BIOHAZARD

Once I went to this place called school. There we had a Senior Creative Writing Club, and there we did some crazy wacky thing called writing. Or at least, we pretended to. One day, back in the autumn of 2007, the leader of the club had a crazy idea:

"Why don't we write words on a flowerpot, then smash the flowerpot, pick up random pieces at random and then write about what words and word fragments we have?"

So we did. I can't remember what my pieces of flowerpot said now, and I am well aware that this piece is not the most well-written thing in the world, but it spawned a sixty-five thousand word first draft of a novel, the piece I did for my first ever NaNoWriMo. It has done more than I ever intended it to, and now it deserves a nice little retirement, here in its own corner of the internet, where people can read it if they want and ignore it if they don't.

Vampires in stories

Last week was the fun fun UK General Election! Which has no relevance to writing or anything, but I thought I would throw that random snippet of information out there.

Anyway, there will not be a blog post next week due to fun fun exams, and this week's post will (probably) be short because I have revision -- and will be about vampires!

Now, I am not a fan of Twilight. In fact, I am not a fan so much that I glare at the copies of it and its sequels whenever I see them in bookshops, and was horrified to discover that Stephenie Meyer had written something else set in that universe: The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. This doesn't mean, though, that I am against vampires in books in general, just the Twilight kind.

Books and characters of a bisexual nature

So, today I have many books. Due to 3 for 2 offers, Waterstone's giftcards and me deciding that I deserve a book as a present, I now have Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater, The Eternal Kiss, edited by Trisha Telep, Need by Carrie Jones and The White Queen by Philippa Gregory. The former two I mentioned wanting in a previous blog post, but the latter were purely because I saw them in Waterstone's, and remembered seeing them before and thinking they looked interesting.

Need is about a girl, Zara, who is living in Maine to stay safe and... is being stalked by a pixie. The sounded good, but what sold me the book immediately was the cover, which I first saw on a food-and-bathroom break in the the four/five hour drive to university:

Original work: We Are Predator

It's late, I am having a suitably exam-revision-filled life (procrastination counts as revision too, right?) and I wanted to do a book review but haven't yet acquired the book I wanted to review. (Partly because I have a Waterstone's gift card and want to spend it but have only been to Waterstone's once since I got it, partly because I always feel awkward buying things when I'm shopping with other people and feel bad for taking up their shopping time, and partly because I keep reading the Terry Prachett books the boyfriend has brought from home.) So, I have decided to put something of mine that I wrote a while ago up on the internet instead.

I never quite worked out what this was supposed to be. I think it was an attempt by my Muse to write some darker things than what I was writing at the time. I think I may also have been reading Prey by Michael Crichton at the time. I don't know whether it was intended to be a weird short story or a long poem or what, but it intrigues and amuses me, so I think it deserves it's own weird corner of the internet.

Books galore!

One bad thing about being a university student: I have to spend my money on things other than books. Like the roof over my head, and food. And textbooks -- while I know they are technically books, they are far less interesting to read. (As a random aside, though, I actually find some topics in my textbooks interesting, which is probably a good thing when I'm doing a degree in those subjects!)

There are good things about going to university, too, of course. The people are all awesome and the lectures range from vaguely to really interesting, I have fun in labs and admittedly less fun doing the lab write-ups and the occasional essay and stuff like that, but on the whole university is amazing.

This is starting to sound like an advert on the merits of going to university, when what it was originally going to be about was books. So, back on topic, university is great but being a student and suddenly having to be careful with my money because I will need it for things other than books and the occasional pair of Doc Martens from ebay (another random aside: best shoes in the world!) is not so great. And so I have built up a long list of books that I really want to buy.

Ink Exchange by Melissa Marr isn't the most vital one on my book list. I have Wicked Lovely, its prequel, and Fragile Eternity, its sequel, and I have read Ink Exchange; I just wanted the book so I could re-read it without having to steal my friend's copy. Radiant Shadows, the fourth instalment in the series, I actually want to buy to read. It seemed, from the website, to be less about the original characters in Ink Exchange and more about new characters, but with the promise of "[a]lluring romance, heart-stopping danger, and sinister intrigue" that I believe Melissa Marr can deliver, I still want this book.

The Eternal Kiss is another one I've wanted for a while. I'm not usually into vampire books, I'm starting to get bored of how many of them are out there, and this book is an anthology of vampire stories, but one of my favourite authors, Sarah Rees Brennan, has a story in there called "Undead Is Very Hot Right Now". Another anthology I have on my list is So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction by, amongst others, another favourite author of mine, Holly Black. (I'm assuming what that particular book is about is obvious from the title!)

Also by Holly Black I want White Cat, a story where magic is banned and the main charcter, Cassel, comes from a family of magic-workers, whilst being the only non-magic user amongst them -- and is "caught up in a mysterious plot". This book, along with Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater, I read about on Sarah Rees Brennan's blog -- Shiver has "interesting and original" werewolves and "characters [that] are refreshingly willing to use their brains to deal with the challenges they face", and both of them sound really intriguing.

Then there's something completely different. Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh is a sci-fi first published in 1988 that one of my Crazy Internet Friends blogged about. The description of it she gave that hooked me was something along the lines of someone investigating her own murder, and I have a secret weakness for slightly odd sci-fi: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik by Philip K Dick (unfortunately, none of which I own, I really should rectify that too), and Shadow Man by Melissa Scott being the ones that come to mind at the moment.


There's another book that I both want to read and don't want to read at the same time: Scars by Cheryl Rainfield. The reason I decided I should look at it was because it has a lesbian romance in it and I was in a particularly prideful mood. The reason I now want to read it is because the book is an "edgy, realistic, and hopeful novel about a teen survivor of sexual abuse who uses self-harm to cope". Just by reading the description, I can tell that this is one of those books that is extremely likely to actually seriously affect me. Only one book has ever done that to me before, and it was not in a good way: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. I'm actually scared of Scars, that it will tear me apart like Wallflower did, only even worse, and yet I still want to read it. Does this make me insane?


Other books on my wish list, that I really shouldn't write loads about because I've rambled on about books enough already, include Eyes Like Stars by Lisa Mantchev, Skinned by Robin Wasserman, Wings and Spells by Aprilynne Pike, Graceling and Fire by Kristin Cashore, Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia, Rebel by R J Anderson, Stardust by Neil Gaiman and then the sequels to any of the books I've already mentioned that I like (that have sequels)... That's just the current list, as it stands today, it is very liable to change (for example, I've added Stardust to it just while writing this post), and I have no idea which one I should read next!