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.