mozaikmage

Like Real People Do by xiaq/E. L. Massey was a pretty good fanfiction for the very good webcomic Check Please! By Ngozi Ukazu (who btw has a new book coming out and it’s gonna be so good), that then filed off the serial numbers and got republished as an original novel by a real, small press, with an editor and everything.

Except for some reason the only changes made to the version that was published as a fic on AO3 were the character names (for the characters originally in Check Please!) and some biographical details of not!Jack and not!Bitty. Jack Zimmermann became James Petrov (JAMES?! JAMES?!?!? We’ll get to that later), Kent Parson became Alex Price, Eric Bittle became Cody Griggs, etc, etc. Vegas was changed to Houston and Samwell, in a decision that feels like a personal attack against Me Specifically, was changed to Princeton.

It doesn’t really work.

As I said on social media, in a fanfic, you can just cut to the fun stuff without having to bother with any setup because the setup was already done for you in the source material of whatever you’re fanfictioning. You don’t need to describe Samwell in a Check Please! Fic because the reader already read the webcomic, they know what the campus and the Haus look like. In your original novel you do need to describe Princeton (and the unimaginatively renamed “house”) at least a little bit because your original novel readers will not have that context.

I was surprised when the airport was only a 20 minute drive but I guess they flew in to Trenton? Not gonna fact check if they have Houston to Trenton flights but I’m pretty sure Frontier does not do first class. I was also surprised that when visiting a town, or even like, the American north for the first time, the viewpoint character (as far as there is a viewpoint anyway, we get very very little introspection on either Eli or Alex’s parts) does not have any inclination to describe it. Or the “house.” I was expecting to see at least one line about the ivy covered buildings on campus, or at least a namedrop of the main fucking street, but nope. Which grocery store did they even go to was it the fancy Italian place or McCaffrey's or what. They get “Boba Teas at the coffee shop on campus” which is not a fucking thing you have to go to one of 5+ bubble tea shops directly across the street from Princeton Campus if you want a boba tea, because Princeton is a specific, distinctive, REAL PLACE THAT EXISTS AND YOU DIDN’T CARE ABOUT IT!!!

Ok Princeton Local sidebar over back to business.

Eli and Alex both feel like side characters in their own story– because they're barely changed versions of an OC and a minor antagonist in a fanfiction of something else.

It’s fine that we don't get a lot of interiority from Eli or Kent Parson in the fanfic because the reader just wants to see their blorbo Kent get with the perfect boy for him. In an original novel, the barrier to caring about Eli and Alex is higher. It feels odd how peripheral Eli's skating career or college friends are to the story, while Alex's hockey stuff is at the forefront, but it makes total sense in a Check Please fanfic because no one comes to a fanfic for the OCs, they're here for the characters they already know and like from something else.

I feel like to make this story work as a novel, it needed a lot more editing than it got. I read the fic version before it was taken down, and every single scene and line of dialogue was basically unchanged from what I remember reading on AO3. Even the parts that pissed me off. Actually those parts got worse.

Enter James.

French Canadian hockey dad haver Jack Laurent Zimmermann became Russian-American hockey family scion James Petrov (now with two older brothers, Eric and Mark, which are actually ok names for second gen Russian Americans to have). JAMES!!!

Most immigrants I know at least tend to name their kids things that are easy to pronounce in both their native language and English, which is why almost every Russian American boy I've ever met was named Anthony, Alexander, Daniel or Ben. (Which makes it extra funny that the American character is named Alex in his story lol). Or something Jewish because Russian Jews. No Russian parents would ever name their kid James, because there is no J sound in Russian and you want grandma (and in this case probably the Russian sports press too) to be able to say your baby's name properly.

I was willing to let this slide under the assumption that James is a second generation immigrant without strong ties to his country of origin, but then he's described as switching to Russian when he's angry, having a slight Russian accent (because Jack Zimmermann has a French Canadian accent) and as wanting to play for Russia in the Olympics (very weird, if you know you're queer already, and it's some year between 2014-2022, and your parents probably left Russia for a reason!) So like. Why tf would his parents give him an English-English name.

Additional Russian nitpicks I remember from the fic version that are still in the book version: no one makes their own pelmeni for fun unless they're masochists because the grocery store version is literally fine and diy pelmeni is a lot of work for not enough reward, the Russian word for recipe is pronounced “recept” so idk why someone would substitute it for “cooking plays” in a conversation, blini are usually eaten with savory toppings or with jam, not “strawberries and a pale pink sauce”... I don't understand why like. If you're getting tradpubbed. You wouldn't do your due diligence on this part at least. Find a Russian and ask a few questions. Blah

The other book I read that was filed off fanfic did a lot of edits, preserving the best jokes but also merging, removing and changing the genders and nationalities of characters, restructuring scenes and plot points, and adding new things entirely (and toning down the romance by a lot because this was a Russian slashfic and the censorship hammer came down hard). It was a very good fic and a very strong original book!

I wish the author of Like Real People Do was willing to be edited more.

Here’s what I read in April! Not as much as March, unfortunately.

Personal updates: Please Read My Webcomic and also My Yachi/Saeko fanfiction

Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki

This book seemed interminably long for no reason. The fatphobia was so insane, I thought I was losing my mind every time the main character (my height) started going on about how she gained sooooo much weight and everyone was treating her sooo differently because she was just soooo super fat now and then the actual weight she claimed to be is still underweight for our height????? ALSO THE QUEER UNDERTONES THAT WENT NOWHERE?? LIKE. I wish someone told this author that lesbians are real outside of all-girl’s schools too. I think making it gay for real would’ve been the only way to save it.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

I quite liked this. I also think it might’ve been improved with more homosexuality, but I found the endgame het couple(s) pretty endearing and fun to follow, and the setting felt very realized and believable. The characters were all pretty fun, and the questions of class and money weren’t as glossed-over as I was expecting them to be. Pretty good!

After this book there’s a 2-week gap in my storygraph and try as I might I can’t remember if I read anything from my library or otherwise during these 2 weeks. Maybe I had a fanfiction rereading moment. I do remember TWotM took me forever to finish, but surely not two full weeks, right?

The Will of the Many by James Islington

Stupid long, but quite fun. Interesting systems. More of a puzzles book than a characters book, which is fun every once in a while. Only kind of felt like a pitch for a film franchise. I liked it overall, will probably check out the sequel when it drops.

You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian

PERFECT FICTION FLIPPED EVERY ROMANCE NOVEL SWITCH IN MY BRAIN INHALED IT IN ONE MORNING AND IT GENUINELY MADE ME HAPPY TO BE ALIVE AGAIN.

Perfume & Pain by Anna Dorn

Pretty fun! I enjoyed the antics, but I think they could’ve been even more antical. I liked watching Astrid get her life together. I think Exalted was more fun overall, but it was fun seeing some of those characters get referenced again.

Tampa by Alissa Nutting

Harrowing, nauseating. Very short but took me a very long time to read through because I had to keep taking breaks. Effective!

Audition by Katie Kitamura

I’m not sure I’m intellectual enough to Get Katie Kitamura. The central conceit was pretty interesting though.

A Merry Little Meet Cute by Sierra Simone, Julie Murphy

So much fun! Really genuinely funny, really likeable characters who are believably super duper into each other immediately, solid stakes and tension and supporting cast, also almost every named character is queer? Iconic. I genuinely really enjoyed reading this to the point that I bought a paperback copy of it when I saw it in a bookstore on Indie Bookstore Day.

Black-Winged Love by Tomoko Yamashita

A 2008 anthology of short BL one-shots by Yamashita, a mangaka I already like. A theme that pops up in a lot of these one-shots is how being gay affects the characters’ community and families, which is something most BLs tend to not think about. I like that focus on the wider world outside the main couples. Also the “read Mishima” panel was even funnier in context.

Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress

Almost but not quite what I want to do with an art school dark academia. I liked the revolving viewpoint characters and how they all saw each other so differently, I loved Louisa and her thing with Karina, and I found the descriptions of art and art-related stuff very believable. Now I want to write MY art school book lol.

40 Love by Madeleine Wickham

Very good for a first book, but definitely not at the level of her later work. The class and money and Britishness was really interesting, I wish Ella had more of an impact on the plot and didn’t just quietly slip out at the end. She should’ve burned the house down or something. More lesbianism would’ve improved this book also.

