Max Ride Forever, Book Review Part 1

Or: Oh God Why Does This Book Exist?

(Normally I wouldn't give a heads up about the language, but this one is saltier than usual.)

 Hey readers! It's good to be back, I thought I'd launch right in with the latest Maximum Ride, reviewing it as I go. (So, obviously, there are going to be spoilers during my review.) I already mentioned before that, despite ending the series, James Patterson apparently needed more money and decided to pull yet another train wreck out of his arse. Never mind that, in an interview, he admitted he was tired of writing about all the characters except Max (I really wish I could find a link to that interview.), so that further ruined the book for me, knowing a tired author was writing about characters he was sick of.

When I first enjoyed Maximum Ride I would read the previous book before blowing through the new one in a single day. As each new book came out a creeping feeling of dread would get worse and worse. I was not excited to read Forever one bit, it felt like a chore, and the book sat on my nightstand for weeks at a time. Even Twilight ended after four books for crying out loud!

Blearrrrrgh!!

Each Maximum Ride Book is separated into "books" which I think is really stupid. Really they're more parts. So I'll separate them like that as well. Part 1 is the largest, with parts 2 and 3 being about equal in size to each other. 

So, here for your craptastic enjoyment, is part one of the train wreck of Maximum Ride Forever.

The beginning is set 3 months after Nevermore (which, as you recall, was subtitled The Final Maximum Ride Adventure, just saying), because even James Patterson couldn't fix the unfixable mess he'd left the story in.

Patterson makes his first groan-inducing mistake right on page 2: Total talks.

OHMYGODJUSTDIE

It's not soon after that Dylan is killed off. Like before, Patterson is bending to the will of the fans to ensure that the Max/Fang relationship stays as the primary one. Never mind that Dylan, like Maya, was one of the most interesting, multidimensional characters in the series.

Eventually the flock leave their stupid island, you know, the one that was supposed to be a fallout shelter against all the apocalyptic bad stuff that was going to go down? They got all set up for it and then suddenly a meteor came out of nowhere. Never mind that scientists track that stuff over the course of years, and would know about it so well in advance that your parents would know about it before you were even born.

Anyway, as they travel the flock discover that the end of the world was apparently caused by more than just a meteor. It was plague, earthquakes, floods, droughts, global warming. Pretty much every single apocalyptic event except for the Rapture and zombies.

Eventually the flock come across some hyena-like creatures at the very top of a high-rise building in the middle of a destroyed city because...well, I honestly can't think of a reason that, of all places, hyenas would be 120 stories up in a building. The fight goes on, although for some reason the flock doesn't have the same cool, actiony moves they did before. Max even pulls out the sink sprayer and uses it on one of them. I don't know how my love for the series could have shriveled up even more than it already has, but it did at that moment.

So beautiful, yet so deadly.

Akila, Total's completely normal dog companion who he (apparently?) even married and calls his wife, is carried around all this time from the beginning of the book. She gets injured during the hyena fight and dies. This is one death I'm actually okay with because she was a waste of book space and contributed absolutely nothing to the story.

They end up in a cabin eventually and Fang finds a tablet device that apparently still works. It doesn't have wireless but let me quote a big here:

""Five G." Nudge wiggled her magnetic fingers. "I know it makes no sense, but don't question it."

THE READERS ARE #&%*ING QUESTIONING IT!

Let's take a moment to talk about writing.

I have a book called How NOT To Write a Novel by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman that has a short, but useful, part about How Your Job is Harder Than God's. Here's a bit of it from TV Tropes:

"Why Your Job is Harder Than God's". A Contrived Coincidence can resolve a conflict in real life, but for fiction, the reader will expect the resolution to be set up within the context of the plot. As a rule, major coincidences can be used to set a plot in motion, but not to resolve it.

You don't pull crap like that in writing.

With that out of the way, I'll continue.

Fang checks his blog and, apparently (expect me to use "apparently" a lot, this is a story of deus ex machina), other people have "Five G" as well because they are still making comments. Because of some new information gathered from it the flock end up torn between Russia and the United States. Fang wants to stay with Max, but Angel reminds them that the longer Fang sticks around the more of a threat he is to the world's survival (??). I thought at some point he was supposed to be the key to saving things? I honestly can't keep track anymore. I do remember that Fang was supposed to be the cure for the apocalyptic plague, but that was thrown out the window. He was also supposed to die, but I thought that prophesy thing was resolved with the cliche of his heart stopping a few seconds a few books back? (Yet another cliché.)

