Title: UnWritten Author: Chelsea M. Cameron (Twitter) Rating: Recommended Genre/Category: Contemporary Romance, Families/Kid-fic , Body Positive, Happy Endings, New Adult Release Date: July 6, 2014 Order Here: AMAZON
Note: A version of this review is up on Goodreads/Amazon. The changes between the two versions are mostly minor!
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Chelsea Cameron’s UnWritten is basically the Single Dad AU of my dreams.
I follow the author on Twitter and she’s an actual peach. When she tweeted about this book being on Kindle Unlimited, I basically leapt to attention because everything about it is my kind of thing. UnWritten stars a curvy secret romance novel writer, a gorgeous single dad, and the cutest fictional three-year-old I’ve seen in a book in a long time.
I made high-pitched, eager noises for my first full hour of reading because this book is literally almost everything I’ve ever wanted.Read More »
To be better at deadlines for work and school and to get comfortable communicating when a deadline isn’t going to work before it hits.
To go after the things I want (jobs, writing opportunities, friendships) without talking myself out of it.
To finish at least one short story a month and either post them or submit them to websites/magazines/anthology calls.
To be more confident in my writing as I go about improving. I don’t have to change my style to fit anyone but myself. Getting better at writing is different from changing how I write so I need to focus that.
To read more and to review more. I have this thing about making my reviews perfect but that means I don’t get as many out as I want or should. So 2017 will be the year I review more of the things I read right after I’m finished reading them
To remember to disengage from situations or behaviors that aren’t helpful or healthy. I love critiquing fandom and media as much as the next nub, but I need to remember to step back. Hurting people (myself included) is never going to be something I want to do here so I need to keep that in mind.
To lose a little weight. I feel fine and healthy, but it’s still something I want to do.
To be better with Patreon or shut that shit down. This goes hand in hand with me sticking with deadlines, obviously.
To bake macarons!
To learn how to drive!
To get an actual adult job and an apartment of my own.
To be a better, more engaged friend. It’s hard for me because I prefer to be alone most of the time, but that’s not fair to my friends.
To spend less time on things I hate and people I don’t like.
To read 60 books! And review them (at the very least, on goodreads).
Note that this list isn’t in any particular order. They’re all books I either enjoyed a ton or that stuck with me even after I was done reading. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list as I read a lot of amazing books but had to pare this down to ten books so I could actually manage to get the dang thing out before Christmas.
Note also that I was mad tipsy when making the accompanying podcast and so my scatterbrain is at an all time high. If you’re looking for something where I remember character names and heck, even basic plot points, um… please don’t listen to the audio and just read the descriptions instead!
The sixth book in Craig Schaefer’s Daniel Faust series, The Castle Doctrine is one of many urban fantasy novels that legit left me messed up by the time I was done reading them. Schaefer’s writing style is incredible, full of descriptions that left me cringing (but still flipping the pages on my kindle).
The way the man writes violence is like… out of this world. Daniel Faust reminds me a lot of Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden only you know… not a misogynist and with a clearly defined moral code of his own (like Deathstroke but with magic and broke all the time). Start out with The Long Way Down and work your way to this book because it’s so worth it.
Title: Red Sonja: The Falcon Throne
Author: Marguerite Bennett (Twitter) Artists: Aneke and Diego Galindo Colorists: Jorge Sutil and Morgan Hickman Letters: Erica Schultz
Covers: Marguerite Sauvage
Rating: Recommended Genre/Category: Swords and Sorcery, Fantasy Release Date: October 2016
Yesterday was the last meeting of my most stressful class. I am so glad that I don’t have the class again and that I (probably) won’t see most of the people in that class again.Read More »
Content warnings: ableism, sex worker shaming, abuse and abusive relationships, and racism.
The worst part about it was that she was right. I couldn’t just put a bullet between her eyes, not unless she threatened me. I glanced at the waiting zombies, patient as the dead, but underneath that endless patience was fear, and hope, and . . . God, the line between life and death was getting thinner all the time.
Anita after realizing that the zombies Dominga raises are sentient because she put their souls back inside their bodies. So far, this is the one thing that Anita won’t do. It’s a small comfort considering all of the things that she does do in future books.
I just want to get this off my chest before I go any further: The Laughing Corpse is a hot ableist mess. On top of this second book in Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake series continuing the trend of being ridiculously racist – specifically towards Black and Latinx people – it’s also full of the kind of ableism that shouldn’t even have existed in the Nineties when this book was published.Read More »
Note: I absolutely wrote the wrong title down initally because I am a space case. Deal with it.
I went and saw Fantastic Beasts this past week.
Considering that my video review is almost an hour long, obviously it inspired a whole host of grouchy thoughts on my end. Mainly that the film’s beautiful cinematography and the way that the magical creatures first brought to our attention in Rowling’s 2001 magizoological textbook are brought to life on the big screen don’t make up for barely unbroken whiteness, Rowling’s misuse of Native cultures in and out of the film, and what reads to me as a really shitty narrative about abuse survivors.
I fell out of love with the Harry Potter series pretty early on. I liked the idea of the franchise and owned all of the books at one time or another, but with every new tidbit that Rowling revealed about her characters and the world that they lived in, I found myself increasingly disenchanted. This is all thanks to Rowling’s constant need to express regret for everything except how lacking her works were in diversity and her new material which contains things like confirming/canonizing her “lycanthropy as a stand-in for AIDS/HIV” stance or the way she views Native cultures as a monolith while misrepresenting and misusing Native peoples and cultures.
