WWW Weds: I Published Two Books This Week

This is a weekly meme hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words.

What Did I Recently Finish Reading?

Does a collection I’m included in count? This week I had two anthologies launch. While we worked on these books over the course of 2021, I got the chance to read many of the stories at various points in their creation, but I didn’t get to read all of them, and I hadn’t read any of them in their final form (except for mine obviously).

I just finished reading through the entire collection. It’s awesome and I’m so glad I was included alongside so many talented authors!

I think my favorite is Pixie Stormcrow’s. It’s an erotic short set in her Playgrounds universe. I’ve read a number of different books set in the Playgrounds world. All of the characters’ stories intertwine and I think that’s why I love Pixie’s work so much

The safe word was “Prometheus” XD That had me dying. So clever.

Overall, this was a bit too brutal for my taste. I prefer gentle femdom and this is just femdom.

However, for the humor alone, this erotic short is worth the read.

I read another Zoe Chant book. I love these books and how wacky they are. This one had a whole subplot with alien crop circles and alien chasing youtubers. Chant books are like a Hallmark movie, except they have sex scenes and they’re on some complete other shit. Chant gives no fucks. All 12 of her give no fucks. She’ll throw whatever into a plot and all the readers better be here for it.

Mikayla Whitaker is a newish writer who has improved a great deal just in the short time I’ve known her. The world-building in this story is really interesting and this has the potential to be a really great story.

Since she’s a newish unestablished writer, I’m opting not to post my criticisms of the story publicly. I sent them to the author privately and, as always, she heard me out very graciously.

I think the biggest problem with the book is just that it isn’t ready to be a book yet. It needs more time to cook.

This isn’t a situation where I think the story is flawed down to the very foundation. It’s the opposite: I think the bones are very good and I think Whitaker has a lot of imagination and talent. However, it’s raw talent right now and in time, when she’s spent some years polishing that raw stone of talent, I think we’ll be looking at some really innovative oceanic fantasy.

What Am I Currently Reading?And now I’m on to this Zoe Chant book. I started out really NOT liking Zoe Chant. And then for some reason…I read another of her books. Then I was sort of torn on her. I kept reading and now, well, I’m hopelessly hooked.

They’re cute and formulaic enough to get the Hallmark effect, but they also always have some surprises in them. You might be able to predict all the basic plot beats, but Zoe Chant has no chill when it comes to the subplots.

In this one, for example, the hero was bitten by a hellhound and now blacks out and shifts into a hellhound and fucks his own life up. All while the heroine is cursed by a witch and can’t touch anyone without feeling intense pain.

I just love the combination of wholesome and wacky.

I’ll probably binge the rest of this book later today. Because I’m in a really bad mood today. For no good reason. I mean, I have a reason, but it’s stupid. So if anything will get me out of a really stupid bad mood, I think a Zoe Chant book will.

More about the terrible problems of the psych industry. Here’s a reminder that you’re not a mental health advocate if you aren’t talking about how to reform the mental health field and educating yourself on the rampant conflicts of interest.

The most vulnerable patients don’t need to be reminded about self-care. They aren’t middle class white ladies with a plethora of social and financial resources. What they need is to stop having their human rights violated. So shut up about bubble baths and taking “mental health days” and other privileged nonsense. Instead look into the standards of care in involuntary in-patient facilities, the overlap between the homeless and mentally ill, or how often law enforcement is involved with mental health interventions.

If you want to start somewhere easy, please spread some awareness about this page: This page consists of actual psych nurses mocking and saying vile things about psych patients.

A while back some folks on reddit came across this page and realized that many of the women mocking the mentally ill on this page were doing so with their real legal names. They tracked down linked in pages, passed them around, found facebook accounts-you get the picture.

I didn’t participate in this, but I did enjoy watching it go down.

If you’re gonna say evil, vile shit about a vulnerable population that you HOLD POWER OVER, then yeah, you deserve to get harassed and have your workplace called.

Also, whoever runs the page makes merch. MERCH. They make merchandise around the concept of mocking the mentally ill.

And they make memes like this-mocking traumatized children and reveling in them being restrained. Disgusting.

Burn out is not an excuse to act this way. If you are burnt out, quit.

But I’m starting to think a lot of nurses are just those catty, cruel sorts of women who enjoy punching down and abusing those they have power over.

I can’t think of any other reason why Involuntary Psych Memes would exist.

Yet, people want to roll their eyes when I tell them the nurses further traumatized me when I was in-patient for the first time at 14. They were horrible, nasty bullies. But I thought I just had an outside-the-norm experience. Now that I’ve seen this, I’m wondering if something about psych nursing attracts vile people.

Anyway, if you really care about mental health (and not just mild middle class mental health) then we could use a lot more awareness around the human rights violations taking place in-patient.

Just like with the erotica anthology, I didn’t get the chance to read every story while we were working on the book, so now that I have a physical copy in my hands, I’m reading the whole collection through. Again my favorite from the collection is Pixie Stormcrow’s story. It’s such a cute paranormal romance. The hero is Death and he falls in love with a dying human. It’s very cute and unique.

This book is very different from the types of books I usually read. It’s a story based on the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. It’s very complex and layered, with a wide cast of characters and multiple POVs.

What Will I Read Next?

I need to finish reading Dracula. I took a break from it, because I’m struggling with this classic.

And I’ve got to jump back into reading Dark Lover, as I’m reading it for a discord book club.

And I have this arc I got from Booksprout that I need to read and review.

And lastly, I need to get back into reading the 4th book in the Bloodlines series, which I’ve been slowly making my way through for way too long now.

That’s it for me! Have you read any of these books? What are you reading this Weds? Let me know in the comments.