A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon

My first time reading a book that desperately wants to be a webtoon. There was no reason for the narrator to not have a name. Very short. Lovely illustrations, though. Should’ve just made the webtoon.

General announcement: succumbed to the siren call of a cash prize and started posting a Webtoon in this year’s contest, please read it and like share subscribe (there will be 5 more episodes, updating every Monday)

I read 16 books in March but it felt like less because each book seemed to take me forever to finish. At least most of them were good this time!

( The Books! )

Tsuge review here.

It was a very slow month at work so I got a very normal amount of reading done! Structured in order of when I read them, because I have a narrative arc in the middle there.

( The Books! )

Check back in with me next month when I read... probably less, because our busy season is starting up again and also I have less hours in March for some reason and I mostly read at work lol.

I'm on a sapphic romantasy kick in search of comps for my WIP. The Honey Witch came onto my radar because I went to a panel the author was on at NYC last year and she seemed fine on the panel. Surely her book was at least readable, right?

I finished this book and told my friends "I don't think I like reading anymore."

The Honey Witch broke me.

I've read bad books before. I'm kind of a hater, honestly. But I've never read a book that fails so comprehensively on every possible level after being put out by a big 5 imprint with at least two editors and a literary agent having worked on it.

From basic grammar errors (you don't go on walks "throughout" an island, you walk "around" it) to logical inconsistencies (the entire premise of the stupid curse) to whole sections that read more like outlines of chapters than actual chapters, to structural problems (why do we open with Marigold's family stuff instead of her with her grandma already? Why do we fast forward past her relationship with her grandma developing to her grief? Why did we establish that tattoos were illegal and that Lottie has them in the SAME conversation??), this book felt like reading a teenager's first nanowrimo attempt. I've read Wattpad novels with stronger fundamentals than this (admittedly not many but still.)

I returned the book immediately after finishing because it felt like having it in my home was a cognitohazard but here's some examples from the free preview on Google Books:

"Now close your eyes and drink this. When you open them again, tell me what you see."

She takes the honey potion that will allow her to access her full power.

How does she know the honey potion will do this? Why didn't Grandma just say that? Why is it in narration like this?

Then there's this part of a conversation where Marigold's dad lets her go with Grandma:

"Because I know your grandmother very well, and your siblings, and most of all, I know you. And I know what you've always wanted. That's why I never stopped you before, and I'm not stopping you now."

"But mother--"

"I know her, too. She is only trying to protect you, so much so that she cannot see how it is harming you. Perhaps it is the artist in me, but I've always thought it so romantic to have beauty and creation as your purpose. And that is the life ahead of you, Marigold. I have every confidence in you. Your mother will see that soon, too."

This conversation happens way too fast, and it's severely lacking in body language or other descriptions for Marigold's dad. The last paragraph especially should be broken up into smaller pieces. Yeah, you don't technically need dialogue tags for a conversation between two people when you know who's talking, but the rhythm here is just shot!

I have a big problem when I write my own stuff of not expanding enough about things that matter, which is why all of my attempts at novels come out too short on the first pass. It's kind of infuriating to see a properly book-length book have the same kind of structural issues I run into at half that length. Like surely someone could've told you to expand this at the draft stage right.

Other people have talked about the tattoo thing, the inconsistent curse, the bee death and revival, the grumpy sunshine romance that's only grumpy sunshine aesthetically and actually grumpy/grumpier in practice, but what bothered me the most was the... Bad sentences, that led to bad everything else.

The author mentioned she wanted to write about the grief she felt over losing her grandmother, which surprised me because I'm very close to my own grandparents and am highly sensitive to fictional media where grandparents are harmed in any way (the opening to the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors always made me cry as a kid because I love my grandma too much to be mean to her like that lmao). The bonding with the grandma part, grandma dying, and grief processing in the Honey Witch were all so glanced over in favor of the romance that should not be happening in the first place due to the whole curse situation that it barely even registered to me.

Naomi Kanakia said no matter how old you are or how well read you are, your first attempt at serious writing will always read like a 12 year old is doing it. I felt this very strongly here. It was that bad on a basic sentence level. I wish the author had like, practiced her craft more before she started querying this book. She mentions revisions and beta readers and multiple drafts on her blog, but I can't even imagine how much worse that first draft could've even been if this was what it looked like after significant editing. I wish someone fucking stopped it from making it to press in this state.

If this was self published or a kindle exclusive niche thing I'd be like whatever, but this was put out by fucking Orbit! Respected SFF imprint of Hachette! In the US and the UK! Every single person who was supposed to make this book better failed at their goddamn job, and it made me lose faith in the publishing industry as a whole.

Unrelated personal update I POSTED A COMIC IT'S 48 PAGES OF ART SCHOOL TOXIC GIRL FRIENDSHIP GET THE PDF HERE ok anyway.

I don’t know how I read this many books in a month, especially the longer ones. Some of them are graphic novels, I was off work for a week and then when I did work it was insanely slow and thus conducive to reading time, and I did skim a lot. But a lot of these were really good!

Presented in the order I read them because:

Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe REALLY started the year off on a good book. I loved Margo’s narrative voice and all the characters surrounding her, and I really wanted to see things work out. It was funny and sweet and yeah sad at times but I enjoyed it a lot. It’s a book about a college student who suddenly finds herself a single mom and so starts an OnlyFans and how both of those things affect her life and the people around her. It just… it just works so well.

The Whole of Humanity Has Gone Yuri Except for Me by Hiroki Haruse

Gift from my girlfriend <3 the premise is incredible, the attempts at a plot were not as incredible, but it was a cute quick read and overall fun enough.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Those 1870s rich people sure could pine. I mostly found myself feeling bad for the women in the story, and also for everyone else in how deeply restricted they were by such arbitrary social rules. Which I think was the point? Trying to read more Classics these days anyway.

Averee by Dave Johnson, Stephanie Phillips

Gift from a friend. Really disappointing because the premise sounded right up my alley and both author and artist seemed to be very experienced professionally, but the overall story was thin and shallow and the art was stiff and uninteresting. It felt like if it was twice or three times as long and also used the basic setup differently to explore the actual social impacts of its conceit it’d be more fun.

Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

It was fine. I think this would’ve hit harder if I was reading it as an exvangelical, but I have only ever experienced American Christianity from the outside, so. Probably my last Tingle book, I don’t think I really vibe with the writing style.

The Fury by Alex Michaelides

We get it you really liked The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. (Also maybe Lolita?) I feel like the author was desperately trying to pull off a specific kind of likeable-unlikeable narrator here that ultimately fell flat with me. He was just too obviously scheming. Sorry for the spoiler I guess.

I Think Our Son Is Gay, Vol. 04 by Okura

It was ready to borrow on Libby and I couldn’t remember which volume I’d read last so I impulse-grabbed it. Cute, short, sweet. I totally forgot everything about the supporting cast since the last time I checked in on the possibly-gay son. It’s cute though!

Edison by Pallavi Sharma Dixit

THIS RULED. EXTENDED REVIEW HERE. I LOVE IT, NO NOTES.

Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

I was not expecting this book to be about the horrors of drug addiction and pain and obssessive personalities, but as an exploration of those things it was fine.
Taiwan Travelogue by 楊双子, Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

It's always nice to read sapphic historical fiction by a lesbian. The main character is annoying but in a kind of fun way, and the food descriptions made me put the book down and run out to the local Asian food market for wintermelon tea and braised pork over rice. I think people who think Babel is a nuanced and complex look at colonization and imperialism should read Taiwan Travelogue.
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

I was interested in checking this book out for a while because when I worked at the bookstore I could see its VAST LENGTH on the shelf and was frightened and intrigued by it. Then it was ready to borrow on libby and I was like great I don’t have to lug a brick around. Then I realized I had to read the brick. It felt like it took forever and at least two of the viewpoint characters felt superfluous as consistent throughlines, but I liked the lesbian subplot and the language and worldbuilding was interesting, which was mostly what I was reading it for. I liked how the fictional lands were both distinctly fantastical and clearly inspired by real-world equivalents.

Book Lovers by Emily Henry

I finished Priory and then immediately needed a palate cleanser so I reread my fave. Still good! Still fave. Despite the het.

