#also I planned and broke up a reread for the books in May / June / July for everyone to join in on

[wundrousarts]

I think I need to stop setting up the silverborn countdown challenge for the billionth time or trying to plan a collaborative reread…. bc the book just keeps getting delayed, and who knows whenever the actual final dates are 😭😭😭

[ninja-muse]

May seems to have stretched itself. I measure time partly by books read, and several of the books I read this month took me more than a week, which is unusual but non-fiction and classics will do that. This was balanced, of course, by me proving my ability to read an entire book within 48 hours, which happened a couple times, and so May also felt kind of liminal?

I read two books off my TBR shelves this month: Evelina and The Book of Margery Kempe. Margery is technically a reread, though, since I was assigned it in university. I picked it up because I wasn't feeling historical or cozy or queer or any of my other normal reading moods and I remembered it being the right sort of bonkers. Which it was, but I'd forgotten how much Margery goes on about God and his plans for her and how much more pious she is compared to everyone else. It got a little wearing, and I don't think I'd have liked her much if I'd met her. But I'm glad I reread it!

(My current reads are also brought to you by not knowing what to read next. Thank goodness that I have a stockpile of 200+ unread books at any given time.)

You will also notice there was yet another book haul this month. In my defense, I had a gift card and company access to a discount book supplier, and then my boss got excited about the James Patterson book and wanted everyone to have a copy. Unsure whether I'll actually read it but hey.

I also did pretty well with my physical ARC haul, in that I broke even, and had a DNF. The Book That Wouldn't Burn was more grimdark than I was expecting and failed to hook me on characters, plot, or world. Alas, because it was recced by a coworker. (The other ARCs hauled were digital. I need to get to at least two of them in June so stay tuned.)

In other news, I attended not one, but two cultural events on my own this month! I used to do this more regularly but then 2020 happened. It's only in the last year or so that I've really started going out to things again, and I'm not actually sure if I'd gone to anything alone until now. In any case, the history lecture and the symphony concert failed to do me in, so I might keep going.

Click through to see everything I read this month, in the rough order of how glad I was to have read them.

Evelina - Frances Burney

Evelina travels to London and learns that the only thing more distressing than suitors is her newly discovered family. Inspired Austen.

9/10

warning: misogynist society, xenophobia (against French people)

off my TBR shelves

The Demon of Unrest - Eric Larson

The story of the six months leading up to the American Civil War, complete with weak governments, echo chambers, and political grandstanding.

9/10

warning: racism, slavery, war

reading copy

The Butcher of the Forest - Premee Mohamed

Veris is ordered into the north woods to find the Tyrant’s lost children. Inside are tricks and monsters. She has one day.

8/10

🇨🇦

library book

Baking Imperfect - Lottie Bedlow

A cookbook that encourages bakers to embrace mistakes and imperfections.

8/10

library book

The Teller of Small Fortunes - Julie Leong

Tao is a travelling fortune teller content with small fortunes, but she can’t help being drawn into bigger things when she meets a thief and a mercenary seeking a lost child. Out in November.

7/10

Chinese-coded protagonist, Chinese-coded minor characters, Chinese-American author

reading copy

The Mars House - Natasha Pulley

A ballet dancer fleeing climate disaster finds himself a second-class citizen on Mars. Fortunately—or not—a xenophobic politician needs a husband to raise their polling numbers.

7/10

🏳️‍🌈 main character (queer), 🏳️‍🌈 major character (ungendered), major character with prosthetic leg and PTSD, major Indo-Martian character, largely ungendered society, largely Chinese society

warning: xenophobia, police brutality, riots

library book

The Forest of Vanishing Stars - Kristen Harmel

A woman surviving in the Polish wilderness puts her knowledge to use aiding Jews escaping the Nazis.

7/10

largely Jewish cast, author with Jewish heritage

warning: Nazis, antisemitism, the Holocaust, kidnapping, death of child and parental figures

library ebook

The Honey Witch - Sydney J. Shields

Marigold becomes her grandmother’s apprentice as honey witch, even though it means never finding love. Unfortunately, there’s a very pretty woman in her new town who doesn’t believe in magic.

7/10

🏳️‍🌈 main character (bisexual), 🏳️‍🌈 secondary characters (lesbian, pansexual), Black secondary character

library ebook

The Monstrous Kind - Lydia Gregovic

Merrick returns to her family estate following the death of her father. She expects to take up the fight against the fog and the Phantoms (and her sister), but stranger things are afoot. Out in September.