Because of Fang's refusal, Angel has a hissy fit and decides to "show" Fang. Because, along with reading minds, she can also see the future apparently? And also Vulcan Mind Meld. Anyway, remember how stupid the Thor vision bath in Age of Ultron was? Yeah, it's that kind of stupid.

HURRRAAAUUUURRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!

After that Fang turns Emo (when before he was just sort of broody) and then he and Max have sex I think? (?!?) Which has, in itself, become a cliche. You know, when Character X needs to leave but Character Y doesn't want them to. they have sex and, while Character Y is asleep, Character X slinks off. If this isn't a TV Troupe by now, it should be.

So Fang gets attacked by more hyenas, which are apparently robots for some reason. Then he leaves.

After that the rest of the flock splits up. Max, Nudge, and Total head back to the island which is, literally, unlivable now thanks to a volcano spewing lava and ash everywhere. Max wants to stay there because she's emoing too, and hopes her mom, sister, and Dylan are all still alive. Thus far they are not, but the mini flock come across a bunch of fish kids who now life in the underground network of tunnels (because Patterson doesn't know how volcanic activity affects water). Nudge decides to stay with them and Max changes her mind (yet again....) and wants to leave the island. So far Max's count for the island is: stay, go, stay, go, and that's just counting this book, not the previous one. Anyway, Total stays behind with Nudge and Max continues forward.

So, let me back up a bit.

During this whole time it cuts to chapters about a character with the mouthful name of A10103. Chapters about him didn't appear until Dylan's death, which makes him entirely obvious until shown otherwise. He works for the bad guys and is part of an elite number of people known as Horsemen. Since A10103 is a pain to read, the character decides to give himself a nickname. He calls himself Horseman.

...I think I liked A10103 better.

For the first half of the book he just runs around tracking the flock, never actually catching up to them and being a general douchebag.

After that he unceremoniously murders Nudge. Seriously, it happened about like that (boo!), then it's hinted that he murders Total (yay!)

Does that make him a cereal killer? Sorry...

Now, the irritating thing about Maximum Ride is that the characters never stay dead. Normally I'd hate for characters to come back (I'm not even a huge fan of Nudge), but this us a pretty asshole move on Patterson's part to kill off characters just because he's sick of them.

So far the book is not doing anything to assuage my predisposed hate of it.

Blast From The Past Post #4

Twilight: How I Learned to Enjoy It

(Original post date May 31, 2013)

Now, you've probably never heard the phrase "I used to hate Twilight" but I'm sure it's happened.

For me, it was when I read another terrible book.

A friend let me borrow a book called Crank, by Ellen Hopkins. It was, hands down, the worst book I have ever read. Not so much with grammar or the flow of the story, but the subject matter itself. It's about a girl who gets addicted to crystal meth and other such substances. One part in particular has stuck in my mind where she smokes a cigarette for the first time, after coughing and hacking she says (I paraphrase here): "I did the sensible thing: I took another drag." I think eventually she gets raped and has a crack-addicted baby. The end.

No, seriously, the end. That's the end of the book.

And then my face was stuck like this for three days.

Bad books stick with you about as well as good ones, and you can't help but think "This book was actually worse than X!" (in my case X=Twilight). You then begin to compare and contrast the level of suckitude. However, I stated blending the ideas of both books when I realized the character's withdrawal from crystal meth in Crank sounded eerily like Bella's feelings and actions when she was away from Edward in Twilight.


I've heard some people describe Edward as less of a vampire and more of an incubus, so let's take a side-step here for some learning (which I will keep at PG-13 for my own sake) and some references so I can try and get you into the right mindframe for a theory.

An incubus is the male equivalent of a succubus. The incubus in folklore are known to seduce and "lie with women" in order to produce offspring. Enough horizontal mambo and the woman starts to get ill and, eventually, die.

In The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher there are three different types of vampire: Black Court, Red Court, and White Court. For the sake of discussion I'm just going to focus on just certain aspects of the Red and White. Red Court a very narcotic and addictive saliva, which make humans enjoy every moment of their oncoming death, and the White Court are basically incubi and succubi that feed on human emotions and desires. Humans get addicted to White Court vampires as well, and keep coming back for more until, eventually, they're totally consumed and die (though they enjoy every moment of it.)

