enjoyment wanes more and more, until I don't even want to think about writing!

I don't know what the culprit is...
If I just picked the wrong projects to try for, then I should probably return to the idea lists and see if any others are more appealing.
If instead it's just that current events of the world are getting to me too badly, and no project is going to be something I can enjoy, then it's probably better to stop pushing.
Bleh.

Feels weird to be a fourth of the way through the year!

The year so far...

The year was off to a surprisingly strong start in terms of wordcount... but not so much in terms of progress on fiction. I mostly wrote a lot about my intentions for the new year, as well as reviewing the books I was reading, though I did make some progress on my WIP.

So what about for March?

Well, after looking at my goals and realizing that "plan to work on and complete multiple novella and novel-length projects this year" was not actually completely compatible with "plan on writing 75k words for the year," the goals I set for myself in March were really simple:
- Work on the current WIP
- Finish editing the current chapter of my friend's book

I did the second one, at least! 

Not so much the first. I'm not sure if why I didn't falls more into reasons or excuses territory. I did have almost a whole week spent over at my mom and Taylor's, which made writing time difficult to carve out. Overlapping with that, I had work drama that left me in tears multiple days, and stressed me out so badly I couldn't even contemplate working on something. But also, there've been days that I open up the document, stare at it for a few minutes, then shut the laptop and take a nap. So... was it fair that sometimes I just didn't have the bandwidth for it? Yeah, probably. Were there also days where I probably should have pushed a little harder? Also yeah.

Some thoughts on the current lack of writing:

My current struggle with the WIP, I think, is that I am having a hard time not dwelling on the things I want to go back and change. There are whole scenes that I really don't care for, that I know I want to completely rewrite. There are a couple other things I also plan to change, like a few key aspects of the setting.

It feels like the "right" choice is to keep going, to push through just getting the first draft done. That way, when and if I find more big things that I want to change, I can address all of them in one rewrite. (This is already a rewrite to some degree: I'm fleshing out and connecting a bunch of little single scenes and ideas I've had floating around for years. I also already went back and rewrote a couple chapters during this draft because I abruptly realized that it would be better for me to completely change one character's role.)

I'm glad that I went back and rewrote the bit about the character I changed, because it did directly impact what happened with the parts after it... but I'm torn between whether I should do the same now, or if I should just write the rest *as if* I had fixed the old stuff, and then fix it for real in the rewrite. I'm not completely certain to what extent the planned changes are going to have ripple effects on other aspects of the story. If the answer turns out to be "not much," then it's not a big deal to just do it in the next round. If it turns out that it's a bigger impact, then I don't want to create more that needs fixing... but I just can't tell.

I think that the setting change is probably the former; I'll need to change descriptions, and it'll mean reassessing how long it takes them to get to certain places, but I don't think there'll be much of a cascade of things that need changing. The scene re-dos are more likely to be the latter, I think. I want to establish a very different early interaction between some of the characters, and the whole intent is that it changes the dynamic between them and sets up their future relationship with each other differently.

I *want* to go back and try to fix it. But I'm afraid that way lies too much repeated tooling of the first half and never making it through to the end.

It also feels a bit like... well, if I can't actually get appreciable progress on this story, maybe it needs to be shelved for now so I can move onto something else.

Over the last week or so I have really started to miss having some sort of fandom engagement. It feels weird to have not written a fic in this long! The next fic I was planning to work on is the Cyberpunk AU, so maybe I can start outlining that to scratch the itch. Plus maybe that'll give my brain a break from where I'm stuck on the other WIP while still letting me do something!
(Of course, that means I have to figure out where I want that story to go... it's been in the "periodically daydream about" zone for so many years, the parts I have feel like they're a bit of a disjointed mess.)

So...

