#I read like 300-ish pages of the book without stopping and then realized

[rainedroptalks]

Started reading Gideon the ninth and quickly realized exam week is not even close to the correct headspace to be reading that in

[walkwithheroes84]

Immortals After Dark (Half Way) Series Thoughts And Couples Ranked

I started reading the Immortals After Dark series by Kresley Cole on February 5th, 2021. In the last twelve days, I've read roughly half the series. And, believe me, I was crushed to find out that the last book was released in 2017. The fandom is dead and the author - whether due to publisher issues, health issues, or a mixture of both - hasn’t been active on any social media platforms since 2019. 

I have some mixed feelings on the series, but since I have no one to share them with, I’ve decided to put them here. I chose to read this series because I liked the idea of it: immortal beings, preparing for a major “battle”, all while dealing with last-minute villains and finding their true soulmates. Yeah, I’ll read that. So, what have I liked about the series?

Let’s start with the fact that it is very clear that Kresley Cole had a major game plan in mind. Hints of future books, hints of storylines, and future important characters are introduced in every book. Since most of the novels take place around (or even at the same time) readers are often given several perspectives of the same events. Someone who seemed like a no-so-great person in one novel is shown to be a better person two novels later - because we  now know their backstory and what makes them tick. A character might offhandedly mention something in a novel (example: Garreth mentioning Lucia is his destined mate in book one) and it comes full circle in another novel - we get to see that story play out. 

Even if your favorite character plays a minor or side role in one novel, there is a great chance they will be a main character at some point in the series. And, as someone who often loves the side characters more than the main characters, that was a nice surprise for me.

It’s also fairly clear that Cole took some time in developing the different (major) groups within the Lore: who they are, what they can do, who they are friendly with, etc. That was a nice detail that I liked, especially as it didn’t really change in the novels I’ve read. And to be honest, in such a long series, it would be very easy for an author to forget smaller details. But, I don’t think Cole has - yet. 

There were some things I didn’t like, of course. Having read books 1-7 and then 9-10 (I don’t have access to book 8 yet) in the span of twelve days - it is so painfully clear that Cole has a formula she likes to work with. 

Most of her novels play out the same way: ML and FL meet. An attraction forms, with the ML realizing that the FL is his destined mate/Bride/whatever. They fight, he chases her, they fight some more, there is a bit of sex, there is a misunderstanding, he’s possessive, they fight and have sex, there is something terrible looming in the background that gets quickly taken care of in the last 50 or so pages, they fight again, they makeup and then they ride off into the sunset until they have a few cameos in other couples’ novels. It’s painfully predictable at times, and in truth it works well with some couples and not so well with others. So, I do like when Cole changes things a bit. (See book ten, Dreams of a Dark Warrior, for example.)

I also have to fully admit that some of the Alpha males, who were so possessive, running around calling women “Mine,” while being borderline abusive or/and manipulative at times turned me off.  That kind of guy is just not my cup of tea. So, I’m sad to say I have not (as of yet) been a huge fan of the Lykae and the way they tend to treat their fated mates. 

That said, I’d like to go over each couple and rank them. 

09. Emma Troy and Lachlain MacRieve from A Hunger Like No Other (Book 1): I almost stopped reading because of this couple. I understand that he was tortured and hurt by vampires for years, but he was so awful toward Emma when he thought she was a full blooded vampire! He demanded she touch him in exchange for a phone call! It was so clear that she was scared, and because of his own trauma, he did nothing to calm her. Not a fan. 

08. Sabine, Sorceress of Illusions and Rydstrom Woede from Kiss of a Demon King (Book 6): While I liked them as characters, their relationship just felt very toxic to me. At times I was even uncomfortable with the way they treated one another. From reviews I can tell that a lot of people like them, so I may go back to this novel once I have finished the series. 

07. Holly the Bright and Cadeon Woede from Dark Desires After Dark (Book 5): Cadeon was fine. Holly was fine. But - he was going to sell her out! I can’t get behind that. In the end, they did win me over, but I just felt (at times) that Holly could be a bit boring and that Cadeon’s betrayal (while somewhat understandable) was too much. 

06: Mariketa the Awaited and Bowen MacRieve from Wicked Deeds on a Winter’s Night (Book 3): Mari was stronger than Emma in dealing with her Lykae and because Bowen thought his feelings were a spell he wasn’t as possessive with Mari as Lachlian had been with Emma. Mari and Bowen had a bit of humor in their relationship, a bit of teasing and they were just...fun. I enjoyed their interactions before and after they were together. Do I think Mari forgave him way too easily? Yes. Do I  think their issues were solved too easily? Yes. But, my goodness, I still enjoyed them. 

