Reading Record 3

 Finished reading another book.

Lady Tan's Circle of Women by Lisa See.  It was an impulse buy after seeing it on a table full of historical novels at the bookstore.  (Thematically, the other books I was buying at the time were at least one volume of danmei (Chinese gay romance web novels) and a volume of The Apothecary Diaries light novel.  Also a volume of manga, but I don't recall which one.)  However, the book sat on my "to-read" shelf for quite a long time (about a year, probably?) because on retrospect it seemed a bit heavy; I tend to prefer lighter, more escapist reading.

And yeah, heavy is a good word for it.  (And I felt like there ought to have been some kind of warning before we got thrown into the deep end in the first chapter, with the lead's mother dying from a foot-binding-related infection!)

Anyway, the novel is a heavily-researched fiction invented to give a life story to Tan Yunxian, a female doctor in the early Ming Dynasty, who wrote a book about some of the cases she had treated.  All that is actually known about the real person is what she wrote in her book, plus a few names and dates supplied by commentary and introductions to later editions, mostly coming from her brother's descendants.  (And the author of this novel was very up-front about admitting how little is known of the real person in the acknowledgements section of the book.)

The story given to her life in the novel was rather more melodramatic than I typically prefer, to be honest.  This was not, it turns out, the kind of book I normally read.  Especially since the heroine was being oppressed by some of the worst of the institutionalized misogyny that imperial China had to offer, which makes for an intensely frustrating read.  To me, anyway.  Others may react differently.  (It did really highlight just how much the xianxia/wuxia settings of the danmei novels I enjoy so much have bent the setting (or picked eras in which Confucianism hadn't yet so thoroughly ground women into the mud) to reduce the amount of misogyny that their female characters have to suffer under.  (And keep in mind that female characters in danmei novels frequently end up dead!  In MDZS, for example, two strong female characters sacrifice their lives to save the hero, and three more die fighting off an invasion that used his actions as a pretense at justification (they weren't so much protecting the hero as protecting the household's young master, but still!) and...yeah, survival rate for female characters in that novel is astonishingly low.)

Anyway.

What was I saying...?

Hmm.  Nope.  Totally lost my train of thought.

Oh well.

Anyway, luckily I have a nice, light book of folklore to follow this up with.

It will hopefully be a soothing balm.

Reading Record DNF

 Since I'm keeping track now, I'll also record things I dropped.

Which may sound awful or something, but...I couldn't keep going.

I won't name the book/author, since that would be like publicly shaming them, but I will say that it's something that had been sitting on my shelf waiting for me to read it for years.  And that it was something I had backed on Kickstarter back in the days when I was far less cynical than I am now.  😰

The plot and setting seemed interesting, though their Victorian England didn't entirely feel properly Victorian.  Not that there were many direct anachronisms; it was more the tone, the sense, of the setting that felt too modern.

That's not why I decided to give up on it, though.  It was all the problems that a professional editor would have fixed.

When it was just the rather samey sentence structure, the overly dense description of fairly minute physical details surrounding the lead (while not describing his emotional reactions all that strongly), some missing commas, and the occasional missing indentation at the start of a paragraph, that was livable.  Nothing worth quitting a book over.

Then I got further in, and reached conversations, especially ones between multiple people...

Five or six lines of dialog, from three or four different characters...

...all in the same paragraph.

Not just once, either.

It happened repeatedly.

It was like the author thought paragraphs had to be a certain length to be allowed to exist.

Reading it was frankly excruciating.  I just couldn't keep going.

I know that is a risk you run when you read something self-published, but...ugh.  Clearly, I've been spoiled by the Eternal Library series, which are well-written and edited despite being Kickstarted.

Anyway, I am gonna switch now to something that was actually published by an actual publisher and sold in bookstores.  There should be no way it will have any of the problems this other thing had!

Reading Record 2

     So, I finished reading something else today.

    The something else in question being Lady Molly of Scotland Yard by Baroness Orczy.  (The author of The Scarlet Pimpernel.)

    It's a book of short stories, though, so I've been reading it on and off in between other books since, like, March, I think?  (In book club, after we read The Seven Dials Mystery, we were all talking about how public domain mystery novels might make good choices to adapt into visual novels, so I went out looking for ones that I could see if I wanted to adapt them.  And I thought a short story collection by a woman and featuring a female detective might be a good idea, but...)

