#ms.post

[msmargaretmurry]

if one of my fics ever gets linked in a mainstream media outlet i WILL remove the text from ao3 and replace it with "this has been removed because [name of journalist] linked it without permission in an article they got paid to write and i refuse to let them monetize my fanfiction"

[msmargaretmurry]

the feminine urge to [concept or idea that any human being regardless of gender is fully capable of experiencing but is being used to fulfill a specific aesthetic of womanhood that implies more about what real masculine men don't feel than anything else]

[msmargaretmurry]

this godforsaken country is crumbling around us but at least we have magnolias

[msmargaretmurry]

the cost of playoff tickets would have been worth it just for these rally towels but i AM glad they won

[msmargaretmurry]

went to f.lyers vs o.ilers today with about 15 friends from the internet and we acquired so many grittys...... also we were sharing our suite with a couple dozen old men who were having a reunion for their prep school rowing team from 1980 and they showed us their yearbook. incredible vibes. there is old man yaoi everywhere for those with eyes to see

[msmargaretmurry]

don't worry y'all. i have notifications for sean avery's hockey romance novel set for all of my library cards and i WILL be reading it and sharing all of my thoughts and feelings

[msmargaretmurry]

hello tumblr i have finished reading s.hoot your s.hot and so this is a post about all my thoughts about it for @moregraceful and also anyone else who is interested i suppose!

first off let me say that i have nothing against l.exi b.rown, i am neutral-to-positive toward her as a person/public figure in the hockey world. like, i do think that sometimes she lets the line between space for fans/space for the hockey enterprise we are fans of get a little uncomfortably blurred, and sometimes she loses sight her own privilege a little bit, and sometimes she's a little bit cringe, but whomst among us isn't a little bit cringe? being a little bit cringe is an essential part of the human experience. but overall i think it's good to have a loud voice in a place of privilege within the hockey community who is willing to adamantly say trans rights and black lives matter and homophobia is dumb and bad, you know? i feel the need to say this because i AM going to be a little mean about this book but i have seen reactions to it here on the world wide web that feel like the people behind them are just getting off on the chance to be mean to a woman who is popular on the internet.

anyway becky just review the book.

SHORT VERSION: when i first posted that i was reading this, a very nice anon messaged to be like, i read it and while i thought it wasn't great on a craft level, i thought she delivered on the things she said she would deliver on — accuracy in the hockey parts, queer rep, and poc rep. and i agree, and i think those are worthwhile things! on a craft level the book was pretty clunky and in some specific ways Not For Me, but on a story level it was fine, and in other ways it was good actually. it was far from the worst hockey romance i have ever read and not worse than other clunkily written romance novels i've read and judged but that other people seem to love. anyone acting like it's the worst book ever written needs to take a breath. it was fine! there are some things i liked about it! the sex scenes were really bad though!

TL;DR VERSION:

so i went into this book with low expectations, largely because in the leadup to it lexi did not really make herself out to be a person who, like, particularly enjoys or respects romance as a genre. the built her audience in the hockey romance world by poking fun at other hockey romances and making fun of "sexy" hockey tropes and while i didn't necessarily disagree with her takes on those things (i felt very vindicated that she disliked my beloathed HIM, for example) i think that being a normal nobody who is critical of those things online is different from being a person with a pretty big platform who does it and then turns around and says, and now i'm going to write a book in this genre that does things RIGHT! while at the same time talking about how the books you actually enjoy reading are like, edgy literary fiction or whatever. (not derogatory; i also love edgy literary fiction)

so in addition to that setting my own expectations low i think that right off the bat it set her up for some unsympathetic responses — by selling herself as the person who could "fix" hockey romance, she possibly drew in people who wouldn't read hockey romance otherwise, or who have tried it and didn't like it, which could be a good thing if the book is like, genre-trancendingly good, but when it inevitably is not, all those people just wind up reading a mid hockey romance set against way too high expectations. also some people just REALLY like an excuse to mock women on the internet/romance as a genre.