05. Kaderin the Cold/Kind Hearted and Sebastian Wroth from No Rest for the Wicked (Book 2): This is a weird one, because I can’t really tell you why they made my top 5, but they did. I liked Sebastain and the way he just wanted to make Kaderin happy. I loved that Kaderin was not the damsel in distress that some of the other heroines had been throughout the series. In fact, I would dare say that it was Kaderin who was leading the romance instead of Sebastian, which was a nice change of pace in this series. 

04:  Daniela the Ice Maiden and Murdoch Wroth from Untouched (Book 7): I really loved the setup here: when Murdoch had been alive, he had been a, well, he slept with a lot of women. Dani is a virgin at 2000 years old. Why? Because she is half Icere Fey, which means when anyone touches her skin they freeze and she burns. Dani also happens to be Murdoch’s Bride, which means after 300 years of no sex (or interest in sex) Murodch suddenly wants to have sex - with Dani - who can’t. They have a lot of back and forth, push and pull. They find some very creative ways to be together without actually touching. And, for some weird reason I really enjoyed them. They weren’t the typical story in this series and I liked that.

03: Carrow Graie and Malkom Slaine from Demon From the Dark (Book 9): Me, Tarzan. You, Jane. That’s what seems to come to mind for a lot of people who read this one. Malkom is a seriously traumatized demon/vampire, who knows nothing of the world and is somehow really sweet toward Carrow. Carrow is a witch, who's seen it all and done a lot of it. She’s using him to save her adopted daughter, but Carrow falls for Malkom. And it’s a weirdly sweet and cute story. 

02:Néomi Laress and Conrad Wroth from Dark Needs at Night’s Edge (Book 4): A ghost and a vampire. Who knew I’d love them so much. It’s even better, because she’s his Bride, but she’s dead...so they can’t get physical. Instead they talk and get to know one another. She was a woman of the world, and he’s a half-crazed vampire bounty hunter, who was once a virginal vampire bounty hunter. She flirts and teases and he is angsty. They are basically perfect. 

01:Regin the Radiant and Declan Chase (Aidan the Fierce) from Dreams of a Dark Warrior (Book 10): Chef’s kiss. Regin does not take crap from Declan and he actually has to work to win back her trust. Declan is a mess, but it’s not used as an excuse for his misdeeds. Yes, he has had a traumatic past and he has been brainwashed, but his actions are not excused by Regin - especially when he goes back on his word. Declan has to fight for Regin, just as much as she has to fit for him. I loved them. 

I have book 8 on the way, I already have books 11, 13-15, and book 18. I’ll be buying books 12, 16, and 17 soon-ish. While the series has some flaws, I do like it overall. The books are really quick reads for me and overall I like the overarching story and a lot of the characters. I’m rather disappointed that nothing new has come out in four years and that Cole has fallen off the grid. I know she had books 18 and 19 planned, and reportedly book 18 is finished. I hope it is able to be published someday.

[arcticdementor]

Someone on SSC Discord summarized James Scott’s Against The Grain as “basically 300 pages of calling wheat a fascist”. I have only two qualms with this description. First, the book is more like 250 pages; the rest is just endnotes. Second, “fascist” isn’t quite the right aspersion to use here.

…

Sumer just before the dawn of civilization was in many ways an idyllic place. Forget your vision of stark Middle Eastern deserts; in the Paleolithic the area where the first cities would one day arise was a great swamp. Foragers roamed the landscape, eating everything from fishes to gazelles to shellfish to wild plants. There was more than enough for everyone; “as Jack Harlan famously showed, one could gather enough [wild] grain with a flint sickle in three weeks to feed a family for a year”. Foragers alternated short periods of frenetic activity (eg catching as many gazelles as possible during their weeklong migration through the area) with longer periods of rest and recreation.

Intensive cereal cultivation is miserable work requiring constant toil with little guarantee of a good harvest. Why would anyone leave this wilderness Eden for a 100% wheat diet?

…

Scott’s great advantage over other writers is the care he takes in analyzing the concrete machinery of statehood. Instead of abstractly saying “the state levies a 10% tax”, he realizes that some guy in a palace has resolved to take “ten percent” of the “value” produced in some vast area, with no natural way of knowing who is in that area or how much value they produce. For most of the Stone Age, this problem was insurmountable. You can’t tax hunter-gatherers, because you don’t know how many they are or where they are, and even if you search for them you’ll spend months hunting them down through forests and canyons, and even if you finally find them they’ll just have, like, two elk carcasses and half a herring or something. But you also can’t tax potato farmers, because they can just leave when they hear you coming, and you will never be able to find all of the potatoes and dig them up and tax them. And you can’t even tax lentil farmers, because you’ll go to the lentil plantation and there will be a few lentils on the plants and the farmer will just say “Well, come back next week and there will be a few more”, and you can’t visit every citizen every week.

