I love seeing my handwriting just flatten out in the middle of a line into just bumps

like, yeah, those are legible in situ, but the rest of the writing is so very normal, and then some bumpy lines.

8D

was playing a game on my tablet when she crawled in, put her paw on the button to close the app, and grabbed my finger. No more game tonight, I guess.

...she is very smart, your little girl.

A new coworker discovered I like fantasy and is lending me a book - she hasn't read it yet, but she bought it to support her friend's husband who wrote it, and she's interested in hearing what I think (in a "you don't have to be nice about it or like it" way - they're not close friends and she's kind of new to reading fantasy).

The author's name sounded familiar.... Turns out it's a dude who came once to my off-season NaNo-ers writers group, announced that (essentially) if you weren't aiming to be published, you weren't a real writer and was otherwise fairly pompous.

He didn't come back (we hobbyists were clearly too low-brow for him), which was no skin off my nose because I'd decided I didn't want to read his books ever anyway.

So here I am reading his book. It's just as pompous as he was, doesn't respect my time as a reader, and treats me like an idiot. Oh. And the magic power his light/sun goddess wields? It's called lumen. You know, like the literal scientific gauge of light for lightbulbs. Come on.

OH. And his fickle god of war and savagery and bad things?? Keos. Yeah, say that out loud. Very Clever, writer-man, naming your chaos god literally Chaos.

.......y i k e s

okay one more petty (very petty) gripe about this book. "Five of the boys wore brown smocks... the rest...wore varying shades of beige." Beige is brown. Beige is a shade of brown. Y- you couldn't HECK I DON'T KNOW, chosen a different color or at least gone with something more descriptive than BROWN for the first word so that BEIGE doesn't scream so much???

MOOD

rings very A Knight's Tale. "It's.... green! Trimmed in a sort of... pale... green... with little... wooden toggles."

[this section is from a skills exam/tournament thing, just to give some context]

Maybe I'm too ace for this, but... WHAT THE FUCK. Why did you word stuff like this?? Why did you try to make this sexy or something???

SHE WAS STUNNED. YOU DIDN'T "SHARE" ANYTHING.

Friendly reminder that fictional characters do not have real life agency. The writer may have in-world justification for actions, but it is still the writer's decision to portray something, and their choice is words on how to portray it. This is not Annev being a young lustful teen. This is an asshole writer.

Ah, good, the author thinks that the opposite of being unmarried is having kids! Or that you cannot have kids if you are unmarried. Good, good. Good Mormon author!

??????? wtf

there is. there is so much wrong in this book

SO MUCH

.... that's just...
if a man in an eyepatch winks at you, that's just blinking.
he just blinked.
that's it.
/sigh

Okay listen.

I think I've figured this book out.

I'm 525 pages out of 575, I'm in what this book would consider the climax. I would put this at the point of no return, which comes just after the inciting incident. The inciting incident for this is most definitely in the 400s-pages. There is a HUGE block of this book that is entirely unnecessary and could just plain disappear.

good lord.

Listen, here's another thing.... In his own review of his book (yes, he reviewed his own book), the author even says that he includes a lot of cliches of the genre so he can play with them. He says, "Whatever you do, don't think for a moment that I'm blind to the tropes I've chosen to use. They serve a purpose and are conscious choices."

Okay, if that's true, sir, explain yourself. You set up a romance plot that's the core motivation for your main character--she is his reason for wanting to succeed his exams, because once he succeeds he'll be able to legally marry her, and success even might bring prestige on him in her father, the headmaster's eyes,

and he waxes all poetical about how much it would suck if A) someone else got her first, or he never got to be with her for a literal variety of reasons.

Sir, you also try to convince us that she is a likeable person worthy of his devotion while also telegraphing that she's, frankly, a terrible, ableist, racist person who is neither a good person worthy of his devotion nor someone who would ever accept him.

I understand how this might seem like a subversion of the trope: present one single female character to a male main character and they must fall in love, yes? Except the problem, sir, is that she repeatedly shows what a garbage human she is and the failure of any future relationship between them IN FRONT OF HIM many, many times.

We the audience dislike her so intensely that to have her as the main character's sole motivation is laughable, perfectly inconceivable, a weakness of the plot's foundation so profound that the rest of the story does not and cannot hold.

Her betrayal is so blatantly obvious and inevitable that his surprise is outrageous and his hurt comes not with sympathy from the audience but pure incredulity and ridicule. Even if you are trying to upend tropes, you must still make a solid foundation of story beneath them or the subversion fails.

AHAHA NAME OF THE WIND?! ARE YOU SERIOUSLY CLAIMING TO BE ANYTHING LIKE THAT BOOK???

...I may have Opinions.

He's SO self-righteous, jesus

Review: This book honks