Combining the crystal meth, incubus folklore, and White and Red Court vampires from those sources, I suddenly had a very interesting take on Twilight. Here it is:

At some point Edward says vampires "sparkle" to attract their prey, but that's just silly. No one is just going to go "Shiny!" and walk right into a pit of spikes where a diamond was dangling from. However, what if the sparkly vampires had a less obvious means of making themselves attractive to humans?

Stephanie Meyer explains a lot of the Twilight-verse in her website that she was either too lazy to explain about in her so-called "saga" or else didn't think about it until people started bugging her about it. One of those questions being how their eyes manage to move around in their heads despite pretty much being made of solid rock. The answer is that they're made entirely of stone and venom (the venom that causes other people to become infected) their eyes are rocks that float in the venom. That means all of their bodily fluids are venom.

Now, logically, the first kiss from Edward would have Bella rolling around and screaming because she'd gotten infected from the saliva in his mouth. Or, later, she'd have certainly gotten infected, erm, on her honeymoon night.

My theory is that, in small doses, Smeyer's vampire venom acts as a highly addictive narcotic. Only in large doses does it cause full-blown vampirism.

I read the book, keeping all this in mind, and it's got some pretty sound evidence to it.

When Bella first meets Edward, sure she's going to watch him, he's a pretty boy. Still, at her first description she does describe the Cullens as the skin around their eyes looking dark like they were all recovering from broken noses. With every description after that, Bella's description of Edward is "Perfect" in one word or another.

I took some notes, so you can even look it up yourself it you want.

Page 45 is when they first touch. Bella describes it as an "Electric hand sting" it's not pleasant to her, it's actually a little painful. We come back to the "All bodily fluids are venom" thing that Meyer herself has confirmed, along with my "Narcotic venom" theory. If all fluids are venom, then that means sweat would be, too, as well as the natural oils on the skin. Edward is, literally, covered in a small amount of venom. When Bella touches him she's coming into contact with the venom for the first time, it would explain the sting she feels as some things can be absorbed though the skin.

By page 56 she's already anxious to see him. You've probably heard of some drugs that take only one use to become addicted. Maybe vampire venom is the same.



Hey Steve, I'm gonna need about 3 more ounces
of Edward Cullen's underarm sweat

The more body contact there is, the more skin absorption Bella has of Edward's sweet, addictive substance.

On page 56, there's full-blown half-body contact while Team Tyler's Van cheers one determined Forks highschooler tries to shorten the series an entire four books by running over Bella and Edward pretty much smothers Bella all over trying to keep the Van of Awesome away from her.

That night, she dreams about him.



Zzzz...Heroin...Er I mean....Edward.

By page 70 she's become incredibly depressed when he ignores her. A few pages later her hands are shaky.

Page 74: "I couldn't allow him to have this level of influence over me. It was pathetic. It was more than pathetic, it was unhealthy." Sounds more like an anti-fan than Bella herself, right? Go check, I'll wait right here...

Are you back? Good...then Ha! I knew you had a copy, too! You're never gonna live this down! I'm going to tell everyone you're Team Jacob and you make out with your Siberian Husky and-

Oh, sorry, got a little off track there. Let's move on.

Of course, by page 79 she's calling him perfect. Page 92 her mind just goes blank. Shaking hands, thinking constantly about getting a fix, and losing her thought processes at the drop of a hat? Hmm, sounds like withdrawal symptoms.

Page 138 and continuing into 139, she's considering Edwards advice that she avoid him and she feels a "Sudden agony of despair" and her mind "rejects the pain." Not bad for knowing him for less than a month.

Page 139: "I didn't know if there ever was a choice. I was already in too deep. Now that I know, if I knew, I could do nothing about my frightening secret. Because when I thought of him, of his voice, his hypnotic eyes, the magnetic force of his personality, I wanted nothing more than to be with him right now."

Replace all mentions of a person with a substance, and if you're like me, it sounds creepy.

Page 141: "I couldn't feel the right kind of fear."  If people are smart, they know the drug they're addicted to is bad, it's wrong, they're aware it's going to kill them.

At page 145, Bella's been having a great day, but all it takes is not seeing Edward at lunch for her to think this: "Desolation hit me with crippling strength" so either she's trying to be poetic by using large words, she's overreacting, or she's freaking out because she can't get her fix, which is becoming more and more needed.

There's the whole alley scene where Bella's rescued by Edward, and he gives her his jacket. She takes a big ol' whiff. Now, I don't have to quote anything for you to know there are inhaled addictive substances.