    In short, what I can say about this book is:  avoid.

    Excessive classism at every turn, combined with racism, internalized misogyny, and that bizarre phenomenon you encounter in some older works where perceived "national character" is treated with racism-like prejudice.  (It might be called "pseudo-racism," perhaps?  I've heard the term,  but never been quite sure what it referred to, precisely.)  Admittedly, I expected a certain amount of classism going in, what with the author being a baroness and all, but I hadn't expected it to be as egregious as it was:  people of lower classes were invariably described as filthy, stupid, lazy or some combination of the three, sometimes presenting those characteristics as a purposeful repudiation of propriety.

    On top of all that, in the final story, which I can only assume was being serialized slowly and the author failing to check back on what she had already written, the title character was being romantically pursued by her own half-brother.  Neither she nor the narrator (her former maid and now best friend, who always described Lady Molly as "the woman I love best" and yet it was hard to interpret it as anything sapphic that might have salvaged the work) seemed to recall that this dude's mother was the same woman who was Lady Molly's mother.  Made my skin crawl.  Though the whole book did that already, of course.

    All in all, it was like a full course on how not to write.  (The mysteries weren't even very good!  Lady Molly either jumped to conclusions based on intuition alone, or came to logical conclusions based on large amounts of information not presented to the reader.  And in one case the police were literally incompetent:  they failed to ask such basic information of the witnesses as the height and body type of the killer they had seen!  Additionally, multiple cases were described as among the most "dastardly" ever seen, when the victim was merely poisoned or bludgeoned.  It's like, "lady, have you forgotten about Jack the Ripper?"  How can you call a simple murder "the most dastardly" when there was a guy who was slicing women to pieces in alleyways?  (And these stories were written around 1901-1904, so it's not like there's any chronological excuse!))

    Honestly, I think I only finished reading it because I kept hoping that it would get better.  Only to have it get worse instead.

IWSG: I want to make a "May" pun but I can't think of a good one

 

    Yet another post without a decent title.  :<

    Well.  Anyway.  I don't have anything to say about this month's suggested question, so...

    Hmm.

    I have to admit that I kind of feel like I'm spinning my wheels a bit lately.  My "top priority" is still supposed to be the Atalanta and Ariadne series, since I've been working on getting it released since 2021.  (And I wrote the first drafts of all seven novels back in 2014!)  But that is sort of...both frustrating and slow?

    I'm currently working on the next draft of book four, but as soon as I finish it, I have to go back in and fix up book two.  I did, at least, get version 2.0 of the first book released during the past month!  That was a big milestone, as I made some epic upgrades to the text, as well as changing the engine the interactive version was released in.  Ooh, actually, I can share a sample of the upgraded text!  Here's the old version, as released in TWINE:

(Comparison is just the two paragraphs from "The interior of the cave" onward.)

    And here's the new version, which is in Ren'py:

    Not all of the text was changed that radically, but...yeah, it was a pretty drastic change.  I don't know if the second and third books will get that much alteration (and they won't get more than a text change in the interactive versions, since they're already in Ren'py), but...I still want to get those changes made.  In between working on drafts of book four.  It's exciting to be able to point to something like this and be like "my style has improved so much in the past five years!" but it's also depressing to think I released something that badly written, plus the new version is still only mid at best, and it's generally a draining process having to do this.  So...yeah, it leaves me in a weird place mentally, I guess?

    In other news(?), in between releasing version 2.0 of the first book and getting to work on the next draft of book four, I told myself I could have one fun little fanfic project.  All my standing ideas for fanfics were guaranteed to be long, though, so I had to come up with a new one that I hoped would be short.  (It ended up being somewhere in the neighborhood of 45k, so...not really short, but at least it's well under 100k?)  I wanted to experiment to see if I was capable of writing a murder mystery, since I've read a few of them lately.  (I joined a Discord book club, and the first book we read was The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie (and then during the book club meeting, people who had looked into it talked about just how garbage the Netflix adaptation was, including changing who the killer was!), and on learning that the heroine, Bundle, had been introduced in an earlier book, I hunted up a copy of it and read that, too!)

    So, I ended up trying my hand at a murder mystery fanfic.  Naturally using the cast of Mo Dao Zu Shi (Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, aka The Untamed in its live-action adaptation)) for the story, because I've been obsessed for years now.  😅  (Ugh, these Windows 11 emoji are so ugly! 😭  Eew, especially that one...)