Goals for April:
- outline Cyberpunk AU
- maybe write more on the current WIP... if I can push through

Goals for May and beyond:
- finish iddy romance WIP first draft
- start snowflake outline for the Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity fic
- first draft of the Cyberpunk AU
- outline the next iddy romance
- rewrite iddy romance #1

I am having some regretful feelings about how little it feels like the above amounts to. I had such ambitious plans, about so many different ideas, both original and fanfic! I'm just... not really getting anywhere, and it's frustrating.

Now, I have no right to be surprised that I'm not getting anywhere, because I'm fully aware of how many days go by without me typing in a single word! And I can't say that I'm managing my time as well as I wish I was. I have diverted a lot of my time toward reading, but unfortunately, I just don't know where else I can pull time from. Or perhaps the issue is more that I don't have extra energy to repurpose from elsewhere; if I could completely quit giving into the desire to nap, that would net me a few bonus hours each week, but it's hard to do that when I can't keep my eyes open! I know the only secret do getting the writing done is to suck it up and just do the writing... I'm just having a very hard time making it happen.

Setting a lower writing goal for the year, making the decision to focus on other things, was a choice I made on purpose. I'm free to change my mind on it at any time... but I don't think I'm there yet, either. I'd just be happier about doing less writing if it felt like I was actually doing more of the other stuff than I am, I think.

The struggle continues.

I thought that reading six books in January was a weird high point that I'd fail to recapture... but I've read six books in February, too! (To be fair, some were started in January, and some were shorter novellas. But still!) I'm pretty glad that it means I've already read more in the last two months than I managed for all of 2023.

This month I read...

Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire
Wayward Children Book #3
Fantasy - physical novella
4/5
Back at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, a girl comes falling from the sky into our world from another. Her name is Rini, and she's from a nonsense world called "Confection." She's on a quest to find her mother, Sumi, once a student at the school. ...Except Sumi is dead, murdered by a fellow student months before. Since Sumi was killed before she returned to Confection to fulfill her part of a prophecy in that world, it has been taken over by a villain Sumi was meant to defeat, and Rini herself is beginning to vanish from existence, since she could never have been born.

My thoughts, minor spoilers:

It's a good thing I decided to reread the early books, because while I know I did read this one back when it came out, I barely remembered it. This story was cute. Confection is a fun sort of candyland world, one I see the fun of in a childish fantasy sort of way, while also seeing how exhausting it would be, ha. (I enjoy the inventive types of worlds that show up in the series.) Cora, our main character (a displaced mermaid,) is a good one, and I do love getting more of Kade and Christopher, who are a couple of my favorites in the wider cast. 
It feels like the book introduces something that leaves me wondering if it's going to show up in a future installment of the series. (I didn't read much beyond this in my initial read.) Rini having a magical bracelet that allowed transportation to any world seems like a pretty major THING. We've already had a character who became a serial killer in the hopes of reopening their door, and basically all the students, with the exception of Kade, want nothing more than to get back to their worlds... It felt a little strange to me that the involved characters used it purely for the current quest with very little tension over any of them wanting to use it for themselves to go "home." I think there's one tiny little implied bit of jealousy, but it isn't really dwelled on. They lose the bracelet over the course of the quest, but it isn't destroyed, they just don't choose to go back for it. They also make mention a few times of possibly asking the person who created it to make another if Rini needs it again... So idk, it just seems weird that all the characters are so extremely desperate for this one thing that's considered next to impossible (finding the doors back to their worlds), but when they discover a magical item that allows someone to travel to any world of their choice, it's just... nearly a non-event. This is a small thing, and maybe it's setting up a future plot point, but I kept expecting it to turn into A Thing, and it never did!

Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Neo-noir horror (very background m/f) - ebook novel
4/5
Atl is a Tlahuipochtli, a vampire species native to Mexico. She is also the last surviving member of her clan, the rest killed in a brutal drug war between them and a rival faction of Necros, a different vampiric subspecies. She has escaped to Mexico City despite it being a supposedly vampire-free zone, and she hopes to lay low long enough to escape the country. Here she meets Domingo, a trash picker, and against her better judgement accepts his help. But the Godoy family, the leaders of the Necros who killed the rest of her family, have tracked her to Mexico City, seeking revenge for the casualties on their own side.