Page 175, he freaks her out a bit, but her "Spasm of fear" is "stifled by a sense of safety." She has alarm bells going off in her head but there's something tamping them down. Again, we come back to the fact that people are aware that a drug is bad for them and they use it anyway. Also, she's wearing his jacket at the time, the one probably just dripping in venom from being worn so often (sorry, too gross?)

Page 190, Bella says "Not seeing you. It makes me anxious, too." I can understand Edward being anxious, his food (ie: Bella) is off wandering around being stupid. You'd be worried too if you had a delicious bucket of chicken wandering around a city full of cats and dogs (You attached wheels to the bottom of it...I have no idea why.)

On page 193 she smells his breath and notices it smells the same as his jacket. I don't know about you, but I would never want my breath to smell like my jacket or my jacket to smell like my breath. The only explanation is that venom has a smell to it.

By page 195 she's totally in love.

Page 211 "If I had to, I supposed I could purposefully put myself in danger to keep him close." That's certainly a far cry from the previous "I couldn't allow him to have this level of influence over me." Although she discards the idea of putting herself in danger, she does so for the wrong reasons, not because it's stupid or even a sick idea, it's because she knows she'd get in trouble....It's also pretty impressive what people will do to get another hit of their addiction. You know...just saying...

Page 219, she's got an "Overpowering craving to touch him."

This is only half of the book. I didn't manage to read it all in time to make this post. It's just slow and I had other books occupying my time.



A satyr in a wedding dress. How could I resist?

Anyway, I didn't really need to finish it. I've made my point. I'm loving every moment of my reread because it's not the loving story of an air-headed moron falling for a bi-polar prettyboy. It's the dark, sick story of a normal girl who becomes addicted to a narcotic substance that causes her to fall out of touch with her friends, school, family, the real world and eventually ends with her death (and subsequent rebirth into a venom-producing monster to lure more hapless humans.) This doesn't even count all the eye-gaze-induced brain-scrambling Edward does to control Bella and everyone else around them.

So remember kids, don't do drugs.

...And don't lick Edward Cullen.

Blast From The Past Post #3

How I Became a Writer
(Original post date February 1, 2013)

Nobody just sat down one day and decided "I think I'll slam my face on the keyboard for months at a time until Microsoft Word tells me I have 50,000 words." Although I've heard of people (mostly girls aged 13-16) suddenly deciding they want to write, most usually give it up after about the first page or two once they realize writing is hard and it's too much like homework.

However, most dedicated authors you hear about had really bad lives (don't quote me on them, these are just what I heard) like JK Rowling was buying Christmas presents for her daughter from thrift stores, A.A. Milne (author of Winnie the Pooh) had an abusive father, Lewis Carroll had a bad stutter, J.M. Barrie (author of Peter Pan) was rumored to be psychologically stunted.

It's like you have to have a dark past in order to write.

"Mom, give me a black eye. It'll make me a famous writer someday."

But nah, that's not the case. One of my favorite authors, John Flanagan, started his career by writing stories for his son.

A good way to help keep you writing is stop and think about what got you writing in the first place.

When I used to tell people how I became a writer I would start it when I actually began writing a novel at around 14, but a couple of years ago I realized it actually goes further back than that. I must have been anywhere from 6 to 8 years old and I started writing these little stories called Hearts and Stars. It was about a girl who was friends with a talking dog and cat and other stuff. The sun and moon also talked, and were in love with each other, but were never allowed to see each other. Throughout the whole little pages I glued on shiney metallic hearts and stars, hence the name.



Have you considered killing off a character?

I've mentioned being homeschooled before. A big part of teaching kids is trying to grab their interest. My brother and I have always been really into videogames, and around the point where our dad decided we were going to be writing some papers we were playing Diablo 2 (I was 12, though I could have sworn I was younger) Our homework was to write letters to Charsi (the blacksmith in Act I) in-character about our adventures.


She was awesome.

I don't remember an awful lot about them, but I do remember having an absolute blast.

I've always been quick with my wit, though my source needed some work. Usually I quoted something from one source or another and it was rather applicable, but never original. As I got older I was able to from a good sense of humor and managed to come up with a lot of my own comebacks and additions to a conversation. Problem was, people would laugh and then ask "Where did that come from?" Not so much a rhetorical question (to the effect of "Oh you're such a card!") as much as it was Wikipedia asking "Source?"

They'd always asked it, but it was only when I'd started coming up with my own material that it began to bother me. I didn't want to be thought of as a parrot of television shows. I wanted to prove that I could come up with something entirely original.

