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
Loading …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!
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 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.
Spoiler
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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.
Spoiler
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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!
The Welcoming Committee was a success. New students continued to pour into Larkdale Secondary every week, now all able to easily find their classes, join the clubs they wanted to, and had a support system in case they needed anything. And they nearly stopped getting killed by the city. Nearly.
Many of them were restless, unable to even speak freely outside of the club room, and new transfers came with new ideas about how to deal with the problem of Whitten. With Matt still not recovered from last semester, Indira is hesitant to try anything, but she knows that it’s only a matter of time before one of them decides enough is enough and when they do, they will be killed by the Speckled City.
Thank you to everyone who voted in the novel poll this year! The race was close this year, but the victory by a single vote goes to Genetically Impaired!
And while I have you, City Without Heroes is out now!
Whitten was just what Indira hoped for. It was a city that had banned heroes and villains, which meant no more rebuilding her home after a disaster, no more texts from her mother about how her father had been kidnapped, and no more worrying that she might be forced to become a hero herself one day.
Indira soon finds out that the city holds a dangerous secret. Keeping superheroes and supervillains out of the city comes at a cost and, if she isn’t careful, she may disappear with the others.
It’s that time again, folks! As every year, I’m running a poll to decide what book I’m going to be writing for NaNoWriMo this year. I ended up writing a couple of the options for last year over the course of 2017, so there’s a few new options for this year to check out.
You may choose up to two book options. Poll closes midnight on October 24th, so get voting!
Looking Glass Saga: Beauty Sleep
With the end of middle school approaching, Alice is getting ready to deal with her bet with the Bandersnatch. She’s done everything she can, but when her roommate, Adrianna, falls into a deep sleep and no one can wake her up, Alice has to put the bet aside. She hopes the answer to waking her up lies somewhere in Wonderland, but time is running out and if she doesn’t find it Adrianna may never wake up.
Cloned Evil: First Steps
Fredrika and Beatrice know their mother is in prison and they need to get her out, but Auntie Jezebel insists that they are too young. They haven’t even been alive a year yet, and there is still too much they have to learn. If they are very good and finish all their studies, however, she might let them join her in the breakout. Unfortunately, Auntie Jezebel is hearing nothing but trouble from the one daycare she could find that would take them.
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.
Genetically Impaired
They were looking for a test subject. It was fortunate that one drove right in and died on their floor. Seeing this as an opportunity, they took it upon themselves to see if they could reanimate the corpse. The young man didn’t have a name, so they called him Damon and decided to keep him, whether he wanted to stay or not. After all, they had many more things they wanted to try with their newly reanimated cadaver.
NaNoWriMo 2017
Total Voters: 66
Loading …Apparently a lot of people in my own region don’t even know this story, so it’s time to gather round to answer one of the questions of NaNoWriMo. What is with Timmy and those fridges?
The short version: It’s my fault.
For those who don’t know, NaNoWriMo has many avenues to connect with people during the month, and one of those is via the IRC Chat rooms. In these chat rooms, there is a bot named Timmy ((His full name is There Are Some Who Call Me Tim, if I’m remembering right)) and the bot was originally created right here in the Vancouver region by a user who… I don’t know if they want to be named. ((If you’re reading this, let me know))
I believe the year was 2012, and I wanted to be ambitious and decided that writing two books in a month was a good idea. I may have gone a touch loopy. It all started at a New West write in about mid-month during a lot of people’s two week slumps. I was just starting book number two and someone was having problems with their book, and I, being the helpful genius that I am, asked if they had tried throwing a fridge at it. This suggestion went over very well and we all ran with it. But I wasn’t done with it.
Two things you should know about me: I am very annoying when I get an idea in my head and I don’t know how to let a joke die. Ever.
This advice continued for the month, to the point where it is now if one of my own books as a recurring plot point throughout the series. ((Different coloured fridges and everything. That’s how you know if a fridge is ripe!)) For the month ((What was left of it)) it was sort of an in joke within Vancouver, and it was added to Timmy so we could continue to throw fridges at each other.
And that is how I ended up making my mark on NaNoWriMo. You’re welcome.