Reading Record 44

 So, yesterday I finished reading The White Cat's Divine Scratching Post, volume three, by Lv Ye Qian He.  (And considering volume two was in the Reading Record 10 post, I think I can forgive myself for any details I forgot in between them!)  Didn't want to post about it yesterday because of IWSG.

Anyway, final volume of the novel.  Did not disappoint.  😁

In the course of my new danmei obsession (if "new" is the right word for something that started in like 2022) I have now read three novels in which the main pairing is between a cultivation master and one of his pupils.  This one was by far the least questionable of the three.  (Unsurprisingly, actually.) For comparison's sake:

The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System:  the protagonist died and was reborn as Shen Qingqiu, a villain in a particularly bad webnovel, which the protagonist had actively been griping about when he died.  (In fact, he basically died of rage at just how badly written Proud Immortal Demon Way was!)  To save himself, he decides to treat the original novel's protagonist, Luo Binghe (a student of Shen Qingqiu's), like a precious pearl, so that he won't want to rip all of Shen Qingqiu's limbs off, like he did originally.  This, of course, proves a little too effective, and Luo Binghe falls in love with him.  The "romance" is definitely the weakest part of the novel, and has a lot of questionable aspects to it, but the teacher-student aspect ranks much lower than some of the other aspects.

The Husky and His White Cat Shizun:  protagonist Mo Ran, having taken over the world, commits suicide and wakes up in his own teenage body, then proceeds to relive his life, and instead of coming to hate his teacher, Chu Wanning, as the ultimate enemy, he falls head over heels in love with him.  (Er, well, that covers at least a little hint of the earlier portions of the plot...this book is crazy long (it ends halfway through volume ten!) and the plot goes all over the place...)  There are so many unsettling aspects of both this book and the primary romance that I couldn't list them all even if they were all things I was willing to talk about on my blog!  Weirdly, the teacher-student aspect of the romance is so tame by comparison that it doesn't even make the top ten.  😰  I saw someone on discord describe this book as "not for the faint-hearted" and they were very right...

The White Cat's Divine Scratching Post:  protagonist Mo Tianliao dies after protecting his precious pet kitten from the forces that are causing his own death, but his spirit doesn't dissipate, and after three hundred years he manages to possess the divine Undying Tree, turning it into a new body for him.  Before he can resume his life, he has to join a cultivation sect to train up a bit...and the teacher he ends up studying under just happens to be his pet kitten, who has cultivated a gorgeous human body over the last three hundred years.  Again, there are some issues with their relationship (mostly the whole "pet kitten" issue), but since their teacher-student relationship was fake to begin with, it really isn't one of those issues at all!  This is, in fact, a pretty sweet and almost innocent novel...(aside from how many of the other cultivators are treating spirit beasts with full human sentience as essentially slaves...which is at least a practice the hero wants to put a stop to...)

So...yeah...why did I just spend so long talking about other books in this post...?

Hmm.

Well.  Anyway.

Uh.  Yeah.

Book was fun.  Will probably read again someday.  😊

Original language:  Chinese

In other news, my November writing challenge numbers for the last two days:

Yesterday's total was 12419

Today's total was 15536

Tuesday's total was 9689, so that means

Yesterday I wrote 2730 words and

Today I wrote 3117 words.

Seems like 2-3k a day has become my new norm?  Not great, but not terrible, either.

IWSG - What is "Good" Writing?

 

 So, lately I've been thinking about what makes a novel (or other work of fiction) "good."  And, by extension, what makes a work fail to be "good."

Thinking about the way works are discussed in various times, places and settings, it seems like maybe there are a variety of criteria one might judge.  Summing up my perception of those criteria...

Prose that is one or more of the following:

• Eloquent
• Clever
• Beautiful
• Entertaining
• Readable
• Erudite
• Etc.

Characters who exhibit one or more of the following:

• Entertaining
• Likable
• Deep
• Realistic
• Possessed of a notable growth across the course of the work
• Exhibiting a lesson to the reader
• Admirable
• Deplorable
• Etc.

