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Oh how I want to be that person who can sit down, put their laptop, notebook or whatever on their lap, open a half-written chapter and just write, and write, and write, whatever, even if it’s something they’ll need to edit over and over again, just put the words out there in sentences and don’t feel like all they have in their head is lumps of dirt and wind and pain, but definitely no actual words formed of actual letters, and definitely not in any single language. 
Except irrelevant posts, apparently.

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My mind is falling apart and I sort of want to write it somewhere on a wall in big red letters because, hello, cliché, and because I’m really not good at screaming.

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so, I have a specific relationship with words. 
Which I may have mentioned a few dozen times already.
Words immediately form images for me, and they taste, and I don’t know how words work for all other people but I did notice that not everyone finds typos and translation mistakes as hilarious as I do, because not everyone gets those images in their minds together with the words, and not everyone cares about how words taste.

Anyhow, the point of my rant in this specific moment is that I may have been reading a lot of some non-serious fiction and fanfiction to unclog my brain, and have seen people use the word “wife-beater” a few too many times when they are specifically describing someone attractive, in an enticing state of undress.
And all I can see when I read that word is a dirty piece of white cloth, stained by sweat and food and other substances we better not imagine, stretched over beer-and-fat belly of some unkept person with IQ below 40. 
I mean, honestly. Even I don’t go into the whole cultural background of naming a piece of clothing after domestic abuse. 
As a writer to fellow writers, how can you use it to describe something you want to portray as hot and not flinch?
I can even understand how it can be used in correlation with an antagonist, to give a negative impression. But even that is not necessary, since it has so many other names – tank top, a-shirt, sleeveless shirt, undershirt…

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Can I please order food without having the delivery person ask me where I am from?! EH?!

That’s like the easiest way to get the ‘go fuck yourself’ reaction from me. And there are not many of those, actually.

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I can neither take nor give praise correctly. 
Some say that’s messed up. Perhaps.
But I prefer people who’d look at something attentively,
and give constructive criticism,
and point out all the things that they think need to be corrected,
than kissass.
Also, absence of points of criticism makes me feel like people didn’t even care to look.
Basically, it’s hard to think of something where there’s no more room for improvement,
and I’d prefer people to focus on that. What to make better and how.
And when people ask me for my opinion,
and I can see that what they mean is that they want someone to pet them on how well they have done and encourage them, I seriously have no idea what to do.

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Touch of Power (Healer, #1)

Touch of Power by Maria V. Snyder

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


A fantasy adventure that had a promising start, but got lost, and lost all of its appeal half way through.

The first half of this book looked like an ‘okay’ fantasy adventure, with a promise of some romance, and admittedly less-than-average writing. The world-building was not bad, if not very deep; there was a lot of phrasing that felt too modernistic to fit with the setting, and characters did not really feel very interesting or developed… but most of it felt more or less passable.
Unfortunately, from around the middle of the book, it then all went down the drain. The time progression, events sequences, felt random and mangled. More and more things felt unnatural, like the way they kept getting captured and released, and the reasons for both. It became tiring to follow. It was already increasingly difficult to keep myself interested in reading on, and then a character of a type I practically hate the most got introduced (a nasty manipulative egomaniac), and I found myself skimming pages just to get it over with.
Also, the whole idea of people having sex for the first time, and more, while one of them is dying form a plague (and due to die in few days) actually made me uncomfortable. I don’t find it romantic, don’t like how it was done, or how romance was done in this story in general.
I though there were some promising ideas at first, but overall it turned out to be very disappointing.



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I do honestly recommend to take a look at Hellblade. (if you can handle disturbing images) 
If you prefer/can – play it and support the developers. (it’s neither expensive nor long)
Or be like me and watch it like a movie. (not that I don’t want to support the developers, I just can’t really handle playing on my own right now) 
I personally watched it on Mr.Odd’s channel. (but if you prefer a playthrough without any commentary, I’m sure there’s tone of those too.)

But do take a look if you can, because in terms of story-telling and visuals, it’s a damn masterpiece.

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Warprize (Chronicles of the Warlands, #1)

Warprize by Elizabeth Vaughan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A healthy fantasy romance to make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.

A easy ‘comfort book’ through and through, with a handsome and overprotective warlord, likable side characters (also very protective), a ‘stubborn healer archetype’ heroine, a healthy relationship (admittedly, an ‘insta’ one, though), and grand gestures. Nothing else to say really. A good romantic read to put some balm on your soul and get away, without having to read about much angst and intrigues.



