End

Posted on August 14, 2023 by Amanda

My first official blog post was 15.5 years ago on 2/14/08. My first official post at this URL after some blog shuffling, when I was resurrecting The Zen Leaf, was nine years ago today, on 8/14/14. I’m still honestly not sure I won’t regret this decision later, but I entered a new phase of life a year ago. I’ve felt for quite some time that it’s time for me to fully commit to that new direction, and let some old parts of my life pass quietly into the past. Much of the last year, I’ve spent culling social media down, removing extraneous things that no longer bring joy or connection, and evaluating where I want to go next. So this will be my last post here.

The blog itself will stay up at least until next July, because I’ve paid for the URL that long. I’m also still on some social medias, where I talk about books and cats and photography and health and pretty much all the stuff I talk about here anyway. So if you haven’t already and would like to, here is where you can find me:

Instagram: @pookasluagh
Tiktok: @pookasluagh
Photography: Gossamer Studios

Thank you to all of you who kept reading and commenting and such over the years. Love you all.

Posted in Personal | 4 Comments

Callback: Good Omens

Posted on August 10, 2023 by Amanda

I am currently obsessed with Good Omens. Here’s the thing: I listened to the audiobook way back in 2010. It was one of the first audiobooks I’d ever tried, and I enjoyed it immensely, but I didn’t get obsessed. I also clearly missed a hell of a lot of subtext, and forgot lots of important details, because when the miniseries came out in 2019, I could’ve sworn that, while it was a good adaptation, there were a lot of embellishments and changes. It was a good show, and my whole family enjoyed it. Like many good shows, I watched it twice in a row. I meant to get around to rereading the book because it had been so long, yet never did. Then came season two.

I enjoyed the book. I liked the show a lot. But season two? That was something entirely new and different and it took over my brain completely. My tiktok fyp is filled with nothing but the ineffable husbands at this point, heh. I watched those six episodes, rewatched the sixth, rewatched the entire season twice more, rewatched the first season, went back to the last two episodes of season two again, and finally got around to rereading the book. I’m dreaming about it. I have the urge to write fanfiction, which I’ve never had the urge to do before. Actually, I’m excited about potentially starting to write something at all, for the first time in nearly a decade. I thought I’d forever lost this love and excitement about writing after the traumas of my year in Boston, but here I am. Maybe this is what I needed. Just a few more times watching through the show first, especially the second season. And pining for season three, which won’t be here for years. Sigh.

So when I say that I’m obsessed, I very strongly mean it. And that obsession finally got me to pick up the book again. It’s been 13 years since my last read, and while I was planning to listen to the original audiobook, I learned that there was a full cast version. Normally, I really dislike full cast audiobooks, but this one had Michael Sheen and David Tennant, and I couldn’t not listen to it.

Things I learned, on second read: The miniseries followed the book far more closely than I remembered. Yeah, there were some differences, but a lot of what I thought was made up or added or embellished was actually there in the book. Second, I either completely missed or purposely forgot about some of the really cringy language that marked the book as being published in 1990. (F-slurs and R-slurs and fatphobia and cultural stereotyping – many of which were presented to be just as horrid as they are, but some of which were just there, accepted and acceptable.) And weirdly, I didn’t remember much of the queer-baiting from the book (the slurs and descriptions, yes, but not the actual Azira-Crow undertext), probably because I was 31 and still trying to break free from of my very heteronormative upbringing. The book was both better and worse than I remembered, and honestly, at this point, I think I like the TV version better. I know that’s pretty blasphemous for a book person to say, but it’s true. The book suffers from some of the drawbacks of its time, like any media.

So now it’s time to go back to the show and obsess over micro-expressions and put together theories for the future and cry a little bit more over that ending. J and L are surely getting exhausted of me talking about Good Omens, but at least I know I’m not the only person obsessed out there. If that means my sister and friends and I are texting each other memes and TT vids and theories, so be it! And if you haven’t 1) read this book or 2) watched this show, both are highly recommended!