A story that is one or more of the following:

• Instructive
• Educated
• Allegorical
• Filled with symbolism
• Possessing natural foreshadowing
• Neither too simple nor too complex
• Making a statement about humanity, the world, history, society, etc.
• Deemed "of value" (whatever that means)
• Etc.

Obviously, even those lists are filled with vagaries, redundancy, repetition and incompatibility.  Which is partially a symptom of the fact that I don't often think about what makes a work approved of as "good" and partially because it's been a very long time since I took a literature course.  😅

Part of the reason I've been thinking about this is because I know that any and all academic criteria would say that Frankenstein is a better book than Dracula (which I read for Halloween) and yet I also know that no matter how many times the choice is put before me to read one of those two books, I would always pick Dracula because it's much more pleasant to read, in addition to being considerably more satisfying as a story.

But by extension of all this, there's the fact that I long ago abandoned any pretense of pursuing the idea of making my own writing "good" by these social standards...and I kind of wonder if that makes me somehow a weakling or quitter or something.  Like, I have never written (and undoubtedly never will) anything I would want to share at a family reunion or tell former classmates about.  Is that a failing on my part, or just a reflection of my innate sense of inner privacy?

Is anyone else ever plagued by these kinds of questions?

November Writing Challenge '26, day 3

 Okay, so today's total is 9689 words.

Yesterday's total was 6673 words.

That means I wrote 3016 words today.

So...more than "on track" for 50k by the end of the month, but a sad showing in comparison to some of my early NaNoWriMo endeavors.  🤷🏻‍♀️

Kind of a pity that I ran out of steam when I did, though; the love interest is about to show up!  (And yet, I just couldn't keep going today, somehow...)

November Writing Challenge '26, day 2

 Today's total is 6673, from a shorter writing window than usual due to life stuff.

Yesterday's total was 3910.

So that means today I wrote 2763 words.

Not great, but not bad.  (So far, I'm having fun with putting an old-school vampire in an ancient China setting...)

November Writing Challenge '26, day 1

 So, trying the whole "write 50,000 words in November" thing again.  Going it on my own, using the blog to keep track.

This time, I'm putting everything I write in one big file for convenience (and then copy-pasting into other files as needed if I write anything on pre-existing works)

Currently counting both planning text and the actual text as I start a new project that is a Dracula-style vampire in ancient China.

Current word count is 3910 (though only 1173 of those are the actual story)

We'll see how this new way of handling the challenge works out, I guess.

Reading Record 43

 I was gonna wait until tomorrow morning to post, but I am not quite tired enough to sleep yet, so...

Finished reading Dracula by Bram Stoker tonight.

Not a lot to say since I've read it three or four times before.  Though it might be fun to someday do as I've heard of others doing and reading it in "real time," which is to say reading each segment on the day it happens.  It would mean reading some bits out of order, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️

Anyway...

Um.

Half an hour to midnight.  I should be trying to sleep, not to write a blog post.  😅

Original language:  English

Reading Record 42

 So, I just finished rereading volume five of Mo Dao Zu Shi (English title Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, which completes the novel!  😁

Naturally, volume five (despite being the longest volume) is the fastest read, because the quite long incense burner bonus story is...uh...well...cursed.  I like the introductory materials for each section--especially the first part, where we get insight into the recurring dreams of the two leads--but as soon as the story gets to its intended 'subject matter' then I skip ahead because...*shudder*...

Anyway.

Hmm.

What else was I gonna say?

Dang.

I am distracted by my impending dentist appointment, I guess.

If I remember what else I wanted to say, I can always add it back in later.

Original language:  Chinese

Reading Record 41

 So, I just finished rereading volume four of Mo Dao Zu Shi (English title Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu.

Ah, volume four.  Some of the best moments--the final and most exciting drunk Lan Wangji episode, especially--and all of the worst--namely, the tragic spiral that ends the flashbacks leading up to the death that started the novel.

