#but the whole story has the vibe of intrigue. the 'open letter'. its contents.

[boleynqueenes]

Mary was sufficiently recovered by late September to write to Sir Nicholas Carew, a gentleman of Henry's Privy Chamber, and an old friend of the king's. Mary had known his for many years, and he was her loyal supporter. This immediately aroused suspicion and Lady Shelton was asked by Henry to [investigate]. Mary told Lady Shelton the letter had been taken by her servant, Randall Dodd, and a response had been received from Carew's wife, Elizabeth. [...] Lady Carew had sent an open letter, urging Mary 'for the Passion of Christ' to obey her father, or she would be utterly undone. Lady Bryan confirmed the truth of the statement. Nevertheless, Henry was right to be suspicious. Lord Hussey and Darcy had both told Chapuys that an invasion by Charles V would have much popular support and Carew was no friend to Anne [...] The mention of Dodd, who had been in Mary's household since 1525, suggests she was not as isolated as Chapuys claimed.

the king's pearl / melita thomas

[hooksbooks]

The O in ABO is for Opera Ghost

Now that the author has received it, I can show off this bind! The Phantom of the Opera is a fandom I enjoy, but I don't check in on it very often. Recently I checked in and found that @kotaka-kun had written a bunch of ABO one-shots and drabbles where Erik is an omega and Christine is an alpha. Which, hello, didn't know I needed THAT in my life but YES PLEASE. Female alpha with male omega? Absolute favorite. Erik who is absolutely worshipful of Christine but still socially awkward? Love it. Possessive Christine going "See this weirdo? This is MY weirdo, no one gets to say bad things about him. No, not even you, Erik" like a boss? The most fabulous. So, anyway, I read all their stories and decided that I really needed a physical copy of these ASAP (and then read them all again for good measure).

In a completely unrelated event in the same week, I was introduced to the dwarsligger format of books, which has its text arranged parallel to the spine so that to read the book, the spine is held horizontal instead of vertical. Like a flip-phone, for us olds.

[ID: A dwarsligger book, held open. It has a top page and a bottom page rather than a left page and right page, as the spine is parallel to the lines of text. The whole thing is about the size of a hand. /End ID]

I thought this format of book would be PERFECT for these stories, as they gave me very "it's not like other people do it, but that doesn't mean it's wrong" vibes, which I feel this format of book reflects perfectly. New, different, maybe a little unnerving, but also a little intriguing at the same time.

I format my textblocks in MS Word, and it was tricky to arrange things into a "top" and "bottom" instead of the more regular verso and recto (left and right), but the WORST part was getting the page numbers to work correctly. Because the page numbers are only displayed on the bottom pages but Word has the top and the bottom as different pages, it wanted to put the page numbers as 1, 3, 5, 7, etc. I had to go digging real deep in the MS Word niche features to figure it out. I ended up finding the information I needed on a nearly-20-year-old blog that kept referring to Word 2007 as "new Word". Whenever you need really precise, niche information, it's always on a 20-year-old blog, they're the best source of knowledge. If anyone's curious, I ended up having to do some math in the page number field codes so the displayed page number was always half of the actual page number + 1 (using integer division). So 1, 3, 5, 7, etc. became 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. Unfortunately the Table of Contents field codes are a black box and don't let you edit the internals, so I had to generate the table of contents (which displayed the actual page numbers instead of the displayed page numbers) and then edit all the numbers myself.

On the bright side, this format and size of book (it's an octavo, so one-eighth of a letter-size sheet of paper) is PERFECT for a drabble collection. A title, plus 100 words, plus a page number, exactly fits on one top-and-bottom spread.

I of course made myself a copy as well as an author copy. However, there were...issues.

[ID: A black and brown copy of the same book lying on a cutting mat, front covers up. They're both titled "The O in ABO stands for Opera Ghost" with the text arranged parallel to the spine, but the brown copy is noticeably narrower and the title barely fits on the cover. /End ID]

When I trimmed my copy, I measured wrong (or rather, measured right but in the wrong place) and trimmed the right side twice. Luckily I had left large enough margins that I didn't trim off any text. I'll just trim the left side by the same amount and I'll just have tiny margins on my copy, no problem, right? Wrong. I immediately proceeded to cut off all my kettle stitches on the left side.

[ID: A hand holding a dwarsligger book open with a thumb under the stitching in the middle of a signature, showing that the knots securing the stitching have been completely cut off on the left side. /End ID]

Luckily the stitching is secured at three other points and I glued the spine well, but it was still a face-palm moment.

Technical details:

Size: Letter-octavo dwarsligger

No headbands on this one (intended to, forgot until I glued the oxford hollow on, at which point it was too late)

Rounded but not backed

Chisel-trimmed

Things I especially liked about this bind:

The format! So weird, so delightful

Things I would improve next time:

Not cutting my stitching off, ideally.