Posted in 2023, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Kittens and KonMari

Posted on August 7, 2023 by Amanda

L and I were meant to leave on our roadtrip yesterday, but we canceled. 1) The weather was alternating between excruciating high temps and severe thunderstorms for the entire week of travel and being outdoors, and that didn’t sound like fun for either of us. 2) Our a/c went out completely at the end of last week, and we spent 48 hours without anything but a window unit. With our hvac guy still ghosting us, we did finally manage to get ahold of a different person, who came Friday afternoon. It turned out that the motor had blown, so the fan no longer worked, so the unit wouldn’t run (and if we tried to run it, would immediately ice over). The part itself was under warranty, but between the labor and having to replace the thermostat because ours shorted out as well, we paid over a grand for it. Frankly, canceling the roadtrip to get back a big chunk of that money just made sense, especially as neither L nor I wanted to spend long days outside with no shade cover in areas where it was going to be over 100 degrees (or storming). Not after spending several days with no a/c in our house.

(Droplet)

That left me with no plans for an entire week, so I decided to take advantage of the break. First, I did a little photoshoot with the kittens on Sunday. They’re going back to the shelter in a week, as they’re now healthy and over 2 lbs. I’m going to miss these kittens so badly. They’re the sweetest, cuddliest, friendliest, most amazing kittens I’ve had in quite some time. I’ve grown very attached, so this will be a hard giving-up.

(Smudge)

Second, I’m going to start with a new round of semi-KonMari. I first used the KonMari method all the way back in fall of 2015. Since then, I’ve kinda updated things bit by bit as I go along, and honestly, I’ve found that the book was right in saying I’d never need to do the whole thing all over again. It’s been incredibly simple to keep things in balance. I have periodic moments when I do minor sorting, but have never needed to go through the whole big process again.

(Puddles)

Recently, though, I’ve had a bit of an epiphany. My tiktok algorithm plopped me into a series of videos from women who had gone through weight loss surgery and had been unable to stop losing weight. They were in the 90-110 lbs range at this point, suffering losses in hair, nails, bone density, muscle mass, etc. They can’t get enough nutrients to be healthy, and they’re scared. At the same time, I’ve had several friends who lost weight rapidly over the pandemic, mostly due to extreme keto diets, who have just this summer begun to suffer the longterm effects of nutrient-deficiency and rapid weight loss. Then there’s the entire messy clean-eating-to-alt-right pipeline that has been very eye-opening (to me, personally) over the last few years. I hate diet culture. I hate the way eating disorders are being repackaged as “intermittent fasting” and “clean eating” and “natural diets.” I hate that fatphobia is so prevalent and acceptable. I hate the hold that fatphobia and diet culture has on most of us, and I’ve been slowly breaking away as much as I can. Which leads me back to KonMari.

(used to be in containers, now in drawers)

Under my bed, there are four drawers full of clothes of different sizes, each a range of sizes that fit me at different weights. My closet has one full wall dedicated to clothes that can’t be put in drawers but are too small for me to wear. Some still have tags on, because I bought them as “inspiration” clothes. Some items are so small that they didn’t fit even when I was thin, and were “goal” clothes then. (Some of these items were never going to fit, because frankly, my cup size and wide shoulders are never going to allow me to wear certain sizes or styles!) I’ve had many of these articles of clothing for nearly a decade, just hanging out under my bed or in the back of my closet, waiting until the day I might get to wear them again.

(2013: goal dress, which was several inches from being able to zip on the side. I still have this dress and I have no idea why. The lace is even ripped in places. I got it for like $5 at a thrift store.)

When I did KonMari the first time, I sorted through all these clothes, and I got rid of anything that didn’t “spark joy” as she says. But in 2015, I was less than a year out from when I’d fit into most of these clothes. However, it’s been another eight years. And now, I’ve realized that I don’t want to get back to where I was in 2014. Fck BMI. My body looked and felt best at about 15-20 lbs higher than that, but I was too obsessed with the number on the scale and the labels on my clothes to see that. I hadn’t yet learned to view my body in terms of function rather than form. I don’t want to get back to a “healthy BMI” again. Which means I have an entire drawer of clothes I’ve kept for a decade that I don’t even want to fit into anymore. I’ve held on out of some fantasy, as well as a deeply engrained Great-Depression-mindset that my family passed down to me: if I got rid of it now, and then ended up needing it one day, it would be wasteful. But really, isn’t it wasteful for it to sit and rot under my bed?