But you can tax grain farmers! You can assign them some land, and come back around harvest time, and there will be a bunch of grain just standing there for you to take ten percent of. If the grain farmer flees, you can take his grain without him. Then you can grind the grain up and have a nice homogenous, dense, easy-to-transport grain product that you can dole out in measured rations. Grain farming was a giant leap in oppressability.

…

And so the people were taught that growing grain was Correct and Right and The Will Of God and they shouldn’t do anything stupid like try to escape back to the very close and easily-escapable-to areas where everyone was still living in Edenic plenty.

…turns out lots of people in early states escaped to the very close and easily-escapable-to areas where everyone was still living in Edenic plenty. Early states were necessarily tiny; overland transportation of resources more than a few miles was cost-prohibitive; you could do a little better by having the state on a river and adding in water transport, but Uruk’s sphere of influence was still probably just a double-digit number of kilometers. Even in good times, peasants would be tempted to escape to the hills and wetlands; in bad times, it started seeming crazy not to try this. Scott suggests that ancient Uruk had a weaker distinction between “subject” and “slave” than we would expect. Although there were certainly literal slaves involved in mining and manufacturing, even the typical subject was a serf at best, bound to the land and monitored for flight risk.

In one of my favorite parts of the book, Scott discusses how this shaped the character of early Near Eastern warfare. Read a typical Near Eastern victory stele, and it looks something like “Hail the glorious king Eksamplu, who campaigned against Examplestan and took 10,000 prisoners of war back to the capital.” Territorial conquest, if it happened at all, was an afterthought; what these kings really wanted was prisoners. Why? Because they didn’t even have enough subjects to farm the land they had; they were short of labor. Prisoners of war would be resettled on some arable land, given one or another legal status that basically equated to slave laborers, and so end up little different from the native-born population. The most extreme example was the massive deportation campaigns of Assyria (eg the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel), but everybody did it because everybody knew their current subjects were a time-limited resources, available only until they gradually drained out into the wilderness.

…

Scott thinks of these collapses not as disasters or mysteries but as the expected order of things. It is a minor miracle that some guy in a palace can get everyone to stay on his fields and work for him and pay him taxes, and no surprise when this situation stops holding. These collapses rarely involved great loss of life. They could just be a simple transition from “a bunch of farming towns pay taxes to the state center” to “a bunch of farming towns are no longer paying taxes to the state center”. The great world cultures of the time – Egypt, Sumeria, China, whereever – kept chugging along whether or not there was a king in the middle collecting taxes from them. Scott warns against the bias of archaeologists who – deprived of the great monuments and libraries of cuneiform tablets that only a powerful king could produce – curse the resulting interregnum as a dark age or disaster. Probably most people were better off during these times.

The book ends with a chapter on “barbarians”. Scott reminds us that until about 1600, the majority of human population lived outside state control; histories that focus on states and forget barbarians are forgetting about most humans alive. In keeping with his thesis, Scott reviews some ancient sources that talk about barbarians in the context of people who did not farm or eat grain. Also in keeping with his thesis, he warns against thinking of barbarians as somehow worse or more primitive. Many barbarians were former state citizens who had escaped state control to a freer and happier lifestyle. Barbarian tribes could control vast trading empires, form complex confederations, and enter in various symbiotic relationships with the states around them. Scott wants us to think of these not as primitive people vs. advanced people, but as two different interacting lifestyles, of which the barbarian one was superior for most people up until a few centuries ago.

…

Scott tries to downplay his own role in the book, emphasizing how much he is just relaying the discoveries of more accomplished Sumer experts than himself. But the part I most appreciated was the part that was most clearly Scott-ish: the role of grain as a state-builder. In this story, the beginning of civilization – like the progress of the High Modernists – wasn’t an advance in human welfare or economic growth. It was an advance in tax collecting and the machinery of oppression; everything else followed.

…

Read this book, and you may never think about cereal crops the same way again.

[ladyofmind]

Music Monday- Back to Basics

Finally it’s Music Monday again… Am I the only one that needed this since like Friday?

 So much thought went into this one. For the first official music post, do I tell you what I am listening to now, and share some of my favorite holiday songs? Or do I start with the song that was one of the important pieces that restarted my love of writing again?

