FRANS

Last night I dreamed I was on a trip to a version of South Korea that had an exceptionally strange train system, and also my father was still alive. Grinning, bearded, funny. I dreamt of my mother for over a decade after her death, so it makes sense I'm still dreaming of my father nearly nine years after his, but there is a strange comfort in it, dreaming of the dead. I know dreams are not really a liminal place where we can reach those in the underworld. And yet, it still gives me that same wistful feeling, the comfort of being held again by someone I can only visit in sleep.

(Contemporary romance)
Pretty Face by Lucy Parker
British theatre romance. I read the first in this series and was charmed by it. This was less successful for me, largely because it was exploring a dynamic I'm not as interested in. The characters are likeable, which is good as there's a lot of them, and it has wit and charm. It's certainly not bad. It wasn't super my thing anyway, though.


(Non-fiction/worldbuilding)
New Worlds, Year Two by Marie Brennan
I imagine a lot of people are reading the essays week by week but I wanted to wait until they were all collected up like this so I could read them all at once. Just as interesting and delightful as the Year One volume, and gave me a lot to think about.


(Mythology)
The Mabinogion translated by Jeffrey Gantz
A friend had a copy so I borrowed it from her. My favourite story is probably Math Son of Mathonwy because so much crazy stuff happens. I'd previously encountered bits of it - the brothers turned into three kinds of animals to breed with each other as punishment, the girl jumping over a broomstick and babies falling out, Gwydion fighting with Aranrhod over his nephew - but I didn't know they were all in the same story! My other favourite is The Dream of Rhonabwy, with its lovely contrast of the filth and disappointment of life with the surreality of the dream. I'm not sure whether the story I dislike the most is How Culhwch Won Olwen, which just keeps going and going and going and going, and is even more obnoxiously repetitive than the other stories, or Gereint and Enid, just because Gereint is a total dick.


(Literary criticism)
New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays edited by Sarah S G Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger
It took me so many months to read this that I can't remember most of the essays any more. Some of them were a load of wank and some didn't really feel that academically rigorous, but there was decent variety and it wasn't limited to boring stale questions like 'is romance fiction sexist or feminist???' Published in 2012 so the essays that mentioned LGBTQ+ characters in romance fiction felt the most dated, not least because people other than Suzanne Brockmann write m/m now, and the essays about SBTB also felt dated because the internet and blogging have changed substantially over the last seven years.


Reread:
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
I hadn't read it since childhood, and as you'd expect of a middle grade book, it's really not as magical and exciting through adult eyes. The Magician's Nephew was always my actual favourite, granted, but this seems weirdly diminished; I did, however, realise that I'd forgotten that touch of Aslan telling them to wipe the blood off their swords, which I always liked. As for the rest, the religious stuff - which is nearly all of it given the son of Adam and daughter of Eve stuff, the mingled terror and awe people feel looking at Aslan, the resurrection on the stone table, the white witch being a descend of Lilith, etc - is not just more obvious to me but also much less enjoyable now than when I was a kid. I have no connection to Christian stuff, sorry. Nor am I particularly horrified by it? It's obviously the point of the story that it be a Christian fable.

I realise I have approximately zero percent of the feelings about portal fantasy everyone else has, which is weird as I'm technically writing one. I can't say I read this and want to live in Narnia at all. The real world has cartoons and pizza delivery, you know, so as far as I'm concerned it's superior.


DNF - The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden - I thought this was going to be woman-focused fantasy with tons of magic, a la Uprooted, but I got 100 pages in and (A) there wasn't nearly as much magic as I'd wanted and (B) it was way more dude heavy than I wanted. Much as I was vaguely intrigued by Sasha's homoerotic yearning for the monk, the rest left me fairly cold. I couldn't stand Pyotr (yo, maybe if your new young wife is crying every time you bone, you should think about why), I'm not really interested in vague politicking in historical Russia tbqh, and spoilers tell me it later turns into a wicked stepmother thing which is... fine, honestly, because I hate my stepmother, but at least make the story focus on the female characters if you're going to do that, maybe. I passed it off to my aunt to see if she'll like it any more than I did.

Writing guides read: Forensics for Fiction: Crime Scenes by Geoff Symon - US focused but still full of tons of things that will be helpful for me if I ever finish a story with a CRIME!!! I especially like the way he detailed bad evidence handling and faulty police work in two famous cases to show how these things can go wrong. Recipe for Outlining by Megan Barnhard - I should read this through again, because there's some tips on how to brain storm/outline more extensively/expand to draft that I think will help my process.