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.  😅