6.5/10

dark-skinned secondary characters

warning: child abuse, fire

reading copy

Picture Book

A Crocodile Should Never Skip Breakfast - Colleen Larmour Crocodile’s late for his job as a ferry so he skips breakfast—but then he gets hungry while carrying animals… Out in June.

Reread

The Book of Margery Kempe - Margery Kempe

The memoirs of a 15th-century Englishwoman who is sometimes proud, sometimes pious, and definitely determined.

warning: marital rape, antisemitism, violence and torture, possibly mental illness stigma

off my non-TBR shelves

DNF

The Book That Wouldn’t Burn - Mark Lawrence

A girl ripped from her desert home and a young man trapped in an enormous library find themselves in the crosshairs of destiny.

library ebook

Currently reading

A Bouquet From France - Wilfred Thorley, translator

A collection of French poetry from Middle Ages to the 1920s.

off my TBR shelves

Steampunk - Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, editors

A collection of steampunk stories, old and new.

warning: misogyny, child abuse

off my TBR shelves

Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century - Richard Taruskin

A history of early written European music, in its social and political contexts. The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle

Victorian detective stories

disabled POV character (limb injury), occasional Indian secondary characters

warning: racism, colonialism

Monthly total: 9 + 2 Yearly total: 51 Queer books: 2 Authors of colour: 2 Books by women: 8 Authors outside the binary: 0 Canadian authors: 1 Classics: 2 Off the TBR shelves: 2 Books hauled: 4 ARCs acquired: 6 ARCs unhauled: 3 DNFs: 1

January February March April

[corpsentry]

behind the taylor swift gundam was in fact another, smaller gundam: a brief inquiry into the events of june 2020

so back in june this year june and i got together and we made this motherfucker of a story with this motherfucker of a thread to keep track of it all. but you already know that! and i’ve already got one foot and three elbows in my grave, so i’ll spare you the long-winded stuff. you wanna know how i wrote 93,035 words in 4 weeks? i’ll tell you how i wrote 93,035 words in 4 weeks-

-by linking you guys to copies of my planning documents because i feel like those words speak louder than any words i can offer in the present day. these are long documents. but they are also historical artifacts. very interesting. very weird. very, uh, full of cussing. so anyway, here’s

BIG DADDY: THE ORIGINAL PLANNING DOCUMENT

for those, like me, who have no motivation left in life to do anything and rely on summaries from others to acquire new knowledge, it all started with a single line.

prince of a fallen kingdom atsumu tries to kill hinata but falls in love with him instead

june, april something, 2020

with that in mind i tested the concept out with a few paragraphs of text, which you can find at the bottom of the Big Daddy document in the graveyard segment, accidentally sold my soul to the image of hinata with epaulettes, and then worked backwards, structuring an entire plot around two images:

a) hinata getting the shit beat out of him, with snark b) hinata and atsumu dancing in an empty ballroom under the stars

if you want a betrayal, you have to have something worth losing. if you want to fall in love with someone you don’t know, you have to meet them. if you have to meet them, there has to be a reason for that meeting, and so somewhere in between atsumu became a sword instructor and hinata the prince with daddy issues. june and i used this method of glancing anxiously over your shoulder to see what you’d missed to fill out the blanks in the story, after which i tacked up a bunch of post-its, typed out the plot, consulted june, typed out the plot again, and then broke the characters down into a bunch of questions, like ‘what do they want?’ and ‘what do they have?’ and ‘what are they afraid of?’

with the plot more or less ironed out, i decided it was time to start writing, and then i decided that i was actually too scared to start writing after all, so instead i set a couple of timers using classroomtimers.com (15-20 minutes long) and i sat down and i wrote about the world that hinata and atsumu inhabited.

each warm-up was 300-500 words long, and for the first few days, i’d write one before getting into writing the story proper. later these evolved into simply picking a scene from the story and launching straight into it, which became useful for opening those scenes later when i got to them organically.

then i got lazy! so i stopped. but these shitty little exercises were really useful for me because, unfettered by plot, convention, or any kind of tradition hovering over my shoulder, i was able to fuck around loosely enough to realize what i wanted this story to be. it was a very contrived kind of trial-and-error, an exploration of the characters, the story, but most importantly, the tone.

RESEARCH, PLANNING, AND VICTORIAN BOUGIE FASHION

this is a loose map of the castle and Important Locations within it, which i drew up at the start so i could keep track of where everything was and how i could get my characters from point A to point B. i wanted the story to have Some kind of internal logic, you know, even if that logic amounted to ‘a compass would function normally in this world whereas kageyama tobio would not’.