So this week, I’m pulling it all out. I need that rack in my closet for photography/costume space. I don’t need it for a bunch of clothes I’ll probably never wear. Ditto drawers under my bed, which could have far better uses than holding clothes I’ll likely never put on my body again. I’m sure I’ll keep some clothes that are smaller than I currently fit into, because my body isn’t comfortable and doesn’t function well at my current size either. But there’s no need to keep clothes that are for a body 40, 50, 80+ lbs less than my current weight/size unless I really, really love them. (My wedding dress, for instance!) After all, there are always going to be new things I love, like my new red dress with built in tulle petticoats and pockets! I wasn’t always very good at wearing things I loved as I gained weight, partly my own body-image struggles, partly due to limited plus size options at a reasonable cost. So it’s time to pare down to only the things I love again, and go from there.

Posted in Personal, Wellness | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

July 2023 in Review

Posted on August 2, 2023 by Amanda

July was a really hard month. We lost a family friend to ALS right at the beginning. We almost lost a foster kitten. Our a/c failed during one of the worst heat waves we’ve seen in a very long time (and STILL hasn’t been fully fixed, ugh). It’s been a month of crisis, but also a month of helping. I was able to care for my friend who became a widow, driving her places, helping her organize things, etc. I’ve been nursing these three needy foster kittens through extreme illness and then rebound illness. My cousin rescued a kitten from a hoarding situation, and I’ve been helping her nurse him both through knowledge and with physical resources (supplies and such). So at least there was that – hard, but I was still able to do something. And actually, if anyone out there is reading this, she could really use help with the vet bills, which are piling in the multiple thousands at this point. We’ve set up a gofundme and we would both really appreciate any help you could provide!

Reading and Watching
My brain hasn’t really been on books. For most of the month, I read nothing, only slipping a few in at the last second again. Those last second reads brought my total to four this month, with Yumi and the Nightmare Painter (the only early-month book) being my favorite. And actually, I haven’t really been focused on TV either. L and I watched some old reruns of the original Unsolved Mysteries, but mostly I’ve just had other things to focus on. I did finally watch one of the four movies that have been on my list for ages, Jurassic World Dominion. Those are such silly movies and it was nice to have an afternoon off from thinking while I watched, heh. And this past weekend, we all went to see the Barbie movie, which was…okay? I’m still digesting it.

House
There was obviously the (still unfinished) a/c crisis. Thankfully, it’s holding up okay right now, but I’m really irritated that our HVAC guy is ghosting us again and we can’t get any other company to call us back. Sigh. Then there is the pipes – did you know that pipes can burst not only if they get too cold/icy, but if they get too hot and melt? One of ours did that in mid-July, and Jason spent two weeks soldering pipes back together in his rare spare moments. But in better news, the other house thing that got done this month was that we finally painted the living room. We bought the paint and supplies for that back in the spring, but just hadn’t gotten around to it with everything else going on. We were worried especially about the cats and if they’d be curious/get into the paint, but actually, they completely ignored it and didn’t touch the drying walls at all. Whew!

The Ferals
Poor Juice. While Flo immediately went out onto the adoption floor after surgery, Juice had to wait another two weeks before his turn. (Probably because orange cats, especially orange girls, get adopted quickly, while black cats don’t.) Then, once he was out on the floor, it took a week for him to be adopted – only to be returned the next day. Boo! He’s an aggressive little guy, and that hasn’t changed. L and I actually visited him the day before his one-day adoption, and he almost immediately started biting and playing aggressively with us. Poor little dude; he’s going to need a very patient family! Other than that, we’ve been caring for Droplet, Puddles, and Smudge all month, through several bouts of illness. They’re set to return to the shelter for surgery and potential adoption later this week, provided they fully recover from their latest poop issues. I’m going to be sad to give these guys up, though. They are the sweetest batch we’ve had since the A Team back in the fall.

Health/Fitness
Happily, I had my bloodwork tested in early July, and the numbers improved even more since March. Despite my size, my health – as tested by blood, anyway – is absolutely perfect with the exception of the high inflammation markers that rheumatology is trying to work on, so far without success. I still suspect that inflammation won’t go down until the actual cause of the inflammation is discovered, just like with my teeth infections in 1998-2009. My doctor and I have settled on the lower level of Mounjaro because the next level up, while helping me to lose weight, causes a lot of nausea and fatigue. I’d rather have the level that seems to keep me steady, and potentially allow me to lose weight on my own, once it’s not 10,000 degrees outside and I can exercise again. In other good news, the insurance finally approved the Mounjaro so I no longer need to worry about the coupon code running out at the end of the year!