(which isn't to say everyone has been a hater about it; it seems like her book launch events have gone great and plenty of people have genuinely enjoyed the book, so, good! i'm glad people are having fun!)

so, i am going to list the good parts and the bad parts, in my opinion.

BAD PARTS:

alternating first person present tense povs. my actual least favorite tense+pov combination in all of literature. i know some people like it but it is actively a turn-off for me.

needed an aggressive line-edit so bad. on a sentence level the prose was clunky in a lot of places. too many words. girlie needed to ctrl+f certain abverbs so badly, and then delete delete delete.

the pacing was not horrible but not great at times, especially with time jumps between chapters that were sometimes a little confusing. honestly a lot of my gripes about the craft stuff in this book are big baby's first novel problems, and romance novels are notoriously poorly edited, so.

the show/tell ratio was wayyyyy off. girl stop telling us stuff and show us instead. related gripe so it goes in this bullet point as well, you can tell when an author doesn't trust their readers to make connections or come to conclusions themselves so they feel like they have to spell out every little think they want you to think and i find that very tiring.

oh lord the sex scenes. lexi said at some point that she's uncomfortable writing them (but felt like she had to include them due to genre expectations) and you can really tell. the prose was at its clunkiest in these scenes and it seemed like she was trying to get through them as quickly as possible. imo the book would have been just fine, possibly better, without them. also girl no one forced you to write in this genre.

i said to jess and maggie early on in reading this book that it has a kind of wattpad self-insert fanfiction vibe and now having finished it i do think that on a story level it's a step up from wattpadesque, it cannot escape the self-insert fanfic vibe of a bisexual woman married to a black hockey man writing a book about a bisexual woman and a black hockey man who seem to have personalities fairly close to the real people. this may have been helped if she didn't name the characters LUCY AND JJ but who knows. this made reading it a little weird sometimes! there were points in reading where i wondered if she would have been better off from a craft/genre-appreciation level writing a straight up memoir or like, purposely thinly veiled literary autofiction, but of course those things don't have the market power of hockey romance. idk. despite this i also liked the diversity, so, big shrugs from me here.

this book is billed specifically as a ROM-COM and not a ROMANCE, which to me feels like lexi trying to distance herself a little from traditional romance, because she's not a big fan of traditional romance, which gets a huge sigh from me. also while there are some genuinely funny moments, a lot of it reads like the scenes of a movie being described, which is a pet peeve of mine. it is REALLY hard to write a funny story; i think that romcoms thrive on screen because they benefit from physical comedy, chemistry, and timing in a way that's really really difficult to capture in writing.

some people don't mind a lot of pop culture references in their contemporary fiction but unfortunately i am a person who often finds them pretty awkward and therefore the fact that many characters' personalities hinge on the pop culture references they make and the brands they use was tiring to me. relatedly, while i mostly didn't have gripes about factual accuracy in this book, at one point lucy mentions that they're been dating for a month and gotten halfway through watching naruto and i'm like girl do know know how many episodes of naruto there are. how did they have time to fuck

my one big accuracy gripe is that at a certain point lucy (an artist) starts selling her art online to make ends meet and is super successful at it, with no explanation of how this happened. selling art online is really hard! is she working social media hard to bring in customers? did she somehow tap into an existing market for her style of art? we just don't know!

GOOD PARTS:

the hockey details did indeed feel very accurate! it is worth acknowleding imo that she has a certain privilege in this area — she can literally just ask her nhler husband how things work if she doesn't already know from her years around the league — but the accuracy level in other hockey romances i've read have been so abysmally low that simply being accurate to the basics of how nhl/north american hockey works was pretty refreshing.

even though the writing was clunky, some of my favorite parts were when lucy was hanging out with her queer friends and the work that did to keep this book from feeling aggressively heterosexual in a weird patriarchal gender roles way that so many hockey romances do. and not even just het hockey romances. HIM (beloathed) was so wildly misogynistic it boggled my mind. it was nice to read a hockey romance that didn't feel like it hates women!

