Progress Post: Week 29

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Hi, welcome to my author vlog. This is week 29 of 2023, and let’s get started. Hi, my name is Danielle Forrest. I’m an alien romance author. Here on this channel, I do videos about myself, my writing, and anything related to those topics. Today I’m going to give you a quick recap of what I’ve been up to this week and then talk about a book I’m currently reading. First off, I have 13 subscribers on YouTube. That is really cool. I started from one when I first started videos on this channel recently. That feels really exciting. Also, my favorite number is the number 13. That makes me feel really happy inside to have 13 subscribers. Next, I wrote 2.3 thousand words in Match the Alien Captain. I finished writing Episode 7 of Fated Mates of the Drakoan, and I will start editing that episode this week. I also played around with the layout on my channel a little bit. If you’ve been on the home screen, I guess it’s called the homepage for my channel, it will look a little different. Not much, but just a little bit. I also sent an email out to my mailing list.

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So if you’re a member of my mailing list, you got an email this week, which also is another thing. I shared the cover images for Fated Mates of the Drakoan and Match the Alien Captain on my mailing list, so if you would like to see them, they’re on the screen right now. Aren’t they awesome? I really like them. I feel like the scales on the Drakoan serial cover art didn’t come out quite as pronounced as I wanted to, but it’s cool. I think it’s good enough. Now onto what I’m reading. So I’m not actually reading an alien romance right now. What I’m reading is this book here, Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust. I don’t know what to think of this book. I got it as part of a book swap at Work. I’m not even sure if the book is well designed from a structural perspective. It felt like… You can see I’m about halfway through the book now. It really felt like there was no true inciting incident, or at least that the inciting incident of the book didn’t really trigger the author… Well, not the author, but the character to actually have a path forward, make a decision.

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There’s usually a point of debate after an inciting incident where people are hemming and hawing, do I really want to? But in this book, that lasts for 100 pages. It was literally like you didn’t know what she was going to do right up to the point she did it. I don’t know what to think about that. I still have no idea where this book is going. And that can be fun sometimes, but here it just feels like the author doesn’t have any clear direction for the book. I don’t know. It feels weird. It really just feels weird. And then there’s the fact, another thing, and this is something that as I was reading it initially, I thought was a little bit strange, is the book is very whitewashed. I keep forgetting where the actual thing is. But you look at the book and there’s literally nothing on here that actually gives any cultural context. There’s no specific words. The most you’ve got is the name of the character, Soraya, which I don’t know of any culture that that actually comes from. But for the most part, it’s very bare bones, very basic, simple terms that everyone knows that are not connected to any culture.

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And yet when you get into the book, it’s very culturally based. And there are occasions where there are words that she gives but never defines or explains. And I literally ended up just looking up the terms to try to figure out what they were. I didn’t know, she doesn’t say. And that would be fine if this was a book that’s specifically geared toward people who are familiar with that culture. But I think this is also like ancient Persian, so I don’t know how many people that would qualify for. I thought the concept was really cool, but the way that the author pursues it is not one of a dozen different ways I would have done it. We’ll see. I don’t know what to think. I really don’t. If you’ve read this book, give me some comments on what you thought. Does my thinking match up with yours? Like I said, I’m only about halfway through the book, so that’s all I really got to say for it so far. Anyway, that’s everything for today. Until next week, bye. As always, thank you again for watching the video. If you like this video and would like to see more from me, hit the subscribe button, hit the bell if you want to get notifications, and you can find all sorts of links to connect with me and my writing in the description of the video.

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There are cards on the screen for more videos you might want to see. Again, bye.