    Anyway, it's not really much of a murder mystery, I fear.  Especially not for anyone who knows the fandom, because there's pretty much only three possible suspects, since most of the cast would never commit a murder unless they're acting direly out of character.  But I think my story's biggest problem as a murder mystery is that everyone the investigating character talks to is being honest.  Usually, suspects lie even when they're not the murderer.  (Don't they?)  But again, that's partially a limitation of the fanfic situation, since most of those characters are typically honest.  I did, at least, manage to get a lot of inconsistencies between different characters describing the same events, since their perspectives are different and their opinions alter how they think of things, but...

    Well, for a first attempt, it's at least decent?  I'll certainly be posting it on AO3 eventually (there's a lot of other fics waiting their turn to be edited and released first, though, so it'll take a while), in any case.

    Sometime, I'd like to write a more proper mystery, though.  (Maybe not a murder one?)  Either something original (in which case it'd probably be a visual novel) or something with a fandom that's a little more flexible so there would actually be some genuine mystery to it.  (Because really, "was it Jin Guangyao, Su Minshan or Xue Yang who murdered Jin Zixun?" is not much of a mystery...though I guess not making Su Minshan the killer would at least surprise people a little?)

    ...hmm.

    Disjointed as always.

    *sigh*

    Maybe I can chalk that up to the pain-killers I'm on because of the dental surgery I went through a few days ago.  (My cheek is still swollen, and it hurts to touch it!  It sucks so bad!)

Reading Record 1

 I've decided to start using my blog to keep a record of what I read.  Not to review the books--though I'll probably make comments and leave notes--but just to keep track of them.

Why?

Well, because?  I guess?

See, I recently joined a book club on Discord.  (Uh...depending on your definition of "recently"...the meeting we just had this weekend was the third monthly meeting...)  I seem to recall that one of the reasons behind it was that the person organizing it wanted to ensure that they actually managed to read twelve books a year.  I've seen people in other Discord servers say that they had aimed for that number and failed.

My mind frankly boggled at the idea of reading so few books in the space of an entire year.  I am, in fact, fairly certain that I've read more than that already this year.  (Depending on how you define "a book," something I'll get into in a minute.) But I also find myself somewhat challenged in terms of perception of time.  I have trouble pinning down exactly when I read something.

In fact, that time perception issue is the larger part of why I decided to start writing things down.  See, I skipped the second month of the book club because it was a horror book and I am easily frightened.  Before this weekend's meeting, I was wondering if I would have people asking me if/what I read in that interim.  (No one asked, as it turned out.)  But as I tried to go over what books I had definitely read in the last two months...I wasn't sure which books I had read recently were before those two months and which were during it.

Thus, I thought a reading journal, as it were, was a good idea.  Nothing elaborate, of course, just a light aid to my inability to parse time properly.  Starting on January 1st would make more sense, but if I waited that long, I might forget all about it!

So, starting now.  At least it's a book I started reading on May 1st, so it's a clean monthly start...?  (Though I only read one chapter on May 1st, then realized I didn't remember what was going on, and the next day I spent a while rereading the last three or four chapters of the previous volume.)  I haven't had a lot of time for reading over the last few days, hence the absurdly slow reading speed on this book that I should have finished in two days, three max.

Anyway.

The book I finished reading today was The Legend of Exorcism, volume 5, by Fei Tian Ye Xiang.

Now, this of course brings up the question of "how do we define 'a book'?"  Because this is only volume five out of eight.  The eight volumes together comprise the full text of the novel.  That being said, this volume is a full 413 pages long (admittedly, in a moderately large font).  And Chinese Web novels are rather (in)famous for their great length, so...

I dunno.  Is it wrong to consider it a "book" I have read when it's only 1/8th of the full work?  Or is it right to do so, when it's fully as long as a regular novel?

Fortunately, this isn't something that requires a definite answer, since I'm not doing this for any reason but to bolster my weakening memory, but it's still sort of gnh that I don't know how I personally take this.