My thoughts, no real spoilers:

This was a fun read. The setting is interesting - it's a sort of alternate version of the modern world, in which vampires (split into ten different subspecies, with variations on their appearance and abilities) have been known to exist since the 60s, which has led to a slightly different geopolitical landscape. The neo-noir aesthetic of Mexico City was also a really fun setting to have. It would be fun to see it put to film. (Not necessarily a wish to have it adapted, but it could have a very cool visual aesthetic.)
There are a lot of different characters that we shuffle between, and part of me wishes we'd narrowed in more completely on just Atl and Domingo, but the perspectives of Nick, Rodrigo, and Ana were all also fine, and it provided a nice contrast between them all, particularly truly understanding all of their individual motives and such. I really did enjoy the characters, particularly the two mains. Atl's experience of balancing her nature and how she wants to be seen and the question of whether her nature truly is entirely what she claims is a good throughline. Domingo was also an interesting primary character to have, a bit different than I'm used to seeing. The different varieties of vampires were also cool, since it was an opportunity to work in a lot of different folkloric vampire traditions into the various subspecies.
Style-wise there were a few aspects that felt stilted to me, but that's just personal preference, I think. Most characters didn't use contractions, which sounded odd to me in dialogue, but again, that's probably just preference.

Her Rival Dragon Mate by Arizona Tape
F/F Romance - ebook novella (free download)
3/5 [I originally rated this a 3.5/5, but later adjusted it to a 3.]
Alisha is a lawyer, working hard to steadily make her way up the ladder within her firm. Then they hire Kendra, a dragon-shifter. Turns out the two of them hooked up once before, so there's already some history there. Worse, Kendra seems to be on the fast-track to promotion ahead of Alisha, being given lead on a big case the firm has taken on. Alisha does some digging and finds out a secret that Kendra may have preferred to keep, but she also starts to think that maybe the dragon isn't as bad as she initially assumed.

My thoughts, no real spoilers:

This book was cute and perfectly fine. I was reading it to be brain candy, and that's what it was. It wasn't unreadably riddled with typos and errors, which is an improvement over a few of the similar ebooks I've read, but there were definitely some. A lot seemed to be weird word choice errors, with the author just using a similar but not quite correct word. (One I remember was "She imbued confidence with every step" or something to that effect. It seemed clear from context that the word she was going for was "exuded," not "imbued.")
The romance was fairly sweet, if standard, though the last third or so felt kind of rushed. I don't feel like the whole "we hooked up before" thing was... at all necessary? Besides a slightly awkward moment when they recognize each other, it doesn't really come up again, except I guess to already establish that they both like women and that they already found each other attractive.
As far as I could tell, this is the first book in a series of books set in the same world, but it sort of felt like we were coming into a setting that had already been established elsewhere. Nothing super weird - it's a shifter romance, I will Just Go With It that shifters are an expected and normal part of society - but there were locations and things like the monthly mate-finding ritual that seemed like they were meant to be familiar. Then again, I'd rather have that than pages of out of place exposition.
Minor disappointment: if you ARE marketing this as a shifter romance, I want the shifter love interest to shift! Show me the dragons! While there were multiple shifter characters (a mix of dragons and bears... can't remember if there were any other species mentioned. Maybe wolves?) no one ever actually shifted! Instead the whole shifter thing seemed to be more of an excuse to explain why there's a fated mates deal going on.
I don't think I'll be rushing out to buy the series, but I wouldn't refuse to read the author again either.

Never Say You Can't Survive by Charlie Jane Anders
Nonfiction - physical book
4.5/5
A series of connected essays about writing, and especially about writing when the outside world is miserable and tumultuous. The book's subtitle is "How to get through hard times by making up stories." Some of it is about craft, some of it is about ideas themselves, a lot of it is about knowing yourself and what you want.