Favorite Photos
Other than the two planned photoshoots, I took almost zero photos this month. I’ve started to realize just how few photos I take generally during the hot months of the year, probably because I rarely leave the house! 98% of my photos were phone shots of the kittens, and the only one I’d call a favorite is the one I posted up in the Ferals section! So I have absolutely nothing to feature here for July.

Highlights of July
Given the amount of sorrow and grief and difficulties this month, there honestly weren’t a lot of really good moments, but I recorded a few.

  • Jennine and Andrew’s wedding, with all of the moments that entailed
  • new art for my art wall!
  • Florence got adopted within a day of availability, despite there being about 70 kittens available (kitten season is in full swing!)
  • absolutely beautiful copy of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter
  • hanging out at Knight Watch with L
  • feeling ridiculously victorious at finally reaching someone to grant me a necessary permit for a client’s engagement photoshoot
  • the engagement photoshoot itself!
  • pinning down so many new tattoos that I want, after all the years of hesitation!
  • spending time with some of my siblings that I haven’t seen in months
  • an unexpected afternoon thunderstorm in late July after two months without rain
  • Ladies’ Night tattoos with Stephanie
  • learning that my cousin’s kitten survived his night in emergency treatment, because we really didn’t think he would make it through

Coming up in August
There might be a small upcoming road trip for L and me, and of course, near the end of the month, L returns to Canada for school. August is a month that usually manifests, weather-wise, similar temps as July but with added humidity for extra misery, so it’s no wonder it’s also a month that has historically been correlated with really bad depression on my part. Hopefully the road trip helps with that?

Posted in Personal | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

A House with Good Bones, by T. Kingfisher (audio)

Posted on July 31, 2023 by Amanda

Between work assignments, Sam goes to spend a few months with her mother in the house where she grew up. Sam’s brother has expressed concern about their mother’s recent behavior, and Sam is equally alarmed when she arrives. Her mother has lost a lot of weight. She’s redecorated the house to look like it did before Sam’s grandmother passed away, and she’s started to care about the things Gran Mae emphasized when she was alive. Worst of all, though, is the constant fear on her mother’s face. Sam is afraid her mother is suffering from delayed grief, or dementia, or something, because the alternative – that her dead grandmother is haunting the house – is just too impossible to consider.

Wow. There is so much imagination in this one, set on a background of the most suburban mundane you can imagine. I had no idea where the story was headed. Creepy, but funny, and then…well, off the rails. Does anyone remember that one weird taste of lemon cake book? Where the girl could taste the emotions the person cooking felt while cooking? Then the weird stuff started happening to the brother (won’t say re: spoilers) that was entirely unpredictable? Well, it’s completely bizarre like that, except not whole cloth out of left field like that brother, and this book’s oddities were much, much creepier. Horror, without the gore, and with all the WTFuckery.

And having Mary Robinette Kowal as the narrator – oy, she was good! She could lean heavily into the soft North Carolinian accent without overdoing it, and her little “mew” during the horror portions? *shudder* Excellent choice of narration!

Honestly, I probably listened to this book WAY too fast once we got to the cliff-edge of this story. I was still processing what the heckers was happening when more began to happen, and more, and more. An avalanche of bizarre, inexplicable moments that had no right to exist in a very real world. I have so many questions, and I don’t know if maybe I missed the answers to them in my rush to absorb the story as fast as possible, or if they were meant to be unknowable. Either way, this is another of those books that I’ll definitely be rereading in the future! Kingfisher is proving herself a master storyteller!

Posted in 2023, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Sunday Coffee – The Summer Blahs

Posted on July 30, 2023 by Amanda

Back in the early days of blogging, when I was paying attention to views and comments and reader engagement, I noticed a few times each year when statistics would fall across the board. Some of those drops made sense – around the winter holidays, for example. But without fail, stats also fell off sometime in mid to late July and remained low until September. I don’t know if it’s the heat – whether that’s miserable heat like in the south, making people depressed, or welcome heat in the north, letting people spend more time outside their homes – or that it’s a popular vacation time or possibly related to school timing schedules. I just knew that I’d suddenly go from averaging hundreds to thousands of views each day to a hundred on a good day.

