Trifextra: We Live Our Virtual Lives

This weekend we are asking for a thirty-three word confession. You're free to write non-fiction or fiction or to blur the lines in between. We just encourage you to get creative and give us your best.

This week's Trifextra Writing Challenge is to write a 33 word confession, and here's mine. 
Uh, I suppose it's...fiction? Non fiction? Non fiction, I guess. We all have our virtual avatars.

Here it is:

By http://mihaelaj.deviantart.com/

I don’t dance; she does.

 I don’t smile; she does.

 I am reserved; she speaks of sex and violence, politics and ambition, dreams and illusions.

I am her.

She is me, only binary. 

Pedantic Signs: Trifecta Writing Challenge

Holy Blonde-Cheerleader-Batman!


I wrote Trifecta again. I am freaking writing again. I am not staring at a blank Word document wanting to bang my head against the wall anymore. Holy holy holy holy crap. (As you can see I am way too happier than any sane person should be)


God, I love Trifecta. Honestly, this entry is just crappy and weird, but I'm happy there's an entry.


This week's prompt:PEDANTIC (adjective)
1 : of, relating to, or being a pedant(see pedant)
2 : narrowly, stodgily, and often ostentatiously learned
3 : unimaginative, pedestrian


(a.k.a what my writing has been for the past few months)


MY ENTRY:

The girl raised her head to look around at the world.


There were three glass birds pecking at a lamppost. The lamppost was wriggling around trying to admonish them, but lampposts couldn’t speak. Beneath a laburnum tree, two girls were helping their sister to break free of the roots her feet had pushed into the earth. Little leaves were sprouting all over her arms and the rooted girl was crying large green tears. The trees shook their branches in protest every time they tried to heave her out, sighing and howling and shedding leaves in annoyance.


(Trees liked new neighbors.)


Two steps in front of the girl, her boyfriend paused and turned around to look at her.


“What is it?” he asked, worry turning his large wings teal-colored and full of jumbled letters. When he was thinking, they had the tendency to shimmer with the words running through his mind, so she never had to ask what was bugging him. The only hitch in their relationship was when he thought in purple prose.


She pointed. “It says ‘please don’t create your reality recklessly’.”


He looked at her gravely, his dark hair windswept. “Are you going to comply?”


She shrugged. “It says ‘please’. And we’re in their neighborhood.”


Looking a little pissed, he disappeared in a sparkle of light, and so did the glass birds. The snowflakes with the stories written on them turned to regular snowflakes. The three sisters began playing skip-the-rope and the trees were silent. The lamppost did one last wriggle but stilled when she glared at it.


She hoped the sign was happy with this reality. It didn’t look very reckless, but realities could sometimes be deceiving bastards.


She walked a few paces before she saw the next sign.


It said “Thank you.”


Some signs are just tragically pedantic.

Review: Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell

Goodreads Summary

Rating: 5 stars.
Paperback, 225 pagesPublished August 3rd 2010 by Holt Paperbacks

Zombies have infested a fallen America. A young girl named Temple is on the run. Haunted by her past and pursued by a killer, Temple is surrounded by death and danger, hoping to be set free.
For twenty-five years, civilization has survived in meager enclaves, guarded against a plague of the dead. Temple wanders this blighted landscape, keeping to herself and keeping her demons inside her heart. She can't remember a time before the zombies, but she does remember an old man who took her in and the younger brother she cared for until the tragedy that set her on a personal journey toward redemption. Moving back and forth between the insulated remnants of society and the brutal frontier beyond, Temple must decide where ultimately to make a home and find the salvation she seeks.

Occasionally I have these periods where I can’t read. Where I don’t find interest in any book on my iPad, where I start a million different books and leave them half-done, plot threads gathering dust at the back of my mind. And nearly always, there’s a book that comes to pull me out of the funk. Last time, it was The Marbury Lens by Andrew Smith. Before that, it was The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter. This time, it’s Reapers are the Angels. And to Alden Bell, I say:

   

 I’m not a zombie-apocalypse fan. Guts and brains and long paragraphs about reeking alleys and stench making babies with other kinds of stench don’t interest me. Blood-drenched heroes don’t interest me either, I always want the human factor rather than the hero factor. I loved Zombieland, but for the laughs. I hated Stephen King’s The Cell. I tried a hundred other zombie books- most notably Andrew Fukuda’s Rot and Ruin series, Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth series- and while I gave up on one, the other I read for the romance. How do you write a literary zombie book though? How do you write a literary zombie book with a teenage heroine and not make it sound, say, extremely pretentious? How do you pare the details of your FUBAR world to a bare minimum and stay in the head of your not exactly reliable, not exactly child, not exactly adult heroine? This is what Reapers are the Angels manages so easily. Temple is written beautifully. Her southern accent, her observations about the minutiae of post-apocalyptic life, the breadcrumb trail that opens door to her past: I loved all of it. Look at this snippet: 

She’s thinking of a thousand things—waterfalls and lighthouses and record players and men who travel with wonder and the deafening mumble of cicadas in the dry grass of the plains. She’s thinking of corpses piled high and all the dead things that still move and the hard rain that falls and drives the mud and waste into all the corners and seams of the world, and she’s thinking of airplanes and little boys and grown men with grit teeth and beards and others with soft moans that bleat on and on without cease unless you find the right song to sing and you fill the car with your voice so that he doesn’t have to hear his own loud crying. 