I found this in writing.

I was in the range of 13 or 14 when I started writing my first novel, Carda's Cloak. I wrote it entirely by hand, so often that I started to cramp. I'd managed to make about 100 hand-written pages over the course of what felt like a year or two, but was probably closer to six months. Edits were hard, since I had to erase large chunks and hope the edits filled the same amount of space. I'd even changed the main character's name at least twice, going through all of the pages, erasing, and rewriting it by hand.

I later realized that writing would work much faster if I used the computer. I could add or remove whatever I wanted much faster. So I began transcribing Carda's Cloak all into Microsoft Word. Problem was, there were too many things I wanted to change. It was like writing a whole new story. Even as I rewrote it I began to realize something that Stephanie Meyer couldn't: Writing an entire novel based on a ten second dream I had was a mistake. I scrapped it, though I still have the original hand-written version sitting somewhere today and, more surprisingly, the Microsoft Word version that, apparently, hasn't been touched since 2005.

I was 15 when Metroid Prime was released, and I got way into Metroid (before that I still loved the original Metroid and Super Metroid, but fandom was a whole different thing before the Internet as we know it today). Trying to find more Metroid, I stumbled across a website called Metroid Galaxy (now defunct) and, at the time, they were recruiting for the Metroid Role Playing Forum. I thought to myself "Metroid and writing at the same time? Awesome!"



And that's why all women today wear space helmets to feel sexy.

So I joined and, with everyone's help and encouragement there, they molded me into the writer that I am today. There's no possible way I could even begin to show my appreciation, and all the times I've attempted to sound a lot like the written equivalent of a drunk-dialing at 2 AM, slurring "I love you man..." into the receiver.

Somewhere between Carda's Cloak and the start of joining the Metroid Role Playing Forum I started a novel called Langoria. I was about 16 to 17.


Not to be confused with Eva Longoria.

It was later renamed to Angel Queen. Angel Queen is probably the point where I could actually call myself a writer. This was the one I really dedicated myself to. It was the first time I actually considered publishing. I worked on that one until I finished it, 50,000 words, and then edited it several times and called it finished in 2008. After that I was really excited to start on Book 2, Angel Grey. Though rather thin at 32,000 words, I finished it in a year and hopped right into Book 3, Angel Fall, in late 2009. I only got about 3,000 words in when a certain group of kids took up residence in my brain: A werewolf, a witch, and a vampire.

I tried to finish Angel Fall, but Crystal, if you've read the book, is a rather insistent character. After some back and forth I finally caved, slapped Dusted together in roughly 6 months, and went back to Angel Fall.

But I couldn't leave Dusted alone.

Although my records say I last worked on Angel Fall in January 2010, and I started Dusted February 2009, Dusted was here to stay. The Langoria Trilogy was, officially, dead.

Although Angel Queen was the first novel that made me say "I want to publish this" Dusted was the first anything I had ever written that made me think "I can publish this." Dusted had some kind of magic, a spark, that made me realize this was a great story and that people would not only read it, but would enjoy it.

So I wrote it, beginning to end, and it was an amazing trip. I made some edits, and, over the course of a year or two, built up the courage to share it with people who could help me polish it. It would be a little while longer before I managed to gain courage to start sending it to an agent (with a big push from Cynthia Hand, of which I mention the story Here)

 

 

Here's the rejection letter I got (with the name removed):

 

Thank you for sending me a query letter describing your work. After careful evaluation, I have decided that I am not the right agent to represent your work. Please do not take this rejection as a comment on your writing ability. Given the large amount of submission I receive, I can only properly represent material that greatly excites or interests me. Since this is such a subjective business, I am sure another agent will feel quite differently about your work.

I wish you the best of luck finding representation with the right agent and good fortune with your writing career.

 

Nice of her to send a response, even if was generic.

 

Anyway, I was reading some articles about getting published, and self publishing, and one in particular that my dad sent me gave me enough motivation to say "Stuff that!" to the publishing business, get Dusted published for Kindle a week later, and here I am today.

 

I've got a new novel in the works. It's nearing completion and will need some revision, so it's still a way off. The roleplaying forum (I prefer the term "Collaborative writing forum") is still alive and well today, though they've since moved away from being specifically Metroid-oriented and have renamed themselves Reality's Exile. I even still participate. If you're interested, or at least curious, you can find them Here where they are currently trying to recruit some new members.

 

So, there I am.