Isn't writing a whole novel a lot of work just to win the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest?

He was just making sure.

I've been working my way through Marion Zimmer Bradley's gothics, and I discovered that she "wrote" an urban fantasy/witchcraft/gothic series in the early 2000s. "Wrote", because it turns out that they were entirely ghostwritten by Rosemary Edghill. Which is great for me, because I love Rosemary Edghill's "Bast" mysteries, which were witchcraft-themed.

Oh, I loved the Bast mysteries! and I always wonder how many of the characters were based on real people.

She also wrote some Regency romances, three fantasy novels and, under the name eluke bes shahar (which may be her real name) she wrote a SF trilogy - the Hellflower books, which I really enjoyed (sometimes, when holding a door for someone I know, I'll say "I am a tongueless doorstop").

Thank you for reminding me of the Bast mysteries, Jilli. I have the three novels on your earlier rec, and just found and ordered the volume of short stories and novellas.

And Todd,I'm bookmarking the Hellflower books under the alternate name--thanks!

I do enjoy the way she writes.

If you're on instagram, the #authorlifemonth tag is full of bookish goodness

I loved her Regencies. They were so different than most of them.

Ok, megan, so I had to reborrow to make sure I wasn't talking out of my arse about 5th Wave, but here you go. Note that I have only read the book and not seen the movie.

In the book, the character Evan *is* the sniper who shoots Cassie. Basically, he's a Silencer who is supposed to kill her. He is tracking her to do so, sees her in the woods, sees the stuff with the Crucifix Soldier go down, basically stalks her instead of finishing her off. He goes to kill her...and then doesn't. And then having not done it, finds it increasingly harder to do so each time he gets the chance. He continues to stalk her, reading her journal, etc., eventually falling in love with her, more or less as a reason to justify to himself why he didn't kill her initially. He loses track of her, finds her again, and this is when he shoots her. But he, uncharacteristically, doesn't kill her. He waits for her to come out from cover and run. Except she doesn't run. She confronts him, and instead he runs. She would have died from her injuries, but he then takes the not-killing her a step further into saving her.

For her part, Cassie basically has killed the last person she's seen, at a point when she speculated she might be the last person alive, before meeting him. She's utterly reliant on him initially while he nurses her back to health, and she comes to the relationship considerably more reluctantly. She knows she can't trust him, but yields to, I think, the basic human need for companionship under duress. Then as events reveal that she is right not to trust him, she ultimately leaves him. He follows, and she finds herself relieved to see that this is the case, but the complexity of their background is never lost on her.

So, in my view, unlikely, but not completely unbelievable. Is that helpful?

Ursula Vernon is apparently working on a series of subversive fairy/folktale treatments, under her pen name of T. Kingfisher. I just read The Raven and the Reindeer today, it's a retelling of Hans Christian Anderson's "The Snow Queen". It's really excellent, with a lovely femslash element to the story, and some totally marvelous flying otters. Plus a raven with an unwieldy name.

She also did a "Beauty and the Beast" retelling called Bryony and Roses, and something called The Seventh Bride, which is excellent, and seriously creepy. Highly recommended, all of them.

Oh, I loved The Raven and the Reindeer ! There were so many Finnish elements that delighted me. Maybe this is how people of Scottish-Irish descent feel when they see bits of Scottish and Irish myths and folklore in fantasy novels.

Thanks, Liese.

Interesting, the fact that I have no idea what a Silencer or Crucifix Soldier is probably explains why their relationship doesn't play quite right on screen.

As for your second paragraph, that scene is what opens the movie and it's amazing, so it was really a shame that the rest of the movie doesn't really live up to it.