Since this time period corresponded in the latter half to my yearly August-Depression, and I’ve never been fond of the heat in July either, I started taking this time of year (if not the entire summer) as a blogging break. Sometimes I’d announce that I’d be gone, other times I’d just sort of shuffle along, posting lackadaisically in random spurts. That’s kinda what I’ve been doing this year. I haven’t had a lot to say – the heat affects everything from my reading mood to how often I can go out to do a photoshoot – so I’ve dropped back to bare minimums again.

As the summer blahs have come over me, and as I begin a series of transitions on social media (aka my Facebook profile will no longer exist in just a few weeks, my GR profile won’t be used anymore after this year), I’ve once again begun thinking about letting go. Fifteen years is a long time, and honestly, I’m not sure I have anything left that I want to write about. I’m starting a new period in my life. When I began this blog, I was settling into life as a stay at home mom. I needed something to give structure to my day that would also let me reach out to other likeminded folks. Blogging has been good for me. But it’s also probably gone well past its usefulness to become a crutch, letting me avoid things I should be doing instead.

My vision board for 2023 is all about RELEASE. Letting go of things that I’ve held onto for too long, finishing those things that I’ve been putting off. Does anyone remember Syabira from the last season GBBO? Each week after she’d been Star Baker, the hosts would try to tease her about the pressure of that, and she’d say that it didn’t matter, that each new week was “the clean slate.” That’s been my motto this year – to start each month with “the clean slate,” to stop carrying things forward, not little things like getting backed up on podcast episodes, not big things like important goals. I want to transition to this new time in my life fully, with the clean slate.

Minds change, and I’m not going to say for definite that I’m leaving the blog. But my mind has started to lock onto Valentine’s Day as the end. That’ll be sixteen years, and while sixteen isn’t a year I would have chosen myself, I can’t deny that I’m tickled by the correlation to the Cosmere (where sixteen is a major thematic element). And sixteen might be enough. Again, I’m not going to say for sure, but given the way my thoughts have been trending, I know the time to end is definitely approaching.

*****
Note: After writing all this, I looked back through my blog feed-reader. Other than my own personal feeds and my library/wowbrary feeds, I had a total of 54 blogs listed under various categories. I go through this list about 1-2x per year, and remove blogs that I no longer want to follow (which generally means “blogs that haven’t posted in 5+ years”). But honestly, I’ve kept a lot of blogs from folks I loved following, even when they hadn’t posted in 10+ years, just in case they come back one day. This time, I decided to pay more attention, and I checked every single blog. Of those 54, 30 no longer existed at all. Even though I’d kept them “just in case,” their actual websites were gone, privated, or co-opted by spam sites. Of the remaining 24, a further 7 hadn’t posted for at least five years, so I removed them too. This leaves me with only 17 folks in my feed reader, and of those, only FIVE post at least a couple times per year. Five. Y’all. Blogging is dead. It’s done. I’ve made it to the end, and now I just have to figure out how to taper away (which isn’t easy for me).

Posted in Personal | Tagged | 4 Comments

because some tattoos are just silly

Posted on July 28, 2023 by Amanda

I waited so long after my last horrific tattoo experience in 2014 to finally get the one I got last month. It was like a dam burst. All these ideas that I’d had swimming in the back of my mind for so many years flooded in. I’d kept inspo photos for years, tucked away in various corners of my files. Cat tattoos and spooky tattoos and silly tattoos. Pretty tattoos and interesting tattoos and unbelievable (aka patch) tattoos. Suddenly, I was organizing all those files into collections, labeled with the location I wanted to get them and screenshots from the artists I wanted to work with.

(I am so bad at taking selfies!)

There’s a chain of shops in town called Ink Couture. Every Thursday, they do a walk-in only Ladies’ Night where you can get a 3×3 tattoo for a discounted rate. Stephanie wanted to get her first tattoo and it fit the parameters of the event, so yesterday afternoon, I took her over to our closest Ink Couture location for Ladies’ Night. It turned out to be a slow night at the shop. The artist who came to meet us had been ghosted by her appointment, so she actually ended up taking my makeshift designs for a calf tattoo (that was slightly too big for the LN parameters) and tattooing us both.

