I HAVE BOOKS!

Guys, its going to be a short post this week. Mainly because I have super important news! 

I HAVE BOOKS! 

That's just one of the boxes that came in! They are all so perfect! I am glad to finally have one of my own to put on my shelf. Yes, I do keep one of each of my novels. That shelf is currently filled with other stuff, but it is a larger section devoted to my novels than it was before. 

The book above is a copy of my first fully edited novel, a dark fantasy titled Falling Through the Threshold. One day, I'd like to go through it and edit it to put out there. However, I was originally seeing it as a trilogy... now I think it may do better as a stand-alone. Since I printed it out and got it bound at my local Staples I keep it on the shelf.

They just arrived today! So if anybody was holding off to order directly through me, you can do that now! Just contact me and let me know! It also means that as soon as I can start hitting the convention circuit again that I'll have physical copies to take with me! 

Has anyone finished reading it yet? I am sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to see what your reviews say. I hope you're all loving it!

Currently Reading

Its been a while since I've done a "currently reading" catch up, so this week, I'll be listing out what I've been reading lately and what I've thought about each book. 

Most recently, I finished Smoke Bitten by Patricia Briggs. It's fun and a good book, like most of her Mercy Thompson series. Not the best of the series by any stretch, but certainly somewhere in the middle there. Worth a read if you like Urban Fantasy. If anyone was put off by the love triangle in the first few books, by book 3 or so she has 100% chosen and it isn't an issue anymore. Stick with it, that part goes away. 

Just a few days before that I finished the latest Guild Codex series release, Lost Talismans and a Tequila by Annette Marie. A fun bit of urban fantasy that I highly suggest... as highly as I suggest the Mercy Thompson series. If you enjoy urban fantasy and haven't read either of these series, you're doing yourself a disservice. Go pick up the first one. You won't be disappointed. 

Another book I read is the first book in the Log Horizon light novel series by Mamare Touno. The third season of the anime is coming out later this year in the fall. You can't go wrong with this series. Some may find it a bit wooden to read, due to its translated status. Push past that. The characters are fun and the world-building is top-notch. 

I decided on a lark to read the C.E. Murphy's Walker Papers series again. I finished that series early in July. Again, this is one of the urban fantasy novels that I highly suggest you read. Its one of the series I'll return to again and again. Check them out. 

I read Wolf's Whisper by Arizona Tape earlier this month as well. This one, I can't suggest, unfortunately. The writer writes desire well, but the MC is more than a bit on the stupid side, everyone is an emotional bomb and I still can't tell you if this was supposed to be fantasy, Asian fantasy, urban fantasy, or something else. It was a harem, which was fine, but it was a harem in which there is no sex. Considering that the MC often forgot about her quest in favor of thinking about sleeping with her harem, this is a bit unforgivable. 

Right now, I'm reading the Parasol Protectorate series by Gail Carriger. Starting with Meat Cute, the latest release detailing the oft-mentioned "hedgehog incident", it tells the meet-cute of our heroine Alexia Tarabotti and Lord Conall Macon. Technically, its book 0.75 of the series, as it happens just a few years before the first book. I would suggest you read the Parasol Protectorate series first if you haven't already. Otherwise, you may find yourself in for a hell of a ride in the next books. The whole series (steampunk, paranormal romance) is fun and one hell of a ride. Just stick with it past the silliness... or rather, understand that reading it is half the fun and it is meant to be outrageous that way. 

The other book I'm reading right now is The Undine's Tear by Talena Winter's. So far, its got my nod of approval. This is a fantasy about a mermaid type woman who has to heal the stone that powers everything for her people... set in an alternate earth, it seems most normal people don't even know the merpeople, known as undines, even exist. So really fun ideas there. 

And that is it for this week. Tell me what you've been reading lately and whether you've liked them. Also, can you let me know where you'd like me to link each book to? The Kindle ebook? The physical book from Amazon? Goodreads? Let me know and in the future, I'll see about finding the links that you'd prefer I connect to. 

An Interview Link and a Review

Today is going to be a little bit different. The video game that I've been waiting months for finally released. I haven't been playing non-stop or anything, but I have played it long enough to have my review for it. However, most of you don't come here for my video game reviews. Heck, I'm pretty sure none of you come for my rare book reviews either. Fortunately, in addition to my review below, I have an interview I gave on Talena Winters' website. It was really fun to do and I get to talk about my books, so if you want to read that (and I totally suggest you do), head over there. 