99% of my planning and organizing within those five weeks took place in this lovely dotted cat journal which my sister gave me for my birthday and i repurposed into a metaphorical Diary of Suffering while working on juno. i used it for everything from keeping track of narrative threads to clothing consistency checks, but the main purpose was this: each day at about 10 pm i’d crack open the cat book to a fresh page, stamp the date and the day of suffering at the top, and then write down a list of things i wanted to write, address, or fix today. then i’d sit at my laptop and write like a madman until about 7 in the morning. with breaks, of course, for sitting in the bathroom and staring at the wall and sitting in the kitchen and staring at the wall, but mostly i was writing. and complaining about writing. you were there, you probably remember that.

anyway, here are some pages from the cat book.

aside from the fact that my handwriting is complete shit, you can see that i made zero effort for any of this to be presentable. it was mainly a way for me to keep track of my thoughts because i have the attention span of an ikea wardrobe and tend to forget things as soon as i think of them. the lack of structure also mirrored the way that i went about writing juno. while i did proceed, for the most part, in chronological order, i had a lot of weird and useless revelations during lunch, which by this point was happening around 2 am, and in the 5 minutes before the exhaustion finally hit and carried me down to hell. i changed A Lot. again, to understand exactly how much the story evolved from day one onwards, please consult the big daddy document.

in the meantime, here’s something else.

once june sent over hinata and atsumu’s character designs i sat down like the fucking fool i am and spent 2 hours poring over a document about victorian and other fashion movements of the past so i could assign a noun, adjective, and verb to each element of their outfits. i don’t know why i did this. i certainly could have not, but i attempted to make sense of their ‘fits from a logistical perspective and that went into the cat book too. everything went into the cat book. the cat book is a relic of the past now, stuffed with artifacts such as the birth of oikawa tooru, and also his demise.

MEDIUM DADDY: EDITING, PROOFREADING, AND CREEPY MURDER CATS

i finished writing on june 26th, 2020, approximately a month after i’d first started planning, somewhere around may 27th or 28th. at that point i had about 90,000 words’ worth of story and no sanity left whatsoever, so i took a day-long break to stare at a wall and listen to taylor swift’s enchanted on loop.

and then i made a new document, which you can look at using the link above, and i laid out everything i had to do. i’d discovered a fuck ton of plot inconsistencies and general errors while writing and lying awake in bed at 9 a.m., sleepless in seattle, and now that i was free of the demon egging me towards the first finish line, it was time to Deal with them. i speed-scrolled through the draft, which was 200+ pages compressed into one google doc, because i like to tempt god’s wrath, and fixed up all the plot issues over the course of a few days. this was the fun part.

the actual, hard editing was the extremely un-fun part. i reread the entire thing, paragraph by paragraph, line by damn line, from start to finish, paying especially close attention to awkward phrasing, incomplete dialogue, and moments which had fallen flat in my haste to get on to the next one. this was really fucking terrible. i spent more time lying facedown on the floor than actually editing anything, but after a long time (about a week), that, too was done.

SMALL DADDY: TITLES, SUMMARIES, AND GOOD FUCKING BYES

i spent a good eighty days thinking about the title, though hilariously enough we ended up with something that was a blend of our names. june + elmo = juno, which is, all things considered, pretty perfect, but the process of picking the title was Hell, and i Did Not Come Up With The Title until about 2 hours before posting. you can take a look at the haphazard clusterfuck of my title-selecting process in small daddy, which is linked above.

so the title was a last-minute choice. so was the summary. and the chapter divisions. and actually all the songs in the playlist for juno. the day we dropped juno onto planet earth like a newborn baby pitched out of the sky, i spent an hour hunched over my laptop, cutting my 213 page google doc into chapters based on nothing more than a Vibe. two days before that, i also attempted to voice-act the entirety of juno, an affair which ended at the 20,000 word mark with a sore throat and the kind of exhaustion one typically wants to sleep in a coffin for 23 years to get rid of. so in all honesty, i did very little editing, which is why there are definitely minor typos and/or mistakes hanging out somewhere on that chunky ao3 webpage. but whatever.

my attitude by july 5th (was it july 5th? or 4th? somewhere around there) was basically whatever. anything so i could get finish this damn thing, chuck it out of the window, and never see another google doc until the next century. i’ve been asked a few times how exactly i wrote at a rate of roughly 2000-3000 words per day for four weeks straight, and my answer has always been this: i died. what died, you ask? my soul. my spirit. my Will To Live. i’m a creature of fixations, and juno was my fixation for june. will i ever be able to do this again? would i recommend this experience to anyone? is god real? the answer to all of the above is probably no. juno was a fever dream, and so is my cat book. and so are all the lattes i had. and so was my 9 am to 4 pm sleep schedule.

