If any of you read my review blog, or even the reviews that started on here, you’ll know that I don’t hold back. I tell it exactly how I feel, no sugar, no artificial sweetener. Plain and simple. I’ll post said less than stellar reviews without much thought about it. I feel that my feelings are justified by the examples I give in the review itself and I don’t feel a need to further explain myself.
Well, I just read a book that was pretty bad. Like bad to a point where a few pages in I had to double-check the publisher to back sure I wasn’t reading a self-published book. Granted I have a feeling the criteria for acceptable for this particular small eBook publisher isn’t all that stringent. But that’s not the problem. The problem is this book was written by a fellow book blogger. I don’t know which review blog was her’s. I’m trying to find that out now. But that’s irrelevant. I’m not worried about her reaction. As far as I’m concerned she’s another author that’s subject to both the positive and negative her book could bring about.
I’m more worried about the potential backlash from the book blogging community as a whole for a less than stellar review. Right now the book is in a blog tour so all of the reviews are going to be positive but I’m catching wind of some of them and I can’t help but think some people are really pandering to her but this book was really freaking bad. Bad. The plot was really elementary, the writing was something you’d see in a first draft of someone writing their first novel with maybe some high school English classes behind them at most. I really don’t think you need to be adept at creative editing to see the major flaws and lackluster writing the book has to offer. It’s just not compelling. I only read until the end because I wanted to see if she could pull off an ending. Yup, not so much.
On the one hand I do want to post it once the book is released just to kind of dampen all of the positive. Not because I want to rain on people’s parades but just because I honestly don’t believe that this book deserves the glorious praise it’s been getting. On the other I just don’t want to deal with the damn drama it could potentially cause. The book blogging world, especially the YA side, is so filled with drama to begin with that I don’t want to deal with the “you should support your fellow book blogger” and “I can’t believe you would come out and say that about a fellow book blogger” that would potentially ensue.
On the third hand, my fellow book bloggers know me. They know I review with abject honesty. I don’t know. My first instinct is telling me to just swallow it and not post it at all and the gut instinct is usually right. Or maybe just wait 6 months and review it then. Although by then I’ll probably not care. What do you think?
I’ve come to the harsh realization that I can’t go two years without a vacation. Oh poor me, I know. At least I have the ability to actually take a vacation, right? Well, I’m utilizing that while I can. I need my vacations.
By the time I’m leaving on a jet place in September, it will have been two years since my last vacation. Didn’t take one last year because I used my time preemptively for a vacation the year before. I used a day here and there from what I had left but it wasn’t much. So I’ve been pooling my time off since and it’s time for a nice long break in 60 days. Two 30-day months.
For a last couple of months I’ve been noticing that I’m losing my patience with people a lot quicker than what I normally do. And ever since I started noticing, it’s been getting worse. I’m equating it to getting a hair cut. When I know I have a haircut coming in like a week, it’s like every day leading up to that week is a bad hair day because the thing’s turned into a mop and just needs to be cut. So basically every day leading up until my vacation is going to string me the hell out until I can actually break away and then my biggest worry will be what shall I eat next? Here’s hoping I have a few stress free days in the next 60 because I would really like to go to California with a full head of hair and/or without a court date.
I just reserved the final portion of the trip, the car. I checked about 6 months ago and prices were looking really good. I wanted to get the balance down on my credit card before I reserved so instead of booking then, I held off. Fast forward 6 months and I’m about ready to punch myself in the face. The prices freaking doubled. Add another 5 days onto that and they went up another $200. Mother’s ass! I was able to secure a compact SUV for $275 a week. That was the cheapest car across about 8 different rental companies. Yes, even cheaper than an economy. The economy with this particular company was coming in at $299 a week. The cheapest out of all of the economies on all the sites. The rest of the cars on the rest of the sites were averaging about $500 a week regardless of the size. Shoot me. Here’s hoping I won’t need a booster seat to drive the car. I drive a Honda Civic now. Make that a booster seat or need a step stool to get into the thing. I’m thinking it’s going to be something the size of a Rogue. Isn’t ‘compact SUV’ an oxymoron?
So now it’s just the little things. I’m going to be ordering a new luggage set from Overstock.com because London ate my last one and I’m sure as shit not packing in 2 weeks worth of stuff into a carry-on. I need to get another memory card for my camera so I can have the extra space and then a car dock for my iPod. It’s an hour and a half each way from San Francisco to Santa Cruz. I don’t want to spend most of the time hunting for a radio station. Other than that, I’m hitting up Plato’s Closet on Saturday to look at purses and I’m pretty much good to go.
Just counting down the days. 60 . . .