My calf tattoo was actually the most recent thing I’ve thought of, a silly tattoo that combined my love of tarot with a lingering signature from college. In my second year of college, my mom sent me a box of those Valentine’s conversation hearts like she used to do every year. Those things are disgusting, but it was family tradition, heh. In 1999, the company introduced a new heart that just had a wide smiley face on it. This particular smiley face was only around for that one year, and it was a rare find. I loved it. I loved it so much that I bought a giant bag of disgusting conversation hearts just so I could pick out the four smileys that were in it and send one to each of my closest friends. And I began signing my letters – because I was still sending post letters regularly then – with a smiley heart.

In subsequent years, the smileys first disappeared, then returned as a smaller smiley inside a circle, then became a weird flirty smile with oblong eyes and creases on the smile ends. I can find photos of those two online, but I’ve never seen a photo of the original that only existed the one season. I’ve drawn it so many times, though, that I know exactly what it SHOULD look like. And as I was thinking about silly little tattoos I might do for Ladies’ Night after Stephanie and I decided to attend a few weeks back, I realized I wanted this little smiley heart. It’s not important, it’s not meaningful, it’s just a silly thing that I remember from college. And because it’s me, I decided to turn said smiley heart into the Three of Hearts from the tarot deck, in an ironic twist – to smile despite being stuck in the middle of the heartbreak card. I’d say it’s meant to be a reminder or some such nonsense, but it really isn’t. It just made me laugh and reminded me of the Everything is Fine Modern Witch tarot card hanging over my computer.

I chose to use the version of the Three of Swords from the Phantomwise tarot deck (done by Erin Morgenstern, inspired by The Night Circus) as a template. Most Three of Swords cards will show the heart pierced in a way that doesn’t allow room for a smiley face to show, but Morgenstern’s art provided a perfect empty tableau for the conversation heart portion. The smiley inside the circle on the more recent conversation hearts is mostly the right shape and proportion to itself, just needed to be bigger to match the 1999 version. I’ve said it before – I’m a terrible artist. But this is the rough sketch I came up with. (Heart itself was printed from online, which is the only reason the heart and its bottom shadow/sides are correct. I can trace mostly! Heh.)

The artist informed me that this particular tattoo would not work in the 3×3 parameters, because it would muddy up too badly over the course of a few years within that frame. I was okay with paying a higher rate, though, and said absolutely she could take this design and make it her own, as long as the smiley was right and the heart looked like a conversation heart. I’m no artist, and I want the true artist to take my idea and make it perfect! So she did. Quincy was our artist, and she turned my silly little idea into a silly little tattoo with her own twist on the design. It’s simple and effective, and one day I might get the heart shaded in one of the pale pastel colors of the candy. I laugh every time I look at this, because it’s just so incongruous, the smile and the swords, ha!

Three fun facts: 1) This is the first tattoo I’ve gotten on the right side of my body. My wrist and shoulder were on the left, my back tattoo was obviously in the center. 2) This is my first tattoo with any shading. All the others are line-work only. I still don’t have any with color, though I hope to change this soon! 3) Ink Couture had those gumball machines for flash tattoos, and I really want to play that game at some point!!

Posted in Personal | Tagged | Leave a comment

Death and the Conjuror, by Tom Mead

Posted on July 25, 2023 by Amanda

1930s, London. When Dr. Anselm Rees is found murdered in a room locked from the inside, the cops are flummoxed. Inspector Flint calls on a retired stage magician, Joseph Spector, to help him solve the puzzling case.

Let me start with the good: I enjoyed the mystery in this book. I never figured out what was going on, and the plot kept me engaged. That was enough to give the book a solid 3 stars, if I rated books. Unfortunately, that’s where the good ended.

I wanted to start with the good, though, because most of the “bad” is very subjective, and wouldn’t irritate every reader. It also wasn’t bad enough to negate the good. Ironically, weighing the two together made this a “just okay” book – the type of book I try to avoid or cull from the beginning. If I hadn’t been in my summer-brain mode, I definitely would have culled this one early on. But as I said in my most recent Sunday Coffee, I kept going for 28 pages when finally the mystery itself overcame my other reservations. Culling may have been a better choice for me, but also, it had been weeks since I’d really read anything, and that may have made continuing worth it.

