Words have meanings, and they matter

 So.

Bit of a rant here.

I'm still slogging my way through the novel I started in June, the one that promised me a lesbian love story in and around the epic fantasy novel.

And it's clear that yes, eventually there will be romance between the two female leads.

Though given the number 1 on the spine of the novel (which I somehow didn't notice until I was over 100 pages into the book) it may not get very far into said romance until a later book in the series.  (If so, I guess I'll miss out on it, 'cause it is not working out between us.)

This morning, I got to a passage exposing a secret of the sinister woman who (without specifically meaning to but also without caring in the least) ruined the girls' young lives.  Said woman always wears gloves, and did at one point move to take them off in a threatening way, but events prevented her from doing so.  Well, she finally took one off, and of course exposed a hand that was not human.

Well, duh.

But the way that hand is described?

In the paragraph where she takes the glove off, it's described as being "amphibious."

On the next page, it's described as "reptilian."

Those are two, completely different, mutually exclusive adjectives!!!

ARGH!!!!!!!

{pant, pant}

Okay, sorry.

I'm calm now.

But that really gets to me, because they're both powerfully evocative words, and they call up wildly different images!

Amphibious:  soft, smooth, moist, possibly slimy, porous, and without any kind of claws or nails.

Reptilian:  hard, scaly, dry (usually), typically with claws.

But this book wants it both ways.  How?!  How could that ever be possible?!?

Since the initial description says the hand has razor-sharp "talons" (which are a bird thing, not a reptile thing, unless you're talking dinosaurs), I'm guessing that "reptilian" was the word the author actually wanted, but I shouldn't have to guess that!

The editors on this book were really sleeping on the job, and I don't just mean the amphibious/reptilian gaffe.  I mean cases where two words or phrases were used when only one was wanted.  I don't recall where any of the passages were in the 356 pages I've slogged through so far, but I can give a very close approximation.  Things like "She turned to look at the girl young woman and smiled."  So, you know, cases where the author changed their mind about what word to use and forgot to delete the old one...and then somehow no one noticed.  (Goodness knows, I've done that myself, but I'm not a professionally published author!  And I typically notice that kind of mistake before posting something to AO3 or itch.io.)

And that happened more than once, along with other annoying little errors that wouldn't bug me so much if I was actually enjoying the book.

...sigh.

I shouldn't be complaining, of course.

It's a sprawling fantasy with two female leads, both strong in different ways, both determined to control their own lives, etc.  And they're in love with each other, which is great.

It's just...

...well, the prose is a lot.  So much more description than we really need.

Though I think what really soured me on it was when we caught up to one of the girls after their separation and learned that she was actually half-succubus.

I'm sorry, but I don't want a lesbian heroine who sleeps with men to drain them of their energy and turn them into her slaves.  That is just a no-go for me.  (Honestly, I'm not sure I'd want to read about a straight woman who did that, either.  Magical seduction is not cool all around, as it's decidedly borderline on the whole consent issue.)

Okay, I'm done now.

I just needed to vent.

(I won't be identifying the book, obviously, because that's pretty uncool, to post nasty things about a book and thus discourage people from reading it.)

EDIT:  I did eventually finish reading the novel.  And, as I had feared, the two heroines didn't get much more than a few kisses before they were separated again, and they were still separated at the end of the book.  But one of the final scenes.  OMG, talk about the editor falling down on the job!  One of those scenes literally referred to one of the heroines by the other heroine's name.  Seriously.  Any good will the last 75ish pages had given me (as the story finally started, you know, going somewhere) was blasted to smithereens with that one.

IWSG - no idea for a title this month

 

    My heart thing is still stopping me from working on any of my original projects (had a massive flare-up due to writing out the idea for a no-pressure, not-jam-related game!) so I don't have much to talk about in my own writing life right now, so I guess I'll be answering the monthly question instead.  (Though I will be seeing my doctor again next week, and I'm hopeful that my friend was right and menopause might be playing a role in it.  That would both give a direction for treatment and guarantee that the problem would eventually go away on its own.  Also it would mean not dealing with being tested for sleep apnea.)

