writing

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I was running through crowds and fighting some people in funny hats with a sabre that didn’t feel entirely real in my hand… in my dream tonight.
And my brother (who was fighting with some sort of naginata) decided to get married in the middle of all that. And I was the only one on his side of the family (hiding my sabre behind my back), and the mother of the bride cried when she thanked me for coming.
And then the enemies came, I shouted ‘Battle formation!’ and woke up.
… and I don’t even have a brother.

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When I try to sound serious and say something like “Peal kickle”
Peal kickle. In brutal ways.

And write Suncho instead of Synchro
Suncho mode
Suncho area
Suncho attack

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There are senses… smell, taste, just the feeling of the air around you… that sometimes make you feel like for a fleeting moment you were able to jump through space or/and time, dimension … and that fleeting moment shakes your whole existence for hours to come because you feel like if you can catch that moment and bring it back you might really travel somewhere. Or maybe you did travel somewhere and it was someone else who came back. Or maybe, you were finally about to wake up, but didn’t reach for the surface strongly enough.
Glitch in the matrix.

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  • Your lever be lest alone (Your lover will be left alone.)
  • This is not bat too. (This is not too bad.)
  • Toy will be a fitting enemy. (You will be a fitting enemy.)

When I’m on  roll.

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Today,
writing is like untangling those strings from a tightly-tangled ball, before even attempting to weave them into any sort of fabric.

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Sometimes I feel like writing is building a huge puzzle from few thousand pieces without knowing the final picture.
Sometimes I feel that it is like building a living body in baby steps, assembling the bones on the first draft, then connecting the nerves, the muscles, adding some meat, some blood with every next editing, and finally skin, and colour before it is ready to become its own seperate being.
Sometimes I feel that it is like having a thousand of colourful strings and trying to weave a tapestry having no idea how to do it.

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I can’t use my writing to get the bad blood out of myself.
Because I need my writing to be my good blood.

But then I suffer a lot from the need to get the bad blood out somehow and not knowing how…

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Contagion (Contagion, #1)Contagion by Erin Bowman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Survival thriller with possibly promising sequel.

I rate it 3.5-ish, but rounded it up simply because I will actually be looking forward to see where the next book goes.

I must say, this books gets better towards the end, and not because you might think (not because that’s where the real action in this kind of books begins to happen).
Unfortunately, I almost missed it, because I had a lot of trouble getting through the first half, and here’s why:
1) “A bunch of screw-ups and kids-who-don’t-deserve-it get thrown into a deadly dangerous situation without responsible adult supervision. Who do you think will survive, if anyone?’ is how it reads for the whole first half, and I kept thinking “well, isn’t it ironic that this book tries to make fun of stupid horror movie stories and then basically follows in their steps”? Enter a dozen of unbelievably stupid decisions that are likely to make a few of less tolerant people close this book forever.
2) The writing is inconsistent at best. Sometimes it bordered on the ‘okay, yeah, fine’, with an occasional sentence making my editing fingers and eyebrows twitch, and sometimes it fell entirely into the field of ‘someone really should have edited this a few more times before getting it out…’. It’s the odd word and phrase choices that don’t really fit and ruin immersion, it’s the fact that the interludes feel like they weren’t thought through enough to feel organic… It was simply speaking… too rough to be read smoothly, and it irritated me a lot.
3) More even than the surface lack of polish in writing, it really bothered me how this book treats character development descriptions. It tries to raise some issues and give its characters interesting back stories, but it kind of fails to do a good job of it – it fails to do it organically. It chews on everything extensively, explaining what people feel and why exactly, instead of showing it. Ideally, a book is supposed make its reader aware of a character’s ‘issues’ without actually spelling them out in a way that gets you thinking ‘does it really make sense that this person is aware of all their inner issues and actually name them to themselves, yet still behave the way they do…?’.
In short, it does this thing where, for the most of the story, instead of letting readers pick up on things on their own, it says ‘here, I’ll spell every psychological issue out for you, name it and explain every little thing, like you’re too stupid to understand on your own’. It tries to employ interesting issues, but pretty much fails to present them correctly.

It’s hard to talk about this genre without much spoilers. So I’ll probably leave it here.
Overall, while some of the story decisions I find questionable, it gets actually interesting enough to make you want to read the sequel, even if only out of curiosity, and that is what matters.

View all my reviews

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the literature that makes a point to tell people of evil (and other disgusting things) that exists can’t attract me…
because we already know that evil exists
what it needs to be telling is that evil can be dealt with, destroyed or overturned

and overall, I prefer to read about things I want more in my life, than about those I don’t really want to exist in it at all

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got stuck in a very silly place in a middle of a chapter

staring into the wall trying to think how hair different to my own would behave in a world without hair products
seriously

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that frustration when you have just comfortably barricaded yourself in your seat, with all the cushions just right, with the leg support, and laptop stand on your lap, and a nice chocolate cake nearby for a snack…
… aand you realise you forgot your tea and need to get up to get it
and then you realise you forgot your glasses somewhere too…
and then your workbook you need for writing is also not where you though you put it…
…and when you finally sit down for the nth time thinking you’re ready this time, you realise you better go to toilet too

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exaggerated contrast between good and bad, some strength, some bravery, some love, some steel, and horses, and some beautiful free lands, preferably with some snow, is what I need to return my peace of mind
and balance
and writing