Creative on a health break
Thank you so much for participating! I’ll be contacting the winners shortly so that you can get your prizes. For those who did not win, don’t forget that Static is still available for preorder for only $2.99. The price will go up soon after the launch, so preorder your copy now!
This was a lot of fun, though. I’m thinking about running another one. Let me know what series you’d like me to do this for next and I’ll run a contest through November!
It started out as a standard personality quiz, but evolved into one focusing on how you would deal with something more like what happened in the book and how your dealing with those situations would match you up to your characters.
Let me know who you get!
And once, you’re done, don’t forget to enter the giveaway for the Static bundle for a free copy of White Noise and Static!
It’s that time of year again! A little later than usual, but it’s time for another poll to decide what I’ll be writing in November. for NaNoWriMo! You know the rules, up to three votes for whichever one you want me to write and, on October 25th, I will know what book I’m writing! ((Happy birthday to me!)) Without further ado, let’s get to the options!
Cloned Evil: New Beginnings
Fredrika and Beatrice know their mother is in prison and they need to get her out, but this is getting tiresome. Now that they’re in their twenties, both sisters think it’s time for them to move on with their lives, and their mother is now out of the way and unable to stop them from forging their own villainous path in the world their own way.
Thornbrooke
It seemed like perfect timing. Bree was accepted into an accelerated program to accomplish her dreams of becoming a doctor, and her mother took a long standing offer to relocate to Iverson. Though they are both hoping for the best, the city is a hotspot for superhero activity, and it’s very hard not to get caught up in it all. Making it even harder for Bree is the parting gift from her friends: A secret identity of her own.
Looking Glass Saga: Lovely Pale Colors ((Book 8!))
Alice and Peter are showing signs of wear as another force has decided to take control over Wonderland and Neverland, blending them together and taking down the barriers between the worlds.
Dreamscape: Drifting ((Anyone who’s been following me a while, yep I’m reviving this and turning it into a series))
Ciara hasn’t woken up. She is trapped in this dream, uncertain of whether all these other people around her are part of her dream or not. Strangely, this one girl seems much too happy to have company in her dream and seems to know exactly what’s going on.
Atlantis Project
When the kids escaped into the portal to another world all those years ago, they ruined diplomatic relations with an entire universe. Years later, the one child they managed to get back is charged with finding the rest of his friends and stopping their shenanigans so that they can mend their relationship with the alien race.
You can vote for up to three options!
NaNoWriMo 2018
Total Voters: 61
In honour of Static, the sequel to White Noise, coming out in October, I’m running a contest during the month of September! I’ll be giving away advance copies of the eBooks and the paperbacks. I may add more prizes if we get a lot of people entering. Open internationally, so get your entries in now!
Oh hey, the plot kicked back in! They’re actively doing things to find Glendower again, which is the main thrust of the series! Find the old dead Welsh king and then… something. Have a wish granted, gain is favour, I’m still not actually sure what they think is going to happen or why it will happen when they find the tomb.
This book tries very hard to give Blue an arc outside of being in love with Gansey and it doesn’t quite land for me. It’s a lot of things happening to her to try and give her other things to do. Her mother is missing and it is something that she has to deal with. It could have been an arc but it kept feeling more like something she was reacting to than something she was part of.
And they gave Gansey a magic which no. He was going to be the one non-powered character bringing them together in the quest by his personality and his drive to do all this, but giving him the power to command things as an actual power tosses that out.
Adam and Ronan are fine. Adam is still a dick and being portrayed as not a dick. Ronan realizes he likes Adam in this book but, as he’s a male character, he had his character arc established outside of this relationship and he gets to have his own story that isn’t dependent on the love story and guys I do not care about Blue anymore and it makes me sad.
So let’s talk a little about the plot and structure of the series as a whole. Each of these books could conceivably be about a single character’s arc and how other people interact with that arc to further their own larger narrative. The first being Adam, second Ronan, this one Blue, and fourth will be about Gansey. Of those four book, only one has not been about the hunt for Glendower, which makes the beats of the series a little weird.