I watched Fantastic Beasts specifically because I wanted to check the film out and provide an honest opinion of it. I did go into it expecting to hate two specific things (the lack of diversity and Johnny Depp) but I was surprised at all the other things that made me annoyed or uncomfortable throughout watching it.
Note: If you’re unfamiliar with the critical slant I tend to take when watching films, understand that this isn’t going to be a review where I say super goopy things about the film. I think I say one and a half nice things about it and they’re not very nice at that. So be prepared for a rather caustic look at the thing you probably love!
Notes, clarification, warnings, and links to thing you might want to read are under the cut!
“… And Fate them forged a binding chain / of living love and mortal pain” is one of my favourite lines in JRR Tolkien’s Lay of Leithian; encapsulating the poem’s driving conviction that mingled love, pain, surrender, and redemption can form the foundations of the most important relationships we can have with other human beings.
I found myself thinking about it after reading Nightwing #8 (by Tim Seeley, Javier Fernandez, Chris Sotomayor and Carlos Mangual) because love, pain, and redemption are so much a part of Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, and how they relate to each other, and I haven’t read many comics that mediate on that as beautifully as this one (and hell, this whole arc) does.Read More »
Okay so it’s been a long time since our last Radioplay Day, but I haven’t forgotten about my desire to go through “Superman and the Clan of the Fiery Cross” with y’all.
Once finals are done and I’ve got my freelancing schedule on lock, I’ll get back on track and start putting up the posts for the episodes I’ve listened to by then.
But for the time being, please check out this clip from Drunk History’s “Atlanta” episode which is a brief look at how Superman played a rather important part in undermining the authority and influence of the Klan.
(I recommend the entire episode because it’s hilarious and the first person to drunkenly retell history is the adorable Jenny Slate fumbling through a history of Coca Cola’s invention.)
Note: This post contains spoilers for Invincible Iron Man #1 by Brian Michael Bendis, Stefano Caselli, and Marte Gracia.
Earlier today, Marvel Comics’ writer Brian Michael Bendis made a bad judgement call.
With people all over the world reeling from the fact of a Trump presidency, Bendis decided that there was no time but the present to do one thing: ply his comic, the upcoming Invincible Iron-Man #2, as a distant distraction.Read More »
One of the three graduate courses I’m taking is a class called “The Author in their Time/s”. It’s a class that looks at authors writing fiction about a period in history as they lived in said period. This specific class, taught by a professor that reminds me a bit of Heathcliffe (the cat, not the Wuthering Heights dude), is about the Cold War.
A huge issue that I’ve been having with academia – even before the Literature degree in-progress – is that a lot of the people who teach my classes or who are in said classes have no idea that comic books could even remotely fall underneath the banner of respectable literature. We learn about the same white guys and gals and the same types of Literature on end until it’s all but beaten into us that academia only cares about certain types of narratives.Read More »
My darling and talented friend Vi (who I’ve commissioned to draw art for this story because she’s GREAT) surprised me with a super cute birthday sketch of Asra, one of the main characters in my short story “Breaking and Entering”.
Not only did she give me permission to share this sketch, but also an early piece that she did of Asra and Katan when getting a feel for the characters. So now, y’all can see what my presh babies look like before the story eventually goes live! Please join me in basking in Vi’s amazing art and how beautiful she’s made my babies because WOW!
Under the cut is the aforementioned art as well as a snippet from the main story.
Okay so obviously, it’s October and that means it’s birthmonth!
I’ll be 26 on the 24th and that’s AWESOME!
As usual, if you feel like dropping money on me (but again, you absolutely don’t have to), I have an Amazon wishlist with books I want to read that’s basically the only thing I’m super into right now as I live up to life as a Lit major.
I don’t have that much planned for Birthmonth because it neatly coincides with everything I have to do being due (I’m talking three papers, the form for my thesis (sort of), multiple reviews, and 5000 words of fiction), but I’m hopeful that with the help of my dear friend Vi, my short story “Breaking and Entering” will be up and illustrated by then.
No promises of course, because life can get busy in the worst of ways, but I’m super hopeful that y’all will finally get to see the story that I’ve been working on for over a year.
When I first heard about Connie Willis’ book Crosstalk, it sounded like a bunch of fun.
I put it on my wishlist and dropped a bunch of hints that I’d be open to reviewing it even if I had to buy the book myself (which wouldn’t be an issue as even if I get an ARC, I buy the books once they’re released).
Then today, I woke up to see an article on The Verge where she was interviewed about the book and, in one response, managed to miss the entire damn point about romance as a genre and as an aspect of our lives (for those folks who aren’t aromantic) and I decided to save my money. Read More »
On her first day of actual, licensed superheroics, young speedster Pix comes to a startling realization about her chances of surviving once she goes head to head with a super-powered criminal that thinks nothing of smacking her down like a fly.
Pix is going to die.
It’s her first day of actual, licensed superheroics and she is going to die before she even gets a chance to use her League discount card to buy a cup of coffee at the nearest Sundollars. What freaking luck.Read More »
Title: UnWritten
Title: Red Sonja: The Falcon Throne
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