But I have now gotten through it and can move on to the final confrontation, the happy ending, and the bonus stories...though of course some of the bonus stories are only half-reads, 'cause some of them contain some of the most cursed sex in all the fiction I've ever read.  😰  (Reminds me why I am so super-glad that MXTX opted not to include any sex scenes in Heaven Official's Blessing!)

Anyway, all that lies ahead in volume five, after which I will have a whiplash moment as I move on to reread Dracula.  😅  But you just gotta respect the classics around Halloween, right?

Original language:  Chinese

Reading Record 40

 Hmm...did my numbering go off at some point?  I could swear I already had 40 pass by earlier... 🤔

Oh well.  Anyway, I just finished rereading volume three of Mo Dao Zu Shi (English title Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu.

This is really taking way too long, but then again I am constantly stopping to take two different sets of notes, so that's probably why...?

I'm trying to think...I feel like there was some thought that had occurred to me during this volume that I wanted to mention, only now I'm not sure what it was.

I mean, I know I realized suddenly that pretty much everyone (not just me, but everyone in charge of the various adaptations) gets the Jin Clan's uniforms wrong, but that wasn't it.  It was something that I was thinking yesterday or the day before about posting about, but now I don't remember what it was.  😭

Anyway, it's lunch time and I'm hungry, so post over.

Original language:  Chinese

Reading Record 39

 So, today I finished rereading volume two of Mo Dao Zu Shi (English title Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu.

I now understand why I had forgotten about the massive, slammed-together chapters:  they only did that in the first volume, so the remaining volumes have more manageable chapter divisions for those who, like me, prefer to stop reading at the end of a chapter whenever possible.  (They must have gotten a lot of complaints after the first volume hit the market...)

Took far fewer notes on things I wanted to check if they were changed or fixed in the hardback.  Not sure if that means there actually were fewer problems or if it was just that I was more caught up in the story.  😅  (Some things were genuine errors, though, like one time it said "Xicheng" instead of "Xichen."  (Humorously, "Xicheng" is actually a ship name for that character.  It's a pretty popular ship, afaik, despite that the two characters have no really major interactions, and that Lan Xichen has two much more plausible, built-in potential love interests...though they both end up dead, so maybe that's why some people ship him with Jiang Cheng, despite that Jiang Cheng is the most deeply hetero character in the whole novel.  (Uh, possibly excluding Jin Guangshan.))

Anyway, not much to say since I've read it so many times before, lol!

Original language:  Chinese

Reading Record 38

 So, today I finished rereading volume one of Mo Dao Zu Shi (English title Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu.

Took me a little longer to read than it should have, because I kept setting the book down to take notes.  Two kinds of notes, in fact:  some of them were general notes on details I might want to consult later for fanfic purposes, while the other was for a stranger purpose.  Specifically, I wanted to keep a list of things to check if they were fixed/changed in the fancy hardback release.  (So far, I haven't checked most of them, but I can at least confirm that the hardback's prologue fixed the error where it said "Burial Mound" instead of "Burial Mounds.")

One thing I'd forgotten since the last time I read this--surprising that I managed to forget it so fast since I last read it in January of last year!--was how artificially long the chapters are!  One of them was almost 100 pages long!  For some reason, the English editors decided to combine a bunch of the original online chapters, usually at least four, but that one chapter was made up of seven of them!

Another weird thing is that there are still things I was getting wrong in my MDZS fanfic, even though this is the fifth time I'm reading the book!

Maybe I just don't read as carefully as I used to?

Original language:  Chinese

Reading record 37

 And now I have finished rereading volume four of The Apothecary Diaries light novels by Natsu Hyuuga.

One thing I kept noticing as I progressed through the latter three books is how well-constructed the arc is; various details that only came up in this volume were set up throughout the previous volumes, all the way back to volume two.

Since the second episode of the new season will go up tomorrow, and I watch two episodes of anime every night to help my brain shut down for the night, I think I'll probably wait and watch the first two episodes of the new season together.

