The time is nigh upon us!!
RIGHT, so you guys want to know how awesome I am? When I decided to write my big bang, I asked rhythmsextion to be part of my email audiencing cabal, since she'd been super helpful and awesome with my past couple J2 stories. Then I was like, "And I can totally helpfully audience for you in return!" DO YOU SEE WHERE I'M GOING WITH THIS?
For those of you who haven't heard, she's posting Hail Mary, the sequel to Next Man Up, today and it is AWESOME!!! No lie, I completely STALKED googledocs while she was writing. As in, every two minutes I would refresh and be like, "HOORAY MORE SENTENCES!!!" like a complete and total creeper. I'm actually not even exaggerating there.
I'm so in love with this whole universe, I've been trying to think of a way to properly articulate it for like a week now. It's not a J2 fairytale romance and generally I am totally a fairytale romance sort of girl. But the universe completely sucks you in. You know, in that way where you want to dwell there long after you've stopped reading.
Here's the funny thing: I HATE football. I'm not talking the negative, apathetic, "Blah, whatever" kind of hate, either. I'm talking about the active, take time out of your day to concentrate on it and nurse the hate sort of loathing that I generally reserve for Sting and people who slow down on freeway on-ramps. Football is not allowed on my home TV, not even on holidays, GDI!!! I have been known, from time to time, to even consider it a cruel trick of the universe, created just to torment me for some past life misdeeds.
It doesn't even matter. Joy is such an incredibly talented and deft writer that I find myself not just reading the football parts, but actually interested in them.* Trust me, that is HUGE!!
Umm, honestly, I'm thinking Hail Mary doesn't really need any talking up at this point. I guess I just wanted to brag say that I had a chance to re-read it in its entirety this weekend (around having houseguests-I totally stayed up way too late reading after everyone else went to bed). It's such an amazing story and an incredibly satisfying read.
If you haven't read Next Man Up and the timestamps and stuff, the master post for that is here. I can't recommend them highly enough.
* WRT the whole football thing, it's one of those things where I think, if the author knows the subject and is passionate about it, that's going to come across to the reader. The closest comparison I can think of for my feelings on QB 'Verse is Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Catch Trap (which is not to say that it's one of those, 'if you liked/didn't like x, you will/won't like y' sort of things).
I think the actual writing for The Catch Trap is not overwhelmingly fantastic, but MZB had obviously done her research and I was completely drawn in to the world she'd created. It was one of those books where I felt sort of adrift afterward, because I wanted to read something that I could similarly get so completely absorbed in. (Ack, you know what I mean, right? When you get to the end of a book and you're like, "I want that again!!!")
That's how I feel about Joy's QB 'Verse. Like I'm completely engrossed in the world and the story and the characters that I'm not quite ready to leave by the time the story is done.
Oy, so! Yeah, there's that. Perhaps not so much a rec as a long rambling squeefest on my part. OH WELL. I can't WAIT for everyone else to read it!!
For those of you who haven't heard, she's posting Hail Mary, the sequel to Next Man Up, today and it is AWESOME!!! No lie, I completely STALKED googledocs while she was writing. As in, every two minutes I would refresh and be like, "HOORAY MORE SENTENCES!!!" like a complete and total creeper. I'm actually not even exaggerating there.
I'm so in love with this whole universe, I've been trying to think of a way to properly articulate it for like a week now. It's not a J2 fairytale romance and generally I am totally a fairytale romance sort of girl. But the universe completely sucks you in. You know, in that way where you want to dwell there long after you've stopped reading.
Here's the funny thing: I HATE football. I'm not talking the negative, apathetic, "Blah, whatever" kind of hate, either. I'm talking about the active, take time out of your day to concentrate on it and nurse the hate sort of loathing that I generally reserve for Sting and people who slow down on freeway on-ramps. Football is not allowed on my home TV, not even on holidays, GDI!!! I have been known, from time to time, to even consider it a cruel trick of the universe, created just to torment me for some past life misdeeds.
It doesn't even matter. Joy is such an incredibly talented and deft writer that I find myself not just reading the football parts, but actually interested in them.* Trust me, that is HUGE!!
Umm, honestly, I'm thinking Hail Mary doesn't really need any talking up at this point. I guess I just wanted to brag say that I had a chance to re-read it in its entirety this weekend (around having houseguests-I totally stayed up way too late reading after everyone else went to bed). It's such an amazing story and an incredibly satisfying read.
If you haven't read Next Man Up and the timestamps and stuff, the master post for that is here. I can't recommend them highly enough.
* WRT the whole football thing, it's one of those things where I think, if the author knows the subject and is passionate about it, that's going to come across to the reader. The closest comparison I can think of for my feelings on QB 'Verse is Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Catch Trap (which is not to say that it's one of those, 'if you liked/didn't like x, you will/won't like y' sort of things).
I think the actual writing for The Catch Trap is not overwhelmingly fantastic, but MZB had obviously done her research and I was completely drawn in to the world she'd created. It was one of those books where I felt sort of adrift afterward, because I wanted to read something that I could similarly get so completely absorbed in. (Ack, you know what I mean, right? When you get to the end of a book and you're like, "I want that again!!!")
That's how I feel about Joy's QB 'Verse. Like I'm completely engrossed in the world and the story and the characters that I'm not quite ready to leave by the time the story is done.
Oy, so! Yeah, there's that. Perhaps not so much a rec as a long rambling squeefest on my part. OH WELL. I can't WAIT for everyone else to read it!!