but what we made is real. the research, oikawa tooru, the 4 am conversations in which i was like ‘how the fuck do i end this’ and june was like ‘jade proposal’ (the proposal was her idea. all rise for twitter user atsuhinas. she is the mastermind behind all of the Inch Resting moments in this story; i just flapped a korok leaf in her direction and made sure the air circulation was working properly) are real as fuck, and looking back, there’s a lot i’d change, but i’m lazy. and college is starting. and anyway, i did write 93,035 words in just under five weeks, four if you don’t count the week of Editing Hell, so i think that’s pretty cool.

thank you for reading this to the end, and for following us on our journey through the enigmatic taylor swift gundam fic which quite literally consumed my entire twitter account for the five weeks i spent working on it. retrospectively speaking i really was butt-obsessed so i am frankly incredibly impressed with everyone around me for putting up with a Husk of a Man for a month. thank you for doing that. thank you for indulging my vague tweeting, and our butterfly dns, and for reading 93 thousand words of gay fanfiction set in a high fantasy world with epaulettes and galettes. on behalf of june, once again, we are incredibly grateful for all your support.

if you have any questions about specific aspects of the writing process, or anything you’d like to know in general with reference to JUNO, feel free to drop me an ask through my tumblr inbox, or through my curiouscat over here. i’m aware i didn’t cover everything, but there’s frankly too much to put in a tumblr post without passing away somewhere around the 56% mark, so let me know what’s on your mind, and i’ll try to answer that to the best of my abilities. but anyway, before i go, here are some

TAKEAWAYS

one: don’t try to write 93,000 words in five weeks. seriously don’t fucking do it you will end up jittery and sleep-deprived and you will leave all your friends on read for a month. pace yourself. set realistic goals. you wrote 2k this week? that’s fantastic. you wrote 4k in a day? you absolute motherfucker. i hope you’re taking a long fucking break tomorrow. your story will not run away from you, but if you run too fast, you will get tired, and then you will pass away.

two: you don’t have to know everything about your story before you start writing. in fact if you have a single camera shot of two characters holding hands under a rose garden awning, i think that’s fucking wonderful. if you look at big daddy, you’ll realize that my initial plot draft, and all the ones following that, are not perfectly aligned with the final version of juno. i improvised over half of the scenes in this motherfucker, and to be completely honest, some of the improvised scenes were the best. fucking oikawa tooru was improvised out of nowhere. he only got written in way later, around chapter 8 or something, because i realized i needed a plot device and a source of information to keep the playing table from toppling over. i Sat Down one day and was like ‘okay, it’s time to write oikawa into the introduction. because he matters now. he didn’t matter last week but now he does, and soon he’s going to be the fulcrum of the entire story, because it’s like that with oikawa tooru’. it’s okay to change your mind halfway. it’s okay to go back and rewrite entire scenes or segments. it’s okay to highlight 4 pages of fresh, sentimental writing, and hit delete. writing is a fluid process, and you Will make discoveries as you progress through your story alongside your characters. be understanding of that iterative process. be kind to yourself.

three: You Are That Motherfucker. you, me, your dog, your dog’s friend, your dog’s enemy, all of us are that motherfucker. i never thought i’d be able to write anything longer than the great big map, which was a much simpler, linear story in which the other main character did not appear in the current timeline until like the eighth chapter. juno was different. juno was the motherfucker, and i was scared shitless of it, and to cope with that fear joked constantly while writing that it’d never see the light of day.

but it did. it was a rocky process, and i was awake for 48 hours after posting it because of the sheer adrenalin stuck in my skull, but i got through it. and i wouldn’t have been able to do it without june, who stepped in when i flopped over facedown on the floor and dragged me to my feet like the badass friend she is, and without everyone else in my life, who put up with me talking about The Thing that i couldn’t really talk about, but juno’s up there now. forever, or until the internet collapses and civilization goes extinct. and if the nineteen year old clown with the attention span of an ikea armchair and an a level certificate from hell wrote the 93,000 word long thing, so can you. i mean this completely unironically and with every ounce of genuine emotion i can summon from the cracked asshole of my heart.

writing is hard. writing is scary. writing is an investigation of the world around you and therefore, by extension, yourself, and that kind of honesty is freaky. it’s like going skinny-dipping next to the president’s mansion. who’s going to see you? what if they take a photo? what if you lose your spot at university?

but don’t think about that. our world is overrun with stories the way cereal bowls are full of cereal, but it’s those stories that keep us all sane in the disgusting day-to-day muck of reality, so think about your story. what’s haunting you today? what message do you want to leave printed in font size 666 comic sans across the southern hemisphere of the planet? what will you be tomorrow?

a writer. you’re going to be a motherfucking writer.

