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quillpunk posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
booknookSoon, it's time for the 2026 October Review-A-Thon (sign-ups still ongoing!).
How are we feeling? Have you decided what book(s) you're reviewing? (I have not, orz.) Do you have your review ready or will you be pantsing it on the spot? Any other thoughts? š
seleneheart posting in bookclub_dwvamp_ress who is the host for October: What book should we read in October?
Interview with the Vampire
5 (41.7%)
The Southern Book Clubās Guide to Slaying Vampires
3 (25.0%)
Stokerās Wilde
4 (33.3%)
chocolatefrogs posting in addmecocosmileyboo posting in addmeAge:
37I mostly post about:
Whatever I feel like. I tend to post about my real life (those are friends-locked), memes (often public), things I am engaging in (video games, books, TV shows), random links and videos (varies), and just whatever I'm in the mood to post, I guess. I can post many times in a day (spam posting, sorry) or go a month or more without posting. I'm trying to be more consistent.My hobbies are:
Creative stuff (writing stories and poetry, mostly), reading, video games, taking walks, spam-posting on my journal, daydreaming, swimming, playing with my dog, watching random YouTube videos (recently discovered BookTube), watching TV/movies/anime, shopping, collecting things, etc.My fandoms are:
Not really into the fandom scene anymore, but... Fullmetal Alchemist is my all-time favorite anime. I also love The Ancient Magus' Bride, The Apothecary Diaries, Yuri!!! On ICE, Yu Yu Hakusho, Sailor Moon (original anime, manga, and Crystal), Black Butler, Death Note, Demon Slayer, Avatar: The Last Airbender (not technically anime, but similar style)... non-anime stuff~ The Vampire Diaries, Doctor Who, Twilight, A Discovery of Witches, Anne Rice, the Sookie Stackhouse Series/True Blood, Shadowhunter universe, Visual Kei and jrock and other music (my taste is eclectic), A Court of Thorns and Roses, Fourth Wing, Greek Mythology, Repo! The Genetic Opera, The Phantom of the Opera, etc.I'm looking to meet people who:
18+ who are open-minded, kind, engaging (comment if/when you have something to say), won't ghost me if we don't click (please just say "we didn't click" if you unfriend me), etc.My posting schedule tends to be: daily/weekly/monthly/sporadic/etc
Pretty erratic.When I add people, my dealbreakers are:
I give most people a chance, just don't be an asshole.Before adding me, you should know: I live with schizoaffective disorder, anxiety, ADhD, and am probably on the Spectrum (undiagnosed). I try to live a low-key, low stress life (haha, and I will let you know how that's working in my posts), and I'm probably pretty boring even on the internet.
enchantedsleeper posting in smallwebtempural after the first Small Web September, so by rights it should have appeared last year, but I forgor šš So... here it is now!
tinkaton
cocosmileyboo posting in findingfriends rocky41_7 posting in booknookOn Tuesday after finishing my last book, and with no library holds ready, I dug through our shelves for one I’ve been meaning to get around to, Smoke But No Fire: Convicting the Innocent of Crimes that Never Happened by Jessica S. Henry. I finished this last night.
This is an examination of the phenomenon of a person being convicted of a crime that didn’t happen within the American criminal justice system. Some examples in the book include being charged with arson over a naturally-occurring fire, with drug possession when there were no drugs present, and, bizarrely, with the murder of a child who never existed.
Often, this happens because an incident is initially mislabeled a crime, and everyone just rolls with that. And if there’s a crime, there must be a perpetrator.
If you’ve already studied the criminal justice system, or the legal system more broadly, there’s not much here that’s going to shock. Police with confirmation biases, overworked public defenders, prosecutors desperate to look “tough on crime,” defendants ready to plead guilty to something they didn’t do just to get out of jail pending trial, and judges who are being forced to wear too many hats all contribute to this tragic situation. I do think Henry lays it all out in neat order though, so that even if you knew about these things before, it might be clarifying to see how she puts it together.
I do think it’s something everyone should have at least passing awareness of. Popular media has hammered home that when something feels off, it is off. Humans put enormous stock in our “hunches” and intuition, which, when it comes to other people, are very often wrong. And if you are someone in a position of power—a prosecutor, say—that wrong hunch you’re committed to can cause real harm.
