review! love & realness chapter four!

well that was a fast week that went by after i told myself, "eh, it's fine if i skip just this one day!" willpower, claire! willpower!

this one is actually a pretty long chapter! compared to the first three, anyhow. starting off, we get into bitsy's day after having coffee spilled down her front by a guy she thinks is a Real. a pretty good chunk of her day she spends babbling to people about her subway platform encounter and having to bite her tongue about thinking the dude is a living breathing human instead of an android.

did i name her bitsy to rhyme with "ditzy"? coz she kinda is, in an adorable-ish sort of way. and i do love how everybody has these almost-normal names with a computery tweak, like her coworker "trish" being lectricia. i think this is the chapter where gigory shows up too. "gigory"... ha!

for a chapter where not much is happening for most of it, this one is pretty entertaining. ditzy bitsy fretting her day away about whether the mystery man might call her and running her mouth to people most of the rest of the time.

and now here's gigory awkwardly showing up at bitsy's cube making her think he's about to say something pointless to her like he does every day because for some reason he just has to say something to her every day -- only it turns out this time he really does have something to say to her, because all her lagging and gabbing has meant she didn't finish the work she was supposed to finish so gigory could do his followup part after that.

so bitsy's all guilty-feeling about screwing gigory over by not doing her job, and gigory's all guilty-feeling for making bitsy feel bad, and whoa! after telling him she's going to work late to catch them up, bitsy offers to buy gigory dinner sometime to make it up to him!

and then gigory goes off blinking in surprise at his good fortune and bitsy buckles down to work and the chapter ends with her desk phone pinging.

honestly, this book is so far maybe half a real chapter's worth of writing in a real book, but so much is crammed into it! i don't know if it's because i'm a better writer than i thought or if it's because i'm so lazy about getting off my patootie and actually writing.

onward!

xoxo,
claire

review! love & realness chapter three!

hah! right off the bat, the first paragraph has this gem in it: "you wouldn't want every Tom, Diode and Harry to know ..." it's extra funny because of the way diodes tend to be shaped, but i'm not sure that was intentional.

some fun swearing in the chat between the real guy and bitsy: "Oh, Loj," and "Dear Logic, what do I do?" 

snort! and then she tells him she'll excuse being late to work by claiming she "caught a bug" and had to take the morning off sick. and then he asks her for her number and he means her serial number!

so this chapter is way longer than the other two, but it's still pretty dang short compared to most books. the length really works, though. it's a whole dramatic unit, just like each of the first chapters was. i'm really impressing myself so far ... now i've just got to get through this whole review without getting paranoid that whatever new chapters i write won't be as good as these ones.

review! love & realness, chapter two!

(super spoilers warning! you really should go and read this chapter before i get going here! and chapter one if you haven't read that already!)

so did it really make sense to end chapter one so quickly and in that exact spot?

the answer is yeppers, folks. because chapter one is where bitsy is, and chapter two is totally a page turning for her. we see a smidge of her morning routine and then she goes outside and it's just rained overnight and the whole city is beautiful and sparkling around her. dang is it ever well described! and then we get another one of those one-sentence hum-dinger chapters:

"It was one of those days Bitsy could have sworn she was alive."

we follow her on her way to work and learn so much about bitsy's android world and culture without any of it interrupting the story flow. there's even some mythology or history, nobody knows which, about the guy who set up the whole "nobody knows for sure if there are still real people still alive and mixed in with the androids or not" scheme. get this: "professor heisenborg." (omg, i was on fire writing this!)

then -- big twist! bitsy literally runs into the plot, a guy who spills coffee on her from the collision and, when she looks up, turns out to have these brown, brown eyes that convince her he's Real.

this is another 10/10 chapter, guys. still super short, but it still does everything it needs to, and with panache!

also, now that i'm remembering it, i wasn't completely on fire writing it, because i actually worked really hard finding ways to make bitsy's speech and the language of her culture just jam-packed with computer lingo. (probably part of why these chapters are so short ... i was really sweating over that stuff.)

man, i'm enjoying the heck out of reading and reviewing this!

awesome idea, yesterday claire!

xoxo,
today claire

review! love and realness, chapter one!

this chapter gets off to a pitch-perfect but maybe a little too predictable of a start. meaning, it opens up with a chapter title, which is, "Chapter One."

okay, so yes, i am sort of going to reaction blog this while i'm reading, but i promise from here out i won't go word-by-word!

(if you want to know what the heck i'm talking about, go over to my left sidebar and scroll down (and down and down) to near the bottom of the post/page lists and you'll find a whole section for this book, where you can click open chapter one and read along.)

okay, holy shit, that's a damned good opening paragraph! bang! our main character's an android. bang! everybody's an android! bang! she has a morning routine that's weirdly similar to a human being, including brushing her teeth and hair. if i didn't already know why i wrote it that way, i'd for sure be curious as all get-out about why an android needs to brush her teeth.

bang! this chick android is obsessed with the possibility that there are still real humans hanging around somewhere in the world, and she might meet one and have a whirlwind romance.

guys, i just took 5 sentences (plus a bunch of bang!s) to summarize it, and the paragraph itself is only 2. and it's got a whiz-wham fun style to it too! how did i do this???

onward.

okay, so, holy shmoley, paragraph 2 is only 2 sentences too. it totally didn't feel like that when i was reading it, but going back just now to check, i was like, "where's the period? where's the period? where's the period?" (it would be in bad taste to make a pregnancy-scare joke here, so i won't, but i'm going to point out that i'm not doing it or else one of my yams will come along and read this and they'll make a pregnancy-scare joke and then i'll be peeved that they interrupted themselves reading this awesome book that i put so much effort into just to make a lame, bad-taste joke.) and then when i'm almost out of breath, i get to a question mark and say, "whew! not a period, but at least i got to the end of a sentence finally!"

and then the next sentence was even longer.

there's kind of two ways long sentences can go when you're reading a book. first, they could make you feel like things are dragging on and on and never getting anywhere. but second, they can just keep rolling and rolling like a snowball gaining speed and energy going downhill, and before you know it, your head is just full of all this info and understanding and feeling.

my second paragraph of my first novel i ever started writing pulled that second one off! dang, i can't help being really proud of me. next up, paragraph 3!