My thoughts:

I wrote my thoughts out on each chapter individually, so I don't feel like I have a lot more to say. It was a good book to read, and I found a lot of the advice helpful, at least as far as showing me some areas that I may still need to figure out for myself. (Turns out, I think I'm still carrying a lot of baggage from bad advice I bought into as a teen, up through even just a few years ago. I've been trying to get rid of a lot of it, but still have a ways to go.)
I read the book now in part because I really wanted and needed a sense of hope in general, because that feels like something in short supply. And in particular, hoping to regain a sense of hope for writing itself, ha. It feels frivolous and borderline irresponsible to care about my silly writing projects when the world is the way it is. Unfortunately... I think my pessimistic and cynical feelings really did still get in the way. I've heard a lot of people say that the book was inspiring to them and made them feel a lot more excited to be creative... it didn't really leave me with those feelings. I don't think that's the fault of the book so much as the fault in my headspace. I'm not sure much of anything can get through to make me feel less like we're in a doomed timeline. (And in terms of trying to have creative writing be some sort of light in the dark for that doomed timeline, I feel like other people are doing far better than I can.)
It did give me some things that I want to try and do more deliberately and with more care in my writing when and if I am able to work on it. And it does make me at least feel a little better about still wanting to write stories, even if I'm still not convinced that the ones I want to tell have any particular importance.
I think I'll likely try to come back to this book in the future, whether that's a full reread or just poking at the individual chapters. If I were in a less miserable mental place, I think I'd get more out of some of it.

The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling
Sci-fi/Horror (background f/f) - physical novel
5/5
Gyre has been hired for an extended caving mission, mapping out a large cave system on her planet, presumably for mining interests. She may have falsified most of her qualifications, but upon seeing the quality of the gear she was being provided with, she was confident that it meant the mission would come with a strong support team to help. She was sure she'd be able to make it successfully through the mission... and to the high payout waiting on the other side. 
Instead, there is no team at all. Her only support in the cave is Em, monitoring her from aboveground... the woman in charge of the mission entirely. Em is able to completely control Gyre when she wants to, taking control of her caving suit, administering drugs, and controlling her displays within the cave. More and more details about the mission and the cave itself start to seem strange, with supply caches gone missing, unexpected changes to the cave system, and discovering just how many attempts have been made before Gyre's. Soon it starts to feel like she's not alone... and she is extremely unsure how far she can trust Em.

My thoughts, only minor vague spoilers:

This is my favorite of the books I've read (so far) this year. It's creepy, and I absolutely felt Gyre's mounting paranoia and fear. This is possibly the most successful example of "...and now make it worse" that I've ever read: every situation already seems like the worst it could be, and as soon as the characters figure out a way past the new disaster, some new terrible thing happens, ramping up the danger and the stakes even more. Yet all of those horrible events and setbacks and disasters felt completely believable, and like "yes, of course this would go wrong, now!" whether it was caused by an earlier bad decision or just bad luck. The earlier crises felt no less terrifying than the later ones, even as every situation gets worse and worse. 
I found both Gyre and Em very interesting, and they're good foils for each other. Both of them are unlikeable at times, but in a good way, where if one of them had been a 100% sweet cinnamon roll or unimpeachably justified in everything they did I wouldn't have found them nearly as compelling. 
The setting is creepy, and I found myself wishing I could explore it... though maybe via a video game [which I think could be really cool, and would probably feel something like Iron Lung (which actually feels like a relatively close comp title in some regards)] rather than in reality, ha. 
I like that there are some ambiguities left at the end about what the exact cause of some of the horror and anomalies were. I don't want to spoil the specifics, but there are multiple events that could have multiple explanations, and while most have a probable explanation, there's at least some ambiguity left, and I like it in this case.