Heart and Seoul by Jen Frederick

Absolutely deranged that this book says ON THE FRONT COVER that it's a romance and yet the main couple ends the book not together for reasons of family drama scandal situation. I don't think you're allowed to do that! Romances are supposed to be happy endings! Otherwise it was both more and less intrigue kdrama plot twisty than I expected. I liked the one roommate that got character development but I wish the other roomies did too.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

I disagree with her philosophically on the matter of quotation marks for dialogue. Otherwise I really did like the relationship between Ivan and Margaret a lot but Peter’s head was kind of annoying to be in. Too Joyce 4 Me. I like how his love triangle works out in the end that was a fun choice.

The September House by Carissa Orlando

This was fun and unsettling. What if you moved into a very haunted house but you were totally fine with it because you had a system and you were coping and then your daughter comes to visit and is like mom what the fuck? The way in which the narrator was unreliable here was really interesting. To me.

I Am Not Jessica Chen by Ann Liang

I am a known Ann Liang stan so when I say this is her best book so far I'm being very serious. Also I am never reading it again because it made me sob and brought me back to the worst parts of being the dumbest kid in the smart kid classes at my high school. It hit very hard. I enjoy reading her funny stuff more. But this is a very good book.

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

I like this matriarchial kind of 1840s English village situation. I feel like I learned a lot about a very small and specific world. It didn't spark with me the same way it did with whoever I was reading on dreamwidth that mentioned it but it was nice.

The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher

Not as good as Dear Committee Members sorry.
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account Of The Everest Disaster

HARROWING. I have developed new phobias of things I didn't know I needed to fear. Did not know oxygen deprivation did that to people! Also the back and forth with Boukreev as described in the post script was understandable but very sad.

Okay SO.

I was expecting Edison to be more of a traditional romance novel, and was already mentally bracing myself for the inherent cringe of the romance novel structure and writing style as applied to A Place I Have Been To Multiple Times. Instead I got something much more expansive, interesting and FUN.

Edison is about this guy Prem who's the youngest failson of a rich family and the only thing he likes to do is sit in his room and watch movies forever. He's soooo miserable and pathetic, everyone is ashamed to be around him, but most of all Prem himself is embarrassed to be the way he is and yet can't figure out how to change it. He tries to make a movie production company, it fails horribly, he runs away to America to try something else and immediately loses all his money and ends up crashing on a mattress in some tiny apartment with a bunch of strangers and working at the gas station down the street. This ends up being the best thing that could have happened to him. He falls in love with Leena Engineer, the beautiful daughter of the local grocery store owner, but her father does not approve of his precious daughter being with a random gas station employee with no ambitions! (They do not know his father is insanely rich.) So he has to make a million dollars to win his future father-in-law's approval, and win back Leena's heart! (Because she could not forgive the way he listened to her father first instead of trying to figure out a way to be together without her father's approval.)

For most of the first half of the book, Prem has no ambitions or goals, and this is frustrating to literally everyone around him. It's a little hard to watch the protagonist be so aimless for 200ish pages, but it works because the rest of the cast is so much FUN. And I think it's only really possible because of how long this book is and the long timescale it spans (almost twenty years) that you can keep track of such a large revolving cast of neighbors and aunties and coworkers and roommates and family members.

It's also really funny-- I was quoting lines out loud to my mom when I was reading on the couch the other night. It's so nice to read a book with actual jokes in it. I feel like recently I've been reading a lot of books that felt like the writer did want to write something funny but also felt writing actual jokes would make it too easy, or something. Not this one though, there's jokes! With punchlines! That made me laugh!

It's also a rare book about movies that feels like a movie without being too self-conscious about its own desire to feel like a movie. I feel like Valente often runs into that, where she gets too into her own voice and overdoes it and it just ends up seeming kind of cheap. Dixit's writing style is pretty plain on a sentence level, but does a lot with its structure. It reminded me of Midnight's Children, but with less magical realism and more extremely well-observed realism. It's so easy to sink into and so hard to put down. I just really enjoyed it all the way through. The love story is dramatic, but not over-the-top about it. Prem slowly growing into himself is so so satisfying! Just watching him transform from someone so desperately afraid of other people to someone who realizes he loves and needs lots of people around him, and who goes out of his way to talk to strangers and make them feel comfortable on purpose, was really nice.

I grew up in the second Highest-Percentage-of-Indian-Americans town in New Jersey after Edison, which is half an hour away from me and which I visit at least a few times a year. Accordingly, about a third of my childhood besties and classmates were Indian American, so I'm familiar with some of the cultural stuff mentioned in this novel via lunch table osmosis. It did feel New Jersey to me for sure. Also I did academic decathlon the year the theme was India, so while the only Bollywood movies I've seen (PK and Three Idiots, the first only dubbed in Russian, as screened to me by my father who is a bit of a "thing, India" guy despite being Russian, and the second once in Russian and once with English subtitles at my friend's birthday party) were made after the time period covered in the novel, I recognized a lot of the Bollywood people cameos in a "Lata Mangeshkar from my Music Resource Guide packet mentioned!" kind of way. I don't think knowledge of Bollywood film is necessary to enjoy this book, but it would probably enhance it. My bestie did say "that's a super Bollywood way to start a story" when I was telling her about the first few chapters I'd just finished, but I mean. I think it really worked.

Anyway, I enjoyed reading this book and I hope you read it and enjoy it too!

Also the Rom-Commers which I read in November and forgot to track.
According to Storygraph I've read 170 books this year which is a normal amount probably. I didn't track every manga volume I read though so it's technically probably higher. Anyway, let's go!
The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
I don't like it when authors use words in a foreign language that have a direct english translation to make the thing seem More Foreign, and I didn't like it in this either. "Dochka" THAT'S JUST DAUGHTER COME ONNNNN Really good overall though, the building tension felt legitimately scary and it felt believably of the time period it was supposed to be set in.
Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
This worked well for me. The leads have a Book!Howl/Sophie, Maomao/Jinshi, Grumpy Nerd Girl/Magical Prettyboy Who's Super Into Her dynamic I always love, and the footnoted historical fantasy worldbuilding wasn't quite up to the JSMN bar but did get closer to it than some other contenders. I choose to believe the fairies cancelled homophobia in this AU and that's why the major side couple was butchfem lesbians. Unfortunately their existence did make me wish the main couple was also butchfem lesbians. It was fun!
I think my biggest quibble with it is the journal entries did not feel like journal entries, especially not like journal entries a person like Emily would ever write. Leon's POV in Beth O'Leary's The Flatshare is the kind of writing style I'd expect someone as no-nonsense as Emily to journal in. I enjoyed it, but I did not immediately rush to check out the second book.
Help Wanted: A Novel by Adelle Waldman
As a current retail-adjacent customer service employee and former retail worker, parts of this book felt so real they hurt. A lot of it was very funny, and the end result was honestly kind of a relief. I liked it.
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
I feel like this book spent the most time on things I wasn't interested in and the least time on the parts I was interested in. As a result, kind of a slog. I
understand they were only in magic school for half the book bc we're being subversive Harry Potter for Grownups here but I wanted to like, experience magic school more than post-magic school ennui. I think the speed at which this book passed through a fairly long timespan made the character relationships feel less developed to me.
How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler
This was funny and I liked it! I like Davi and her various entanglements. Overall kind of felt like a web serial I'd read chapter by chapter with my friends in a discord server. Not surprised OP cited So I'm A Spider So What as a major influence, I could feel the spider aura. I will probably seek out the sequel when it drops.
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
Nonfiction! I think I liked it overall. Klein uses the framework of "I get confused with another person named Naomi online" to explore a lot of different dichotomies and dualities. Easier to read than I was fearing.
You Belong with Me by Mhairi McFarlane
Nowhere on the cover or introduction to this book did it mention that this was in fact a sequel to another book from a decade ago, not until the afterword. So I found myself wondering "why does this feel like the sequel to a book about these two characters get together" the whole time I was reading it. I did like it, but I probably would've liked the first book more. Get-together stories have more built-in tension than staying-together stories, where the tensions usually end up feeling more manufactured, I think. But McFarlane is really good at developing characters that feel real and specific and interesting, and I generally like her work.
Not in the Plan by Dana Hawkins
UGH it was so bland and forgettable I can't believe I wasted five bucks on this ebook. The author was doing a storygraph giveaway for the third book in this series that sounds more up my alley dynamic-wise, but this was so..... It's just not very good. Also at one point a character describes bubble tea as "creamed" which I think should be a crime maybe.
Vita Nostra and Vita Nostra 2: Работа над ошибками by Sergey Dyachenko, Marina Dyachenko
Twitter mutual pressured me into reading the sequel right after the first book but I did them BOTH IN RUSSIAN SO HUGE W FOR ME! I liked it. I really felt for Sashka and her relationship with her mom was the most interesting part for me. I really liked Lisa in book two, but liked the sequel less overall because I missed that mother-daughter dynamic. It was surprisingly easy to read in Russian for me. Apparently the English translation Jelly-Donuts's pirozhki and kefir, which is kind of funny to me.
As far as the magic school books this month go, I understood The Magicians better, but I felt more emotions, was more attached to the characters, and wanted to keep reading Vita Nostra more.
Murder Falcon by Daniel Warren Johnson
This RULED. I tweeted about it when I finished. This is a graphic novel that operates on "what is the maximum coolest thing that can happen next" and just does it every single time. Really fun ride. Great reading experience.
Worry by Alexandra Tanner
I do not understand or see the necessity of this ending. Kind of refreshing to read a Bleak 20-something Sadgirl book focused on a toxic sister relationship instead of a boring man obsession for once, but otherwise, I dunno. Didn't really vibe.
Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath
This was also very fun! Beautiful watercolor, creepy serial killer story. I liked it. So did, apparently, everyone else I know who also read it!
Far Sector by N.K. Jemisin
I wanted to try one of the DC compact graphic novels because I don't really read big 2 comics much, so I asked my comic shop guys which of them's the best to start with and they suggested this one. It was okay I guess. I don't think superheroes are really my thing. I liked the meme people.
*The Rom-Commers by Katherine Center
I mixed this book up with How To End A Love Story bc they're both about screenwriters and honestly they're both kind of eh but in different ways. HTEALS I think is more ambitious. This one is very weird in that it does not show a single word from the screenplay the two characters write together, which I don't think I've ever seen in a Book About A Character Writing Something before. Not In The Plan showed Mack's novel in progress! Why can't we see the rom-com!
Anyway, happy new year! My New Year's Resolution is to stop watching/reading negative reviews about books I don't like/have not read.

