Day: June 30, 2021

Read: Half a Soul (Olivia Atwater): A young lady with only half a soul (which produced symptoms that look a lot like autism) tries to make the world a better place and also find love in alternate Regency England. A very anti-wealth, anti-war, and anti-cultural appropriation story, with faeries and an obnoxious magician.

Read: City of Ghosts (Victoria Schwab): A 12-year-old girl has secret ghost-interacting powers, a secret ghost sidekick, and parents that unwittingly drag her to the most haunted spots they can find (in this case, Edinburgh).

Read: The Border Keeper (Kerstin Hall): A mysterious and deeply suspicious visitor comes to the immortal guardian of the border between the mortal world and the realms of the gods, and causes a lot of trouble. Mythic and fantastical.

Words: check. This is more or less the end of the thing that distracted me from my stated goal for the writing challenge. I guess now I have to figure out how to produce a second draft. Should I edit the text I have? Should I rewrite it from scratch, knowing what I know now? Should I delete it and pretend it never happened?

Wait, is this year really almost half over?! WTF, I hoped for more from each of my few remaining years!

Read: Blood Tally (Brian McClellan): Sequel to Uncanny Collateral, our part-troll collections agent and his snarky ring get tangled up in another surprisingly important affair

Read: Death of an Irish Mummy (Catie Murphy): Third in Kit’s “Dublin Driver” series, and the main character is already taking a lot of grief for having dead bodies turn up. I’m surprised the cops don’t just throw her in jail whenever somebody in Dublin is murdered, to keep her from getting involved.

Read: A Pilgrimage of Swords (Anthony Ryan): Sword and sorcery, a protagonist with a horrible past and a cursed sword, monsters, dead gods, distant lands with strange customs.

Read: The Kraken’s Tooth (Anthony Ryan): More sword and sorcery. The main character might feel bad about his bloodstained past, but he’s still awfully hard on places he passes through.

Words: Check, barely.