review! love and realness, chapter seven!

i was doing so good keeping up with this most every day! i swear it was just going to be a day or two i was skipping out of laziness. aaaannnd, here we are two weeks later. okay, let's go then!

they're at the coffee place and bitsy's just spotted gigory. oh no!

so obviously right away she's telling herself it's no big deal and then just as right away, she's jumping to a horrific scenario in which gigory for some reason comes over to say hello and ends up giving up the goods on the fact that bitsy invited him to dinner sometime.

so she takes cover at a nearby table behind a big plastic potted fern. she keeps going through these hilarious Y/N decision trees the whole time and ends up sitting in the worse of the two chairs at the table -- the one with the fern looming right over it where its fronds accost her hair.

let me tell you, this poor girl's absurd desperation really tickles me.

now it's the worse-getting-worse department, because when she looks over at cord, he's texting on his phone, obviously perturbed by whatever is interrupting his coffee mixing. and of course that prompts her to wave to get his attention, hoping to distract him from the phone -- and instead of cord, the wave attracts gigory.

wait, that's the end of the chapter?! i guess this was in one of the stages where i swore i'd just write however much i had time and energy for, not push myself to finish a "real" chapter (like any of these chapters has been as long as one in an actual book).

fun chapter! and short!

which ... makes it even worse that i didn't sit my butt down a week and a half ago and review it then.

all right, i've learned my lesson!

more tomorrow ... then only three more chapters after that before i have to start writing new ones ... eep!

xoxo,
claire

review! love and realness, chapter six!

two days in a row! score! i feel totally back on track now. let's get to it!

more on this dream feed thing, and ding-dang jangle-jang, i want one of these! a gizmo that makes your dreams reach a perfect moment of closure right in time for your alarm to wake you up? why does this have to be fiction???

pfft! and now bitsy's getting ready for her morning coffee-date, to be followed by work, and part of it's "emptying her recycle bin in the toilet." who goes this all-out making an android realistically human? (it's me, obviously. lol, i did that!)

but you know, as immersive as all these android details are, it's the real-life ones that make the story feel alive, you know? like bitsy panicking because she sees a passenger she's used to seeing on her normal train and freaking out because if she's on her normal train, that means she's going to be late for her pre-work date -- and then coming down from her panic when she remembers that it's wednesday, and that passenger is never on the train with her on wednesdays. not only am i feeding the reader a new angle on a bit of bitsy's reality that had been mentioned before, but i'm also feeding them some reality in the form of this background character having their own life completely separate from the plot of the story. (wait! did i just spoil the fact that this asian girl with weird makeup isn't ever going to show up again? maybe ... or maybe i'm saying this as a red herring because she's totally going to show up again. or maybe i don't actually even know myself.)

the doors open ... she looks around for cord ... their eyes meet, and ... no boom, no fireworks -- cord smiles but looks like he's having to force it. uh-oh. trouble in paradise for bitsy?

cord's explanation when she asks if his day got off to a bad start is that someone ditched on him for a work appointment later. but he lightens things up by saying his day would have been off to a much worse start if she'd been the one who ditched.

more worldbuilding! cord asks her how she got into her work field, and she's puzzled because the answer is what it is for most androids: she came off the factory line and went to an employment office, and they used a copy of her "childhood simories" and "simucation" to figure out an ideal job for her. the implications abound! and then bitsy realizes that cord has to ask because he's real, which means he didn't go through the routine most of the androids go through.

okay, and now this part is pure bitsy: they're getting near the front of the line at the coffee stand and she suddenly remembers she doesn't like coffee!

did i mention i keep getting impressed by the swearing in this book? instead of "oh, shit," bitsy thinks, "oh, shorts." which for a second sounds like she's cursing with a garment name, and then you realize it's "shorts" as in "short circuits." (or at least, with my semi-awful memory, i realize it. maybe you caught on right away and showed the author herself up.)

and of course the coffee sizes are memory prefixes.

even more world-building! cord reveals his work sometimes takes him out of town, and bitsy's immediate curiosity means it's an oddity for people to leave the city. what's up with that? bitsy wonders if she should make small talk by mentioning that she went out of town to "the parklands" as a kid because her family's lottery number comes up, but stops herself because she thinks a real wouldn't have any interest in her "implant memories."

and the cliffhanger arrives! bitsy finishes stirring cream and sugar into her coffee and steps aside to look for a table while cord uses the counter to prepare his own cup -- and who does she see entering the end of the line? gigory!

i'm thinking (and semi-remembering) things are about to get awkward in chapter seven!

xoxo,
claire

review! love and realness, chapter five!

did i say i was going to be reviewing one of these chapters every day? i'm too scared to go back and look. i think probably i did. but you know, i'm not going to beat myself up about it! anyway, i better get to reviewing, right?

ooh, now i remember, last chapter ended with bitsy getting a call!

i'm going to be honest here, i have no idea what bitsy does in her job, but in sentence number one here, we find out it's in the "recursive accounts department," which for some reason i really love. i also love that she's freaking out before she even knows it's the guy calling. and then he asks if she's the coffee girl, and she blushes because her "embarrassment code" is programmed to put color in her cheeks at moments like these.

i really have to hand it to me, bitsy's a goofball pile of nerves in the dialogue here and it just makes her so relatable and sympathetic. and the dude is super-charming over the phone too, partly because it's really obvious he thinks her awkward scramble for something to say is charming in its own way.

also, both of them are funny. i like funny people, you know? (probably that's why i made them that way, now that i think about it.) 

and now her "circulator" is pounding in her chest! ha!

they get a date set up for the next morning to have coffee, and then bitsy manages to ask him his name, which turns out to be "cord."

i'm still just loving all these names!

right here at the end we get another high concept being introduced: the dream feed. it's just a teaser that doesn't really tell you what it is or what it's for, but obviously it's some kind of system processing the androids' memories of their days into dreams. why? whose idea was it? what's it end up doing? i mean, i know some answers about that are coming up in other chapters, but if i didn't know that, i'd sure be asking all those questions and curious as all get-out.

dang, i sure better review another chapter tomorrow night and take advantage of the way the story keeps drawing me in!

xoxo,
claire

review! love and 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 and 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 and 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