If there had been one more book in the series, I think the pacing might have been better. As it is, Blue Lily, Lily Blue feels like it was trying to cram in a lot of setup for the climax. ((And I remember the climax feeling very cluttered, so that doesn’t help)) There were new things introduced, including characters, that don’t really get much time to land properly. Like Henry Cheng and the “Vancouver crowd” which I will go on about in the next book. ((I am Asian. I am from Vancouver. I have thoughts.))
Unfortunately, the pattern of Glendower, something else, Glendower, something else, Glendower couldn’t be maintained because it is only four books. If Noah were a more prominent character instead of being relegated to having as much screentime as an animal sidekick, it could have been a bit better paced as a series, but ultimately this is what we get. Which is fine. I liked it a lot more the first time around, though.
Dream Thieves is the second book in the Raven Cycle and I can see why Aiden ((The person who originally got me to read the series)) likes it so much. It’s all about Ronan, and it’s also a book where the plot and the characters feel like they are actually connected to one another in a substantial way. Mostly because this is a book where Ronan is the plot.
Which means I actually have something to talk about other than structure.
Ronan develops into an interesting character in this one, not only because he has developed magic powers. He gains some depth in the form of his backstory, in the form of how he deals with stress, in the form of how he deals with success. We see what he cares about and what he doesn’t care about. And all of that builds him into a wonderful character that I was happy to follow through the majority of the book, even if he has a questionable choice in crushes.
Weird thing is that I liked Adam a lot more the first time I read this series. Adam played a much larger role in the first book, with his quest out of his abusive home life, but this book left me realizing that he’s a dick. Yes, growing up around abuse makes people process the world differently and he may not be able to relate to people in typical ways, I know. But there’s a constant sense that he sees himself as lesser than the people around him and that makes him better than them that permeates through his perspective. Not to mention that scene between him and Blue, which plays out all too familiarly to any female who had male friends who expected that their friendships meant more than they did.
This is also where I really notice that Blue is the only female voice in the story, really. There’s mention of her being a raging feminist that is only forgivable because they are teenagers and eye rolling in pretty much any other context. There are things that happen to her where I really feel that lack of female peers around her because there were conversations that really should have happened that never happen. Does she really have no one to talk to about boys? Not one? Hell, not even her mother or cousin or one of the other women in the house who could have pointed out any of these things to? At the very least to talk to about what happened with Adam? Or anything else?
The love story kicks in and I do not care you guys. Romance is not my thing. I always feel bad when I stop caring about female characters, but their plots always seem to devolve into something related to romance and Blue is no different. In the first book, she was sort of seeing Adam, but in this book she falls in love and the prophecy that she’ll kiss her true love and he’ll die develops a firm target. Gansey, who we knew would be her true love in the first book, is now someone she has fallen for. And just… I stopped caring about both of them in an instant.
Gansey, though. Let’s have a moment to talk about why he’s so hard for me to sink into despite him still having another plot around him. I don’t know why he wants to find Glendower. He has a lot of reasons. He thinks he’s not dead because of the grace of Glendower. He has an intellectual curiosity about him. He’s got a weird obsession. It’s about the pursuit of him more than what the end goal is, and when there’s no real end goal, I have a lot of trouble hooking into the character’s motivations.
However, this book is in large part about Ronan. And Ronan is fantastic. I know I’m being a little harsh about the rest of the characters, but it overall is a pretty entertaining read.
I read this series before and I’m revisiting it now. I’m realizing that I’ve got different feelings about it this time than I did the first time, which happens. I’m looking at the formatting of the book for one ((And I don’t like it. For the record.)) and paying more attention to the structure and how the series itself is constructed. Which is interesting, loose, and a little on the hybrid pantser/plot side of things.