 I’m a sucker for this. I adore this kind of writing, stream of consciousness if you will, and it’s so rarely that you find something like this in a Young Adult book. (Not that I believe Reapers actually belongs on the YA shelf: violence is very much PG 13) It’s brilliant. It’s an explosive build up to an emotional state that leads to awesome, gut-wrenching things. Alden Bell also does one-line characterizations extremely well. It’s wonderful to read a book where you get that the evil guys are evil, without repeatedly being bashed over the head with examples after examples and/or Persian cats and Cuban cigars. Evil Moses Todd is evil. And oh so human too. Maury gives me intense feels. The moment Abraham lays eyes on Temple, the description of his gaze is so visceral, my skin literally crawled. And oh lord, the ending:

   

 All in all, to me at least, A+ book. Thank you, Alden Bell, for kicking me off the stupid threshold and into the world of books again.

Waiting on Wednesday (And No More Radio Silence)

Wow, been a while right?
I just couldn't find the time to do a post, and it's really been gnawing at me. I'm reading TONS as usual (Okay, how great was Clockwork Princess? Pretty GREAT!) but there's just no time to post anything, and yeah sure, you've alllllll heard me whine the same thing before, I do it again and again and agaaaaaaaaaainnnnn.....

So. Right. Waiting on Wednesday. Hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, featuring all the latest awesome.

Without further ado, here are my picks:

INK by Amanda Sun
Expected Publication : June 25th, 2013 by Harlequin Teen

GOODREADS SAYS:

I looked down at the paper, still touching the tip of my shoe. I reached for it, flipping the page over to look.

Scrawls of ink outlined a drawing of a girl lying on a bench.

A sick feeling started to twist in my stomach, like motion sickness.

And then the girl in the drawing turned her head, and her inky eyes glared straight into mine.
On the heels of a family tragedy, the last thing Katie Greene wants to do is move halfway across the world. Stuck with her aunt in Shizuoka, Japan, Katie feels lost. Alone. She doesn’t know the language, she can barely hold a pair of chopsticks, and she can’t seem to get the hang of taking her shoes off whenever she enters a building.

Then there’s gorgeous but aloof Tomohiro, star of the school’s kendo team. How did he really get the scar on his arm? Katie isn’t prepared for the answer. But when she sees the things he draws start moving, there’s no denying the truth: Tomo has a connection to the ancient gods of Japan, and being near Katie is causing his abilities to spiral out of control. If the wrong people notice, they'll both be targets.

Katie never wanted to move to Japan—now she may not make it out of the country alive.

I SAY:

I ADORE ANIME. I love the colors, the craziness, the intense storylines. Ink sounds right up my alley! In fact, the title Paper Gods reminds me of some anime. There were 3 sisters who could make paper stuff come to life...or something like that, I don't know. How SQUEEEEE worthy is the cover?

ANDDDD

Indelible by Dawn Metcalf

Expected Publication: July 30th, 2013 by...um, Harlequin Teen again (See the pattern?)

GOODREADS SAYS:

Some things are permanent.

Indelible.

And they cannot be changed back.

Joy Malone learns this the night she sees a stranger with all-black eyes across a crowded room—right before the mystery boy tries to cut out her eye. Instead, the wound accidentally marks her as property of Indelible Ink, and this dangerous mistake thrusts Joy into an incomprehensible world—a world of monsters at the window, glowing girls on the doorstep, and a life that will never be the same.

Now, Joy must pretend to be Ink’s chosen one—his helper, his love, his something for the foreseeable future...and failure to be convincing means a painful death for them both. Swept into a world of monsters, illusion, immortal honor and revenge, Joy discovers that sometimes, there are no mistakes.

Somewhere between reality and myth lies…

THE TWIXT

I SAY:

That blurb is just MADE OF AWESOME. CUT OUT HER EYE! WTF! Monsters, Illusion, bad boys, glowing glowing GLOWING GIRLS? And oh, you beautiful, beautiful cover. *wibble* This one better be good or I'm gonna be RANTING.