In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire
Wayward Children Book #4
Fantasy - physical novella
4/5
In 1964, when she is eight years old, Katherine Lundy finds an impossible door. Through it she finds the Goblin Market, a magical world where every action and every item can be bartered, always in the service of what the world itself considers "fair value." Those who fail to provide fair value incur debt, and may find themselves slowly changing into birds that populate the forests around the market. But the Goblin Market only wants citizens who are sure that they want to stay. As such, the doors allow children to pass through between their ordinary lives and the Market any number of times as children... as long as they make a permanent decision by their eighteenth birthday.

My thoughts, no real spoilers:

This is the Wayward Children book that I stalled out in the most recent time I tried to read them. (Which was in 2020 - in the book I found my receipt from the time we paid 64 cents per gallon for gas, because it was only a dollar something and we had 70 cents off, lol.) I don't remember there being anything I disliked about it, but it was one of those "I set this down and just never picked it back up" situations.
The book sort of already starts as a tragedy, because we meet Lundy in book 1, and we know how her story has gone and how it ends. 
The Goblin Market is another of the worlds of Wayward Children that I see the appeal of, and is probably fairly similar to the kind of world I would have been likely to find as a child, ha. (Lundy collecting items to take back with her as trade fodder is something I did as a weird elementary school kid. The pockets of my jackets were full of random stuff - lengths of string, small pencils, sugar packets, hard candies, paperclips, coins, rocks, beads, bits of broken glass that weren't too sharp - because it was the sort of stuff I wanted to believe would be useful if I ever got swept up into some sort of fantasy adventure, lol.) 
I can definitely see the allure, too, of a world with an omnipresent power that enforces the idea of fair value, ensuring that no one can take advantage of anyone else by asking too much or providing too little. (Or enforcing that they can't do so for long before they're changed in a way that makes them incapable of continuing to do harm.) Boy does that feel appealing in comparison to *gestures at the world.*
Just a sort of point of interest to me: in her real world life, Lundy was born a year after my mom, so I kept thinking about those sections as happening when my mom was roughly those ages, which was an interesting connection.
Lundy's story is also heartbreaking. Like I said, it's already a tragedy from the start, because we've already seen how it ends for her. It's still painful to see it happen, to see the inability to decide between two terribly important, but incompatible things. (As the narration itself calls the reader out: it's easy to say that of course you'd choose the magical world where you knew in your heart and soul that you belonged... but could you abandon the people on the "ordinary" side of the door that you truly love, that say they need you to stay?)
I didn't particularly care for Lundy as a character in book 1, though I didn't dislike her, but that also wasn't her story. It's maybe not surprising that I connected better with her here. 
In terms of broader worldbuilding, I think it had come up before, but it's interesting to see a world that multiple generations of the same family have visited, and leaves me with questions, ha. (Does the world keep trying, opening doors for new children of the family until it keeps one? Does the cycle continue through nieces and nephews and cousins even if someone does stay? If so, could you find your extended family through the door?)

I am currently in the process of reading four books:
Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt (current main read, emotionally heavy so far)
Lord of Souls by Greg Keyes (with Alex)
Aftermarket Afterlife by Seanan McGuire (with Taylor)
Breaking the Rules by Jen Katemi (my brain candy time-killer ebook)

The current plan is to rotate in sets of three: one of the Wayward Children novellas, then one of the horror ebooks I got from that humble bundle, then another book from my TBR list. Once I'm done with the Wayward Children novellas (though that'll take a while, since there are ten of them; reading one every third book means I've got 18 more to get through before they're finished) I'll reassess the plan. Should I then alternate in groups of just two, one ebook, and then one TBR book? Introduce some new category for every third book? Start allowing myself to filter in some rereads? Start on the author-specific ebook humble bundles that I was planning to start on next year?

