D&D, Magic and the fifth circle of geek.

So we are settled into our friend Ryan's place where we will be staying until the end of the school year when we will commence looking for a more permanent residence. That's going quite well and most of our free time is being filled playing Magic cards or D&D. Really I thought it just didn't GET any geekier than that but alas, I was wrong.

On Sundays a bunch of his friends come over to play Star Wars, a tabletop game similar to D&D. While waiting for the festivities to commence three of us got into a rather heated argument about whether or not Blade would be classified as chaotic good or chaotic neutral. It struck us that when you get into an argument about the D&D alignment of a comic book character you really no leg to stand on if you ever try to deny your geekdom. Lucky for me I don't even try.

Writing is coming along slowly and transcribing even slower. It is my own stupid fault because I picked up new books. One was Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King. It was pretty good although I was less than enthusiastic about a few endings. The other was Northern Lights by Nora Roberts. I only picked up the latter because it was lying on a counter at work and I was bored but it sucked me in. I ended up reading it in less than two days but that was two days of virtually no writing.

So now I am on a self imposed reading sabbatical and will not read anything else until I finish transcribing what I have done and write at least two more chapters. That should light a fire under my butt. Unless of course Lori sends me something in which case I will break my own rules and read it.

Twilight is over, so is 2008

I finished book four of the series last night. It took me 5 days to read the entire series so I think it is pretty safe to say we aren't dealing with foundation shaking literature here.

For anyone who has never read the book but intends to, you should probably stop reading here. In case you are slow that was your spoiler alert.

I knew a lot of the problems with the book going into it thanks to Lori and Papercuts but I turned off the part of my brain that listens to them and decided to judge the book on its own merit. After all they were (sorta) wrong about Eragon.

Lets start with my biggest problem a certain irritating twit named Bella Swan. I actually wished I was a fictional character so I could eat her. I don't even have to be a vampire I would go cannibal just to silence her constant whining. So yeah she is whiny did I also mention she is stupid? How about her serious Daddy issues?

"Oh I'm SO in love with Edward. I love the way he bosses me around, never lets me out of his sight, and sneaks into my house without my knowledge to watch me sleep. It makes me feel so safe and secure and loved." ok that's the end of my swooning Bella impression, but really her psycho vampire boyfriend does these things and she is cool with it. She is everything I hate about female leads. Bella is dependant, whiny, needy, insecure, and helpless and even worse she was created by a woman.

Edward come here a moment please. Surely you didn't think it was only Bella I had issues with. You are my second biggest issue with the piece of fiction. I can get that you don't wanna eat humans and sacrifice to save them. That's cool and even kind of endearing but you are also a psychotic control freak. Any man treated me the way you treated Bella and I would smack him into the next state (or province) with a restraining order. What vampires can ignore them? Well then I guess I would just to have my shape shifting friend deliver the message. Oh and what is with the virgin thing? I mean I get you not wanting to break Bella and all so I can see holding out on her but surely in the 99 years you have been trapped in the body of a 17 year old boy you stumbled across at least ONE promiscuous vampire girl. I mean from what I gathered you are hot enough to melt solid rock and you have women both mortal and immortal throwing themselves at you like groupies and you abstain because? Oh yeah because you are old fashioned .... no wait they had premarital sex back then too hence the gunshot weddings. Sorry you are not a believable character for me either.

NEXT .....................................

With the notable exception of Alice the rest of the coven seems to just stand around and with their turn to be useful to the plot. I mean for three books Rose was about as fleshed out a character as the dining room table.

Now on to the technical side.

You know I can swallow the whole daytime vampire thing as soon as I pointed out to myself that I had made the (IMO inexcusable) mistake of confusing vampire lore with Dracula lore. Yeah Dracula could be destroyed by sun and holy relics and a whole bunch of other things but vampire lore is much older than that and varies throughout the world. Most of us are familiar with the European version so that is what we set all our preconceived notions about vampires by but it is not all there is out there and in much lore they are simply nocturnal the same way an owl is not because they CAN'T go out during the day but because they don't wanna. Why they had to sparkle though is beyond me.

Stephanie Myers writing though is a different story all together. She is NOT a gifted writer and she does not make up for this short coming by being a spell binding story teller. Her story is very linear with many characters being two dimensional until it is their turn to take the spot light. She abuses, the, comma in a , way I haven't, seen since second, grade. For a while I though speech impediments ran rampant in the town of forks. I mean if I put all those pauses in the conversation there was no other assumption to make. well that's not true I could have assumed she lacked technical finesse AND that her editor is an idiot both of which would have been correct. I actually honest to go almost threw the book after reading this

Hey, Edward. Skipping, Bella?

ARGH!!!!!!

Sometimes she changes tenses in the middle of a sentence or from singular to plural. I shut my eyes and shook my head to clear it but the evidence was still there when I was done.

So yeah all that annoyed me but do you wanna know what the worst part was?

I read three full books and part of a fourth (over 600 pages) full of mistakes that a 10 year old would catch. I did my best to swallow that a woman not suffering from munchausen syndrome could seriously fall in love with the vampire stalker. I even did some of my own research so that I could read about a vampire going to school during the day without getting a side stick from laughter.

I did all this for two reason

1. I hoped Bella would eventually get eaten
2. I knew the sex was coming.

Well I was wrong on one *tear* but number two was looking promising. Edward promised to have sex with her while she was human as long as they were married. Like a good little puppet she went along with what she wanted and then came the honey moon. FINALLY this book gets a redeeming quality ------------------------ WTF do you mean it's the next morning? I spent 600 pages in purgatory and I don't get ANY details? How did you get those bruises? What happened to the poor pillows? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

SO not fair.

In review:
The book was poorly written.
The characters were unbelievable.
There was no sex.
There was minimal violence.

Since I would hate to end 2008 with THAT literary catastrophe I am reading some Steven King now. "The Dead Zone" has to be better.