Hiiiiii I read 14 books this month and here they are!

I also: WROTE A BOOK AND SUBMITTED IT TO A CONTEST you can read the stuff I sent in here if you’re interested it’s about what if Hatsune Miku was like a doll that lived in your house and you made music together and fell in love. If you want to read it chapter by chapter I'm also posting it on a webbed site where no one is reading it because I haven't showed it to anyone I actually know yet. I want to see if it could magically become popular just because it's good and not because I have some followers somewhere, idk.
Also I left a comment on this post if you want to say nice things about me anonymously.
Anyway, onto the books!

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee

Okay that’s a 0 for 2 on “surrealist speculative fiction about the horrors of having a job” I’ve read this year (first being Flux). I didn’t like Jonathan, didn’t understand what was happening (I may just be even stupider than Jonathan I guess lol) and I didn’t like how... claustrophobic it all felt? Like why was he having to clean the dreams of the 3 people he interacts with? It also felt like. A screenplay more than a book, honestly. Or a comic script. Heavy on the visual descriptions and light on other sensory details. Not my thing sorry!

Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell

I stole this from the B&B my girlfriend and I stayed at in Boston over Thanksgiving. This was a lot of fun and only occasionally embarrassingly early-2000s. Her messiness was a lot more interesting than today’s hyperpolished influencer types. It had that Nora Ephron’s Heartburn “cool aunt pouring you an endless glass of wine at the kitchen island while she tells you her life story” feeling. I think if I’d read it earlier in the month it would’ve influenced my WIP even more.

The Default World by Naomi Kanakia

I finally made use of my other library card and found this there! I really wish Kanakia would make her protagonists just a little more likeable. Please. For me. But there was a lot of funny stuff in this one and the general world made sense to me, and it was a fun ride for the most part.

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Succession but they’re Jewish and have different traumas than the guys on Succession. Some parts were very very funny, but idk I think it was too long for me overall.

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

I read this for Lebanon from the Storygraph Reads The World prompts because I’d heard of it and it was available through Gutenberg. It felt like a transcript of a sermon. It made me want to find a video of someone performing it like one.

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

This ruled. OP being a game designer completely tracked, the cyclical nature of the Husbands felt very video gamey to me. I made like three predictions for the endgame and none of them happened, which was a pleasant surprise. I like where it did end up, and I liked how it got there. It was funny and interesting! Both of those things!

Girl Juice by Benji Nate

Finally read the full collection after years of seeing random out of context strips and I don’t know how improved it is by being in a collected form. I liked the short story at the end the most. I think I prefer Nate’s longform narratives to her single-page gags.

Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

I described this book out loud to my friend and she said “this sounds like it was made in a lab for you” and she was right. It even has gay people! I read this in half an hour and loved every second of the experience.

Much Ado About Nada by Uzma Jalaluddin

I missed the Persuasion references because I haven’t read that one and did not pick up on many Much Ado references if they existed. Overall it was fine, I guess. I kind of wanted more humor though.

Luster by Raven Leilani

I Get It Now. Every single book review/essay I’ve read that negatively compares other sadgirl lit books to Luster was right. Luster did it better than everyone else. Every word is so carefully chosen. It’s funny, it’s deliberate, it’s thoughtful. This rules.

The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing by Merve Emre

I feel justified in my dislike of the MBTI now but also I understand why it is the way that it is.

I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue

Less epistolary than I thought it would be from the premise. I should have taken the Eleanor Oliphant comparison on the back as a warning. Overall quite miserable up until the end.

Loyal to the School by Angela Brazil

Anthropologically fascinating but not as homoerotic as I was expecting from a book where the main character is named Lesbia. I mostly read it because the main character was named Lesbia, and it was on Project Gutenberg.

The Housemaid by Freida McFadden

I stole this from the free table at work and read it at my girlfriend’s friend’s wedding. The twist was deeply predictable, the writing was eh. If nothing else it was a very fast read.

Current Music: pinocchio-p's mimic live for youtube weekend which looked epic ngl

I do not want to think about the state of the world so here is my belated monthly reads post!
Much less reads this month on account of all my library holds are months away from coming through and I haven't been going to the physical library recently, and Iphigenia took me for-fucking-ever to finish reading. Contemplating getting into webnovels.
Something is Killing the Children, Vol. 2- James Tynion IV
I read Volume 1 last year. Volume 2 sure does continue the story! I dunno. I don't think I'm a Tynion kinda gal.
Wash Day Diaries by Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith
Gonna be honest I read this because Jamaica was one of the Storygraph Reads The World Countries and I knew the illustrator was from Jamaica because I know her in real life and also I absolutely intended to read this book two years ago and never got around to it. And then it was ready to borrow on Libby!
I thought it was nice.
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Birthday gift from a friend I finally got around to reading! I don't think I'm a Pynchon kinda gal either, sorry October. It was interesting and did a lot of interesting things but I wish the characters were more like people and less like boxes for abstract concepts idk.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
Literally no one is doing or has ever done it like Suzanne Collins. I loved the Hunger Games in middle school to the point where I was on several different RP forums for the series, but I put off reading the prequel because I was scared it would be bad. It was not bad. It was good! And now that I'm an adult I can appreciate what she's doing on another level.
Iphigenia: The diary of a young lady who wrote because she was bored by Bertie Acker, Teresa de la Parra
For Venezuela in the Storygraph reads the world challenge. Reminded me of the Pillow Book: upper-class girl writing in a diary. Extremely depressing ending, even though the girl in question is very annoying for most of the book. A lot of interesting descriptions of like. What she thinks is important.
I Hope This Doesn't Find You by Ann Liang
Reviewed this for the October read-a-thon thing in the booknook comm, but TL;DR least good of all of Ann Liang's books which does not make it bad generally but does mean I would not recommend it over If You Could See The Sun or This Time It's Real.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb
Very fascinating, really good example of narrative nonfiction. I'm impressed with her ability to turn her life into a story with clear themes and arcs. That's probably the hardest part about writing a memoir. Interesting perspectives on therapy and life and stuff too.
Writers & Lovers by Lily King
I've been hearing a lot recently about how the second half of one's twenties are always a big struggle but eventually you will break through and something will click and everything will be better, and this is a book about that happening for a writer and I just want it to be a universal truth and happen to me too. I enjoyed reading it.
Demian by Hermann Hesse
The influential proto-yaoi read for Germany in the Storygraph reads the world challenge. I can see how this would've inspired KazeKi and Heart of Thomas. Mildly depressing but blessedly short. Both more and less gay than anticipated.
The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary
Honestly O'Leary deserves a medal for writing a dual-pov romance where the two POVs actually sound like different people, and have narrative voices that reflect their personalities and where they are in life (a chatty editor at a DIY books publisher with a manipulative recent ex meets a night-shift nurse with problems). I generally enjoyed it all of the way through and found the relationship building convincing and the friends interesting, but I wish Tiffy's arc didn't revolve so completely around escaping an abusive man.