And I’m not talking about the reading lists that schools give out before classes break, albeit I’ve taken a peek at what’s on the summer reading shelves at Barnes & Noble and those lists are far more awesome than mine ever were. I’m talking about those book that make you swim in summer. You crack one open and immediately you can feel the summer heat, you can hear the summer nights and for a short time nothing else matters except the reading.
I’m not talking about those frivolous beach reads, either. Those things are dimes a dozen and will probably make your brains rot. Sure they’re good for a really light read interrupted by ice cream and boogie boarding and sand. The summer reading I’m talking about penetrates so much deeper. These books you can read any time of the year and automatically be transported to palm trees and heat.
My favorite summer reads are my YA horror novels of yore. Not because they’re all placed at the beach or the plots are particularly summer-y. They just bring me back to a time when I had two months of freedom and I could stay up late and read these scary stories with nothing but the crickets and freaky noises to keep me company. My favorite summer read is Song of the Vampire by Carmen Adams. It’s an old school YA horror novel but it also happens to be set during the summer in a coastal California town with a boardwalk and vampires. Sound familiar? It’s so close to being The Lost Boys it’s driving me nuts! The plots are kind of similar too. It also helps that I think The Lost Boys is an excellent summer movie. Lovely package!
What books bring out he summer for you? Are there books from your youth that scream summer to you but might not to anyone else? Do they actually have sand, surf and sun? Or the chirpings of a cool summer night?
So I turned my car on this morning and it roared a little louder than usual. Initially I thought it might have been the radio so I turned it off and listened to my car. Nope, not the radio. My car was running louder.
Awesome, I say to myself. Another muffler is going. My car’s eaten through mufflers for as long as I’ve had it. Including this one, that would be 3 in the last 6 years or so. But I figured I’d drive on it today and take it in for repair tomorrow and it’ll be fine.
I get up to the light at the on-ramp near my house and I’m stopped at a red. The light turns green, I step on the gas and I hear a jumbo jet flying by. For a nanosecond I think it’s the giant Mack truck behind me but the harder I accelerate, the louder the noise gets. Crap!
I pull over because that noise is way too horrifying to drive with. I get my mechanic on the phone and initially I wanted them to come and tow me. If you’ve ever driven a car without a muffler/one that had a giant hole in it (of which I’ve had both, the first time the muffler literally fell off the car), you’ll understand just how insanely loud it can get. But I have them saying just drive it in and my mom next to me saying just drive it in. So I drop her off at work and drive the damn thing in slumped down as far as I can. Did I mention how embarrassing it is to drive a car that loud? And I’m not talking lawnmower engine suped up loud either. It was like a cat roaring like a lion. WTF?
As I expected, I had a hole in the pipe because it’d rotted away. Apparently the age of the car is a factor in how often you go through mufflers. $500 and seven hours later, I get my car back sounding like normal. Oi. Mufflers. You slay me.
I didn’t just realize it but it just hit me that I’m kind of flaky when it comes to my features on this blog. Write It Wednesdays, Poetry Hits and Writing Rules have all kind of farted out with hardly anything fueling them to begin with. Which then led me to re-think just what it was I was posting on this blog. I don’t want people seeing this site thinking that I can’t commit to anything which is just not true. Check out my book blog if you want consistent meme-ing. But what I might consider doing is re-organizing all of my posts, at least so it doesn’t look like I have some dead categories hanging out in the sidebar there. I have a nice long weekend coming up that I think I could fill some of that with. Next to restuffing a site that I accidentially deleted. Awesome.
As for the moronic, I just found out that in SMeyer world, Rio de Janeiro has a west coast. Don’t believe me? Check out the Twilight Lexicon’s description of where Isle Esme is. The western edge of Rio where the nards boarded a yacht. Was the yacht trailered on a truck because that’s the only way you can get on a yacht on the western edge of Rio. Did someone fail cardinal directions class?
I know this wench has already come out and said she was too lazy to research anything. Yeah, at least she admitted it but I’m surprised there wasn’t a rash of writer suicides across the planet. But really? Western edge of Rio? I quick look-up on Google maps can tell you about the glaring error in that statement. Come on. Okay, you’re lazy. But that’s like not wanting to get up to get the remote when it’s in your own lap.
And sad thing is, when the Twitards try to defend horsehit like this, it’s usually done with a thorough rape of the English language and/or a dismissive “who cares about that stuff? just enjoy the story” statement. They claim she’s such a better writer than JK Rowling but can’t actually substantiate those claims without making death threats to the people questioning them. Or claiming said questioner is lacking a life when said person is exhibiting an equally lifeless position.
I’m sure I can dredge better quality work from the anals of fanfiction.net. At least those authors have the decency to utilize Google if the situation calls for it. Sure, they say fuck it to the spell check function but at least they are smarter than fifth graders and can tell you where the oceans are.
My brain, she hurts.
