Books

* Liar City by Allie Therin hit my DNF pile hard. It's urban fantasy m/m.

I liked the writing, the world building and the mystery plot going on. The characters were great, outside of the m/m pairing. The sort-of POV character is dumb. He has the impulse control and grasp of nuance you'd expect from a toddler. It would have been one thing if he was like that at the start, but fucking focused up with all the murder and danger going on, maybe had a bit of a arc about out, but nope.

( Spoilers. )

I was excited for the books as it was a urban fantasy m/m series and the name of the series is Sugar & Vice, which sounded awesome. I could point to some other problems with the book, but like the randomly floating POV, they wouldn't have bothered me if I liked the book overall.

* Tales From The Gas Station - Horror/creepy short story series

I know I got recced this, but don't remember from where. It's very mid, but not in a bad way. It's a series of spooky stories with something of an overarching plot. The writing is very solid, but you can see where the story is going most of the time, sometimes from the set up. It feels like the writer is very in his comfort zone, writing wise. It keeps it from being really spooky, at least for me, but it's very comfy. Most of what I read feels like writers trying to push for something, hit above their weight class and the writers have very uneven writing skills. This feels like something less ambitious, but well polished. The descriptions of the place and the main character's emotional state are really well some.

I listened to it as an audiobook and the narrator was very good.

It's written as if this was originally an online blog that got mistaken for creepypasta and spread virally. I think that the book was originally a blog, became popular and then become a book. But, a lot of the fandom seems to be very into unfiction so I am not 100% sure. Some of the info on the book's origin is contradictory. It's possible that the series is so polished because the book is the second or third version of it.

* Broken by Nicola Haken - m/m romance

I really liked this. It's a tricky one to review because it's an m/m romance where one of the characters has bipolar disorder.

The set up nearly lost me because I didn't know the plot, it just felt like a lot of '00s bl manga were there is a lot of boundary breaking that I wasn't into. I read a lot of those manga because here in the US we got a huge influx of m/m content when bl was taking off. It felt like one of those premises, but then taken really seriously. I don't think that's what the author was going for, but that's how it hit me. I felt like I'd read that first chapter a lot before, but then the story went a totally different direction.

The premise is taken more seriously than some people might expect from a romance novel. ( Triggers and also spoilers )

Day 3 and return to PDX

On the last day I had several hours between when I checked out and when I left. This is one of the reasons I am so into one-bag travel, but I still was wearing my full sized travel pack because I needed room for food and my camera. I only used one lens, but it was my big zoom lens.

I walked south of town to take a picture of the old smokestack:



There was a maritime museum that I went into because I was there, and they had coffee free with admission. It was raining so I dropped my back, sat in front on of exhibit and drank coffee for a bit. Then, I went north of the town back to the public dock for crabbing because the old coast guard boat house was open.

This is what the new coast guard dock looks like:



Maybe I should have gotten a pic of the new boathouse and the shiny new boats for reference. Oh, well.

Piers behind the old boathouse:



The old boathouse might be the best vantage point to take pictures of the incoming train, but I didn't realize that until I was out there. If I'd waited for the next run, I wouldn't be at the bus stop by when I wanted. Notes for next time if I ever head back out, maybe for the fall runs they are starting up.

The air was great out in Garibaldi, clean and cool. And I came back to Portland being like this:



Now, to plan Seattle.