#tagging you laney because I guess people are talking about you and you should be aware.

[hellyellin]

People are always saying how picky guttersniper is and oy flows people worth interacting with.

1) This is weird. Don’t send me your personal feelings about another creator. If you have a problem, take it up with them or say nothing at all.

2) Who cares? Dawg that’s THEIR blog, as in it belongs to them and they made it and they post the content on it. Don’t the people making these comments have their own blogs to attend to?

3) Lastly, if you’re feeling burned because somebody doesn’t want to follow you back or interact with you, then I’ve got some short advice: get over it.

If the worst thing that’s happening to you right now is a creator won’t follow you back or, god forbid, makes their own choices about their content, you will not receive any sympathy from me.

To you and everyone else: Don’t send me messages like this anymore. I don’t do the drama thing.

[useyourrwords]

Grey Tags // Romance Realist, Judgmental Judy & Fatphobia Errywhere – Out of My Comfort Zone Tag

I don’t even know where to start!

I was tagged in this book tag, created by Emma @ EmmmaBooks, by Avery @ Red Rocket Panda. So thank you Avery for forcing me out of my comfort zone because I love you and hate you for it.

This tag has but one rule! You must pick one genre you frequently talk about in tags and DON’T use it for any of your answers.

I think my pick will be fantasy as I do use that a lot but God, it’s gonna be so hard!

If you would like to buy any of the following books please consider using my Book Depository Affliate link!

Past Grey Tags

 Tag // Get to Know Ya

 Tag // Who Am I?

 Tag // The Library Lover’s Book Tag – I Am a Library Fiend

The Questions

1. A book that is an exception when it comes to genres or elements in books that you don’t typically like.

│To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before│To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before #1│Jenny Han│

I am not really a romantic person.

I was as a teen, big time! But Teen Grey was young and hopeful and an optimist. And then life got to her and she stopped believing in love at all. She stopped reading romance books, she stopped watching rom-coms and her go to relationship advice became “dump him”. To be fair a lot of the times she was right and was trying to help someone get out of an abusive relationship.

Flash forward to last year when we got rom-coms like Set it Up, Dumplin’, and you guessed it, To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before.

Unromantic, cynical Grey was no more!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA no that’s not true at all but I do like a ,good rom-com now. They’re still very hard to find but I won’t completely ignore a book just because the word romance is attached to it.

To dip my toes back into the romantic waters, I picked up the To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before book at the end of last year and I fell so hard for the characters all over again and I now have the last two books in the series sitting on my bookshelf.

To be fair, it had a head start with the fake relationship trope, because no matter the genre, I love fake relationships that turn into real ones.

The tension? The will they, won’t they? The kisses to make it look like they are actually dating that turn into real kisses? That shit is better than cocaine!

     2. A book you enjoyed from a genre you previously held some stigma about.

│Black Iris│Leah Raeder/Elliot Wake│

I wouldn’t touch new adult with a ten foot pole a few years ago.

New adult tends to be filled with a lot of things I hate, like abusive men and women who just want to be saved…or so I thought.

Then I picked up Black Iris and nobody is gonna save Laney but her damn self.

It’s dark and twisty and sexy and horrifying and I loved every fucking minute of it.

Thanks to this book I no longer completely write off new adult. I mean I’m still wary but I’m not going to avoid a book as soon as I see that it’s new adult.

     3. A book you didn’t know was actually out of your comfort zone until you started reading it.

│Appetite│Anita Cassidy│Review│

When I requested this I thought it would be a great discussion on the similarities in humans’ relationships with food and sex.

Unfortunately what I did read of it had a lot of fat shaming dialogue and I get the author is trying to show just how cruel people can be when it comes to weight, but as a fat person myself, I just couldn’t get through it.

     4. Pick a friend or BookTuber that motivates you to pick up books you might not normally be interested in. What is one book out of your norm that they convinced you to give a try?