(please imagine every bullet point on this list beginning with, "even though the writing was clunky—")

similarly it was nice that jaylen felt like a real person with real problems and not a weird hockey man archetype of masculinity. i liked that the text acknowledged how his blackness affected his hockey experience. i enjoyed how he was written as a straight man who is genuinely cool with queer people. one of my favorite scenes was when lucy's friend clocks how much he likes her because he quietly gave a huge donation to the seattle pride fundraiser she'd dragged him to. i too would love for an attractive man to express his feelings for me by donating a ton of money to my gay friends!

both lucy and jaylen had genuinely strong character arcs that made sense for real people in their circumstances in the real world, but i especially liked jaylen's in how it was built out of real issues within the hockey world — the extreme pressure players (especially black players and high draft picks) are under to perform and put hockey before everything, the way that can fuck with your head, etc. once again just refreshing to have realistic hockey details!

not every character or relationship beat hit for me, but there were some genuinely cute and funny ones, especially later in the book. i thought one of the things lexi did a good job showing more than telling was the growing level of comfort/intimacy that lucy and jaylen had with each other, and while the third-act breakup did not come as a surprise, it did feel like a realistic problem for them to run into, as opposed to a contrived miscommunication like so many romance novels seem to like to have.

overall i'm like, yeah, it was fine! it wasn't awful, it wasn't great, i wish the writing had been better and there were parts i thought were especially poorly written but also parts i genuinely liked or appreciated! mainly my feelings here are that people are going to keep writing mid to bad hockey romances and i would rather those books have people of color in them, and queer people in them, and know how hockey works, and have a genuine love for the game and the community around it than not have those things, so i'm not mad at this book for existing even if i have some issues with it. obviously lexi has a big, built-in platform and access to the nhl that other authors don't have and hopefully she'll use that for good to inspire and support more diversity in hockey romance!

[msmargaretmurry]

lots of good trees in dc this past month 🌸

[msmargaretmurry]

at 9:01 a.m. today i tweeted to my beloved internet friends and followers: "almost stepped on a dead rat in the middle of the sidewalk on 3rd st walking to work just now........ good omen for the panthers tonight?"

and i just want to say i'm glad it WAS because otherwise the dead rat experience would NOT have been worth it

[msmargaretmurry]

literally nothing better than a trade deadline where every other team is out here pulling the wildest stunts while your own team makes one (1) small reasonable move and then goes out for a long lunch. all of the entertainment with minimal pain. but also i have no idea who is on any team anymore

[msmargaretmurry]

hello tumblr! i read a lot this year and i want to talk about the epic highs and lows of my 2024 reading list!!

i went through all the books i read and divided them into four-ish categories — fiction, nonfiction not for school, nonfiction for school, and rereads, plus two poetry collections that didn't fit in any of those categories, and now i am going to talk a little bit about my favs and least favs, because i like doing a little end-of-year reflection. i was going to do top five in each category but instead i am doing my top however many i think meaningfully represents my favorites in that category. also these are new TO ME, not necessarily new in 2024. i have never in my life been caught up on reading the lastest book releases and i am not going to start now.

top five six fiction reads of 2024

In Memoriam by Alice Winn — a beautiful, achy, tragic, devastating, horrifying, hopeful romance between two english boys who get caught up in wwi and each other. my favorite non-reread book of the read.

The Cold Millions by Jess Walter — a deliciously detailed historical fiction set in the early twentieth century labor movement in the pacific northwest. great characters; i appreciated that the author tried to Do Things with his novel structure even if i didn't that they all 100% worked as well as he wanted them to.

Slippery Creatures by KJ Charles — i loved the entire will darling trilogy but this first installment was definitely my favorite of the three because it has the best of the plot twists and complicated romance.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (trans. Elisabeth Jaquette) — this novella was one of the first things i read in 2024 and it stuck with me all year. told in two equally harrowing parts, it tells the story of the murder of a palestinian girl in 1949 and then the story of a modern-day palestinian woman trying to navigate through occupied palestine to investigate the incident.