I started writing this mid-month so it’s in chronological order of when I read them this time! Please clap.
This month I read 17 books total, including a Russian translation of a Polish mystery-comedy from the 70s, some recent popular books, and a lesbian time travel romance that was getting widely discussed on my TL.

( Read more... )

Here are once again my books of the previous month in reverse chronological order because that’s how Storygraph sorts them!

I read 15 books and no VIZ manga volumes because I got COVID and had no motivation to do anything at all for a good chunk of the month there.
If You Could See the Sun by Ann Liang- god she's so funny. Funniest YA writer working today. Really well-drawn portrait of a very specific environment, really clever gimmick and way of using it. All of the characters felt believable and varying degrees of likeable, and I really felt for Alice's struggles. I can't believe this was her first book. And she was still in college when she wrote it! What am I doing with my life. Also I just realized the title is a pun lol.

Wellness by Nathan Hill- Sad, but also funny. Some of the psychology stuff was interesting. The length of the bibliography was also interesting. It’s kind of refreshing to see a novel with so much research put into it. I think I liked it overall, but it’s hard to tell.

How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang- Sex scenes were pretty good, if het. Somehow very obvious the author is an experienced TV writer but a debut novelist. A little weird that the characters are from a similar part of the country to me, but not as weird as reading Suburban Dicks. I don’t know if the whole... dead sister thing is handled as well as I’d like it to be. I also kind of wanted it to be more about the TV show than their personal lives lol.

The Price of Salt, or Carol by Patricia Highsmith- Slower-paced than I expected it to be. Also less explicit than I thought it would be. And a lot more focused on both the roadtrip and Therese’s life ambitions. The happy ending was sweet though.

Flung Out of Space: The Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith by Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer (reread, because I’d started reading Carol and thought wait what was her life story again)- Ughhh still so good so beautiful and well-paced we have no choice but to stan (Ellis/Templer, not Highsmith) etc.

The Wake-Up Call by Beth O'Leary- Cute and funny! Both of the leads made sense to me, and their relationship developments also made sense. And the premise was really fun too. I liked this one.

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich- Read it because my girlfriend read it and asked me if it was accurate about working in a bookstore. Unfortunately the bookstore I worked at is a lot worse than most bookstores, so I couldn’t really say. Hard to read when in the middle of having COVID, which was when I had it checked out.

Funny Story by Emily Henry- If I had a nickel for every book I read in August with a male protagonist raised by a narcissistic mother, I’d have two nickels (the other being Wellness) which isn’t a lot but it is weird it happened twice. I did enjoy this one, but I’d put it in the middle of my Emily Henry tierlist (Book Lovers and Beach Read are my favorites, personally.)

Hilariously while I was reading it at work some patrons walked by carrying Funny Story tote bags and I mentioned this to them and they said they were a bunch of bookstagram friends meeting up together at my workplace. Wild.

A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid- I liked this more than I expected. The oppressive cold wetness was a very strong vibe for an atmosphere, and I liked the worldbuilding even though it felt kind of decorative. I had a hard time buying that everyone was just sooooooo obsessed with this one recently-dead author, though. I feel like it normally takes a little longer for someone to become a classic. The romance was okay.

Reboot by Justin Taylor- I’ve been thinking a lot about Extremely Online Books (as an extremely online person) and I think where Reboot and Exalted work and where My First Book (Honor Levy) and Fake Accounts (Lauren Oyler) don’t is the specificity of the way they are both online. By not trying to portray every single way someone can be Online, they portray an Onlineness that feels real. I did enjoy Reboot, though it is absolutely not a “voice of my generation” book on account of it is at the very least the voice of the generation before mine. I thought it would be more Bojack Horseman-like but then they referenced Bojack and I realized it was not that at all. Also, it has scenes, in which characters interact with each other and say words, and sentences of different lengths instead of all annoyingly short sentences (Levy) or all painfully long sentences (Oyler). Or maybe I’m just bitterly resentful of the fact that someone my age got a book out already and that’s why I’m so annoyed with Levy and her onlineness.

Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater- I can see the influence of JSMN on this, so it’s a good thing I read that one first. I thought it worked well, the romance felt believable and the more fairytale aspect worked for me. I wish the aunt who sucked got more retribution in the end though.

Women of Good Fortune by Sophie Wan- Generally pretty fun and interesting choice of setting, but I feel like Jane was a little too hard to like for too long. Also Lulu should’ve been a lesbian sorry.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke- Extremely elaborate lore, dryly funny, the footnotes and all the fairy stories and the fairy world stuff was all really imaginative and interesting but the commitment to that 1800s aesthetic made it dense and kind of difficult to read. I felt like it took me forever to finish reading it, even though I did enjoy it all the way through.

The Self-Made Widow by Fabian Nicieza- I can’t talk about this book in too much detail without doxxing myself. It gave me psychic damage. The plot worked for me, and the ending was satisfying. Otherwise. It sure is a book that takes place in locations that exist. Including. My fucking workplace!!!! How's that for a jumpscare!!!
Personal update: thinking real hard about Querying my Book and getting scared and going back in to revise it again. Signed up for the Daisuga big bang. Finished a comic and got it printed in time for Flamecon and Anime NYC, then got COVID and missed Anime NYC.

I read seventeen non-VIZ manga books this month! Mostly because my work schedule shook out in a way that I had multiple hours a week where I was just sitting alone in a room and/or ticket booth with my book of the moment and could straight up start and finish a single book in one day like I was in middle school again. I generally average around 100 pages an hour, which I don’t think is absurdly fast, but I did have a lot of reading time this month. Anyway, here they are in reverse chronological order! Cut for length.
( Reviews! )

What else I got: I finished another draft of my fictional anime fandom zine drama story and sent it around for Opinions! I got some feedback and am going to revise it again before querying... after a few more people who promised to read it get back to me. I'll give them like another month.

Why does the autosave feature work for everyone except me, apparently :((( this is take two of this post, lol.
Okay so! The month is almost over, I don't have anything out from the library rn and my ebook holds are due to come in several months at the earliest, so I'm calling it now. I was inspired by Jo Walton's column over at Tor-- I mean, Reactor Magazine, listing everything she's read in a month. I like how concise and clear her reviews are. Also very intimidated by all the academic nonfiction she reads. I wish I could do that. Unfortunately I went to art school twice instead of learning how to do academia properly. Lol and lmao. I read like six months back in her column and got some new ideas for what I want to read in the future.

Anyway, onto my readings! In reverse chronological order because I copypasted the list from Storygraph. Manga reads will be on WWAC.

Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas

This one was, like Milkfed, a very "there but for the grace of God go I" kind of book for me, where I have enough in common with the characters that I can see how easily, if a few things were different, like if I was born a decade earlier and went to a different kind of school, that might've been me. I hope my former codependent queer bestie never reads this one because I do not think they would enjoy it very much.

Enter Title Here by Naomi Kanakia
Read this one on

queenlua's rec and it vividly threw me back to high school hell. I went to a very normal public school that made me into the kind of person who, when Reshma's SAT score was revealed, immediately thought, "oh no wonder she's so unhinged she's not getting into any good school with an SAT score like that." I would not have enjoyed this book when it was published in my senior year of high school, but now I can look back on that horrible time and kind of, a little bit, laugh.

