Short Update: If the "I LOVE MY CAR" displayed below my User ID didn't give you a hint, I managed to get a another car. It is sweetness....and its wheels have managed to stay on for TWO WHOLE MONTHS!

Current Ponderings/Issues: I'm totally loving Stephen King's Cell. The plot is totally preposterous--an electrical signal or "pulse" wipes everything but the id from human cell phone users, creating a bunch of wacked out zombies who are becoming increasingly more organized and powerful--but I'm becoming more drawn into the story, and hence more freaked out, every time I pick up the book. Maybe it's partly due to the intense gratitude I have to be reading anything INTERESTING in general.

The last book I read was Gregory Maguire's Lost, which is supposed to be related to Dickens' A Christmas Carol. I had been on a bit of Maguire binge; I blew through Wicked and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister like Lindsey Lohan through a bottle of Vodka when the nurses aren't looking. And I loved both novels! As a reader/writer of fanfiction, I can't help but admire Maguire's work. I mean, the guy literally makes a living (and a good one at that) out of writing fanfiction. His novel Lost deviates most from fanfiction, and I would take that as an indication/warning that I should stay away from all of Maguire's non-fanfiction works. The only real reference to Dickens' tale is an assumption that a rarely mentioned relative of the novel's protagonist may have told young Dickens' his lifestory that inspired Dickens' later tale. :whatever: Whatever :whatever:. I ABSOLUTELY, COMPLETELY, TOTALLY LOATHED GREGORY MAGUIRE'S LOST!!!! The real plot encompassed the last 75 pages of an almost 400 page novel and meandered uncomprehendingly through mental-illness/drama-masking-itself-as-a-real-ghost-story to real-ghost-story to utterly-boring-and-uninvolving-crap. I literally forced myself to finish it, thinking that given Maguire's utterly pretentious reader's group notes in the back of the book (which I was able to ignore in Wicked and Confessions) there might be some sort of plot twist that would give the story some meaning and make it worth a damn.

True, this is only my opinion of the book, so you can take it with a grain (or boulder) of salt. But here's a warning/plot-summary to anyone who would think of plodding through this muck of a novel. Yes, this is a **SPOILER ALERT**. The plot in a nutshell: Woman goes to England to write a novel (the reader is forced to read excerpts of said novel--which really sucks even more than the one the reader is currently torturing him/herself with--interspersed with the actual story) and some spooky-occurences-that-could-be-viewed-as-a-ghost-story begin to distract her. It turns out that her "novel in progress" is actually her real life story (the novel's protagonist is really her middle name and married name), which consists of her traveling to Romania with her cousin to pick up an adopted Romanian baby, having bad sex with said cousin, getting snowed in and being revolted by thought having sex with cousin but doing it anyway, and finally making it to the orphanage to find out that the adopted baby has meanwhile died of exposure when the nun tending the fire in his room suddenly (and conveniently for the plot) died and let the fire go out. Her husband divorces her over many things, least of all her having sex with her cousin. What an effin' tearjerker--and you will feel all of the sarcasm in that statement by the time you actually get to this plot revelation. The reader finds this out at the very end of the novel. Why? Because we're supposed to wonder whether or not she's experiencing a real ghost story or just a temporary mental fugue induced by all of the events in her sad-sack life. The answer is both: a real ghost finally surfaces and possesses her in the last 75 pages and drives her to try to relinquish her body to the ghost so that the ghost can kill the body and experience a real death of sorts. The ghost has absolutely nothing to do with either Dickens' Scrooge or Jack the Ripper. Believe me, if you make it this point in the story you won't care about any of the characters, least of all the protagonist and her trashy medieval French ghost.

Go read Stephen King's Cell. Go read anything else except for the utter crap that is Lost.


Enjoyed the fanfiction you read here? Want to read more? A fan of Trigun, perhaps? Well you're in luck, because this
[link] on 's gallery will take you to the first chapter of a big collaboration fic I'm writing with , , and our friend Melissa (who does not have a DevArt account currently, but will be forced at pain of a severe poptart beating to get one in the very near future ). Anyways, please check this out and leave us some comments!


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Young Infatuation--The New Sess x Rin Club!


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