Daniel > Recent Status Updates

The sad moment when you realise it says "copse" and not "corpse"...

unexpectedly ends at 91%

i have the attention span of a knat lately. this is a pretty good showing for Bertha and a weak one for Lam, but largely enjoyable

Bertha is awesome. :)

And we got cops and a dead body at last.

Pet peeve: Characters introducing themselves "my name is" with their title included.

"My name is Doctor John Smith", "My name is Captain Bill Jones".

No. No it's fucking not. Doctor is your TITLE it's not a part of your name you stupid moron. If the character needs to include their title in their self-introduction for some reason, use "I am". "I'm Detective Johnson" perfectly acceptable.

Elsie doesn't feel like the same character at all. And Lam is more on the make here than I ever noticed before. i wonder if the characters would have turned out different had the publisher not rejected this one.

This feels a bit more misogynistic than I recall any of the other installments I read being, still this feels more like the strong Bertha from the other early books and less like the one in Bat's Fly at Dusk. I think Gardner isn't real solid on his characterization and his major chars don't feel super consistent, at least not in their early appearances. Mason in the early books feels nothing like Burr's portrayal.

aggh! stressful. :/

it's like the big misunderstanding, only it's been in progress since the beginning and the entire time they're building their very timid relationship. and there's more than one of them. if this were m/m. ;)

there's a definite sense of suspense now :/

ok, I haven't really cared for Grace up to this point, despite finding her very relatable, but the interaction with her and Thaniel at the ball is wonderful.

it's very hard to see where this is going, which is cool, but also makes it feel a bit unstructured. it's also incredibly understated. like the barest hints possible that Thaniel feels some attraction to Mori, but then there were just two startlingly intimate gestures after Thaniel comes home his first day at the f.o. which were so unprecedented i had to reread and wonder if it really meant what it i took it to mean

"he did not often have business with more than one octopus at a time."

finally feels like there is some threat to the characters now

this is very? calm? serene? idk. slow but not in a bad way. there are events but they don't feel like a plot. the characters are intriguing without really doing anything. it doesn't seem like it should work but it really does.

getting more into this as it goes, but it's def odd.

Yeah, just drop a random Sherlock moment right in the middle of the book with no prep other than her own claim to be the best detective in the world.

One of the blurbs for this says it's like "David Lynch directed a Raymond Chandler novel." But I'd say it's more like Carlos Castaneda wrote an episode of the Rockford Files.

this isn't 100% working for me, but nothing is lately

fu gr

hmmmm. jack is trash, we're finally considering alex, but i really don't know if i care enough to go on

funny, not constant lol type funny, but funny

Aww, Murder McRapeface doesn't want to hang out with all the other murderers and rapists. wtf this book.

this is damn near dnf right now.
problem the first: did I seriously just deal with 20 characters as some damn backstory?
problem the second: blah blah woe is me, wandering around hungry between bouts of paranoid jealousy, words words words. are you seriously expecting me to put up with this pointless bs for murdering rapey mcrapeface?

well, that went well