Miss Buncle's Book by D.E. Stevenson

Read this one on Jo Walton's rec from her column, and it was a lot of fun! Like an Agatha Christie book without any murders, but then again they're writing from the same time and place. I liked the meta aspects of the book within a book situation, very funny.

Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia by Samuel R. Delany

My first time reading Delany after years of hearing about him and reading his tweets at my bookstore job with my coworkers. I actually picked up this copy at my old coworker's used book shop. I really enjoyed it but I think a lot of the more complicated concepts went over my head. I liked this vision of a society, the extremely pathetic and miserable main character, and the whole distant-war-that-comes-too-close aspect felt very contemporary to me, especially as someone with relatives still in Russia and Ukraine. This is the kind of SFF I love-- really small human interpersonal dramas amidst a huge backdrop. The main guy is so awful god bless.

Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

Klara and the Sun by way of Rabess's Everything's Fine which I talked about here before and that one webcomic about government assigned catgirls (It's very good but, once again, the dude SUCKS). Easy to read but simultaneously hard to take because of how much the guy fucking SUCKED good lord if Annie posted to r/relationships or AITA the comments would be full of "girl get out of there now" but it's clear this is a case of unreliable narrator due to lack of world experience. Ending felt inevitable, but only somewhat satisfying for it.

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

I love lesbianism and being a lesbian!! Not really a straightforward romance but more of an ambling jaunt through life. The afterword about how Waters herself thinks it's cringe now but a lot of twentysomething lesbians seem to really like it made me a little embarrassed, as a twentysomething lesbian who really liked it. There's something really, really nice about the idea that people like you have always existed, have always lived lives you can see the shadow of your own life in. I loved that Nell found a lesbian community, and socialism and activism, and a girlfriend who loves her. Her different relationships were all interesting and believable, and the sex scenes were pretty good.

Kiss Her Once For Me by Alison Cochrun
I didn't dislike the romance but I can't believe I picked the one Sapphic Romance Novel that was WRONG ABOUT MY NICHE AREA OF EXPERTISE.
( cut for length I went insane sorry )

The Cynical Writer's Guide To The Publishing Industry: How to Convince the Gatekeepers that Your Book is a Potential Bestseller by Naomi Kanakia

I actually don't feel like it was as cynical as the title made me expect. I think I was expecting a kind of beesmygod-level deeply mean and insulting to literally everyone not living to your exact narrow and arbitrary moral standards (including working for, like, any publisher at all) sort of cynicism, but I found Kanakia's tone to be fairly kind and encouraging throughout? A little tough but like. Nice teacher tough. No sugar coating, expect the absolute worst, this is going to suck forever and you are not going to make it big, but it's still worth trying anyway. And it left me feeling like it was still worth trying anyway after all. Also, helped reframe my perspective and gave me some useful pointers for The Querying Hell that awaits me as soon as I get a draft up to novel-length lol.

Exalted by Anna Dorn

This book was unhinged and I loved it. I need to rewrite my contemporary attempted litfic to be funnier and more unhinged. I was worried I wouldn't like it because I don't like astrology, but I think that made it even funnier. Every character in this book kind of sucks, but in very strange ways. The ending is actually perfect. Ideal last page. Wow.

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

I read this before Idlewild, but it felt oddly similar in some ways. Also about a prep school in the 90s/00s, but Makkai's is about true crime and a murder and the ethics of true crime podcasting and violence against women. And cancel culture. I dunno, I think it was fine but took me a weirdly long time to finish considering it's, like, kind of a thriller? With a mystery that should be compelling me to read faster to find out who did it? But I thought the like, depiction of the boarding school environment was really interesting and believable.

Personal Life Update: Someone posted about my rarepair fic on Twitter and their tweet blew up and now the stats literally multiplied by ten times overnight. It had 3 bookmarks on Sunday. Now it has 52. Number of kudos went from 30 to 316. I have never gotten a kudos email that looked like that before and probably never will again but god, it feels GREAT.

I've put the romantasy aside and have been focusing on revising my fictional anime fandom zine drama story lol. It's getting longer! And I'm actually making the main couple get together this time.

My friend recommended the SweetTouch Taiwanese Lychee Beer to me at the liquor store yesterday, so I got a six-pack of that, gave one to my mom, and she liked it so much we only have 2 cans left today. She gave one to my stepdad and decided we're bringing this beer the next time we go camping. It's really good, not too sweet and not too beer-y, very lychee. Try it it's nice!

Current Music: MaisonDES Urusei Yatsura OP/EDs... ik I'm cringe sorry

Still on the romance research grind but also just reading whatever I can get from the library that seems interesting! Here's a selection of things I have read recently.

Season of Love: pretty good! F/F holiday romance, Jewish lead whose family runs a Christmas experience farm place. An actual butch love interest for once! I feel like it could've been funnier, and I don't think I really understood Noelle or why the Jewish Aunt Cass was so into Christmas in the first place. But it was pretty fun altogether and not weirdly surface level about its representation Unlike Some Books (cough).

Hello, Stranger: het, artist with temporary face blindness from surgery has to do a portrait in a month for a contest. Her evil stepsister is hilariously mustache-twirling ohohoho laugh over the top, which I enjoyed despite the lack of believability, and it's funny how since the MC can't see faces she fixates on her love interest's abs. I did find the mc kind of annoying though and I figured out the twist faster than she did which I always hate.

The Familiar: historical fantasy with a romantic subplot. I really enjoyed it and was surprised and impressed by the side character f/f endgame. Did not think Ms. Bardugo would go there. I refused to read the Grishaverse in HS on the basis of Grisha being a stupid name for people with magic powers (it means Greg. Your mages are Gregs.) but I have enjoyed the not Grishaverse books I've read from her so far so maybe I will end up checking that out too.

The Verifiers: frustrating because it's like a category romance or mystery novel in form (the narrative voice and back cover copy both sound like that to me) but seems to have greater literary aspirations and thus does not deliver on the promises of either the romance or the mystery part of its advertising in an attempt to make some kind of greater point about Relationships that didn't work for me. The main character is a lesbian but she doesn't get a romance subplot (although I think it's supposed be setting up a sequel hook with her coworker?) but like, since the book is about dating and dating apps, I expected and wanted her to have a romance subplot. It subverted expectations in a way that didn't feel very clever but just kind of frustrating. Her dynamic with her siblings was really interesting, I like that resentment mixed with love thing they had going on.

When The Angels Left The Old Country: I think this is the kind of tone I'm going for with my romantasy wip. I like how naturally it combines all of this religion and Jewish American history with LGBT identities.

Wandering Stars: less enjoyable than There There but also probably intended to be that way.

Everything's Fine: Dark comedy, really painful in how real it feels a lot of the time. I feel like I've met this main character and her friends before. Very :').

Penance: also a dark comedy, a book for everyone who was in high school and on Tumblr in 2015. Made England sound like a horrible place to live in. Surprisingly funny for such a dark premise. I really liked it and felt kind of guilty for liking it so much, because it's about a horrible murder and true crime fandom but fictional. It's really accurate in its reproduction of Tumblr interaction (VRISKA MENTIONED!!) which makes the slightly off things (like people saying slay and skinny legend in 2015) stick out more.

Tell Me How You Really Feel: picked up from the library discard cart because I recognized it from the bookstore job as a sapphic YA book. OP did this infuriating thing of titling each chapter with a snappy pop culture quote but having all of the dialogue in the book be absolutely bland and forgettable. Also avoids using the words "lesbian" or "internalized misogyny" in a way that feels like she lost a bet or something. Those words should be in there and yet. I also really didn't like one of the leads, Rachel. She was not only annoying but also uhh not very smart in a way that's a little embarrassing to read about. Wow you're a high school senior who knows the word "deign", do you want a cookie? She goes on about what a good word "deign" is for a whole page! I know you already took your SATs!