Angst about the TBR list:

I did look at my TBR list again, having realized it was definitely longer than I'd thought at the start of the year. (And I was already dismayed by the 90, even knowing it didn't yet include the UKLG or Discworld books...) But still not including those, I've so far discovered 25 books that I had missed (some are new releases or recs that I've added, some aren't new but are books I don't yet own but know I want to read, others were ones I do own but forgot to add). That puts the list at at least 115 books. There are 26 books in the Ursula K Le Guin bundle (taking out the four picture books, but leaving the anthologies and nonfiction), though as it didn't include The Left Hand of Darkness, I want to at least also get a copy of that. (There are other works it didn't include, but I'll probably not worry about any of those until some further future date.) There are 39 in the Terry Pratchett/Discworld bundle. So I'm actually looking at a list of over 180 books... and it is only going to grow (especially if I like the various "book ones" on the list and decide to add the rest of those respective trilogies/series, or find an author I want to read more from). Sobcry.

I'm trying to remind myself that it isn't a bad thing to have a TBR list...  It's a good thing to have so much I want to read! It would be terrible and sad to me to have nothing I was interested in. Even so, I really would like it to feel like a more manageable list. What's likely to wind up being close to (more than?) 200 books seems like an insurmountable number! I'm trying to make peace with this being a years-long undertaking, even when I am putting forward more effort.

(No, I have no interest in attempting a "book a day!" type challenge, even if doing so would get me through the list and more. I know that "a book a week" became like... the lightweight version, and "read 365 books in a year" became the new thing for dedicated bookfluencers or whatever, but nope. No thanks. Not going to try and breeze through some of these in a day. I want quality time with my books, not just quantity, and I only have so many hours I can read as it is. And I am not a booktoker.)

I am really happy with the current pace of more than a book per week (on average), which for a long while has felt like so much more than I was able to do. This is something I'm glad I'm prioritizing, because... Well. I did get really burned out on reading for several years. AP English in high school was the biggest culprit, but even when I took almost no English courses in college (having gotten the required credits through AP) I remained pretty burned out on both reading and writing. I never stopped entirely, but my pace slowed dramatically. I'd read a handful of things, love them, and then... not read again for months. I certainly noticed the number of TBRs ticking up - I still got books as gifts, or bought them for myself when something sounded good - but it just always felt like something I'd get to later. There's always later! Now... it feels a little less like there's definitely a later that I can count on. Do I have enough of a later to make it through several years' worth of books? I guess I'll find out.

(I keep repeating it, but hey, if things go as bad as they could, at least I spent some amount of time reading books and writing stories before the end. If we make it out the other side, then I still spent some amount of time reading books and writing stories, and that is not a waste.)

Continuing my chapter-by-chapter reactions to Never Say You Can't Survive by Charlie Jane Anders.

Chapter 18 is about worldbuilding.

On worldbuilding:

I tried very hard to put a lid on the cynicism when the book is talking about worldbuilding as an inspirational/aspirational thing, a glimpse of the world (or a world) as it should be. I think I was at least moderately successful! (I've been doing poorly with that in general, but am really trying not to be unrelentingly pessimistic.)

I think my favorite thing discussed was about needing to give the world you're building a sense of history. It shouldn't feel like it's just sprung into being around the characters as a setpiece or backdrop. I've certainly read stuff in the past that did give that vibe, like the rest of the world would collapse if the main characters wandered off. And I don't think I'd necessarily thought of it in those terms, but this is one of the things that sets some of my favorite works apart for me. Things that have a sense of history to them are super compelling and interesting, and leave me thinking about the world. (Not a sense that we're coming in mid-story, but the sense that there've always been stories and interesting events happening. This is basically always better than a world with an unexamined "things just happen this way because.")

She also mentions this applying to characters. Making side characters, even if they're one-offs in the story, feel rich enough that a reader imagines they have a life of their own, even when the protagonist isn't dealing with them, does a lot to make the story feel richer and more detailed.

I don't think this is something that I excel at, but it is something I can recognize in other works, when it comes to doing it very well or very poorly. That makes me hope I can figure out how to do it well in my own works!

Chapter 19 is about the "why" of what you're writing, and doing things with intentionality.

On intentionality:

This chapter focuses on asking why. Why you're writing this story, why it matters to you, etc. (And a bit tied in with what: what is the story really about?)