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert — i have to be honest, i was surprised by how much i enjoyed this book, since all i knew about gilbert going into it was eat pray love memes. but i loved the cast of characters and the historical details and the exploration of female sexuality and autonomy.

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark — i read this book and was immediately like "wow i bet some people REALLY hated this lmao." the narrator is DEEPLY unlikeable and unsympathetic, and most of the people around her aren't much better. but she's like that on purpose, and while it's not for everyone, i relished reading her go on this self-destructive spiral, like a trainwreck that keeps getting worse. equal parts funny and disturbing. the excerpts from her best friend's tumblr had me howling.

top five six nonfiction reads of 2024

There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Adburraqib — the thing is, if hanif writes a book it's gonna be in my top reads of the year. that's just the rule. loved what he did with the structure of this book, love how he uses language, love how thoughtfully and poignantly he writes about everything from sports to social justice.

The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government by Brody Mullins and Luke Mullins — one of those books that did make be feel even more deeply depressed than usual about the united states and the us government specifically, but deeply researches and very readable, put so much into context for me about various horrible men whose backstories i was not totally aware of.

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein — this book is excellent all the way through, but what really surprised me was that even in sections on topics where i felt like it probably wouldn't have much new to offer me (like, i am already SO aware of how the people who think vaccines cause autism work) it still did give me some new perspective or context.

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa — a gorgeous and haunting and unique book that is so hard to describe. it is autofiction about womanhood and motherhood but it's also about history and poetry and translation and the silences of the archive.

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado — i read so much of this in a single sitting because i was like girl i can't put this book down until you get out of there!!!!!!!!!!! oof. OOF.

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux — i find crypto so hard to read about because it is deliberately convoluted but this book was not only well-written and readable but VERY funny. faux feels so aware of how so much of the crypto enterprise is built on speculation and wild greed and he treats it accordingly.

Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait by Bathsheba Demuth — obviously this book made me depressed about what capitalism and human industry and greed had done to the land and wildlife in this region but also it's so beautifully written and imo super interesting.

top five nonfiction for school reads of 2024

(i have these in a separate section because i am so aware that academic texts are not written for a popular audience but sometimes they are still really good and i rec them to people anyway.)

Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom by Kathryn Olivarius — reading this book, centered in antebellum new orleans, about the politics and economy of public health and widespread disease in the wake of so much public/policy failure around covid was uhhhhh harrowing. but it's VERY good and imo very readable.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert — reading this book added important new dimensions to the way that i understand global capitalism.

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis — reading this book added important new dimensions to the way that i understand imperialism and colonialism.

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin — this is the most ~for a popular audience~ of my favorite school books this year. whomst among us doesn't like reading about a very nasty very rich man barging confidently into a huge new venture and failing miserably. unfortunately you will also leave feeling furious about the environmental and human impacts of said venture.

other stuff!

i read two poetry collections this year and loved them both:

What You Want: Poems by Maureen N. McLane

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi

my rereads this year were all part of my ongoing goal of revisiting all the fantasy books i loved as a teen/young adult that have been sitting on my bookshelf for years, which has been such a cozy and enriching endeavor for me, especially revisiting robin hobb's books. soon i will get to the point in her realm of the elderlings series where the rereading ends and the new reading begins (i dropped off after the tawny man trilogy in my youth due to reasons) and i am so excited for me.

also, these were not rereads, but i read tamora pierce's alanna quartet for the first time this year and had such a fun time. obviously they're written for a much younger audience than me, but that's fine! i read a few of pierce's books as a kid but was never super into them like some of my friends, so it was really nice to explore these books that are so meaningful and were so formative to people i love. i would love to do more of that next year.