Also Sana's whole identification with Helen of Troy feels like Hot Girl Problems but the author doesn't seem to realize that's what's happening and thus doesn't name Rachel's internalized misogyny or give Sana any of the downsides of being a conventionally attractive and wealthy lesbian (I knew one in grad school so I know there's territory to explore there but OP missed it, probably for whatever reason made her avoid the words internalized misogyny and lesbian)

Their high school feels empty. Sana has one named friend she interacts with multiple times who has a personality trait, Rachel has one teacher, everyone else is barely even in the background. I don't think they even go to class ever. Sana's supposed to be a Popular Cheerleader but like. She doesn't seem tied into the social fabric of the school at all. This really frustrated me. I liked that their families felt fairly realized, especially Sana's, but I wish the school setting got some of that attention too. It's a fancy private school, it should feel special!

Also the povs switched too often and it was confusing because they both sounded exactly the same.

When No One Is Watching: deeply upsetting thriller I stayed up too late to finish. Now THIS is how you do pov switches and unreliable narrators. I really liked it. I enjoyed Alyssa Cole's romances but I wasn't sure what to expect from her thriller. Turns out I like that too! Wish more characters survived alas.

Personal progress: stuck on the romantasy and getting new ideas for totally different stories. Drafting a new one shot comic also. We'll see what actually pans out.

Catrin liked my last post so I'm doing this again! Books I have read recently:

Cleat Cute: I have given Meryl Wilsner a second chance. Maybe they learned, with their third book. Maybe they got better. Reader, they did not learn or get better. The only things that worked about this book were the sex scenes, which were genuinely very hot. The characters were bland. I wanted grumpy/sunshine, not slightly stoic/somewhat cheerful! Their disagreements were minor and too quickly resolved. Both main characters somehow had undiagnosed neurodivergencies as their entire personalities. Pacing was whack. There was one horrible page where the entire story stopped to tell you about the author's opinions on The Discourse.

As you can see, OP has never heard of a Show they couldn't Tell instead. Cursed.
Anyway.

The Centre: I liked most of it, but the ending really fizzled out, and the big twist was very well-telegraphed. I did think it was well-written, for the most part. Can't speak to the representation of Islam/Pakistan/India/Etc obviously, but I thought the unlikeable protagonist was pretty funny except she should've listened more to her gay thoughts. This book could have been improved with gay sex.

Martyr!: See, this guy listened to his gay thoughts and we got a really good book out of it!! I know it's only April, but this is on my Best Book of The Year list already. It's so good. It just does a lot of things, really well. And has gay people in it!

ETA I forgot Last Night At The Telegraph Club! I loved this book a lot, but it's not really a romance novel, more of a coming of age with a romance in it. The obstacles to the central relationship are all external (homophobia, being a lesbian in the 1950s), and the relationship itself is more conflict-free in contrast to everything around it, which I think works well for this story. Malinda Lo can fucking WRITE. Like, she's just a much better prose stylist than Meryl Wilsner, no offense. Clearer imagery, sharper language, more interesting and developed characters (in a fairly large cast!). I should read more of her work... even though I don't really like YA fantasy...

My own book progress: I have passed 30k words on my romantasy project and not worked much on anything else yet!

Every time I open up the dreamwidth post editor my brain goes blank. I have vague half-ideas for posts and then I try to actually make one and I feel like I have nothing to say anymore. But I’ve been doing a lot of stuff!

Mostly, I’ve been trying to write a bunch of books. I’m just kind of throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks: something becomes Novel Length instead of novella length, something is good enough I can try sending it to an agent, something is worth Publishing. I want to be Published. As much as I love printing off minicomics in my room, I want money, and an audience of people who are not personally friends with me, and a career that’s not just selling 5 zines at a fest once every few months, and I want to be published more than anything else and to get there I need to Finish A Book, dammit!

I’ve been working on a comic with an editor for a certain publisher and just pitched a different comic to someone else, so I haven’t totally given up on that front either, but prose seems to be easier right now.

My dear beloved bestie AO3 user pepperfield and I are also trying to write a book together! We wanted to cash in on the romantasy trend, but neither of us are at all into the big popular tropes of the genre, so after discussing what we actually like to write we’ve arrived at a wildly convoluted magic school mystery story with a romance subplot we’re struggling to make actually romantic (even though we met through writing shippy fanfiction?!).

So to try and figure out how to write a Kissing Book, I started reading Kissing Books. Or, reading more of them, with the intent of learning the structure and market around them. I’ve always liked romance novels, and a lot of good shipfic is basically just a romance novel with characters I already met somewhere else. But now I was reading them on purpose.

I also read Romancing the Beat, which I’ve heard referenced a lot. This ruined my enjoyment of several less good romance novels, because a shocking amount of writers stick to this outline like glue and once you can see the strings you never stop seeing them.

And so, some lightning reviews of romance novels I’ve read recently:

Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date: I read the first two books in this trilogy a while ago and remembered really liking them, but either this one was noticeably worse or I raised my standards.

Good: Sapphic! Sex scenes were hot and believable, love interest doesn’t wear makeup or dresses often (the closest thing to a butch tradpub romance novels can handle without getting scared)
Bad: Surface-level diversity. Side characters are introduced like “The Japanese-American Pansexual Nonbinary Individual walked into the bar” and then none of those things ever come up for them again. Side characters new to this book and not introduced earlier in the series (the love interest’s friends) feel underdeveloped. Love interest feels underdeveloped, especially her relationship w/her family
Strange: Very uhhh. Pride Merch queer and yet it takes place during pride month in a major metropolis and none of them go to a pride parade?
Neutral: This author very clearly read romancing the beat and followed every single step of it.

I’m probably being extra harsh on it because it’s f/f and thus I want it to be perfect and exactly what I’m looking for, and I’m disappointed that it isn’t.

Something to Talk About: also sapphic but its greatest crime is: it’s boring, not funny, and the emotional continuity of the relationship makes no goddamn sense. The third act breakup is prompted by the stupidest argument imaginable.

Between Us (Mhairi McFarlane): het, sort of follows the Romancing the Beat outline but is much less cookie-cutter about it. I found the plot of the “screenwriter BF steals her life story for his TV show, turns out to be a huge gaslighting liar” extremely propulsive and compelling, like I just couldn’t put the book down, I had to know what other bullshit this guy was gonna pull next and how the protagonist was gonna catch him! I really like McFarlane’s writing. Biggest downside to me is that the protag had one Lesbian Bestie who was also the only character without any kind of romantic subplot or personal arc going on. :(

Red String Theory: The love interest was boring and not grumpy enough for a grumpy/sunshine duo, and the main character had shades of Manic Pixie Dream Girl in how she transformed his life. The general concept was interesting but the execution was not great. Somehow every single named character in this book was either half-Chinese American and half-white, or the Chinese American relative of the two leads. Which I understand is the author’s personal background, but it does seem like a weirdly limiting kind of world.

High Fidelity: not a romance novel but a literary novel about a heterosexual romantic relationship, starting with the breakup and ending with them getting back together. Not subject to the Romancing the Beat outline. Insanely well-crafted, from the perspective of a Guy who honestly kind of sucks but is so eloquent about why he is the way he is. Very pleasurable read– not exactly pleasant, but like, I had a lot of fun reading.

Yerba Buena: Also more of a litfic with romance elements, but the romance honestly felt kind of pasted on. I've heard a lot of good things about Nina LaCour, but I didn't really like this one. Very... joyless, lot of bad/sad things happening and little humor. The two leads Instantly Connected At First Sight but we don't get to see them spend a lot of time together or what attracts them to each other-- we see a lot more of Emilie's relationship to the married restaurant owner than her relationship to Sara. Also, LaCour has a lot of sentence fragments of the "She did a thing. Did the thing more" variety and it got annoying after a while. As a litfic novel, I was expecting it to play with form more than it did. I did like that the flashbacks weren't symmetrical though.

Fourth Wing: I am in the “does not work for me like not even on a base id level not even a little bit” camp in regards to this one. I hate how little sense anything in it makes. I hate that the narrator says “for the win” twice like it’s 2008. Hate that there are characters named Kaori and Bodhi with no explanation as to how those names exist in this world. Hate how much time it took me to read all that.

I have a lot of ideas for what I want to write and what I want to put into the world, but I just haven't been able to make any of them happen, and it's been frustrating me. Maybe this will help me get there.

