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You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

Annie Proulx (via spnfanficpond)

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Review: The Cruel Prince (Holly Black, The Folk of the Air #1)

Rating: ★★★★★/5

This was my first reread of one of my top books of 2018, and I adored it just as much the second time around.

Keep reading

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“Thirsty” by M.T. Anderson review

I’ve always had a soft spot for “gothic fiction”, as I often call it (god knows if I’m using that right) or, more specifically, books that center around classic monsters and urban legends, things that always seem to get my imagination going no matter how much folks try to ring more out of them in western storytelling.  I was quickly intrigued when I found a novel sporting  fanged teeth as its sole cover in my local goodwill, and discovering the book’s premise about a teenager experiencing the ramifications of being a vampire had me hooked. 

“Thirsty” is the story of Christopher, an otherwise normal teenager who, after a string of bizarre changes to his bodily state, realizes he is beginning to turn into a vampire. Celestial being Chet agress to aid him in his unfortunate situation, but only under the condition that he agrees to prevent the vampires’ evil overlord from being freed.

At first Thirsty disappointed me immensely, as instead of delivering on its promise of a vampire horror story we are expected to listen to it drone on and on about lore and worldbuilding we haven’t particularly been given a reason to care about. That being said, I felt very rewarded for having seen Thirsty to the end, because it took my expectations of a fairly generic hero-vs-villain story and twisted them into a hauntingly cynical tale about a teenager losing control of his life.

Now, Thirsty starts off very promising with the introduction of a world where  monsters are at least partially known to human society; we are introduced to the town of Clayton, which, due to a deep rooted history with the phenomena, has a culture heavily entrenched in superstitions regarding the creatures. This idea is introduced in an actually rather enjoyable info dump as an opener and persists throughout as a sort of worldbuilding backdrop. 

The issue I had came in with the introduction of Chet, who almost instantly spills the beans about Christopher being a vampire, and spends page after page explaining the magical quest Christopher needs to go on despite the fact that we’ve barely gotten any time to know these characters. I was frustrated because the build up to the changes in Chris’s life were previously very interesting, and I wanted more of that!

Then the book pulled something out of its sleeve that made it all worth it: it exploited the beat-by-beat hero-defeating-evil story it had built up by pulling away the security that guidance offered, and making us watch as our hero’s situation tumbles out of control and he desperately tries to save himself and the town he calls home. The living-as-a-vampire horror story I desperately wanted comes back in full force, and the stakes are even higher because now there is no one to help Christopher.

At this point I found myself earnestly wondering where exactly Thirsty was going, and I’m happy to say it held onto that feeling of dread and intrigue for the entirety of the latter half of the novel. The fellow vampires shown in the book are initially treated as soulless beasts and nothing more, but the more our hero changes, the more the book leads us to understand and pity the blood sucking monsters; by the end of the book I wanted to see them to be saved just as much as I did Christopher. But it doesn’t try to rub sob-stories in our faces like many similar stories do: though it makes an effort to humanize these monsters, it largely lets us draw our own conclusions about how redeemable they are as people. 

Now, Thirsty definitely wasn’t perfect, and I think my biggest problem with it is that it spends far too much time on content that ultimately comes to serve as a collection of red herrings. I’m all for drastic, story twisting plot twists (and in fact I find them extremely fun) but the lead up to them should be just as interesting, and I think that’s where Thirsty failed for me. I’m a fairly tolerant reader, but I can easily imagine others putting the book down after the absolute onslaught of exposition that makes up the first half. 

All of the paranormal characters in Thirsty are very engaging,especially Chet, the book’s deurotagonist of a sort--the guy kept me guessing until the very end. However, I never particularly came to care about the human characters, who mostly struck me as obligatory teenage sterotypes that ultimately didn’t contribute very much to the story. Rebecca Schwarts was given a ludicrous amount of emphasis as Chris’s teenage crush, but her role in the story adds up to pretty much nothing by the end; Tom and Chris’s parents only really serve to worsen Chris’s situation with slightly underdevloped drama; Jerk and Paul were actually pretty endearing comedy relief characters, but don’t come around to contributing to the story as much as I would’ve liked them to.

Overall, I would recommend you give Thirsty at least a chance to earn your time. It gets off to a painfully slow start, but becomes an incredibly fun read once it begins to figure out an identity for itself.