But I can't help thinking how sad it is, how an aromantic icon like Maomao deserves a better ending than to eventually be forced to marry.  (I mean, not that Jinshi managed to actually marry her by the end of volume eight, the last one I've read, but he had taken steps that made that fate unavoidable.  (Technically, that fate can be viewed as unavoidable from the very start, due to genre conventions, but...))  I may go out looking for fanfic that lets her escape that dire fate.  Something where Jinshi gets over his obsession with her, maybe falls for someone else.

Anyway.

Technically, I ought to find a banned or challenged book to read next, since this is Banned Book Week, but...

...I've been having such a bad time of it.  I need to read something I already know I love.

Soooo, since 2026 is the novel's ten year anniversary, I've decided to reread Mo Dao Zu Shi next.  (And let's face it, that's not so outrageous for Banned Book Week; if there were any schools that had copies if Mo Dao Zu Shi in their libraries, all those hyper-conservative jackasses would absolutely be banning the heck out of it, considering it has a gay couple bringing down a tyrant.  Twice.)

Original language:  Japanese

IWSG - Currently Cursed

 

    In case you're wondering, the post title is not a leading-up-to-Halloween thing.

Nor is it specifically in reference to this post.

It's more summing up my life at the moment.  😭

First, a sprained wrist has left me barely able to use a computer (or my phone) for weeks.

Then I had a dentist appointment, only to find that the crown that fell off couldn't be simply cemented back in place, because of further decay beneath it, and the tooth would have to be pulled.

The surgery was for one week later, exactly.

The day after the dentist's appointment, I had a sore throat.

By the next day, my nose was stuffed up.

By the day after that, it was a full-on sinus infection, complete with my horrible asthmatic cough, which sounds like a cross between a barking seal and those cries the velociraptors use to communicate with each other in Jurassic Park.

Somehow, I was just barely recovered enough for the tooth to be extracted on schedule...but...

Hrm.

Okay, actually, I don't think it would be fair to potential male readers to mention what started this morning (er, yesterday morning, since I'm writing this the night before), because I know how squeamish most men are on the subject.

Suffice it to say that at my age, it shouldn't even happen, and leave it at that.

So, yeah, that's been my life this month.

I thought "cursed" sums it up pretty well.

I mean, not that I haven't done any writing at all, but given the wrist brace I have to wear makes typing crazy difficult, there hasn't been much.  Mostly just some rewriting on book four of the Atalanta and Ariadne series.

So...yeah.

That's pretty much all I can say right now, I fear.

I am too much of a mess for more.

Reading Record 36

 Last night, I finished rereading volume three of The Apothecary Diaries light novels by Natsu Hyuuga.

My delay to let the figure arrive was not sufficient--it arrived the day after I read the moon spirit chapter.  😰  But that delay was also too long, because lo and behold, the first episode of season three of the anime went up on Friday.  😅  But I'll be done with book four before episode two comes out, so not a particularly big deal, right?

I'm trying to think what else I wanted to say here...

...but it is apparently too early in the morning for that.  😅

Original language:  Japanese

Reading Record 35

 So, last night I finished rereading volume two of The Apothecary Diaries light novels by Natsu Hyuuga.

Funny thing happened the day before that:  I was reading it at the dentist's office, and I had just gotten to one of the (many) scenes where Jinshi is being jealous (in this case because Maomao dared to speak to a man who wasn't him) while the music in the office was playing the song "Every Breath You Take."  It was hard to keep from laughing aloud. How had I never noticed before that that song could practically be Jinshi's theme song?  (And that being the case, is it any wonder that I don't want to read the novels past where I stopped?  I don't want to see Maomao actually forced to let him act on his obsessive, possessive and frankly childish feelings for her.)

Anyway, I will be taking a few days off before I start rereading book three.  That's the one with the "moon fairy" sequence, and I had a figure of Maomao in that costume in my Pile of Loot at Big Bad Toy Store, so as soon as I thought of that, I had them ship my stuff, and I want to wait a bit so it will be here by the time I get to that sequence.  😅

So I'll keep plugging away at reading through that CRPG ebook for a while.

