Updates + books I loved in May! (Patreon)

Hello friends!

I am very overdue for an update or post of some kind. (Verrrry overdue…)

If you’re a paid member I apologize for not having any new writing lately. I’ve certainly been struggling with time management lately and it seems like I just haven’t had any time to write novels or posts. However, I have exciting news on the creative front. I’m taking off the whole summer from the bookstore (except maybe a fill-in day here or there) so I can focus on Youtube AND writing, particularly the Broken Queen sequel. 

Every year, summers are very hard for me at the bookstore because the building is old and not air conditioned. The sun blasts in the big glass windows in the afternoon and I’m very heat sensitive and have a hard time. Luckily Youtube is going well enough that I feel like I can risk losing that extra income. It’s very exciting! I’m buckling back down on this manuscript tomorrow!

I also wanted to let everyone know some of the things going on this month for paid members:

—I’ll be making a bonus subscribers-only video on working with editors!

—On Sunday, June 23rd, from 3-5 pm Eastern (-4:00 GMT) we’ll have our scheduled Discord chat! I pick a discussion topic but then it spins off any which way. This month's topic is dealing with feelings of insecurity and failure.

—I’m also starting a big marketing experiment that I’ll be vlogging on Youtube. This weekend’s video will discuss this in more detail, but on the Discord server I’ll be giving a lot of real-time updates on how things are going.

Not everything has been good news. I’ve been dealing with a lot of anxiety and random symptoms lately, to be honest. I’ve always had a propensity for medical anxiety that leads to psychosomatic symptoms (like, once I gave myself severe but false UTI symptoms because I was so anxious about a doctor’s appointment), so I don’t know if this is perimenopause (which would be perfectly logical), or just plain anxiety because there was a rash of cancer among several friends over the past few years including the shock of finding out that my friend and author Dia Reeves had passed away. It’s been 4 years since I heard and I still think about her every week. Dia was the coolest.

And of course there is always the small chance there could be something actually wrong, and that’s the possibility that the anxiety feeds on. I did see a doctor and got an ultrasound to make sure my ovaries were okay, but the doctor was generally pretty brusque. The visit was over in like 5 minutes and I didn’t feel very…heard. I’ve since learned that most doctors really don’t study perimenopause or menopause at all and since symptoms can vary so widely, it can really be hard to get much information or reassurance about it. So…that’s FUN. 

What I’ve read on the internet suggests that a lot of my fellow Xennials are feeling pretty sidelined that no one mentioned perimenopause to us, nor does conventional medicine really acknowledge it.

Anyway, when I’m anxious, besides all the usual stuff that’s good for health like yoga and forests and deep breathing, I turn to manga, and I’ve read a few good ones lately.

First, Say I Love You, a shoujo series about a socially awkward girl named Mei with no friends who suddenly attracts the attention of Yamato, the hottest boy in school, at which point she slowly starts to open up to him and other people and make friends. This premise sounds pretty typical, so I wasn’t necessarily expecting much out of it, and it was a good example of why I love it when I can have an entire series on hand before I even begin reading a manga. When I started, I thought it was okay, but definitely not a keeper. By the end, I was completely invested and had shifted it to the keeper shelf after all! I identified with Mei’s awkwardness and how she was always wrestling between her desire to have friends and what they meant to her, and her introverted nature. People exhaust her sometimes, even her friends. The story follows the characters into early adulthood and I also really liked how it addressed the struggles of deciding what you want to do with your life and keeping relationships together as people grow and change and move into the workforce. It had the gentle, earnest quality that warms my heart with a good shoujo manga.

On the downside, there is some toxic messaging around dieting and skinniness. Certainly not the ONLY manga to have this, but it did take me out of the story every time. 

Then, I blew through The Water Dragon’s Bride by Rei Touma. This was just a really cute story about an aloof god slowly discovering the charms of humanity. I thought this part of the character development was really well done. This is my second manga by Touma-sensei as I also read and enjoyed Dawn of the Arcana. I find her manga to be just easy breezy sort of fantasy with likable characters. The downside is that they don’t have much dialogue or background art compared to some other manga, so I read them very fast and they don’t have the level of detail that makes me want to reread, so I will be moving this one on. Still, if you can read it affordably, it was enjoyable.

I also finished a pretty thick novel, The Last Witch of Oz by Mae Holloway. I think anyone who loves Oz would enjoy this fantasy romance, but particularly if Return to Oz is your favorite Oz movie (hi that’s me!) because it has a lot of shoutouts to that film and the vibe has the magical darkness of it as well. I haven’t read all the books, but I definitely noticed call outs to the books as well. Still, I must note that I had a crush on the scarecrow and shipped him with Dorothy when I was like, 5, and it was great to read a book where the Scarecrow has grown into a suitably broody-yet-endearing fantasy romance lead.

However, even if you are NOT particularly an Oz fan, I still think this book would be a good read if you’re wanting a good mix of tropes and well-realized characters and world-building, action and twists, and great pacing. I barely noticed that this book was as long as it was, except for the sheer number of hours ANY long book requires to read. I would recommend it to anyone who liked, say, Brigid Kemmerer’s A Curse Dark as Gold. 

And I am almost done with All the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told by Douglas Wolk. This book is built on the premise that the longest epic story is, in fact, the Marvel comics oeuvre. I had never thought of it like that, and it’s a fascinating analysis of what stories have worked, which didn’t, and why—as some of the best stories are also fairly off the wall, at least in the author’s opinion. I’m only very familiar with 70s-90s X-Men, but one of the things that has always fascinated me about comics is how they keep evolving. Characters get rebooted, different writers and artists take things in new directions, past history gets retconned to keep everything in line—and comic fans keep going along with it. For me, that’s why I always kept checking out on comics. I would inevitably get frustrated by a new direction at some point or other.

But looking at it in a more critical way, I see that this method can also build up a lore not unlike mythology (how many retellings and interpretations of Greek gods or King Arthur have existed across centuries?) and invites the reader into an almost scholarly sort of club with layers that one might appreciate more the deeper one goes. While I don’t think I will suddenly dive back into Marvel comics, it was an unexpectedly fascinating read about world-building and how and why something that doesn’t seem like it should work…actually DOES work, for a certain audience. It made me consider what elements of this I might want to embrace in my own deeply realized world, instead of trying to hide from them out of fear of being “inaccessible”. Which is really NOT an easy question, but it was at least worth pondering in a new way.

That’s my latest update—infrequent, but long! And tomorrow I am excited to dive back into writing! I hope to see a few of you in the Discord and the rest of you here or on Youtube! Have you read anything good lately? Do you have any Thoughts about the world-building of Marvel comics? Love it/hate it/both? 

xo,

Lidiya