#WWW Wednesday and #WIPpet Wednesday – 11 November, 2015

Hello and Happy Wednesday! I apologise for not making any rounds last week, but once I got my final essay handed in, I just sat on the couch and read books when I should have been doing other things, like cleaning the house, or cooking, or blogging. I’ll try to be better this week!

First up on today’s post is WIPpet Wednesday. This is a blog hop wherein writers share a snippet from their WIP that somehow relates to the date. We have a linky, which you can find by clicking on the little blue guy just to the right. WIPpet Wednesday has been graciously hosted for some time by K. L. Schwengel, however starting next week, I’m going to be taking over the reigns, with a couple of other WIPpeteers acting as backup when I am detained. I apologise now if I manage to muck it up.

This week’s WIPpet takes place a little while after last week’s. Clara has managed to escape her house, and has been chased by the Creelans. Max was conveniently driving by, and has picked her up. Now they’re driving around while they try to work out their next plan. I have 11 paragraphs for the 11th of November. Don’t worry, they’re all nice and short.

Max frowned again. “The King is here?”

“That’s what they said. He certainly behaves like a royal jerk.”

Max didn’t respond to Clara’s joke. “As soon as we arrived in Thelidon, we started hearing reports that the Creelans had found a way to open the portal, but no one mentioned the King.”

“He made it sound like he only came through today. And besides, he was probably in disguise.”

“Hmm.”

“Hey, can I ask a question?”

“Sure.”

“This thing.” Clara held up the stone pendant. “The King was pretty angry about me having it. He said it was stolen from a dead Creelan soldier.”

Max shrugged. “It probably was. They wear them in battle.”

“Isn’t that kind of… disrespectful?”

“Isn’t invading an unprotected country due to some stupid dispute generations ago kind of disrespectful?” Clara flinched away. Max didn’t raise his voice very often, but she supposed this was a bit of a sore point for him. She decided not to press the point any further. The car was silent for what felt like an eternity.

Next up is WWW Wednesday, which is hosted by Sam over at A World of Words. You can join in over there by leaving a link to your own WWW Wednesday on today’s post. All you need to do is answer the three questions.

• What are you currently reading?

Winter just came out! I actually probably should have re-read Cress before this, as there are a lot of things being referred to that I’d totally forgotten. As with the other books in the Lunar Chronicles, even though it’s long (nearly twice as long as Cinder was), it’s very readable, so I’ll get through it quite quickly. Thorne and Cress still hold the keys to my heart. I still could not care less about Scarlet and Wolf. Cinder and Kai are somewhere in between those two extremes, as are Winter and Jacin.

• What did you recently finish reading?

So many things! As I said, I just stayed on the couch and read books all weekend.

First, there was another Doctor Who audio, The Empty House. It was pretty good though I wasn’t a fan of the narrator. I’ve been rather spoiled with the narrators on the first three I listened to, so I suppose I had to run into one I didn’t like so much eventually.

I finished How To Write A Novel Using the Snowflake Method by Randy Ingermason. I really liked it and am really looking forward to trying this out. The book is actually in the form of an allegorical novel (with a easy-access list of all the steps at the end) and he also includes an appendix with the snowflake method planning for the book itself, which helped clear up a few questions I had about some of the later steps.

Then there was 5000 Words Per Hour and Lifelong Writing Habit by Chris Fox (these were both quite short). These had a lot of really good advice, but the tone put me off. I felt like he was saying “Unless you do exactly as I say, you’re not serious about your writing.” =\

After that, I finished Chasing Nonconformity by Michelle Proulx. This was a fun sequel, though I still think Varrin needs a good punch to the nose sometimes.

I polished off Mothers Grimm by Danielle Woods in one afternoon, even though I didn’t really like it. I’m all for deconstructing the “good mother” trope, but her way of doing that seemed to be to say “Motherhood is a godawful experience that simply ruins your life and why would you do it?” Surely you can still have some positive aspects without going into “good mother” territory. I don’t know if I would feel differently about it if I was a mother, and had experienced the sleepless nights and all of that, but as it was, it just felt like she set out to write four fairly depressing stories. Oh, and the links to the fairytales were so tenuous they might as well have not been there.

And I finally finished The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker. I recommend reading this in as few sittings as possible, as I think it was the fact that I was only managing dribs and drabs that made me take so long to get into it. Once I was able to really sit down and read 100 or pages at a time, I actually got really into it. It’s definitely one of those books where the characters stay with you for a while afterwards and you just want to go back to their world rather than doing the housework, as I had to do when I finished.

I also posted my review of The Incredible Adventures of Cinnamon Girl in the last week. Since I’m reading so much lately, I’ve decided to post two reviews a week for a little while (Fridays and Saturdays), rather than one per fortnight. It was getting to the point where I was scheduling reviews for three months after I’d read the book. So watch out for those!

I’m going to head off now and get another review or two lined up. See you later!

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