Original language:  Japanese

Reading Record 34

 Welp.

It's been a thing.

After the last three books being pretty serious, I wanted something lighter.

Nothing much on my to-read shelf fit the bill.  The closest I could come was one of those books that seem to have been published with the intention of putting them in the "cheap clearance" section of large bookstores.  😅  But that ended up being a DNS.  (A "Did Not Start," in other words.  I sat down to read it, thinking it was art history only to find it was a particularly dry and bland regular history...so I ended up just leafing through to look at the pictures then putting it away.  I've recently read a far more complete history of that culture, one that was much less dry and absolutely more readable.  No reason to force myself to read something inferior as well.)

So I turned to an ebook about CRPGs--Computer Role-Playing Games, that is--which is fascinating, but also almost 700 pages and very, um, stultifying in large chunks.  It's just not the sort of thing that's meant to be the only book you're reading, ya know?  I'm gonna keep picking at it on and off until I finish it, but 200 pages at a time was just the limit of what I could take.

Therefore, I decided to turn to something that wasn't on my to-read shelf.

I decided to reread something.  In part to refresh my memory before the next season of the adaptation starts, and in part because I wanted to revisit a few sections because I might want to write a wee bit of fan-fiction...

Thus, on Friday night I started rereading volume one of The Apothecary Diaries light novels by Natsu Hyuuga.

And having just finished the volume...yup, I can't help it.  Maomao is an icon.  She is a fantastic blend, and absolutely the aromantic poster child.

As always, I'm sort of torn on the whole "Jinshi" issue.  He's an entertaining, likable character, and it's funny just how pathetic he gets in his endless pursuit of Maomao, but no matter how pathetic or charming he is, that can't justify how he continues to romantically pursue her when she so blatantly is not interested.

And, frustratingly, I feel like we, the audience, are somehow supposed to be on his side in this.  Even though he is objectively acting incorrectly.  (Sure, he looks great in comparison to his grandfather, but...that's not enough to excuse his behavior.)

Original language:  Japanese

Reading Record 33

 So, last night I finished reading A Radical Act of Free Magic by H. G. Parry, the second (and final) book in the series started by A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians.

As you would expect, this one moved on from the French Revolution to the Napoleonic Wars.  (Well, the first of them.) And, as you also might expect, it was still excellent.

In the afterward, the author said she had spent the last seven years working on the duology, and I can easily believe it!  The way she wove her story of magic and...something I shouldn't mention because spoilers...into the actual historical events was amazing in its seamlessness.  There were even actual quotes from the real people involved.  (Napoleon's line about "forty centuries look down on you" in reference to the pyramids is quite famous, but there were also several speeches in the first book (both in Parliament and by Robespierre) that I was pretty sure were the real speeches (with some modifications in some cases to add in mentions of magic), and so on.)  And although I'm still pretty sure Fina was entirely fictional, the words she used to start her life story were, I suspect, either quoted or adapted from those of a real person who had suffered the same fate (minus the magical/alchemical aspects) she had in childhood.

Even after giving myself overnight to think about it, I'm still not sure what to say, because it was just that good, you know?

Then again, if I'm mostly keeping this record for myself, I guess I don't need to say anything.

So I guess I won't.  😅

Original language:  English

(Also, what the heck do I read next?  It's gonna be a jarring shift no matter what it is.  But maybe something lighter, since this got pretty heavy at times?)

Reading Record 32

     So, this morning I finished reading The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills, the next book for book club.

    I kind of have no words, really.  This is very much not the kind of thing I normally read, and I don't even know what I think.

    Also, I sprained my wrist the day before yesterday, and it turns out to be really, really hard to type wearing this immobilizing brace that I need to keep from making it worse before it can heal.  (I'm on the internet computer today because I thought I had the new version of book two of the Atalanta and Ariadne books ready to go up, only to realize that nope I had missed something!  So now I have to go back and fix it again and it is driving me nuts and also this brace is a wee bit painful...😭)

    Anyway, yeah.  Typing hard.  Stopping.

