mozaikmage

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.

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.