│The Broken Girls│Simone St. James│Elise’s Review│My Review│

I am always very wary of adult mysteries and crime novels.

The reasoning is pretty similar to new adult, actually, in that they both have a lot of tropes I don’t like. The tropes are just a little different.

With adult mysteries there’s a lot of the same elements just lazily changed around. Kind of like the projects in my class where a lot of people’s versions were just slightly different from mine because I was a people-pleaser and let people copy from me all the time. It’s not my fault that the teachers clearly didn’t read the projects properly. Adult mystery can sometimes be like that.

And I know there’s mysteries out there that I will enjoy it’s just that I have to be in the mood for them and I tend to forget to check the mystery section at the library as I’m a creature of habit and I go straight to YA. So when I do pick up a mystery or crime book, it’s usually a YA one.

But I stumbled upon Elise @ The Bookish Actress’s review for The Broken Girls review on Goodreads and I thought why not? I had just read some YA thrillers based off her reviews so surely she couldn’t do me wrong and it was a great gamble that paid off because I really enjoyed it.

It was the perfect balance of logical mystery and creepy ghost story!

Plus it did have chapters from the perspectives of teens so I think that help. There’s always a high risk I won’t be able to relate to characters in adult fiction as many of them have kids and are married and that’s not a life I plan on ever having so The Broken Girls was the perfect crossover book.

And honestly a lot of the books I read are ones I’ve seen Elise enjoy and I don’t think I’ve ever been disappointed!

     5. A book that is out of your comfort zone that you would like to read.

│The Good Daughter│The Good Daughter #1│Karin Slaughter│Krystin’s Review│

One of the first blogging friends I made was Krystin @ Here’s The Fucking Twist. I saw that she was a fellow Murderino (people who listen to the My Favorite Murder podcast/are far too interested in true crime) on Goodreads and we had a little chat.

If you check out Krystin’s blog you’ll see that she mostly reads a lot of crime fiction and boy or boy has she swayed me to add far too many books to my TBR. Like I’ve said, I’m very wary of crime fiction just because it can get very repetitive but I do trust Krystin’s judgement… even if I’m still yet to pick up a book I added on my TBR because of her.

But I swear I’ll get to it eventually! This year I definitely want to read one of the books she’s rated highly and I think my first pick will be The Good Daughter, since Krystin rated it 5 stars, and it’s highly rated by many other of my Goodreads friends!

I already have a library book allocated for April so I might pick this one up in May or maybe I could give the audiobook a go in April instead????

     6. A book or genre so out of what you normally read that you’ll probably never give it a(nother) chance.

│Bloody Mary│Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels #2│JA Konrath│

I read the first book for this when I saw it on Kindle for free and thought I’d give it a go and it’s basically just everything I hated about the genre in one book.

Your fatphobia is boring. Why are you so boring?

This is one of those books that taught me to probably save my time and skip the free books on Kindle.

I tag;

Jillian @ The Bookish Butterfly

Aurora @ Aurora Librialis

Madeline @ Caffeine & Writing Dreams

Sophie @ Beware of The Reader

Crystal @ Paper Royalty

Past Awards

 Tag // The Liebster Award

 Tag // The Blogger Recognition Award

 Tag // The Versatile Blogger Award

Oh boy do I hate being out of my comfort zone!

Are any of these books out of your comfort zone? Are there any books out of my comfort zine that you think I should give a chance?

│Blog│Goodreads│Instagram│Twitter│Tumblr│

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[embklitzke]

NaNoWriMo 2018 - Wonderland, Chapter 2

Two

Books hit the table with a thud and her friend glanced up from his notebook, brow arching delicately as his pen stilled against the paper.  Hadrian Bridger straightened slightly, leaned back, and regarded her with a puzzled look to match that arched brow.