Anyway, I don't have much to say about the book itself (since the story is far from over!) except that I kinda feel like I peeked at the ending:  in between the previous volume and this one, I read (most of) a book on Chinese history that told me what was about to happen to the historical characters (of which there are many, including the emperor).  On the one hand, that told me before I resumed reading a certain amount of what was going to happen...on the other hand, the author expected his readers to have that knowledge going into the novel in the first place!  (Having knowledge of the history involved is why I opted not to read his non-fantasy, purely historical romance set during the early days of the Three Kingdoms period, because of what I know about the two leads (and how that guarantees a tragic ending to the novel) ...)  There was a special author's note at the start of the first volume (that was specifically added for the English translation) to give at least an indication that the empire was about to be thrust into turmoil, but it wasn't as fully detailed as what I read in the history book.  (Reading an historical account involving people whose names I'm used to seeing attached to fictional(ized) characters was pretty surreal, though!  🤣)

Anyway, that's about all I have to say, I guess.  I'm not sure what to start reading next.  I picked up a sapphic romance sequel (of sorts?) to Pride and Prejudice at the same time that I bought this, but maybe I ought to save it for June?  Ditto the new Eternal Library book, which has been waiting for me to read it for a while now...  (I suppose I could reread Pride and Prejudice, if I could pick which copy to read...)

Welp, I'll worry about all that later.

Right now, I need to make my lunch.  😅

IWSG Last Minute Post

    I normally pre-write these up to a week in advance, but for some reason I thought tomorrow was Wednesday?

🤷🏻‍♀️

Anyway.  Thankfully I can for once lean on the monthly question...

April 1 question - If you have a playlist (or could put one together) that either gets you in the groove to write or fits with one of your books, what is it? What type of music or what songs? 

Well, I sort of can lean on it.  I don't have any playlists that fit what I write (unless I'm working on a fanfic and listen to the soundtrack of whatever it's a fanfic of), but I do have a lot of playlists I listen to while I write.

They're pretty much all soundtracks, though.  Mostly video game soundtracks, with a few anime soundtracks as well.  Lately I've been listening to various Shin Megami Tensei (and spin-off) soundtracks, in part because I haven't put as much of my music collection on the computer I now use to write.  I ought to put more Final Fantasy soundtracks on there, since this is an anniversary year for the series.  (I do have to be careful about some game soundtracks, because sometimes listening to them makes me want to replay the game, and I don't have time to drop everything and play a 40-80 hour RPG just because the music puts a hanker in me.  😅)

The main thing is that since they're usually not vocals (and if there are vocals, they're typically not in a language I speak) they don't distract me from my writing.  (I remember one time, many years ago, since I was starting work on a book set in the '80s, I made a playlist of all my '80s music...and I spent more time singing along than writing.  😭  Not gonna make that mistake again!)

IWSG: March '26

    Another winner of a post title.  😅

I just can't title things, evidently.  Been struggling with that a lot lately, actually.

Anyway, I'm still in a phase that's heavier on editing than writing, sadly, which doesn't leave me with much to say...

...except at least to be able to crow that I have finally finished the rewrite of book four of my Greek mythology series!  Well, the heavy-duty rewrite of the 2014 draft, that is.  I've been working on the rewrite (more a restructuring, really) for almost a year at this point, so being done with it is exciting!

Except...

Except that as I was preparing for it, I had to reread the first three to take notes on various particulars and details...and I saw so much wrong with them.  So now I'm mired in trying to fix them.  About halfway through book one now.

I realize that's a potentially endless cycle of perpetual rewrites, but hopefully this time I'll actually be getting the first three books into a properly acceptable state.

Hopefully.

Or at least less cringe-inducing, anyway.

(Book one especially needed it, because for its interactive version, I used TWINE instead of Ren'py, which means that the text is smaller, and the way I messed around with various settings to increase the amount of the screen that held the text had somehow disabled the ability to go back...which is especially agonizing considering that in the interactive version of book one I had for some reason thought it would be a good idea to insert all these choices where you could see one scene or another but not both, even though the reader of the plain text version of course gets both.  (Spoiler:  it was not a good idea.  Not at all.)  So the updated interactive version is going to be in Ren'py same as the others, and it will have properly working rollback and absolutely no evil "you can only see one of the scenes ha ha ha!" choices.  Also the text should be bigger, which will hopefully make it easier to read.  And the glossary will be better.  Also the horrifically-bad, exceedingly-boring, unnecessary backstory-dump that took up four or five massive paragraphs at the start of the prologue is now gone, and good riddance to it!)