Overall, I love the stories and like the bind. (I also read all the stories through again once I had the finished bind in my hands. Still loved them.) It works, it's functional, it would have been better if I hadn't trimmed my copy way too narrow, but live and learn and it still works so it's fine.

[katelynrushe26]

Rereading “Remnants”

I want to start this review by adding to an idea from my Everworld review. I speculated that the Scholastic Corporation had been afraid to promote a young adult book series from the late 90's called Everworld, due to it being written by the same authors as Animorphs but possibly being too mature for the same audience. This seems all the more evident now that I've reacquainted myself with Remnants, a third book series that K.A. Applegate and Michael Grant also wrote together. The beginning of every Remnants book features a list of the pair's other Scholastic titles, and while that list includes Animorphs, it doesn't include Everworld.

This could be forgivable, since Remnants was also geared towards a younger audience than Everworld, but the final Everworld book actually promoted Remnants. The finales of both Animorphs and Everworld presented a full-page ad and a chapter-long excerpt from the first Remnants book, and yet only one of them got a shoutout in return when Remnants came out. I still can't say anything for certain, but this one-way "cross promotion" really suggests that Scholastic wanted readers to forget Everworld and embrace Remnants as "the other K.A. Applegate series" instead.

This is ironic for two reasons. The first is that despite its lack of adult content like swearing, sexuality, and alcoholism, Remnants is actually way darker than Everworld in tone. Multiple gruesome character deaths occur in almost every book, and most of the proceedings have a bleak, humorless, mean-spirited vibe to them. The second reason is that despite all of this favorable treatment from its publisher, Remnants really didn't fare much better than Everworld. It only ran for about two years with fourteen books, fell into obscurity afterwards, and has very little information about it available today.

And as someone who tried reading it once before as a teen but didn't get halfway through the series, I have a pretty good idea why.

Remnants tells the story of eighty humans who escape from Earth right before an asteroid destroys the planet. After five hundred years in hibernation, they wake to find they've landed aboard Mother, a deserted alien spaceship that can simulate any environment. The catch is that Mother currently has no operator, and three hostile alien species are fighting the humans to seize control of it. Totally unarmed, the humans have to dodge perils at every turn as they wander the ship's patchwork of environments in search of the command bridge.

At least that's what the first half of Remnants is about. The second half centers around the humans, now more or less in control of Mother, rediscovering what's left of Earth and trying to return to it so they can rebuild the world they lost — all while three mutants in the ship's basement try to overthrow them and use Mother to conquer the universe.

Notice that I didn't mention any character names in that summary. That's because when you get right down to it, Remnants isn't really about its characters. Unlike Animorphs, which was almost entirely character-driven, and Everworld, which was more setting-driven but still had an interesting main cast, Remnants is mostly plot-driven. It's about weird things happening and other weird things being done to resolve them. The characters' emotions are largely glossed over, and while some of them do grow and change throughout the series (at least the ones who survive), their primary role is just to witness and carry out all these bizarre happenings until the main conflict changes again.

To be fair though, here are some of the core characters. The main one is Jobs, a fourteen-year-old computer wiz and romantic idealist who just wants the group to have a home again. There's also his best friend Mo'Steel, a fun-loving adrenaline junkie with an easy-going, can-do attitude; 2Face, a girl with a half-burned face who wants to be a strong leader but is too aggressive, manipulative, and paranoid for her own good; Violet, a sophisticated, no-nonsense art expert who always does her best to help; Yago, a selfish, entitled bully who constantly tries to divide the others so he can control them more easily; Billy, a quiet Chechnyan orphan who goes mad during his hibernation and is the only human able to control Mother; and Tamara, a Marine soldier who gave birth to a creepy, possibly alien baby in hibernation that is now mind-controlling her to do its bidding. Like I said, bizarre happenings.

I should point out that unlike Animorphs and Everworld, which were written in First-Person with a different narrator for each book, Remnants is written in Third-Person with numerous shifts in perspective throughout each book. It could be that this different writing style just makes the Remnants characters seem less personal since it's not what I'm used to from these authors, but I also think that having a lot fewer characters would have done this series a world of good. Most of the characters that I didn't list above are either red-shirts who are just there to get killed or seat-fillers who have nothing to do half the time. Some characters die offscreen in between chapters or even in between books, and one who manages to live through the whole series doesn't get mentioned in the final book's epilogue. The story just seems to forget about him.

The most engaging characters are probably 2Face and Yago. We never quite get the full details of how 2Face got burned, but she sees her disfigurement as sort of a scarlet letter for the "ugly" side of her persona. Eventually, that inner ugliness alienates her from the group, and she becomes so desperate to redeem herself in their eyes that she'll stoop to any low towards the end of the series. She's tragic and despicable all at once, much like her supervillain namesake.