But enough. Extremely minor spoilers – to do with how the book was written, nothing to do with the mystery itself – to follow.

I also mentioned in my Sunday Coffee post that the writing style wasn’t my favorite. It remained unimpressive. The author seemed to relish in his own cleverness, using obscure vocabulary (sometimes incorrectly – one doesn’t wake “with a priapic jolt” from a terrifying nightmare, for example) and whole sections of the book where two characters outline what we know in the mystery thus far. There was zero character development, as the characters’ personalities didn’t matter at all to the mystery. There were odd consistency errors that seemed like misdirection but ended up just being errors, like the emphasis on when the rain started – at 11pm on the dot, then at 9pm, then back to 11pm as if the 9pm declaration never happened. Then at the end, there’s literally a one-page section that speaks to the reader to essentially tell them that all the clues are there and it’s their last chance to say they know the answer before it’s revealed. Followed by footnotes during the revelation to show the reader what small details they may have missed. Oh please.

Then to cap all that, the reveal isn’t made organically, like in a good mystery. Instead, the magician gathers all the suspects – without even telling the inspector the answer, but having him look on as all is revealed – and proceeds to explain the night in painful detail. Honestly, the last time that worked in fiction was when Clue released in theatre, and only then because they made it funny – parody of a very old, very tired trope! So the ending fell flat, the reveal feeling a lot like the way it’s disappointing when a stage magician tells you how they did a trick, and said trick is so mundane the magic is ruined.

So in the end, I guess – good mystery, badly presented? At least for me? The thing is, while that all sounds very negative, I’m actually willing to give the author another chance, hoping he’ll improve over time. He has another Joseph Spector locked-room-type mystery releasing soon, called The Murder Wheel. I plan to give that a try, but perhaps with a little more wariness than I had going into this one. If it seems to be written the same, perhaps I ought to skip ahead to the inevitable Spector-Tells-All section to get the answer, and return the book to the library.

Posted in 2023, Adult, Prose | Tagged | Leave a comment

Sunday Coffee – Readathon-ish

Posted on July 23, 2023 by Amanda

I haven’t participated in a Readathon on quite a long time. The last time I tried was spring of 2018, and I realized throughout that I’m just not cut out for a hyper-focus reading day anymore. Since then, I’ve periodically used upcoming Readathon events to sort through teetering TBR piles, cutting them to more manageable levels.

June wasn’t the best reading month, and July has been the same. Other than Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, I’ve struggled to get into any books at all. There were two that I was reading (one print and one audio) for nearly three weeks, then they were both due back at the library and couldn’t be renewed re: other holds, and I realized that I was maybe 15% into each of them max and couldn’t be bothered to rush to finish. I decided instead to just cull them both.

That’s about when I heard that the Reverse Readathon was upcoming. Immediately, I put my entire virtual TBR pile on hold at the library. There were already quite a number of titles on there already, ones on order that haven’t hit their soon-coming publication date. There were quite a few others that had long hold lines, so I knew I wouldn’t get them in time for my little twist on Readathon. But five had arrived by last weekend, and I hoped others would follow throughout the week. I also pulled the unread books off my shelf, adding another four to the pile.

I took that photo on Sunday last weekend, knowing that yes, it was possible I’d get more books throughout the week, and I’d have to take a new photo. And then, because 1) they were sitting in a pile already and 2) I have never had any kind of patience when I get it into my head to work on a project, I started on my Readathon Culling Project nearly a week before the actual Readathon started. Because of course.

My culling method, which has served me well since I implemented it in 2010/11, goes like this: Choose a book, read the first five pages, decide if the book has interested me enough to keep on the list. There’s a yes pile, a no pile, and a maybe pile. Once I’ve been through an entire stack of books, the maybe pile gets an additional five pages read, at which point each book joins the yes or no piles. I’ve never regretted any book I’ve culled, and there have been some books in the Yes pile that I’ve eventually given up on after I pass that five page point. You can tell a lot from those first few pages – writing style, type of characters, how the author wants to draw you in, etc.

