I really enjoyed this YA gay romance. Two young men fall in love while working at a park a lot like Dollywood. I found the music industry shenanigans engaging and liked the MCs (and the performers who voiced them). They were a bit obtuse at times, but high school seniors can be like that. (I live with two of them.)

Pluses: Her emphasis on what characters feel, believe, and want, and the importance of having that be what drives the events of your story, makes deep sense to me. The exercises on writing backstory were interesting and useful to me.

Minuses: She's very insistent that this is the only way for a successful novel to be, whatever its genre, and I don't buy that. Agatha Christie's novels do not turn on Hercule Poirot realizing that some core belief of his needs to be revised; among other things, there's no way that he could go through that many dozens of changes of heart -- she wrote a lot of those books. To give another example, books don't necessarily have a single protagonist.

She's got a very specific process for organizing your work and ideas and developing your novel (and she's talking exclusively about novels, not addressing shorter forms directly) that I don't think will work for me and the things I write. The fact that all her ideas about how belief and feeling drives action are kind of embedded in a series of steps to take, down to what folders (physical or virtual) you should use to organize your work in progress, makes it hard to me to take what I need and leave the rest.

The example novel that's being developed to show us how the process goes doesn't impress me. I would not consider reading the resulting book.

And some of what she does doesn't really apply to fan fiction, which is mostly what I write, but that's not necessarily a strike against her. She should be evaluated on whether she's made a good guide to writing a novel, because that's what she set out to do.

I don't lover her writing -- a lot of the analogies she uses to sell her writing points seem overblown and unnecessarily complex.

So, I think I've gotten benefits from reading this book that will make me a better writer. But I didn't love reading it, and if I were setting out to write a novel I don['t think I would be following her methodology to the letter (and she's so detailed that modifying it feels tricky, plus it bumps up against some of my black and white thinking).

3.5 stars. This is an odd combination of memoir, modern social history, intellectual history, and musings on the meaning of self. It shed some int3eresting light on Dykes to Watch Out For and was interesting and enjoyable in itself. I did sometimes mix up the different figures from the 18th and 19th century, but all in all, well worth reading.

I found this quite disappointing. Lots of verbatim quotes from psychoanalytic theory and transcribed conversations with her mother and not much plain storytelling. I fid love the glimpses into her life that I recognized from where she had previously used them in Dykes to Watch Out For. All in all, though, I think she's too blocked to write a good story about her mother yet. Maybe she can't do it while her mother is still alive. And I didn't find the metastory about being blocked sufficiently engaging.

great info, not something I would enjoy reading cover to cover

I just reread this for the first time in many years. I still love it. It's one of only 3 1970s YA books I still have copies of, along with Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (LeGuin) and Max's Wonderful Delicatessen (Winifred Madison). I never thought about it before, but the reason these three have stuck with me is that there all about kids (boys, as it happens) who don't feel any sense of belonging, then find a person, or people, with whom they belong.

This book has its problems. It has Tragic Queerness, it's got some diet culture stuff in it, and it's trying hard to use 70s teenspeak in a way that rings false. And there's material in it that many people will find anathema:

sexual interaction between an adult and a young teen, as well as the death of a major character

. But, as I said, I still love it, with all its warts, and I wouldn't even choose to change it.

CW: This would have two Major Archive Warnings if it was on AO3. If that might be a dealbreaker, do your research before you read.

My least favorite of the series so far, but still a good read. Some of the material on

religion, miracles, and people choosing their fates/circumstances

was uncomfortable for me. That stuff can so easily be pernicious, and I'm not sure how much of what Inmon writes into the characters he personally believes.

This is a fun, weird little story about love between a woman and her door.

Yes, door.

He doesn't stay in door form the whole time.

I don't really want to tell you more because spoilers. It's not that long, and it's not expensive. If you think you'd enjoy some soft femdom with a touch of myth and a touch of weird, go for it.

90% loved it, 10% irked by it. I really like the magic system and magical world-building. The stuff about the roles and feelings of unmagical people from magic families is cool. The surfacing of the ways men discount women and the reasons they shouldn't is awesome. I mostly liked the romance, and I thought the mystery/thriller aspects were well-done and well-integrated with everything else. But

the third-act breakup felt too much part of a romance formula, and the way it was resolved by the thriller plot bringing them back together with no indication of whether they would have ever fixed it themselves without that felt annoyingly deus ex machina.

Generally a nice romcom with neurodivergent (in my reading, anyway) characters finding a way to fit together. The first sex scene really pissed me off, though --

a character who has previously had trouble orgasming with a partner can suddenly come spectacularly, simultaneously with her partner, during PiV intercourse, apparently because all she ever needed was to shtup someone who wasn't a jerk

.