Original language:  English

Reading Record 31

 I chose this book off my shelf next--wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Just finished reading A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians by H. G. Parry.  And, um, wow.

Okay, so now, back where I started:  I picked this particular book to read next for two reasons.  First, it was long, so I thought it would get me all the way to Saturday, when I planned to start reading the next book club book, since the meeting is the following Saturday.  (It's, what, Wednesday?  😅)  And the second reason is that it, too, is a work of historical fiction...although as the title makes clear, it's a (slightly) different time period, and it's also a work of fantasy.

As the title makes obvious (if you've studied your history), it takes place during the French Revolution.  Or rather, in-and-before said revolution.  What's sort of surprising to me is that rather than the approach many authors would take--inventing purely fictional characters who witness or take part in the historic events--the characters are almost all historical people.  Like, the characters we follow the most are William Pitt the Younger (Prime Minister of Britain for most of the book) and Robespierre!  There is one major POV character, Fina, who I think is probably fictional...but the other major characters she interacts with after she reaches Saint-Domingue are decidedly historical people.  I'm not going to research whether or not Fina is based on a real person until I've read the next book in the series (which has been on my to-read shelf longer than this one, since I didn't notice the "Book Two" bit on the cover until I was sitting down to start reading it 😅) or possibly more books if there are more than two in the series.

Anyway, the particularly remarkable thing to me is how closely it follows the history of what really happened, while simultaneously weaving in a new (or maybe "an additional" would be a better way to put it) about the oppressions that common-born mages suffered from throughout Europe, the threats of magic in warfare, and the even worse crimes magic let plantation owners commit.  Thankfully, the book does not go heavily into describing the bloody deaths and the battles; they're certainly present (particularly the former), but not in gruesome detail...just in horrifying "this really happened" levels of detail.  (Uh, aside from the dark magic parts, anyway.)

Honestly, I'm super-bummed that I can't just dive right on into book two, but I worry that if I do I won't be able to finish the book club book on time.  😭

Original language:  English

Reading Record 30

 (Ugh.  Typing on my phone is a nightmare due to my big fat fingers:  first attempt at that post title said "Reafong Tecord 40".  😭)  Not sure if 30 seems like a big number or a really small one in this context...

Anyway, the book I just finished was A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel by KJ Charles.  And like the previous of her books I read, the title itself, while a good title, doesn't entirely seem to fit the book.  Which is sorta...I dunno, as someone who can't title her works 9 times out of 10, I suppose I have no right to comment on the titles of others.  (Though at least a lot of what I write are fanfics, and can thus be titled with song lyrics if I want.)

As to the book itself, turned out it was a sequel of sorts to a book I haven't read, but a "thirteen years later and centering on a different couple, one of whom was a minor (in both senses of the word, lol) character in the first book" kind of way, so...🤷🏻‍♀️  I should probably order the first book online sometime (since I cannot figure where, in store, these books would be located, as they weren't in regular fiction, and I even held my breath and checked the romance section, but they weren't there, either) but who knows if I actually will.

Like the last one I read by this author, it did feel a bit like a "guilty pleasure" kind of read, but I'm not sure why that is.  I mean, yes, a gay romance by a(n apparently straight) female author is a bit sketchy, but I don't have that same feeling when I read danmei, much of which is also written by women (though at least one of the danmei authors I read is male, and several have gender-neutral pronouns in the "about the author" blurbs from the publisher, so I have no idea about them) so it's something of a curious feeling.  I don't recall feeling that way about the Magpie series, so maybe it's the lack of a fantastic over-narrative that's got me uncomfortable?  Like, these two have been much more focused on the romance than most of the danmei novels, so...?  I don't know. It's an odd reaction on my part, ultimately.

But getting back to the book itself!  It seemed very well-researched on both the location (Romney Marsh in Kent) and the era (1823), even down to various regional and period terms, without being bogged down by an excess of them.  And it was a delight to read, like all the author's other books I've read.  Which is, ultimately, the most important part, right?

Original language:  English