It talks about the importance of examining those questions, and finding your answers. It will let you be more intentional with the choices you make, and the things you emphasize, once you know what themes are most central to the story.

I appreciated the note that if there's something coming up repeatedly, you could choose to try and alter the story to avoid the repetition... or you could lean into it as a motif within the work. I do really honestly like the idea of leaning in to the things that keep sort of rising to the surface within the work. I like to think that there's some reason for that to keep happening. (Though I mostly personally notice similar dynamics or situations coming up across different works, which is a bit different.)

Sure, there are times where the repetition isn't really thematic, but is maybe just an example of two scenes that play out too similarly, and that's likely the sort of thing you'd be better off changing... but again, it probably depends on why the similarities exist. (Maybe there's a reason for the scenes to parallel each other, for instance.)

This chapter did make me think of some of the books that I've read that feel like they have some of the strongest theming to them. (My two [well, five] that came to mind most readily were The Broken Earth trilogy and the Teixcalaan duology.) A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace in particular I remember really impressing me with just how many different ways certain themes came up. Language and identity, how different cultures accomplish science fiction ideas of immortality, as well as multiple variations on the idea of a "hive mind" in a science fiction context. I really enjoyed the way that so many different things were examined from multiple angles, and how strongly those themes connected for different characters in different ways. While it felt intentional, it didn't feel excessive so much as revealing in terms of the work and the world(s) it was built around. I can't say that this was because of Arkady Martine choosing to lean into subjects that arose this way, but it certainly feels like a reasonable example of leaning into something to make it a theme of the work.

I don't think that I often have such clear-cut or intentional themes, beyond things that are maybe a little broad or vague. (There's a lot of "finding people who accept you and value you, even if your place of origin did not," and some that are broadly about searching for an identity you craft for yourself. Some are maybe even vaguer, like "family is complicated" or "revenge.")

Sometimes I do just sort of start writing, and don't really do much early on to try and crystalize those central themes. Sometimes I am frustrated with how meandering the stories can seem as I'm pushing through initial drafts, and perhaps this is a part of why.

Chapter 20 is about weirdness.

On weirdness:

My first reaction to the subject (writing weird, surreal, madcap, goofy sorts of stories as a form of comfort even more than writing them as pointed criticism) was "but... I don't like weirdness for the sake of weirdness all that much. I prefer things that feel grounded."

But thinking about it, that isn't really true. I do love weird stuff! I just also find a lot of weirdness that I don't care for. And as the chapter goes on, she does also talk about the importance of making sure that you have some form of grounding. The weirder the world, the more important it is that you have a really good (as in well-crafted) character who believes all the weirdness to sell it.

I really enjoyed reading The Ambergris trilogy a couple years ago, and it's a real weird setting! One of my favorite pieces of recent-ish media was Scavengers Reign and that is absolutely a great example of the weirdest imaginable setting and story, but with really interesting characters to make it feel believable as a bizarre exploration of an alien world. (She also talks about the differences in weirdness based on genre. A lot of genre fiction does lean on things that are "weird" by real-world standards, and I basically exclusively enjoy genre stuff.)

Maybe it's more that I do enjoy weirdness played straight... not so much the stuff that's intended to be particularly silly. I'm willing to call this a me problem, but an awful lot of things that are billed as being funny/goofy/silly weirdness annoy me far more than entertain me, much less comfort me. (And I feel like such a tool every time I say that. There are things I think are funny and that I like!)

Then again, there are still always exceptions. I was a pseudo-goth teen in the early 00s; Invader Zim is embedded in my hindbrain, and that's basically the epitome of lolrandom humor, so.