[cassiejade]

June has been a fantastic reading month for me, I’ve read so much and have a few new favorite books, along with completing some goals I had. I really hope that all of this reading speed, mood, and momentum stick with me for the month of July because I have a massive list of things to read that month.

But lets get into the month of June.

  An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon my rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this, I liked the cameos that came in and it has made me realize how little I actually know about the American Revolution. I was a little annoyed about how jumpy all of the events were, the story was a little all over the place with what was going on, but I can’t wait to start the next book.

Dear Ijeawele or A Feminist Manifesto in 15 suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie my rating: 4 out of 5 stars

This is probably one of my top favorite feminist books that I’ve read in a while. I love Chimamanda’s words, she has a wonderful way with words and a powerful speaking presence that shows on paper and while I was reading this it made me want to pull up and watch her TED Talk all over again.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly my rating: 4 out of 5 stars

It was really interesting to read about these women and I can’t wait to watch the movie.

The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen my rating: 3 out of 5 stars

This book confuses me. I was somehow both bored and interested in the story at the same time. I don’t know how that’s possible but that’s how I felt. I just had this constant feeling of “I need to see how everything plays out,” there were a few plot twists that really took me by surprise but for the most part, I was really bored with them.

  William Shakespeare’s Star Wars Volume the Fourth: Verily, A New Hope by Ian Doescher my rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

This was so much fun to read, I was laughing and texting quotes to my friends and mom. It’s a fun way to interact with the story in a really different format.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens my rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Oh, my heart! I think this may be one of my favorite books of the entire year. I flew through this and couldn’t get enough. My heart broke over and over for Kya and I admired her and her connection to nature.

Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman my rating: 4 out of 5 stars

This is my boyfriend’s favorite book, he loved this series growing up and has talked to me about it constantly since we’ve started dating, so I finally gave it shot and read it. Overall it was a fun adventure fantasy book.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry my rating: 3 out of 5 stars

This is a book where I didn’t really get it, I understood some of the themes it was trying to get across but I guess the execution didn’t work for me.

  Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I don’t even know what to say about this because it’s that amazing. I almost regret giving The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance 5 stars because it makes this 5-star rating a little less special but those are amazing books too. The anticipation for book 4 might actually kill me, I really can’t wait for it. I do already feel like I need to reread this series before it comes out and I also feel like I need to take notes on it simply because there are so many plot points to keep track of.

Vengeance Road by Erin Bowman my rating: 3 out of 5 stars

This book left me feeling a little underwhelmed. The story was fine I just got bored with the characters after a while. I would sit down and read about 80 pages every time but then it would take 10 or 15 pages for me to get back into the story. I do plan on reading Retribution Rails since I’ve heard better things about it.

It’s Not Like Its a Secret by Misa Sugiura my rating: 3 out of 5 stars

I’m sad that I didn’t like this as much as I had hoped, this book had been on my wishlist for over a year and then I finally got it and read it. I think I had different expectations for this book, I wanted more LGBTQ+ rep but the main focus on the story was racism. Sana is Japanese American and Jaime is Mexican American and the story deals with the two of learning to handle the stereotypes that are placed on them. I really enjoyed the overall meaning of the story but I also think it could have been deeper. My main complaint is that the writing was a little choppy with sudden transitions. There were several points where I had to flip back a few pages or so to see when exactly did we get to this building?

Written in My Own Hearts Blood by Diana Gabaldon my rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I’m actually debating on taking another half star off for this woman’s blatant refusal to acknowledge Alexander Hamilton and denying me a cameo when it wouldn’t have been implausible to give him a spot in the Outlander light!

Other then my irritation at the lack of Hamilton my only other complaints were about some character deaths that didn’t seem to fully add to the story line, they seemed mostly there to tug at heart strings.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman my rating: 3 out of 5 stars

I am so sad that I didn’t like this more but I had a very hard time connecting and staying with the story. The writing style didn’t work for me, the way it kept turning away from the main plot to introduce a side character or focus on the details surrounding it kept pushing me away from the story.

My favorite book of the month: Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson Least favorite book of the month: The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

  June Wrap Up June has been a fantastic reading month for me, I've read so much and have a few new favorite books, along with completing some goals I had.