“What?” Elaine Cavanaugh asked as she dropped into the chair across from him, sequestered in one corner of the university library—their usual spot up on the fourth floor, near the windows and hidden amidst the seemingly endless stacks. She let her bag slide from her shoulder to drop gently to the floor alongside her chair, pens and notebooks and her laptop rattling against each other as it settled.

“I didn’t think you were coming today,” he said simply, watching her as she started unstacking books, sorting them into separate piles.  “Isn’t that launch or whatever today?”

She stared at him for a few seconds, blinking, trying to figure out what he meant.  “What?”

“Universe or whatever.  The VR immersion launch or whatever.  Didn’t you back that?”

“Oh.”  Elaine wet her lips, staring down at the table for a few seconds.  “Yeah, I did.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said, the word coming perhaps a bit too fast—no, definitely too fast, because Hadrian’s brow had only climbed higher after she’d said it. Elaine slumped, sighing.  “It’s Thursday.  We always do this on a Thursday.”

“Trust me, missing one Thursday buried in the library working on research projects won’t kill you,” Hadrian said gently.  “There are a lot more important things than this.”

“This is our careers,” she protested lamely.  “Our future.”

“Not for you and I in our second year,” he said, watching her.  “Believe me when I say it.  There are more important things.”

“A game launch isn’t more important than this research.”

“You can’t hide from everything, Laney,” Hadrian said gently.  “Stop trying.  Burying yourself in all of this isn’t going to change what you’re feeling.”

“I’m not hiding from anything,” she lied, starting to sort the books again. She was fully aware of the weight of Hadrian’s gaze on her, though she tried to ignore it.

She couldn’t.  A sigh escaped her and she shook her head slightly, brow furrowing as she looked up to meet his eyes.  “Sometimes I feel like I have to try.”

“It’s an anniversary,” he said quietly.  “I understand that.  But maybe you should think about making better memories than hiding from the painful ones.  You’re allowed to have fun, y’know.  Wouldn’t they want you to?”

“I don’t know,” she said, even though she knew he was right.  Her parents would have wanted her to be happy, to make new memories and not to dwell on their loss.  After all, it was like her mother had always said—life was for the living, and she was still alive.  Her father would have reminded her that happiness was a thing worth fighting for, no matter how much the world tried to make it hurt instead.

Across the table, Hadrian smiled a little.  “What time is the launch?”

“Not until two,” she said.

“They’re opening one of the gaming cafes at the mall, right?”

Elaine nodded.  “Yeah. Yeah, they are.  Joss is going.”

“Yeah, I thought you were going with her,” Hadrian said.  He tapped one of the stacks of books.  “This can wait, Laney.  One afternoon isn’t going to hurt, especially if it helps you make a new memory to help ease the pain of an old one.”

She stared at him across the table, stomach feeling hollow.  “How the hell do you know how to talk like this, Hadrian?”

A wry smile curved his lips and he shrugged with one shoulder.  “I’ve seen some shit, I guess.”

“I guess so,” she echoed, shaking her head and sighing.  “Is it experience?  Is that how you know that making new memories will help?”

He hitched one shoulder in a shrug, bending to his notebook again.  “You could say that.”

They’d met the year before, both as first year graduate students and bonded over coffee and reading loads that would have crushed mere mortals—or at least, that was the running joke.  She knew a little about him, knew that he was married and had two kids and he was their stay-at-home dad while his wife worked—in law enforcement, she thought, based on what little he’d mentioned.  She also knew that something bad—or several somethings—had happened to him in the past, things that had delayed his education.  He was a little older than she was, though not too much, and was slightly quiet and withdrawn with most people.  Elaine wasn’t sure what made her different from everyone else, but she was silently grateful for it.  Hadrian was great company and they worked well together.  Their friendship wasn’t something she wanted to endanger.

“Right,” she said softly, deciding not to press.  This wasn’t the time.  “Maybe I will go.”

“You should,” he said.  “Go, have fun, enjoy yourself for once.  No one’s going to begrudge you that, especially the people you think you’re honoring by not having fun today.”