(This isn't really completely related, but it made me think of this and I wrote it out, so here it is. One of my least favorite parts of multiple stories I otherwise would have enjoyed far more is the quirky comic-relief side character. The work as a whole often isn't supposed to be super "weird" in the way this chapter is talking about, but these characters seem to be intended as a sort of splash or flare of weirdness/silliness/quirkiness, and I hate them so much.
Whether that's the funny best friend destined to star in the sequel, or the ~hilariously feisty~ elderly family member of the protagonist, or the quirky animal pet/sidekick, they invariably feel like nails on a chalkboard to me, and I loathe it when they show up. Not just any best friend or family member or pet, which are all perfectly fine characters to include... just the ones that specifically exist to fill this niche.)

Sort of rambly, and maybe not engaging completely with the subject at hand exactly. Though I see the point about the real world sometimes being too absurd for satire to even work. Sometimes the only thing to do is get weirder.

Chapter 21 is about the importance of representation without appropriation.

On appropriation and representation:

This is always a super thorny topic, and the chapter basically falls in the same place I see most advice fall (while acknowledging that it's also a subject that is always changing to some degree, and has to be reexamined constantly because there aren't super simple clear cut answers at all!)

The main distinction is representing characters that are realistically diverse and portrayed as three-dimensional and interesting, while taking into account all the things that would make them who they are as POC, or trans, or a religious minority, etc., while not appropriating those experiences as someone who doesn't actually experience those identities.

Basically, authors should be careful not to tell stories that aren't theirs to tell. Writing about What It Is To Be an identity that you do not share is probably not something you should try to do, and is appropriating those stories from the people who actually experience them. That there have been an awful lot of white/cis/straight/etc. authors who try to (and succeed, as far as they get published and read and sometimes praised) is evident... and there's the valid point that those works become the "comfortable" option for an audience that wants to feel like they're engaging with diverse works... while actually leaving out diverse voices.

It doesn't bring up one thing that I sometimes see sort of dovetailing with this subject, and that is how much a given author needs to be "out" about their own identity in order to have "permission" to write a certain subject. Now, since this book is aimed AT the writer, it's not necessarily quite so applicable... Internally, the writer in question (the audience of this book) does know (probably) their own identity well enough to judge what they personally experience vs. what they do not and to make the correct decision about a given story subject.

(With the caveat that sometimes you don't know things about yourself all along. So, so many people I know, self included, went through a period of "I don't know, I just really connect with queer characters. Don't know why; I'm obviously straight and cis [even if cis wasn't a term I knew at the time]. I just really identify with characters who aren't..." [Though I also have the strangely strong memory of being in 7th grade and thinking to myself "Yeah, pretty sure I'm bi. I don't want to deal with that right now though, so I won't" and then proceeding to not really acknowledge it for several more years beyond reading a lot of m/m and f/f books, and later fanfic, while feeling very compelled and mildly guilty.])

But back to identity, while yes, I do think that authors should be mindful about whether the story they're telling is a story they're equipped to tell... it can get really ugly when other people decide to weigh in on whether they agree. There are so many authors who've been pressured to out themselves as some flavor of queer, because an audience attacked them for writing queer stories when it was assumed they themselves were straight/cis. Authors who may or may not want to be open about their racial, ethnic, or religious identities, or their medical conditions, or their personal histories of trauma, or anything else, but end up being pushed to in order to have "permission" to write about something that is a part of their own lives. (Isabel Fall and that whole situation is probably the worst in recent history, but it feels like it happens a lot, just not always with that level of vitriol and toxicity. Becky Albertalli comes to mind as well.)

And on the other side of the coin, you get people who try to fake being part of a marginalized group in order to give themselves clout or assumed authenticity or impact how an audience sees their work. And that behavior is to some degree incentivized (though it does not absolve the people who do this) by the idea that certain stories can only be told by certain people.

It's part of why this issue is so thorny. But all in all, yes, agreed, and good things to keep in mind.

And that concludes part 4!

I'm going to take a wee break from the book for about a week; I'm going out of town with my mom and Taylor for a long weekend, and so don't plan to be reading/writing up thoughts for four days or so. But it also feels silly to pause for those four days when I'd be only a chapter or two away from finishing the book. So I'll save the last five chapters of part 5 for next week.