    Anyway!

July 5 question - 99% of my story ideas come from dreams. Where do yours predominantly come from?

    Most of my story ideas come from things I encounter in my daily life...though that includes things I "encounter" by reading about them, seeing them on TV, etc.  Sometimes that's a pretty straightforward process (I do end up writing a lot of fanfiction, after all, so there's a lot of "what if the hero's parents didn't die?" or "what if the characters from this show met the ones from that movie?" type of things), while sometimes it's also more of a train of thought bouncing around off of something I've seen until it's something new.

    I'm trying to remember a good example, but...that's the sort of thing that--oh, no, I have one!

    So, there's this game called Persona 5 Strikers in English.  (Its Japanese title is slightly less stupid, maybe, if you squint.)  The plot of the game is way too much to explain, but it involves a group of teenagers (and one cop after a while) literally entering someone's mental landscape to find out why it's gone screwy and to alter it so that they'll stop doing terrible, slightly supernatural things to others.  (Not a very good description of the story, but...)  In one case, they've entered the mind of a guy who wrote a really awful, exceedingly generic fantasy novel, which has become a massive bestseller because he's essentially magically brainwashed thousands of readers.  In order to defeat his mental image of himself (it almost makes sense in context) they have to get into the Demon Lord's castle from his novel.  The only one of them who actually read the novel explains that if it works the same way as the castle in the novel, then they'll have to go to all these other places and do these other things to open the way in.  One of the others in the party asks why the Demon Lord wouldn't just have a door that can't open so the hero trying to kill him can't get in.

    My immediate response to that character was "well, he must be into the hero, obviously!"

    That, uh, was not the explanation in the game.  But it set my mind in motion with "what would that be like, if the demon lord allowed the hero out to get him into his castle because he wanted to bang said hero?"

    That led me to write a rather questionable visual novel wherein the player is the Demon Lord who decides that the Hero looking to kill him is very handsome and totally his type, so he allows him into his castle and revives him every time he gets killed by the assorted minions so that eventually the Hero will fight his way up to the top floor of the castle and the Demon Lord can have his way with him. 😅

    This, um, is not typical of my writing.  But it was fun to write something so different from my usual fare.

    And more importantly, hopefully that illustrated the way I derived a more-or-less original story idea from something else.

    (Not gonna share the link to the game, 'cause it's exceedingly embarrassing, as it's technically NSFW because the descriptions of some of the hero's many deaths are fairly sexualized. 😰  I was so embarrassed by it that it took me three days to post it after I finished the game.  (Humiliatingly, it's by far the most popular thing I've posted to my itch.io account.))

Pride Month '23 Reading Recap

     (Or something.)

    Actually, my reading over the month of June was been pretty light, in part because I've spent a lot of time writing, which cuts into the reading time, ya know?  Anyway, I did get to some Pride-appropriate reading, so I'll just sum that up because...well, because it gives me something to write a post about. 🤣

    So, this barely counts, but on the first of the month I was still reading Heaven Official's Blessing, volume 6...barely.  Which is to say that I started reading it after lunch on May 31st and finished reading it after lunch on June 1st, so... 😅  As it's volume 6 out of 8, we're far enough in the novel that the love between the leads has become text instead of just very obvious subtext (as in MXTX's other novels, the love interest is in love first, devotedly/obsessively, and we're not really privy to his thoughts, just those of the protagonist, who is much slower to realize his own feelings), and I think the romantic arc is improved over her previous novels.  Without going into spoilers, the short way to put it is that in her first novel, The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System, the protagonist never really seems to return the love interest's affections properly, just to submit to them out of a more sedate and non-romantic type of affection (and/or fear that the love interest will go yandere and murder him if he doesn't).  In the second novel, Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (currently my fav of them, and likely to remain my fav unless the last two volumes of Heaven Official's Blessing are really stupendous), that the hero returns his love interest's affections is undeniable...but he also goes from "wait, do I have those kinds of feelings for him?" to "I'm gonna marry him" in about twenty-four hours.  (Maybe forty-eight, but not more than that.)  So, like, the trajectory is fine and believable, but the speed of travel is absurd. 😅  As of the end of volume 6 of Heaven Official's Blessing (or really its halfway point, because the second half of the volume was a flashback to events 800 years earlier rather than tell us how the protagonist was going to get out of his current danger 😭), the arc and speed of the protagonist going from oblivious to in love feels much more normal to me as a reader.  (Others may feel differently; dunno.)  Anyway, danmei is sort of sketchy as Pride Month reading since it's gay (male) romance mostly written by women for women.  (At least, MXTX is a woman. I don't know about the authors of the other danmei novels Seven Seas is translating.  But I do know that danmei, like BL, has that reputation in general.)