Henry digs into the ways in which even people trained to detect lies rarely bat above a 60% average in correctly guessing when someone is lying. This allows false accusers to be taken seriously while genuine protestations of innocence are ignored—things that could be resolved elsewhere, but once the people working the case become convinced they know the story, it’s very hard to shake them.
She also takes a swing at forensic science, which is tainted by unrealistic claims of accuracy, practitioners who simply make things up, and the failure of judges and juries to understand the real limitations or pitfalls of the various branches (for instance, “bite mark analysis” has been proven to be almost total bunk, but is frequently still admitted in courts; and juries rarely hear about the fallibility of drug-sniffing dogs).
The book can be slightly repetitive, although I did actually appreciate Henry reminding me who a given defendant we’d talked about earlier was, since there are so many of them we hear about in the book. It’s obviously well-researched and Henry, a former public defender, is passionate about the topic and educating the public. Most people are aware that defendants are sometimes convicted of things they didn’t do, but I think there is much less awareness that people can and do plead guilty to things that never even happened, due to the pressures of the system. A guilty plea is perhaps the most damning piece of evidence you can submit to a jury—but it’s not nearly as definitive as we’d like to think.
vriddyUrgh I volunteered to do something early in the week knowing it was pushing myself a bit and that I'd have to plan for a couple of recovery days after... Instead I collapsed mid-way through the event and my brain has been like play-dough I've been trying to reshape into something cephalic since then. I know I owe a couple of mildly time-sensitive replies, I will get back to you very soon!
General status:
Meanwhile I still managed to squirrel a few moments to work on the snowflake outline for [Redacted]. The snowflake lends itself well to taking a lot of breaks between or during steps while you consider things, so that's worked out nicely. I skipped Step 6 again, but I'm starting to think I expand way too much in the earlier steps anyway, so it's more like the steps gets merged XD
I wrote huh 12k words of outline through this (it's not that impressive, a lot of snowflake is more like stream-of-consciousness freewriting and thinking on paper), but I don't count those words in my yearly tally. I think I have a novel-shaped idea now? For the first time, I tracked the time spent planning too, even though it doesn't really matter because the process needs a lot of breaks and breathing space (with many insights happening during walks, tbh, which I do NOT track). I blame TrackBear ;) Which I am still using. My streak! I don't want to count the words there either, but I'm tracking the time.
In the story, I have to be careful that the politics don't overwhelm the personal too much, because it's neither my strength nor interest. I remember back in the day when reading the Royal Assassin trilogy with a friend... I just tore through the books while she carefully took notes of all factions and named characters to keep track of everyone's loyalties. It felt so proper and clever and right, yet rarely have I so heartily felt "WOW COULDN'T BE ME" despite how much I wanted to be as cool as she is XD
I'm also experimenting with a different kind of magic system, curious how this will work out! I have the foundations established, I'll develop as the story goes.
I learnt that I can never spell betrothed right the first time.
I just started on Step 8/the spreadsheet scenes breakdown yesterday, but it's been harder going than usual. I conceptualise scenes very differently after the last round of structural edits, much more fine-grained, but planning at that level risks smothering the story for me. (Interestingly, while looking for other posts in my snowflake method tag, it seems like with every long project I use the snowflake method slightly differently, and every time I seem to brush against the limits of how much I can plan before the story dies an early death.) I'm experimenting with doing broad strokes and thinking more in arcs for this step, but not sure yet how that will pan out.
Projects:
anais_pf posting in thefridayfivesusieboo posting in booknookSkulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy
A long-running urban fantasy series, about a young girl who discovers a world of magic and danger... and becomes the assistant to a living skeleton. And solves crime with him. This is one of those series where it's hard to talk about it in detail without spoiling some major twists and turns in the first book. But I will say that this is a darkly funny, addictive story that expands and gets more and more intricate with every installment, with a huge cast of colorful characters. We begin the series when our heroine is twelve years old, and the latest books have her in her twenties, so if you're looking for a story where you can watch a character grow up, get stronger and tougher, and go through the absolute wringer, this is a great series to dive into.
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yamamanama
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