SMASH!!! What?!?!?

paragraph 3 is only 6 words long! but they are sledgehammer words. omg.

now i'm looking back again and i'm seeing part of what i did was, sentence 1 was medium-long, and then sentence 2 was medium-longer, making paragraph 1 overall a medium-ish paragraph. then sentence 3 was even longer, and sentence 4 was the longest of all, making paragraph 2 twice as long as paragraph 1. i really did totally snowball that, and then sentence 5 is that split second when the enormo-grown snowball reaches the bottom of the hill and smacks into you.

this is so freaking awesome! i'm a genius! i can't wait to keep g--

oh. 

that's it. 

that's the whole chapter. past claire, what are you doing to me?!?

tune in tomorrow for chapter two!

xoxo,
claire

quick, before i forget!

too late. i already forgot.

but before you get too down on my account, remember that i'm the luckiest girl in the world and also that my boyfriend spends way too much time on the computer. so he came back from a workout and immediately turned on the yam-fam's laptop and staring him in the face there was my blog dashboard and no post for today anywhere in sight.

so he came and got me.

and now because i'm a cheaty cheater and i want my post numbers to go up, i'm calling this post a wrap so i can jump right into the next post, reviewing my chapter 1!

xoxo,
claire

p.s., thanks, msg! you are the absolute bestest boyfriend ever!

desperate times, desperate measures!

people, i sat down to blog tonight, and el zippo came into my head. what's your topic, claire? i thought it, and then i felt exactly like i feel when i tell the computer to do something and a progress bar pops up and just sits there, not filling up at all, just stuck.

and that's when i decided i needed another reliable blogging topic besides our rpg adventures. there's no way i can blog as often as i want about rpg's -- for one thing, we don't play every day or anything like that, not nearly. and for another thing, right now we're getting back into akane's campaign, and she's blogging that herself.

and then a progress bar popped up in my head, with like, a crazy small amount of it filled. and it said ...

novel.

so i went back to the most recent chapter i wrote, chapter 11, and the date said ...

july 31, 2022.

yeeeeeek! that's four years!

and i read that post, and it was short. who writes a book with chapters that short? and the answer was ...

you, claire. all you've got to do is decide to do it.

longtime readers of this blog are now shaking their heads wisely or ruefully, thinking either, we've heard this before, but maybe this time she's really going to do it! or else just, yeah, yeah. we've heard this so many times before!

i'm going to be a smartapus about it this time, though. i'm not going to just jump in and write at it ... i'm going to review my own book. chapter by chapter!

easy peasy, right? every day, there's my topic right there. and i don't have to get any farther in the book while i'm reviewing, and i don't have to come up with anything earth-shaking or amazing, or even anything with a thesis sentence (which i totally suck at by the way). not even any worries about what each post is going to be titled! just, "review! love and realness, chapter ___."

reviewing will also let me remind myself what the heck was going on in this book, so when i get through all the chapter reviews, i'll be all set to move the story forward, right?

will this be another fail-y mcfailington effort like i've done so many other times?

tune in tomorrow and start to find out!

xoxo,
claire

is it just me, or computers getting worse right when they're supposedly getting way smarter?

msg knows a lot more about this ai stuff than i do, and i can totally ask him about tech-y stuff if i need to with a semi-okay chance of success. but he was about to throw a fit over our new computer the other day, and i for sure wasn't going to poke the bear by asking him what's up with computers being such a pain lately.

we've had this one laptop forever, and it still works for what we use it for, mostly, only the last few years it's been giving us guff more and more about the operating system not being compatible with websites and how we should really update it. but the thing is so old, it doesn't have enough memory to update. like, it literally will not hold a new operating system. and it's been doing some other weird stuff for a while, so msg broke down and bought a new one.

which, yay! only the new one doesn't like a lot of our old apps and programs and peripherals. the drawing tablet doesn't work right now, we had to update our photoshop, the hard drive stopped backing up and isn't even reading anymore, and it keeps telling us different drivers and plug-ins and whatevers are about to stop being supported due to this new "silicon" thing mac is changing everything over to.

i get it, we're probably suffering because all the stuff on our old computer was so old.

but ...

is it really that hard to make a newer, spiffier, more powerful computer figure out how to deal with older software than to make the old computer work with the older software?

i'm pretty sure the answer is, no, it's not that hard, but that what's even less hard is to let old stuff go obsolete and make you so miserable about having to update that you give up and update more often so they can rake in more money from you.

but at least they keep adding all these ai features that offer to help you do stuff you don't need help with, and that give all kinds of interesting answers to your google searches only you really can't trust those answers without doing more of a google search to make sure the ai wasn't just making everything up.

anyway, it seems like computers are more likely to turn into those battle droids from star wars sooner than they'll turn into the terminators from terminator, which i guess is a good thing.

xoxo,
claire