“Let’s be honest, Hadrian.  I don’t have fun that often to begin with.”

Hadrian smiled.  “Maybe that’s something you should think about changing, too.”

That was a familiar refrain—he’d been on her to figure out how to live for months now.  She’d started to wonder why it mattered so much to him but again had never quite found the courage to ask.  She’d convinced herself it didn’t matter and maybe it was true, maybe it didn’t matter.

“Joss says the same thing,” she murmured, digging her laptop out of her bag. In fact, Joslyn had been saying it more and more often since December, and even before when she’d talked Elaine into backing GreySoft’s experimental MMO even before that, the summer after graduation from undergrad.

“Joss is a good friend,” Hadrian said.  “You should listen to her more often.”

Elaine snorted a laugh and Hadrian grinned.

“It’ll take you, what, two hours to get ready and get out there?”  Hadrian glanced up from his notebook again. “Work until noon, then go home, get ready, and go there.  Enjoy it and quit worrying about all of this for a little while.  It’s not like you’re behind.”

She winced, watching him as he bent back to his work.  She knew what he was referring to and it made her ache a little. He was right, she wasn’t behind, but he was—though not nearly so much as she thought he might think he was.  He’d been gone for most of September and though there had been quiet suggestions that maybe he should take the semester off, but he’d been back by the time October began and was working harder than any other grad student in his department.

As far as she was concerned, that alone was telling.

“You don’t have anything to worry about,” she said, watching him for a few seconds.  “You’re already way ahead of everyone else in the cohort and you’re smarter by half than most of them.”

“Yeah, well,” he murmured.  “That may be, but I think I’ve got plenty to worry about.”

Elaine took a breath, intending to argue, then thought better of it and shrugged. “You would know better than I would, I guess.”

“Not all the time,” he said, glancing up again with a faint smile.  “Sometimes friends need to pull other friends out of their own heads and up for air before they drown.”

“Is that what all of this was about this morning?”

He shrugged and she smiled.

“Thanks, Hadrian,” she said.  “I do appreciate it, even if I maybe don’t seem like it.”

“Most people don’t, even when it’s something they need.”  His attention was already back to his work.  “Sometimes it’s like that.  I don’t take it personally.”

“Do you want to come?”

He blinked, then looked up.  “What?”

“To the launch.  Do you want to come?  I’m sure we can get you in if you want to tag along.”

Hadrian thought about it for a moment, then shook his head slightly. “Some other time maybe I’ll tag along with you to the café.  I promised Ky I’d be home early today.”

Ky was his wife.  Elaine studied him for a moment, then smiled.  “Well, I wouldn’t dream of getting you in trouble with your wife. Some other time.”

He nodded.  “Absolutely. I’m not going to lie, what they’ve proposed sounds incredible and I’m more than a little curious.  You’ve played the actual game already, right?”

“Yeah,” Elaine said, booting up her laptop and reaching for one of the books she’d sorted.  “Yeah, since launch—Joss hopped into beta but I just didn’t seem to have time.  I’ve played enough to get a feel but I don’t have a ton of time for it, you know?”

“Yeah, I could see that,” he said.  “Still, I’m glad you allow yourself that much of a break.”

“Such as it is,” Elaine said, starting to thumb through the book in front of her.  “Still. It’s a nice escape when I can afford it.”

“Everyone needs one,” he said, lips curving into a slight smile.  “Even hardworking graduate students.”

Elaine grinned.  “True story.”

“Always is,” Hadrian said, watching her for a second.  “One hundred percent always is.”

Then he bent to his work again and she did, too.  A few hours’ work was better than none, and he really was right. She did work too hard and she did deserve to be happy.  Playing Universe made her happy most of the time, but she wondered if it was what she really needed, what she really wanted, or if it was something else.

Even if it was, for the moment, it was what she had, and would have to be enough for now.

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