 Love, passion, and odd inspiration spark for the hands down win…

 Lee Child has said that there are "two or three things in a book that have to collide like atoms collide to make a molecule…" (I first heard this while watching Lee Child and Stephen King talk Jack Reacher from Cambridge, MA 2015) and I like this concept. Books take time to write, and it almost never is "here is Bob." Maybe you remember your school days too, and keep in mind the lessons on the 5 W's and 1 H. Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. Bob alone is about as good as a blank page that simply reads Chapter 1... The rules say that all characters want or need something, so starting Bob off walking fills out one more of those W's. Sometimes just answering those reporter style questions tells you more about what you were thinking than you realize.

 My collision course started with a Role Play I had been a part of for a long time; but various years of changes, including a change in my job scheduling, made it nearly impossible to continue for me. Going from a daily writing project, to none at all happened for a while, as life made work my focus. A few months passed, the analytical surpassed the creative side of my brain. Do forgive the fuzzy memory spots, I did not think to keep track of these moments, as they were insignificant at the time, which is over 5 years ago. Basically, I found I missed the RP and the people associated with it. So I started to think about what the place would look like 5 years later, who would be there, who would have left. I needed a story of closure for myself, one to properly say goodbye to a part of who I had been, one that was a happier ending than the truth. Because saying we grew apart as we grew up was not as satisfying a justice to those friends, or even my own character. It bugged me for a while, and so there was a day when I thought about my lead chars, back stories/future stories what have you. I needed just the right song for my character. That song that you put on and think of this one person, almost like my card catalogue of a mind would act like an internet search. On went this song, and out popped a mental dancing version of its owner. Facts, likes, dislikes etc would show up like recommended links, and slowly my character grew depth.

 But first I had to find that perfect song.

 There had been songs I listened to, some were close, others only for one element or another, but nothing that full on inspired me. I explained my problem to a friend at the time, Doom, telling him how I liked this song but it was too much, another was not enough… a regular Goldilocks and the three bears of music if you will. The song he showed me; that was the one that changed everything. I forgot to answer his messages, I got sucked into the world inside my own head, hitting replay so many times it would have broken a real button. It wasn’t just that night either, that song lasted the whole week without me getting sick of hearing it, as my characters and ideas cooked more. Even now, I do not tire of this song, as it is memory filled music for me.

 Believe it or not, but the song is Boss's Daughter by Pop Evil ft Mick Mars.

This song gave me so much. At the time I know I did not have the words to describe it, only amazement, but now I know what it is. A spoiler to the book series I am currently writing- there is a musician and a waitress. My man had not been developed completely, a shadow of a leading man if you will. Watching that music video, it was like finding his band. I knew what he looked like, what he would sound like, but I did not know his band or their sound. Finding Pop Evil was the best gift I could ever have received. The songs they have written over the years worked so well with my writings, that forever in my head, they became Pop Evil. So you can call it a bit of fan fiction, but it has meant so much more to me.

 Yes, I am aware that some of you might listen to that song and not hear what I heard, and that's okay. Music is subjective, like other art forms. I heard an upbeat and catchy song, one where it sounded like this spitfire kind of woman had men begging for her attentions, and they would do anything for just a little of her time. That was my female character, in a dumb down nutshell. I chose to use it for empowerment, and many of my emotional needs have found a Pop Evil song to fill that "just right" spot of my musical three bears. It is not easy to find a song you like, that conveys a message you need to hear at the time you need it. Music for me is very important for my mood and my mind too, and this one was just the right kind of dirty for me, without being too disrespectful. Love the band tricks too, I mean how far can the one man bend? Just how high can the drummer toss that stick? Do I even have to mention Mick Mars? Pretty sure his name precedes him. Sometimes I consider this song the gateway song into more of the modern rock groups, as I was the type to grow up on the oldies station.

I am not saying this song alone started my writing again, but it did open a door I have not been able to permanently shut since. Not that I would ever want to, but I do recall a few misfires in the beginning. The negativity, self doubt, writing oneself into a corner, I have done that all before. The reason those issues stopped is a story for another day, but I know I restarted the story twice. The first time, about 50 pages in, I got straight stuck. Some time later, I started up again, rewriting it, and strengthening my female character, and we went so much farther. It took about 2 years, but we got to over 300 pages, until the gaps were too huge for me to ever finish. The trouble was that I could not decide what happened 5 years later without telling how everyone met in the first place. 4 more years, another 330 ish pages, and what was the prequel is finally finished. That is currently book 1, aka Red Letters Yellow Days, and it has done so much for me. I finished it in October of this year; right in time for NaNoWriMo to boot camp me. Retrained and so much farther into the book 2 re-re-rewrite, with the halfway point on the horizon, my story and writing has grown so much over the last 5-6 years (if we're counting).

To think it all started with some colliding idea fragments and this catchy Pop Evil song…