So the book itself is about Gansey. The back of it claims it’s about Blue, but she is honestly treated as an observer to the series, watching as three out of the four boys go about their lives with an easy out if she ever doesn’t want to deal with it anymore. She has the most interesting setting around her, with her psychic mother and her being a battery for the supernatural rather than having any psychic abilities herself, and she wants to have an experience that will make her feel more like the rest of her family.
Gansey is the centre of it all, but also the least interesting part in the cast of everyone else. He is a rich kid looking for Glendower, an long dead Welsh king that has for some reason been buried somewhere near Henrietta, the town this all takes place in. He and his friends go to Algionby Academy, and the book is less about this story than it is about the individual characters.
Which works well for me, because some of the individual characters are far more interesting than this idea of wake up dead king and he’ll grant you a wish. Ronan is a main focus, though he is never a perspective character, for instance. Whether this is to shroud him in mystery or because he just doesn’t have much to do besides set up how others see him in this book, I’m not sure, but just using this book to establish the resident badass with a cute pet raven and tragic backstory is fine by me.
And then there’s Adam, who really needs a bit of a trigger warning on him. He’s also got a tragic backstory, but you actually get to see it unfold in this book. He’s a poor kid on a scholarship and working many jobs to cover the rest of the cost and comes from an abusive household. You get to see how that unfolds over the course of the book and probably should come with a trigger warning for anyone who may find the scenario familiar.
The main plot running through it turns out to be about the sidekick character, Noah, who is just… there. I love him, but narratively he’s serving as motivation to move the plot forward, and structurally the plot only serves to make the characters interact with one another. It’s not ultimately treated with as much importance as the individual characters and what they are doing.
Which is to say, I still really like the book, but I’m having a lot more fun this time around taking apart the story on a structural level and examining the pieces of it. Bring to decide if it was really meant to be four books for the series, or if it was made that way because of editorial demand. This book is, in large part, just set up for the rest of the series, with more time spent establishing where the characters came from and where they stand as opposed to telling the core story about the kids trying to find the old king. And I’m wondering if that’s because she wanted to make the series as long as she could manage, or if it was actually because that’s how long the story she wanted to tell was.
I don’t think I really liked Blue Magic. It’s not that it was a bad book, but there were just a lot of little things that rubbed me wrong until eventually t all came together into this box. The elements I liked from the first book were less prominent and the ideas I didn’t much care for were expanded upon which is unfortunate.
For instance, there’s the whole thing about fairyland where the vita has frozen everything? That bit I didn’t care about? That is half of the book, or so it seems. Maybe only a third. And there’s characters in it that I just do not care if anything happens to them, good or bad. There’s a man meant to be a romantic rival and I just don’t care at all.
Speaking of, there’s a lot of romance in this book. Astrid is meant to be with a guy and because it’s predestined, there’s a lot of mentions that they will end up together with no actual developing of that relationship. Which I’ve learned tired me even more than romance, and I have talked about how I feel about romance in books.
The story is also very different from what the first book was. Where the first was framed as how the world came to be ruined, this one is meant to be much grander, but there’s more about what’s happening than the actual character motivations and actions that I’m much more interested in. Instead of being in the story, I feel like I’m watching it from a distance and I can’t really make a connection with any of the characters.
Speaking of the characters, there’s a whole bunch of new ones. I hope you like characters that have names and single personality traits because there’s too many of them in one book to let them have full personalities. Someone died and I have no idea which one it wasI. Apparently it was sad, but I only know that there was a camel and he was important, but I don’t know who he was. What he did. Why I should care as a reader. I don’t even know his name.
Everything seems to be done as a means to an end. Astrid is a chess master and socially inept and incapable of really helping herself in a lot of scenarios. It’s an idealized version of what might actually happen, where everyone’s just okay with the powerful woman being in charge with the most minimal argument. And, as contrast, a competent woman being in charge in fairyland, but having an uprising that kills her.