Anyway, I decided that since this was Readathon-inspired, I’d spend a little more time with each book. Especially given that my brain has just not been book-oriented since May. In this kind of mood, I can give up a book I love within a paragraph, so I have to be very careful to know when I’m actually not interested vs not interested at this moment in time.

Note that below this will go into specifics of what I did/didn’t keep reading, and some people weirdly get offended if I don’t like the writing style of a book they loved or if I find some beloved book boring, so if that’s you, perhaps don’t continue this post? Here is how my week-long culling Readathon went:

  1. The Carnivale of Curiosities – I started with this because I love carnival stories and magic. It really wasn’t capturing my attention, though, so I gave it several chapters and culled it around page 17.
  2. Death and the Conjuror – Unimpressed with the writing style at the beginning but suspected it might just be my summer-brain, so I kept going long past normal and decided around page 28 that I’d continue.
  3. Damsel – This was always a maybe even on the plot, and I was bored right away, so I forced my way through 16 pages before culling.
  4. Biased – By the time I’d finished the introduction, I’d decided to continue with this one. Unfortunately, the audio isn’t for me. Wish it was because I highly prefer audio for nonfic!
  5. I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself – Read through page 44 before I stopped. This is staying on the keep pile, though I’m not sure how much is interest and how much is the one-paragraph-long sections style of writing. We’ll see if I’m still interested after a forced break from it.
  6. Sign Here – Culled after 20 pages, though I knew pretty early on (maybe even the first page) that this was def not the style for me.
  7. The Last Tale of the Flower Bride – I was really disappointed to cull this one, but after 15 pages, I couldn’t remember a word I’d read and the writing style irked me beyond reason. Oh well.
  8. Black Candle Women – Read 27 pages before I remembered that I was only previewing! Can’t wait to get back into this one!
  9. A House With Good Bones – I already knew this is one I wanted to read, but I was pleasantly surprised to find the audio is read by Mary Robinette Kowel!! An audio preview confirmed that yes, I do want to read it.
  10. Saint Juniper’s Folly (not pictured) – Meh. Gave it up after 16 pages. Too young.

Takeaways: Stop buying books before I’ve read them, especially from Book of the Month, as I’ve culled 6 of the last 9 I’ve gotten, and of the other three, one was just okay. This is an old rule but I’ve taken to breaking it quite a bit in the last year or so. Suggestions from Nowhere Bookshop tend to be keepers, as 4 of the 5 kept books were all from them. I now have 4 books to read in print, and I’ll likely try to read the 3 that are library books before they need to be returned. But we’ll see, as I still have a number of others on the hold list that may come in as well! My TBR (physical and virtual) is down to around 15-20 books, excluding those that haven’t released yet, and that’s a good place for me. Goal by the end of the year is to have no unread physical TBR, no audio queue, and under 20 published books on the virtual TBR (preferably under 10).

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Photoshoot: Engagement

Posted on July 21, 2023 by Amanda

Recently I had the honor and pleasure to take engagement photos for a beautiful couple. Julie happens to be one of my oldest friends, having met all the way back to when we were ten-ish. She and her fiancé, Carlos, contacted me about an engagement photo session a few months back. Due to their schedules, it took until this summer to get it all set up, but we finally got out there!

They chose Denman Estate Park and The Rosemont for their photos. It’s a beautiful location with so many great spots to shoot, even though we’re smack in the middle of the summer so the pond was low and a lot of the greenery was a bit less than green. The couple’s chosen outfits were perfect for the location, a great pop of reds and blacks to stand out among the background. We took so many photos, and it was hard to narrow my favorites to just a few.

I loved doing this. Not just because Julie is one of my oldest friends – I love taking the photos, hyping up the clients, finding the perfect looks and poses and backgrounds, then editing it all afterwards to turn good photos into great ones. In the moment, I forget about the heat, about how sore my muscles will be the next few days because I keep dropping into squats and lunges, about how silly I might look getting into the right position to take the best picture. I love the delight on my clients’ faces when they see the photo previews, and it makes me so happy when they’re happy with the final results. I may never make a full living or career out of photography, but I hope that I’ll be able to continue this for a good, long time!

Posted in Personal | Tagged | 2 Comments