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My very sick and boiling mind graced me with a colourful (and easy to understand, I hope…. but I’ve been very wrong about ‘easy to understand’ many times before) and very stupid (I’m allowed to have as much stupid as I want this week, so if you don’t get it, stfu) metaphor to describe how I’ve been feeling. So I’m going to just dump it out here. Because I need to dump out at least something of all the things I made myself keep in.

Imagine. Something is bringing you to an orgasm. Without you having much control over it. But it’s persistent. And it brings you closer and closer, and harder and harder, and just as you think that you’re going to get your release, you realise that you are physically unable to. And won’t be able to. Never. It’s not a denial game, and there’s no one who is doing this to you, no one who is in power to have mercy. You’re alone and your own body is torturing you. And it all has nowhere to go. So it almost breaks you apart, and since there’s nowhere to go it sort of settles back down, slowly. But after it get’s low enough, it starts to build up again. And now you know how this is going to go. And you dread it.
Imagined? 
Now imagine doing all the things you do on your normal day while feeling like that. Walking, working, talking, smiling.
Good?
Now replace reaching an orgasm with wanting to shoot your own brains out. Because they are burning inside of your scalp and have nowhere to go. And there are destructive thought that attack you if you drop your guard for a second, and there’s screaming, vomit and chaos. And it’s all inside.

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The problem I have with assholes is that they wake up my monsters. The monsters that I shoved as far down as I could, and starved, and almost killed myself trying to starve them, and moved myself to the country with one of the lowest crime and aggression rates on this planet, and with people who keep wide personal distance and don’t shove themselves in your head just for walking by, and with one of the strictest outside manners, and I made myself weak and surrounded myself by docile things just to keep my monsters sleeping, and it takes 2 seconds of some random assholes to get my monsters to raise their heads and… it’s just sad. Helplessly sad.

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Work thoughts:

  • Learned a new word a few days before.
    憤死 (funshi) – dying in a fit of anger or indignation.
    Love how there’s actually a separate word for that.
  • Amused by the culture where people believed it was easier to tell who was the father of a person, than who was the mother.
    After reading a number of biography notes starting “A son of B, mother was supposedly C.”
  • Heard people discuss a ‘dad dating’ game… with only appearing characters (as far as I saw), being the dads and their teenage daughters. 
    Still didn’t bring myself to look it up (because scary, not knowing the actual name), because I really couldn’t tell who was supposed to be dating whom in that combination.
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It always amused me how easily we accept that we live in a world where ‘depression and suicidal thoughts’ are listed as a side effects of the medication which you take against the depression and suicidal thoughts.

It’s a small example of a big world-standard pattern, but I hope some will get what I was trying to say.

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Written in Red (The Others, #1)

Written in Red by Anne Bishop

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


An interesting concept of an urban fantasy with a twist, yet unfocused.

I wanted to like this book a bit more. The thing is, I do like the world, the concept, and a lot of its characters. I just kind of feel that the focus was not in the right places for a lot of the story, especially the second half. I would have thought Meg (and hopefully Simon) were supposed to be the main character in this, but after the first initial chapters we don’t really get any substantial focus on the development of their relationships, just snippets here and there. I, personally, wish that the bit about Asia could have been left out altogether, and we could have had more time with Meg and Simon. A lot of their interactions get of ‘looking back’ treatment, when we don’t actually get to read about them happening, but get told that they had happened because one or another character was remembering them happen for a brief moment. It’s like the parts that were supposed to be more interesting were left out or breezed over, and boring insignificant parts about characters who didn’t even matter in slightest got a lot of focus and ‘screen time’.
Regarding the world-building: While there probably could have been a better name than ‘Others’ (and why do we even need the word ‘Others’ if there is a proper name?), I sort of like the more savage concept for the ‘supernaturals’ that were something that have been around long before humans, and will always be more powerful than humans they can feed on. Can’t say if the concept had been really developed believably from all angles, but I think I just like it enough to kind of believe it without looking for holes much.
The concept of blood prophets on the other hand… Definitely had more holes than substance, and was also left out of focus half-way through. I believe it will probably be revisited in one of the following books, but right now it feels more like just a convenient way to make the main character more special and let her predict things from time to time an be useful.

Returning to my very first point, (I just can’t really get over it) I feel that the most interesting parts were the interactions between Meg, Simon, Wolves, and some other supernaturals, but unfortunately they were too diluted by others and felt even more few and far between than they probably were. With the progression of the story, we got less and less insight into Meg and her actions, and it felt like we were getting farther and farther away from her.
I think I’m still interested enough to read book 2, but if it will follow the same pattern – of focusing on insignificant side characters and not on the developments between the main characters – that probable will be ‘it’ for me.



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