Cozy Ink

Hey Everybody! Long time, no blog. I just wanted to log on super quickly to give y'all my top 3 Nanowrimo tips. So, just to start off, I am definitely not a good writer yet, nor am I claiming to be. However, I've done Nanowrimo for four years and have successfully completed it four times. (Some of those, I believe, were for camp.)  I have about 350,000 words written on my account and I actually used to have an old one that I've since lost. These tips are less about quality of work and more about getting words on the page. So, tip number one: Stay away from the wordcount box. Whenever I'm feeling like I don't want to write, I obsessively update my wordcount box. Literally. I will have 3450 and update and 3452. This is not a good writing habit, because it perpetuates a cycle of negative feelings. You don't feel good when you see that you've only written a hundred words. (If that's below your goal.) It traps you in seeing how little compared to...

Right off the bat, before reading " Starworld ," you should know: it is not a love story. Actually, let me amend that. It is not a romantic love story. Starworld centers on two girls, Zoe and Sam. Zoe is sort of the queen bee, popular-for-being-nice type at her school. However, at home, her mom is going through perpetual chemotherapy and her brother, who is severely disabled, is being sent to a group home. Sam's mother, who has severe OCD, makes her home life similarly challenging. Together they begin a text chain where they create an imaginary world and explore it. They also share fears, hopes, and dreams with each other. Spoiler free :   Starworld is hard to rate. It was quite readable (I finished in about two hours.) and had a lot of good representation for disabilities, mental illness, and other things that might be spoilers. The way the girls communicate will take some getting used to, but after about a third of the book I found myself not even noticing it. T...

Before you start reading, you might want to have a mop at the ready. There's going to be a lot of tea spilled. Now that we're over that uncomfortable segue, the way that I'm qualifying a  book as popular is if it has over 1,000 ratings on goodreads or the author has a different book with over 1,000. For me, disliking a book means I gave it one or two stars. 1. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky This is a hard one to summarize. It's mainly about a kid named Charlie, who I think is about 14. It follows him through high school as he deals with growing up. I found Charlie, as a character, to be both immature and pretentious simultaneously. I could have dealt with one, but with both, he seemed to be more of a lens to portray the story then a person. In addition to that, many important issues were brought up and then dismissed. This could have been a lot longer and much better. 2. Sadie, by Courtney Summers The story follows a girl named Sadie whose...

Premise: "With the Fire on High" follows 17 year old Emoni as she enters her senior year of high school. The main challenges for Emoni are caring for her daughter, deciding what she wants to do in the future, and balancing a blossoming relationship. She lives with her grandmother, who she calls 'buela, and her two year old daughter, Emma. Her best friend is named Angelica, and she is flirting with a boy named Malachi. The story kicks off when she decides to take a culinary arts class at her school, although cooking was already a passion of hers.  Writing Style Although this lacked some of the outright lyricism of the Poet X, it was very readable. Emoni's voice was well developed, and the characters had compelling backstories and motivations. Although it was about four hundred pages, I read it very quickly.  Diversity Emoni is Puerto Rican and Black. Her best friend is a lesbian, and her love interest is also black.  The Best Parts Reading this book ...

This May, I had a bit of a reading slump. However, I still managed to read 10 books. Perhaps not so much of a slump after all. So, because I am absolutely terrible at writing introductions, here are quick reviews of all of the books I read last month.                                                                     1. Seconds, by Bryan Lee O'Malley This is different from the things I usually read, but I still quite enjoyed it. The premise is essentially that the main character, Katie, gets do-overs every day, but there's a scary caveat. I thought the art was cute, even if the story was a tiny bit lacking. To be honest, I'm probably a tiny bit too old to have read this, which explains why I found it predictable. Overall, this was a 3.5 out of 5 stars. 2. The opposite of always, by Justin A. Renyolds I real...

I don't know what it is about thrillers that gets me. Maybe it's the jacket design or the reviews that call it a page turner. (If it is, I'm unaware of it.) Maybe it's that I want to be surprised. No matter what it is that keeps me coming back to thrillers, one thing is constant. I'm always disappointed. Today, I'm going to talk about three thrillers that I've read and where I think that they went wrong. Every one will have spoilers, so readers be warned. So, first up. "In A Dark, Dark, Wood," by Ruth Ware  was extremely disappointing to me. I am probably a third of the age of the target audience, and yet I still found it to be extremely predictable and dull. The character motivations were childish, the setting was mildly interesting but proved boring, and the plot was hardly there. The main thing that annoyed me about this was that the murders in the story were committed over a romance that had happened when the characters were sixteen, ten ...