    I'm not sure how much better the rest of my Pride Month reading is, though.  😰  (The fact that most of it is manga doesn't help...)

    Or actually not all manga, because there's a volume of...uh...what was the Korean word?  Manwha?  Hmm, actually, according to the front of the volume, it started out as a webtoon.  Which kind makes sense, actually, in that it's very unlike a lot of what I'm used to seeing in m/m romantic material from East Asia, so if it didn't have to fit in with a publisher's notions of what sells, that would be why.  Anyway, it's called On or Off, by A1, and it starts--much to my surprise--with the prelude to a sex scene, in which our young protagonist, Ahn Yiyoung, seems to be a somewhat unwilling participant.  So it makes you think it's the usual "passive young straight guy seduced/coerced by handsome older/larger man and then somehow assuming that means he's in love" and you start getting worried, yeah?  But then it goes into a flashback of how he got there, and you learn two very crucial details:  our young lead was gay to begin with, and what's making him uncomfortable about the scene is that it's basically a very sketchy add-on to a business deal that went sour.  So it's not that he doesn't want to sleep with the guy (in fact, his first reaction to seeing him was to try to ask him out!) it's that he doesn't feel right about doing so in that context.  Even better, in the explicit sex scene that follows the flashback, it very carefully shows the use of both condom and lubricant, something that I've seen left out all too frequently.  (Especially the lubricant.  The frequently seen "self-lubing asses" are kind of a meme among Western readers...)  And it's not sex = love, because afterwards things are really sour between them for various very logical reasons regarding how they ended up doing it in the first place, so the rest of the first volume is them sort of going from "what a creep he is" to "wait maybe he's not quite so bad?" and I presume the rest of the volumes (I was in the bookstore yesterday and saw volume 4 on the new release table) are moving from "he's not so bad" to some form of love or at least romance.  🤷  I'm not sure if I'll be buying the rest of the volumes, given the business context isn't enormously of interest to me (honestly, I'm sorta surprised I bought even the first volume) and my shelf space is limited these days.  (Or more accurately, my shelves are all full and I now have towering stacks of books leaning against the walls in various places because I need a house three times the size of the one I've got, but where the heck would I get the money for that?)  I did feel like the character motivations and actions were much more realistic than a lot of what you sometimes see in these things, though, so I still might check out the rest.

    Next, actual manga, three volumes of Catch These Hands! by murata.  This one is very sweet and also pretty funny.  A twenty-something former girl delinquent is trying to shake her old tough-girl image, and in going to the store to try to buy some more normal clothes, she runs into her former rival from another school.  The rival gives her a business card on the way out with a time and place for a meeting, and when they meet up there, she challenges her to a fight, on the condition that if our former-delinquent loses to her rival, then she has to date her!  (And, obviously, she does lose, because otherwise there would be no story.)  Which, again, sounds like a set-up ripe for awful things happening, but the rival is actually the sweetest and is determined to give them a nice, happy, normal relationship despite the weird way it started, and of course our protagonist cannot understand why her ex-rival suddenly wants to date her...though by volume three the feelings were starting to be mutual, if not fully acknowledged/understood.  I'm actively looking forward to reading more of this one.

