Grrl Power #983 - Business or pleasure? (Patreon)

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Customs Agent: Reason for your visit to our dimension, Sir?

Thothogoth: Telling off an Ex.

Customs Agent: I see. I will expedite your processing forthwith.

Some book recommendations

The Laundry Files - A lot of people might know this as The Atrocity Archives, but that's just the name of the first book. Basically, a funny-in-a-British-way-but-also-serious-cause-they're-fighting-terrors-from-beyond version of the BPRD, following a beginner field agent as he works to defend the world from Cthonic terrors, apocalyptic math, and avoiding literal Death by Powerpoint. This series reminded me what, and I hate to put it this way, but, what good writing is. I don't mean that all the stuff I've been reading lately is bad, but it's almost entirely functional. It tells a story. Very little of it has any... I don't want to say "poetry" because fuck poetry, but the Laundry Files makes you work just a little bit as it evokes the world. Like at one point the MC is redlining a rental Prius down the Autobahn "while someone back down the road fires Audis and BMWs at me out of a cannon." Obviously no one is actually shooting cars at him, it's just an artful way of saying that everyone in real cars are thundering past him and threatening to send him into a tailspin with their jet wash. Yeah, art. That's the word I was looking for.

Oh, Great! I was Reincarnated as a Farmer - A guy gets isekaied to a new world where he's stuck with the class "Farmer" and hates it so much that the author was able to fill a 600* page book about how hard this guy works to get around it. The thing I like about this book, well, one of the things I guess, is that a lot of the time someone winds up in a world with magic and levels and whatever, and there's no explanation for all the game mechanics stuff. This book explains a fairly reasonable magical ecosystem that actually makes a lot of sense. I also like it because I am an inveterate "Rule Taker Advantage Of" AKA 'Sploitzer, and this book is about a guy who is good at that, but travels to a world where there are literal scholars who study the magical rules of their world in order to try and eek out maximum gains, so he doesn't just show up and figure some obvious thing immediately and all the XP, Gold and Women in the world just fall on his dick right away, unlike a LOT of these isekai novels.

*(According to Amazon's page count thing which always seems to overestimate by about 25% IMO. I don't know, maybe they're calculating it using a 13 point font instead of a 10 or something.)

Engineering Ludus - Okay, so I really like Delvers, LLC. To me it's like the seminal isekai novel. I mean it's definitely not the first story of its kind, but alongside Tamer, it was one of my first. Tamer technically counts as isekai, but really I think there's an implied value with those books that the character(s) will be interacting with another world's culture, and Tamer is like, welp, here's a forest. Anyway I like Delvers and Engineering Ludas is kind of like... official FanFic? Okay, Blaise Corvin invited some other authors to write short stories that take place on Ludus, and published them in Delvers LLC: Surviving Ludus. One of those stories got continued in a full length novel, which the author sent me and was like, "I hear you like Delvers." So I read like one paragraph of it, then got annoyed and had to go buy Surviving Ludus so I could catch the start of the story, read that and came back to Engineering. Despite liking Delvers, I had never picked up Surviving Ludus before because I generally don't care for short stories. I don't like getting invested in a character when their story is only 80 pages long. I generally don't even buy novels unless there's at least two volumes published already.

But anyway, Engineering Ludus is more Delvers, well, not Delvers, but it's more adventures on Ludus, albeit lower level than the Delvers themselves. At least in book 1? Hmm?

On an entirely unrelated note, I don't like that "Isekai" has become the official term for "Hero from another world." Like the Japanese invented the genre? John Carter of Mars was published in 1912, and that's probably not even the first popular example. Yeah, I know, the Japanese largely popularized the trope. I guess no one would understand if I started writing "So the MC gets Cartered and has to fend off all the XP, gold and women trying to fall on his dick..."

Tamer: Enhancer 2 – Progress Update:

Final fight is close to wrapping up. I think it has some pacing issues as I have trouble turning off the "character moments" hose. Like, right in the middle of a fight, the MC gets his first good look at a new character, so I spend a few sentences describing them. It slows down the pace of things for readers. The easy fix it to abbreviate that description to just the absolute basics, then elaborate when the fight wraps, so I'll probably just wind up doing that. I'm haven't quite gotten to it yet as I'm trying to wrap the fight still, but, hey, this is "Progress Update," not "How things will eventually be."