Now, for the review.

Years ago, after I'd tried and failed badly writing my first book, my boyfriend gave me his old Gameboy Advance. Unfortunately, he didn't have any video games of the sort that I enjoyed, so we took a run over to Wal-Mart to see what they had. I got a few games that day, all out of a $10 bin. One of those games was Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town. I fully admit I picked it up because my boyfriend promised me that if I didn't like it, he had a friend who would buy it from me, for the $10 afterward. After all, there was literally no downside to buying a game I was pretty sure I was going to hate. "Extreme Farming" just didn't sound all that entertaining to me. After trying the other few games I got, and becoming bored with them before a week, I finally took 'Extreme Farming' out of its case for a test run.

I got probably got over a hundred hours in that game over the next two weeks. I was playing it on the bus to work, on the bus home, during my breaks, during the evening, pushing back bedtime just to finish one more day, which always became 5 or 6 before the system actually got turned off. 

Even after that extreme rush ended, I was still playing it quite often for the next year. I bought the next games, but they kept going right downhill until Story of Seasons came out. Apparently, they made the original Harvest Moon series, but lost the name and the publisher just kept using it (more on that here if you're interested). Story of Seasons took everything I loved about the original game and made it even better. Since then, I've lost thousands of hours to the Story of Seasons franchise and this game looks to be no different. 

Now that you know the history, on to my review. 

Friends of Mineral Town is a solid 8 out of 10 stars for me. As I mentioned, its a remake of the original, so to keep the vibe it originally had, they kept the story pretty simple and didn't change the characters much. This does mean that the townsfolk tend to be less nuanced than what we've seen from Story of Seasons up to this point. It's more like the more recent Harvest Moon games for that. On the other hand, the dialogue has been upped a notch from the original to make everybody seem a bit more alive and interesting. The new character designs were made with the idea that everybody is hot in their own way. This is more hit and miss. The original pictures had a bit more life to them, showing their personalities through pose and dress, as well as expression. Now we have a lot more to the expressions, and less about the way they dress and stand. Personally, I like most of the new designs, though Zack and the Mayor do nothing for me. Also, the Harvest Goddess was always elegant and beautiful, my marriage candidate of choice in the first one. Here, they made her more cute than eloquent and hot... much to my disappointment. 

I should mention that they've now opened up romances to either gender. You still get a child in the end, and life continues. You can play with it or not as you choose. Personally, I am all for this change, and I hope that we'll have it in every game moving forward from this point. 

In addition to the original bachelors and bachelorettes, we've got a new girl and guy as well. I love Jennifer, everything from her character to her design is awesome... Brandon on the other hand has to be more than the beefcake he appears to be, but for the life of me, I don't see it. He's surly every time I talk to him, to the point where I don't care to learn about him further. 

The controls are a bit wonky... less intuitive than you would expect, but you'll pick them up rather quickly. The days feel like they're passing by too quickly, but if you plan your days in advance (from the comfort of your nullspace home), I can guarantee that you won't feel anywhere near as flustered trying to finish everything. 

One thing I dislike is that we are missing the customization that we've come to expect from a Story of Seasons game. You choose your character (one of four options) and while you'll have different outfits, you won't be able to change your hair color or anything. Also, the skin colors are notably white, pale, and something near tan... I would have liked to see more diverse skin tones, though, with perhaps with them not offering hair options, they felt it was best to limit colors to match the hair tones they chose. Regardless of the reasoning, I missed the ability to change my character and house to match what I wanted it to be. I hope that they'll add DLC or add a quality of life update adding in the options for it, eventually. 

And that's about it. I entirely suggest getting this game. It isn't as complex as the more recent offerings from Story of Seasons, but that simplicity is part of its charm, in my opinion. There's still going to be tons of playability to the game and hundreds of hours of fun for you to enjoy while you play out the different lives you can live in Mineral Town. 

✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰

An Unfortunate Tweet

Camp Nano has been one heck of a journey for me this year. Normally, my editing takes the process of reading my book, assembling it in the correct order, and editing page by page from there. However, when I was working with my new editor on my last book, I found a new way. I went over the book and wrote what each chapter was, put them on post-it notes and stuck them inside my notebook while I played around with it. It helped me to really see where I was missing plot points and make sweeping changes if needed from a top-down approach that my old way of working wouldn't have allowed. I decided to see if it helped me with editing this next book. 