fourth wing — it was so hyped and i truly thought it would at least be bad in a fun way if it wasn't good but instead i found it to be so bad the only reason i finished it is because i read it in my downtime at a work conference when my brain was only half-functioning anyway. bad inconsistent worldbuilding; bad inconsistent characterization; transparent boring plot and relationships. good for the people who inexplicably love it because i'm sure they're having a great time but MAN i hated it.

least favorite reads of 2024

i don't love spending tons of time harping on media that i think sucks in public, but i do love picking apart books that don't work for me in private with my friends, so i am putting these here in case friends want to pick them apart with me 😂

mister hockey by lia riley — i joked that i read this whole book just to see if gordie howe showed up but honestly i was pretty unimpressed that he actually didn't show up even once. your typical bad hockey romance problems (this author doesn't seem to know much about hockey, etc) plus deeply cringey writing plus weird breaches of journalistic ethics that the author does not seem to realize are weird and bad = not a book for beckys.

my next two least favorite books this year were very very small indie books so i am not putting them on blast here, lmao.

accountable: the true story of a racist social media account and the teenagers whose lives it changed by dashka slater — this book was so frustrating and upsetting not only because the subject matter is frustrating and upsetting, but none of the non-victim teens and parents seemed to learn a damn thing and the author did not interrogate that at all. ugh.

reading goals in 2025

my reading goal each year is just a flat 50 books of any kind, so we're doing that again! i want to do a better job reading books i own but haven't read before buying more books but we will see how that goes for me. i might make a spreadsheet about it, which will actually help me 😂 but broadly, i want to read more genre fiction, especially fantasy and sci-fi. i am being very easy on myself on the reading front and not setting any super lofty goals about what or how much to read because grad school brain means i will read what my brain will accept, but i am very much looking forward to another year of reading! and always accepting book recs!

[msmargaretmurry]

every time i'm subjected to the state of unlocked hrpf twitter it gets increasingly harder to resist the urge to yoink all my fic from the internet and simply start emailing it to my beloved mutuals instead of posting to ao3. get in losers we're going back to the yahoo groups model

[msmargaretmurry]

i started writing this post like four days ago and then completely forgot about it, lmao. anyway!! i was tagged by @postoperation to share my top ten songs on repeat! which right now is just a mix of my everyday/commuting playlist + artists i was/am binging before seeing them in concert.

cigarettes and saints (acoustic), the wonder years

HOLD ME TIGHT OR DON'T, fall out boy

light up the sky, yellowcard

the ocean grew hands to hold me (acoustic), the wonder years

cursed romantics, maude latour

feels like home, caamp

take me on, bonner black

you ain't no saint, aaron west and the roaring twenties

junebug, the wonder years

let me down easy, gang of youths

i have no idea who's been tagged in this so sorry if i'm double-tagging you! but @hopetorun @bropunzeling @vivathewilddog show me ur tunes

[msmargaretmurry]

for christmas @hopetorun got me the redwall cookbook and today my friends and i made all the recipes in the winter section and had a feast fit for abbey mice :)))

[msmargaretmurry]

reading through the replies to this post and really struck by the number of people insisting that visualization is an integral part of reading, perhaps even a necessary part or the most important part, and therefore people who don't/can't visualize also don't/can't appreciate and/or understand figurative language, because that's not my experience at all. i have very low levels of mental visualization, i very rarely picture things when i read (and have to concentrate hard to make it happen!), and i've been a voracious reader for the majority of my life. this is not to invalidate other people's experiences, i just found it really interesting, but also i think that this emphasis on visualization is like... it kind of misses the point of prose for me. i love reading and writing because of the way the language feels in my brain, the rhythm of words and sentences, the ways that sentence structure and word choice can evoke emotion, the way good prose pulls in parts of a character's experience far beyond the visual. stories should not be a transcript of what you would see on a television screen. i feel like thinking that the best thing you can do with a story is visualize it in your mind really limits what the experience of reading can be.

[msmargaretmurry]

how am i supposed to go to sleep knowing that right at this moment a picture of dylan s.trome is on the joint connors birthday cake in edmonton