Yago, in contrast, is so over-the-top slimy and egotistical that it kind of gets funny after a while. You can actually love to hate this guy at times, especially in Book 6 when he makes Mother simulate a world where he's the president of the United States. Surprisingly though, the series manages to give him an arc towards the end that leads to some of its few legitimately poignant moments.

But since the plot is the real focus of Remnants, how does that hold up? Well, it holds up fairly well for the first half of the series. The mystery surrounding Mother, Tamara's baby, and the various alien species is all kind of intriguing, and we get just enough answers in each book to keep it that way. Other developments, such as Billy learning to harness Mother and some of the other humans learning that they've gained mutant superpowers, can also make us curious about where the story is going. The climaxes of Books 5-7 are imaginative and exciting, and while the characters don't quite resonate enough to give us an emotional connection to anything, the end of Book 7 still feels like a satisfying achievement.

The second half of the series is where the real trouble starts.

Again, I can't say anything for certain due to the lack of info, but I get the sense that sales for Remnants really started to drop halfway through its run. Books 1-8 have fancy, embossed, metallic lettering for their titles on the front covers, but Books 9-14 have flat, standard printing for theirs. The cover art also starts to look more slapped together after Book 8, and the books themselves start to get shorter on average. It feels like Scholastic saw the writing on the wall and started doing whatever it could to cut corners and wrap up the series as quickly as possible.

But getting back to the plotting, Books 8 and 9 are about the same in quality as the previous ones, even though Book 8 starts with a three-month time jump from the end of Book 7. Book 10, however, is hands down the worst book in the series.

See, Book 9 ends with a mid-battle cliffhanger, and instead of picking up from there, Book 10 jumps ahead another three months and just gives us a summary of how the battle ended. We find out that two somewhat important characters died in the fight, and then a third, more important one also dies pretty much offscreen with little fuss during the events of Book 10. We get two more massive time jumps over the course of the book as the humans sail Mother back to Earth, and then shortly after they land there, a fourth character who was finally starting to get interesting also abruptly dies. And then the book pulls a surprise twist that effectively throws everything the series was about into the garbage. I don't blame K.A. Applegate or Michael Grant for this, since I suspect Scholastic was starting to tighten the vice and I'm fairly sure Book 10 was ghost-written, but reading it made me furious.

Books 11 and 12 have the opposite problem; they try to slow things back down to establish the new characters, setting, and conflict, but they go too far and just drag. I was pretty much ready to pan the entire rest of the series after this point...but then Book 13 came along.

I've heard that this one was also ghost-written, but out of all the Remnants installments, Book 13 feels the most like Applegate and Grant's usual writing style. It's told almost entirely from the perspective of a girl named Tate who got separated from the other humans in Book 10, and it deals with her fighting for survival against the new villain trio in Mother's basement. Survival also happens to be the book's official subtitle, by the way.

This is a character piece first and foremost. It still has a lot of the weird, otherworldly elements you expect from the series, but we're allowed to single in on just one protagonist's view of them and see how she gradually comes to grips with them. The focus is on how those things impact her character, not on the mere fact that they exist and that they're weird. We also get to explore the protagonist's backstory in an open, honest, and meaningful way, and the things that we learn about her from her memories actually factor into her decision making throughout the book. Best of all, the ending throws more of those mind-bending Remnants twists at us, and while they could stand to be better explained, they have a genuine emotional resonance because the book let us properly get to know the character that experiences them. One of Tate's big discoveries at the end of the book even lends emotional weight to the entire scope of the series and makes us understand why it's so important for the characters to try and start a new life on Earth.

Book 13: Survival has Animorphs Chronicles levels of pathos. It's easily the crown jewel of the whole Remnants series, and I wish the rest of the series had been more like it. So it's only fitting that this wonderful exception to every complaint I've ever had about Remnants...is entirely skippable.

I'm not kidding. Everything that Tate accomplishes and discovers in Book 13 gets reexplained to the other characters in Book 14, so you don't even need to read Book 13. Good news for the superstitious readers, I guess.

Book 14, the finale, has the same problem as Books 11 and 12, plus it barely ties up any of the loose ends from all the mysteries that the series built up. One character gets a thought-provoking ending to their arc, another major one dies offscreen, and everyone else gets an ending that's earned, I guess, but the tone of it doesn't feel consistent with the overall series. In fact, I question if it was even Applegate or Grant's idea.

Despite this, I am glad that I finally went back and read all of Remnants. There was a gem or two in there, and when the series was imaginative, it was extremely imaginative. However, I think it's more interesting as a case study in how constant corporate deadlines and pressure can wear down a project. At least that's what I have to deduce it's a case study in. I'll always have the utmost respect for K.A. Applegate and Michael Grant, and while I do believe that Remnants could have been better under more ideal circumstances, I'm willing to view the series itself as the ultimate testament to its thesis: that no matter how disastrous things get, there's always a chance of something good surviving.

But seriously, Everworld is better.

~