While I do like a lot of the ideas here, I wasn’t really a fan of the execution and it didn’t feel like a sequel to the same book Maybe taken separately this would be fine, but it’s not what I liked about the first. If you want to find out what happens, maybe pick it up from the library.
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the script for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is bad. Like, really bad. And yet, I still flew to New York and saw it on Broadway.
You guys. The show is so good.
The acting really does make the whole thing so much better. A lot of lines that seemed flat or off in the script were delivered so well and made it work so much better than it ever did on paper. The characters come to life and become far less flat, and Scorpius in particular ((was my favourite!)) was so well acted and portrayed. The screaming was a choice that I am totally behind, and his interactions with Albus and the other characters was fantastic.
Even the adults, while I don’t agree with a lot of the script decisions, were well done and I loved the way they were portrayed. They managed to retain enough of their book-selves in the portrayal that it didn’t feel too strange while I was watching.
And the special effects! There were some great magic sections in this show. It wasn’t just the wands lighting up, but the transformations of characters from one to another, to quick changes, to characters appearing from nothing, to that absolutely fantastic time travel effect. The sound and lighting are things I don’t normally think of when I’m watching a performance, but they did such a good job with the whole production.
The thing I expected the least were the dance numbers. No singing, but there was a bit of interesting choreography, and the fact that almost every robe swish was punctuated by this sound effect and, well, I really loved it.
It is a very long show, though. We were up in the nosebleeds, but for about 5 hours of show, $100 is not bad at all. We could see everything, even the pool that appeared on stage for part of the show. Honestly, it was such a good show. If you’re anywhere near Broadway, even if you didn’t much care for the script, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is still a show worth checking out!
I read this book first ages ago when I met the author at a conference. I could talk about my experience with her, but this is a book review and that is therefore irrelevant. She was smart, nice, and endlessly interested in the craft, though.
Indigo Springs is about Astrid Lethewood and finding out the legacy that her father left behind that she’s since forgotten. There’s blue magical water, vitagua, that she can use to enchant items that will produce a single spell, and a whole world of this water frozen in ice behind the chimney of her father’s house that she has now inherited. The blue water is melting and she and her roommates are all caught up in the mess that this creates.
I like the ideas in the book quite a bit. While there is a feeling of danger that there’s some outside force that may come after them if the knowledge of the magic gets out, that works more to keep the narrative contained to the characters and how they interact with the magic. In the end, it’s much more about how Saraha, Astrid’s best friend, manipulates the people around her for her own ends and how Astrid really doesn’t have enough of a backbone to stop her before it’s much too late.
There’s also a lot of interesting queer content. Astrid’s bisexuality is portrayed matter of factly, with mentioned of an ex-girlfriend that she lived with and how Astrid’s hesitation to stopping Sahara is rooted in large part in the fact that she has feelings for her.
And, of course, in how she chooses Jacks, her other roommate, in the end because he will actually love her back.
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I am not sure if I wanted more or less of Astrid struggling to understand her mother coming out as a transman, especially since there wasn’t much of a coming out so much as it just was at one point. The conflict all seemed to happen before that coming out point, and vanished after, and I’m not sure how I feel about it.
The climax also felt really messy. There was a big emphasis on the fairy world that felt like it could have been cut, but it might have just been because I am not interested in the fairy world whatsoever. The big bad that showed up felt like a plot device so that there could be a climax, since he was mentioned only in passing before this point, but he had no real character or build up. There was no real fear or tension, and I feel like instead they could have made it Jacks’ father instead of some guy melted from the vitagua ice who came in to try and murder everyone at the end. It just felt bloated and unnecessary.
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Overall, it’s pretty interesting and I do recommend at least checking it out. The way they treat magic as more of a chemical spill and how they deal with the switch from modern present to flashback with the tense switch is interesting to see, if nothing else, though there is plenty else to like about it.
On to reading Blue Magic!