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

So a guy--and it's always a guy, an everyman guy, a kind of pathetic but technically competent youngish average normal guy-- is trying really hard to succeed as a solo narrative storyteller, but his efforts are just not working out for him. But suddenly, the draft or outline or first chapter of a REALLY GREAT STORY falls into his lap. So... He takes that draft, finishes it, and passes it off as his own. And it's the greatest success the world has ever known! Except eventually his lie catches up to him and he faces the consequences of his actions. Woe is him. The end.

I've always found these premises kind of confusing, because I don't think the concept is always better than the execution. Maybe because I read so much fanfiction which is all riffing on the same few plots. Some coffeeshop meet cute AUs stand head and shoulders above other coffeeshop meet cutes (there's a reason no one ever shuts up about Jaywalkers, still, to this day.) And it's not because Le Petit Whatever is a more compelling cafe than a Starbucks, it's because AO3 user batman's writing style is polished and elegant and memorable in a way most prose, fanfic or otherwise, just isn't.

In Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot, the Plot our protagonist steals from a guy in a writing workshop is repeatedly described by everyone as the most brilliant and exciting and extreme plot twist the world has ever seen, which naturally ensured that whenever it was finally revealed it would be a disappointment. I guessed the book-within-a-book twist about fifty pages ahead of the reveal myself, which is saying something considering I'm usually more of a mystery enjoyer than a solver. What made The Plot really work for me overall, though, is that the final late game twist of the frame story around the fictional plagiarism actually did go in a direction I didn't fully expect, which was pretty dark and horrifying! And funny. A little awkwardly funny, but still funny. I also did feel like the main character's creative struggles and mindset were understandable and believable. I enjoyed it, overall.

This premise didn't work so well in the short-lived Shonen Jump manga Time Paradox Ghostwriter by Kenji Ichima and Tsunehiro Date. In TPG, Teppei is a young mangaka assistant dreaming of serialization, but editors are constantly slamming his stories down as derivative and creatively empty. Suddenly his microwave starts spitting out Shonen Jump magazines from ten years in the future. Believing this to be a weird dream, he copies the first chapter of a new story from the future Jump to the best of his ability and submits it. And it becomes a huge success! Except the girl who drew that future first chapter, Itsuki, sees Teppei's debut, and tracks him down... To tell him how thrilled she is that she's not the only one who could come up with that basic premise???

The central theme of TPG, counter to the repeated maxims of "everyone has a story to tell" deconstructed in The Plot and Andrew Lipstein's Last Resort, is that some people really are creatively empty and incapable of creating truly original stories. Which I fundamentally disagree with. If your work seems derivative you need to a) diversify your creative input b) figure out a message besides Have Fun and c) yeah, look inside yourself and your life experiences a little. Your manga looks too much like other manga? Go read some Asterix, or X-men, or Berlin by Jason Lutes. See a play. Take a knitting class. Read prose. It's not an unsolvable problem, and the reason it seems like it to these characters is because they're young and lacking in life experience and perspective. Which I guess I am too, but at least I'm aware of it. Just pair up with a writer like the creators of this comic did.

I think this frustrates me so much because I've never had a problem coming up with ideas for comics, I've just been struggling to execute them effectively for the past decade. I'm desperate to improve my drawing skills to a point where I can get published as a writer and artist, but it feels like nothing I do will get me there. But ideas are easy! It's the execution that's hard!

The Plot and Last Resort had one big thing in common TPG didn't: the protagonists didn't just plagiarize someone else's fictional story, they plagiarized real events that happened to someone else, and that had consequences for their lives. But the manga in TPG appears to be a standard shonen fighter fantasy story, not narratively groundbreaking in any way obvious to the readers of the manga outside the manga. Both Itsuki and Teppei only want to make popular manga everyone can enjoy, not tell a specific story or communicate something to the world, which makes me wonder what exactly makes their comic so super amazing anyway. Caleb in Last Resort wanted to be recognized for his skill as a novelist more than anything else. Jake in The Plot had been recognized as a novelist once already with a well-regarded if not bestselling first book and was desperate for a career reset. I feel like that kind of egoism is a little more honest and believable than the altruistic goal of entertaining everyone. Maybe because I'm an egoist myself. I wanna be the very best like no one ever was, etc.

Bringing it back around to the title of this post and fanfiction, there's a lot of people who write plot-first kinda fics of worldbuilding-heavy canons, who want to "fix" BNHA by making Deku a supersmart quirkless analyst instead of shipping stuff. And a lot of those kinds of fics have potentially interesting ideas! But a lot of them also have an execution that makes me not want to look at them twice, from too many SPAG errors to giving Present Mic a speaking style like a Homestuck typing quirk (a specific fic that haunts me). A really great plot can't hit without good execution. In Last Resort, Caleb's friend Avi sends him the short story version of the story that Caleb ends up stealing for his novel, and Caleb is unimpressed with Avi's actual writing. Caleb steals it almost unintentionally, just driving up the West Coast and thinking about how he could improve the story and make it stronger. The Plot asserts that the specific plot Jake steals would be impossible to execute so badly it wouldn't become a smash hit, but by a fortunate coincidence both Jake and the guy he stole it from were already pretty good writers.

A boring plot can be a hit if the execution is interesting somehow (people like Sally Rooney, after all). A plot that's been done a zillion times can be a hit if there's something, anything about it that's slightly new. These three versions of the same story are all still different from each other, right?

So does having a great premise/concept/plot really matter that much?

Current Location: airport check in line lmfao

Long time no see! Still alive, trying to get back into Posting.
I've been reading a lot of prose books recently, for the simple reason that a bunch of them came off library e-book hold at the same time. Here's what I thought!
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey: I haven't read anything by this author before, but I got the impression from this book that writing about The South is her Thing. Even though that's a small part of the book it is the linchpin of the entire story. Was surprised by the Connie Converse RPF subplot. I guess if she's still alive she can reappear to complain about it, but that's unlikely. I enjoyed the prose at first (that's why I picked this book up at all) but the narrator and cast all started to wear on me as it kept going. The gender reversal of the art world status quo was weird. I don't know if that one key event would actually end sexism to that extent and in that direction. I finished it, and I feel like I should read it a few more times to really understand the story, but I don't know if I want to. This one I got a physical copy of at the bookstore where I worked right before I quit working there. The hardcover feels like a cheap book imitating a more expensive one. It was not actually that cheap, but I got an employee discount which helped.
Beartown by Frederik Backman: Hockey! I've heard people write fanfiction about that! What really impressed me about this book was the sense of atmosphere, place and mood. It felt overwhelmingly cold and wintry. Also how easily he balanced such a huge cast. The teens were the most interesting part, but the story as a whole would've been weaker if it was a YA novel from the point of view of Maya only.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka: Somehow the opposite book to Beartown! This also has a very strong sense of atmosphere, but instead of the cold Scandinavian snow, here we're in the humid smoggy jungles of Sri Lanka. The story feels like a spiral, slowly revealing its center as you keep reading. Like Beartown, it's an intimate family story that affects the whole world around it. The writing is really interesting-- it's not laugh out loud funny, but it is fun and enjoyable.

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Filing off the serial numbers: when a fanfic becomes a book
What I read in APRIL
What I read in March!
What I read in February!
[booktuber voice] RANT REVIEW: THE HONEY WITCH
What I read in JANUARY 2025
I just read Edison by Pallavi Sharma Dixit and it RULED
LAST READS OF 2024
November Reads and Life Updates
What I read in October!
September Reading Log!
August Reads
What I read in July!
What I Read In June!
Recent Reads
more lightning book reviews!
romance, writing, romance writing
Are Ideas Really That Important? Some things I read recently
Recent Prose Reads

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Filing off the serial numbers: when a fanfic becomes a book

What I read in APRIL

What I read in March!

What I read in February!

[booktuber voice] RANT REVIEW: THE HONEY WITCH

What I read in JANUARY 2025

I just read Edison by Pallavi Sharma Dixit and it RULED

LAST READS OF 2024

November Reads and Life Updates

What I read in October!

September Reading Log!

August Reads

What I read in July!

What I Read In June!

Recent Reads

more lightning book reviews!

romance, writing, romance writing

Are Ideas Really That Important? Some things I read recently

Recent Prose Reads