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If you're a book blog reblog this and i'll follow you!

I need more book blogs to follow :)

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Heya!

A while back I started up this blog with the intention of showing of showing off my writing, typically fanfiction at the time. That didn’t go very well, as is evident by the piss poor views each post got--but lately I’ve had a strong desire to start up a blog about book reviews and general writing advice, and I realized that I could essentially kill two birds with one stone using this dusty old blog I had sitting around.

Admittedly, my original effort at this sort of thing was pretty half assed: nothing but link posts, and I totally gave up on the idea after only five posts. Well, I’ve changed a lot as a person since then, and god do I have a lot of thoughts about books that I just haven’t had any place to drone on about in depth. I have a tendency towards horror, thriller and mystery novels as far as genre goes, but other that I try to read any kind of books I can get my hands on.

Primarily I’ll be using this blog to post my thoughts on the books I read, but I’ll also occasionally share my own works and my thoughts on writing as a whole. 

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Formatting your Manuscript

If you’re planning on one day turning your manuscript in to literary agents and publishing houses, you need to make sure it’s formatted correctly. In many cases, your manuscript will be skipped over if it isn’t done to industry standard, so here’s the basics that you’ll need if you don’t want to be ignored. Before I get started, please know that this is aimed specifically at fiction manuscripts. If you’re writing non-fiction or a memoir, the expectations will be different, so it would be wise to Google what you need.

The Basics

Make sure your font is 12 point Times New Roman, Courier New, or Arial. These are the only three fonts you are allowed to pick from.

Your spacing should be 1 inch on all sides of the text. This is the default on most word processors, but double check your settings just to be sure.

Your text should be double spaced.

All of your indentations must be a half inch. Do not press indent. Instead, drag over the top arrow on the ruler to have every new paragraph automatically indent.

The Title Page

The top left-hand corner of your title page will have all your personal information. They want to see your name, address, phone number, e-mail address, the novel’s genre, and word count.

Your novel’s title is allowed to be between 20-24 point font if you want. Bold is also an option, but not necessary.

The title will appear halfway down the title page.

“A novel by [your name]” will be about three quarters of the way down the page.

The Next Pages

If you have a dedication, it will be on its own page.

If you have some sort of verse or quote, those will also need their own pages.

Do not include a page for acknowledgements.

The Chapters

Chapter titles will be 12 point font. No bolding or italics.

Chapters will start from one quarter to halfway down the page.

An easy way to format chapter headings is to press enter five or six times

Make sure you always start your chapters the same way every time.

When you start a new chapter, make sure you use a page break to bump the new chapter onto a new page. This will keep it in place so that it will never budge, no matter how much you cut out or add to the previous chapter.

Page Numbers

Page numbers will start with 1 on Chapter 1 of your manuscript. Page numbers will not appear on the title page or dedication page.

Page 1 will be labeled in the footer of Chapter 1. It should be centered.

Page 2 will be in the header of the next page.

From page 2 onward, your headers will be labeled like this:

If you insert a section break after the title and dedication pages, it will make it easier to insert the page numbers.

For the most part, this is the most important of what you’ll need to know for formatting your manuscript. I used this video as reference, so I’m trusting everything it says is true because it was made by an author who has several novels published, and because it was uploaded this year, it should be up to date.

But just remember, whenever you go to turn in a manuscript, make sure you check the website of the agent or publisher you’re trying to contact. They might have specifications that differ with the ones stated in this video, and you should always do whatever you can to abide by what they want.

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2nd Best Writing Advice Ever

Always question any writing advice that says you must “never” do something…or “always” do something.

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Happy Halloween! Here’s something I did for it. Fair warning, this one’s pretty fucked up and a little violent. I’m still working on “dark” inner monologues...

Ah well, maybe folks will like it away.

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A fanfic I did as writing practice to take a break from my main story. A character study of Yukari, and her past relationship with Yuyuko.

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Here’s another fanic I did..this time centering around the whole issue over whether Sakuya’s gonna die eventually, but taken in a bit of a different direction.

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Hey, here’s the first fanfic I’m posting here-an inner monologue style story of my rather depressing interpration of Ran Yakumo I did as writing practice.