    Finally, two things I haven't finished.  One is the only novel on my Pride Month reading for this year, but...well, it's really long and glacially slow (so far), so I've been having trouble getting into it.  Also, the back of the book promised me a romance between the two girls it describes on the back, but so far it has not delivered.  (The fact that it started out when one of them was a literal infant and she's now only eighteen (by page 186!) is not helping.)  If it ends up delivering on that lesbian romance after all and it seems worthwhile, I'll post about it after I finish reading it.  (Not sure when that'll be, though, considering it has only periodically managed to grab me in that first 186 pages.  But I have to finish it by September at the latest, 'cause that's when the next volume of Heaven Official's Blessing comes out, and I need to know how Xie Lian is gonna get out of that situation!)

    Second unfinished thing is actually a bound fanzine for all three of MXTX's novels, but I didn't want to look at the part for Heaven Official's Blessing since I can't finish reading it until the final volume is published in English.  Anyway, the artist is credited on the zine as Bones, and their Etsy shop is here.  (I'd link to the bound zine, but it's sold out.  There's a pdf version, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's another print run, considering the one I bought was already at least the second run.)  The part I could look at was good. 😆  I loved that the Scum Villain section focused more heavily on the side pairing of Mobei-jun and Shang Qinghua rather than the two leads of that novel, since I never really felt "sold" on the novel's main pairing. 😅

    So, yeah, I didn't really do much for Pride Month, I guess. 😰  I'd say "but I was working on a fanfic for a gay romance novel"...only the main pairing for the fanfic is actually straight. 😱  (In my own defense, I must point out that the novel's main pairing--Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian--is still in the fanfic and has actually so far gotten more attention than the fanfic's main pairing, because I'm much more into the two of them as a couple than trying to follow the drama's unachieved pairing of Jiang Cheng with Wen Qing.  (I can't help it; when I started planning the fic, the only way I could see to have Jiang Cheng be the fic's lead and not have Wen Qing end up dead was to use the drama's version where he's got a crush on her!))  On the other hand, I've supported various fan works that are appropriate for Pride Month?  I've ordered two MDZS zines that just haven't arrived yet, and I bought several pins for lesbian relationships (although actually I bought those yesterday so technically Pride Month was already over, but I can't help that it took me that long to find a good Lumity or Korrasami pin! (or that it took me that long to even look for Enid/Wednesday (is there a ship name for them?) stuff on Etsy))

    Gah, that paragraph died in a cluster of parentheses.

    Rest in peace, paragraph.

    ...

    Okay, I think my brain may have given up the ghost.

    I'ma go now.

    Oh!  Wait!

    There was one other thing I wanted to say!

    I was pretty excited at the bookstore yesterday, because the whole table that particular Barnes & Noble dedicates to MXTX's novels (I'm assuming an important staffer there is a fan, 'cause neither of the other locations around here do that) also had a Blu-ray copy of the animated show of Heaven Official's Blessing!  I picked it up immediately, not so much because I felt like I needed it (it only covers the first volume of the novel, so it just sorta stops at the end of the arc rather than coming to any true conclusion) but because I wanted to encourage the release of more of the danmei adaptations on physical media in the US.  (Specifically, I want a well-translated release of The Untamed, the live-action drama version of Mo Dao Zu Shi/Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, because while deeply flawed as an adaptation, it's still got a lot going for it.  Especially the gorgeous cast.  But also it captured most of the characters really well, and helps to flesh out a sense of what that world is like; you get to see things like how the locals who set up stalls outside the hero's childhood home react to him and his adoptive brother, stuff like that.  Just little details that would bog down a novel, but that help it feel lived-in as a world.  Also the set designs, locations and costumes are all gorgeous.  (Well, except the Wen Clan's home base, which was too much "here's the evil lair of the baddies!" and not enough "here's the home of a powerful group of actual human beings.")

    Anyway, so, yeah, if anyone actually reads this post (chances are against it, I realize) and is into any of this stuff, please support the release of the Heaven Official's Blessing show so the corporate types who make the decisions will get it through their skulls that there's a market for these shows in well-translated official releases.