I finished reading Night Veil and listening to Middlegame.
Middlegame is amazing, although that's not exactly a surprise since it's Seanan McGuire. It's about two kids who were put together all Frankenstein-like. (I think of them as Prometheans because my household is perpetually immersed in World of Darkness). There are multiple sets of identical-but-opposite-gender twins, and I want to be like "Okay but what if half of one pair were trans", but since Seanan McGuire played with something a lot like that in Indexing (more on that later) and to a lesser extent in Every Heart a Doorway, I can assume that there were important narrative reasons to not do it here. I liked that Dodger (the girls half of the central pair) got the math powers while her brother got the language powers. I liked the Magicians-like elements of "we will reset time until we get this right" and "a rough map to what we're doing exists in a popular children's book (that only exists in the world of the story". (I didn't actually like the book The Magicians, and haven't read the sequels. I did like the TV show).
As for Night Veil, I finally figured out what the like, Thing is with the series. And now I'm sort of embarrassed, because it's playing with Tam Lin, and I'm way to much of a fairy tale nerd to note notice that for a book and a half. Protagonist girl had impulsive sex with her faerie lover in the woods, so we should be hitting "ever alas sweet Janet, I fear ye gae wi child" like, any minute now, although the second book is set about a week after the first one, so either we'll need a bigger time skip or it will take several more books. Or someone (the fae, the vampires, whatever Kaylin is) might have super early pregnancy detecting powers. Or I could be wildly wrong.
I also listened to the audiobook of Indexing, although if anyone is looking here for book recommendations, I suggest reading it with your eyeballs. The chapter transitions are a little awkward out loud. Indexing is a risk I hadn't considered when I suggested looking to the Aarne-Thompson Index for plot ideas. Government agency does damage control when fairy tales start happening in real life, which they do all the damn time. You know how I love stories that bring the government into contact with magic, especially when it's more complicated than Cops With A Specialized Knowledge Base. (The ATI Management Bureau does function as a law enforcement agency, but it's definitely more complicated than that). I like the various ways the book plays with the relationship between fairy tales and real life, although explicating any part of that would involve massive spoilers, and this is the rare case where I actually think it matters, if only because a reader with significant experience of fairy tales will likely catch onto things before the characters do, and that's always fun.
All quiet on the writing front, except that I realized I might be able to resume work on a semi-abandoned project if I change the setting to somewhere I'm more familiar with. That's potentially a massive rewrite, but there isn't enough written to make that too burdensome, and the story is part of my project to write trans guys into traditionally masculine roles, so I think it would be worth the effort anyway. I'm going to need to learn a lot about bats in the next little while.
Also the kittens have now grown up enough to look and move like cats, but smaller, rather than confused jelly beans. That's not about books or writing, but it's adorable. More pictures will soon be available to supporter of my Patreon.
Be gay, do crimes, and read all the thing!
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