I should start by saying I knew it had problems. I was expecting a lot of rewrites. However, I was not expecting this method to show me that my entire plot was wrong and needed to be rewritten essentially. And I'm only exaggerating a little when I say that. I just finished the top-down overview and I have 17 chapters that are listed as "rewrite from scratch"... there could be more by the end of this pass, but that's what I'm working with now. 

Despite that daunting number, I'm actually pretty hopeful. Fox's Facade was a really difficult book to write in the first place. It was going a few different places, but at the time, I don't think I was a good enough writer to anticipate what exactly it would need. Regardless of the actual reason, I think the way I have restructured the plot will work a lot better now. I began rewrites a few days ago. Hopefully, it won't take me too long to do them. I'd like to have the edits out to my beta readers by September, if possible, though I'll have to see how my editing is going before I set that as the goal. 

That finished, I'd like to talk about a tweet that was posted earlier this week. 

This tweet from @dntmakeitworse to be exact. If you've read my blog for any amount of time, I'm sure you know how false this is. Yes, women tend to be overlooked in publishing. I'm not saying that isn't a problem. I've read the story all too many times about fans walking up to female authors and thanking them for writing under a pseudonym or their initials. "I never would have picked up your book if I'd known a woman wrote it" is something that all too many have heard. 

That said, while I think this was what the tweeter was trying to convey, they are horribly wrong. Even leaving aside solid staples such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Anne McCaffery, and Agatha Christie, there are hundreds of others. Margaret Atwood, Harper Lee, Ursula K. LeGuin, Baroness Orczy... this isn't even counting that the first novel in the world was written by a woman; my personal hero of Murasaki Shikibu, the lady-in-waiting who wrote The Tale of Genji. 

If you think women haven't always been there, doing the same things men were, you are sorely mistaken. Our tale often isn't told; the women warriors of Shaka Zulu's armies, the female samurai of Japan, the women of Scotland trained to defend the homestead when the men were away. 

And that I think is where I'll end it today. Let me know who your favorite female author as a kid was. Personally, I will also hold a place in my heart for Anne McCaffery. I loved her story of psychics, dragons, and cats. 

Endings and Beginnings

Book four is officially done! The rough draft, in all its unedited glory, has been pushed to the side. As is my usual routine, it will be glanced at in September/October, but otherwise, won't see the light of day until book 3 is with my beta readers or my editor. Book four came in at 107k which is a whale of a book for me. I expect editing will be frustrating as heck as well. Fortunately, that is a problem for future me, so I can safely ignore it. 

Instead, I'm working on book three. Now, the third book came in at 102k when I first opened the document. Fortunately, a lot of that was notes and alternate chapters. See, a lot of my writing process is just me throwing spaghetti at a wall until my mind connects the dots. So, if you were wondering why there was a sudden crab hunt in Hunter's Gambit, I can say that it wasn't planned from the beginning. Instead, I knew what my characters were going to find when they got there, but didn't know how they were going to find it. So, I started writing that chapter and stared at my computer wondering why I was writing about crabs until my mind connected the nodes in my mind. Alternate chapters pop up when I finish a chapter and realize that its bad and I hate it or (more commonly) that the story was being told from the wrong POV and needs to be rewritten. 

So, the good news? Book three is already down to 92k. That's with just easy edits, removing notes, chapters that I'd already known I was going to have to get rid of eventually and that sort of stuff. Some of my chapters that seemed to not fit at the end of book two have been added to three and I have already gone over it once, putting things in order. My next edit is one where I go through and I really look at my plot. I've already found two chapters that are going to be deleted and another seven that will require complete rewrites. While this seems like a lot, its actually less than I was expecting. Between changes made to book two and now knowing where book four is going, I would have been surprised if there were less than that. 

Honestly, what I'm surprised at most this time around is how easy it is to see things like chapters that can be deleted. Knowing that I need parts of those chapters, but not there and not alone, really helps me to figure out how to tighten my writing. Its my hope that figuring this out at this stage will also make my editing go way faster. I haven't hidden the fact that I'm very new to this, which means that I'm still figuring out how to work best and how to speed up so that I can get these books out to you faster.