Narcissus in Chains chapter 29

So I've spent the last two days going over and over AND OVER AND OVER Planet Bob, deleting things, rearranging things, and trying to correct most of the punctuation (I have done worse things than a find/replace search for (.") so I can catch every time I closed dialogue wrong, but JESUS CHRIST is it tedious. And it's not something I can catch without forcing my computer to go "Did you mean to use that here?") and I can no longer look at it objectively. I am that sick of working on it. So I have decided that it is either publish or push it back another month. So either late today or early tomorrow, it goes up.

PLANET BOB IS GOING TO BE PUBLISHED EITHER LATE TODAY OR EARLY TOMORROW. You may either rejoice or cringe as you want to. :D

Now. Back to terrible book. So everybody troops out onto the back deck, because shapeshifting in the Anitaverse makes an ungodly mess. Nathanial doesn't want to have to clean it up.

You know, Anita strikes me as one of those cult leader wives who get to lay around all day and never lift a finger because they know their followers will do it for them. Also, it's Nathanial, the weak little baby, who has to play housekeeper. Does he vacuum in pearls?

Stephen, Gregory's werewolf brother is here, and have I mentioned yet that the odds of two brothers both being lycanthropes of different animals is really fucking small? Because it is. Unless EVERYTHING in this universe is a shapeshifter. In which case there wouldn't be so many laws against them, and this book would probably be cool again (Shapeshifting=AIDS level pandemic. Think about it.) Anyhoo, Stephen is here, and he is just as baby-sweet fragile as Gregory is.

One of the cool things about the Kindle software I use, is it lets me take notes when I read ahead. I highlighted this part:

He was submissive, fragile in every walk of his life,

and I added the note: GO TALK TO FLUTTERSHY. Yes, my faithful blog readers. I have succumbed to the honey-sweet cuteness that is the new incarnation of My Little Pony. And I agree with its characterization completely. You can be a gentle, soft-hearted person who doesn't like ugliness and violence and still turn bad-ass awesome when you need to. SUBMISSIVE and FRAGILE does not equal BROKEN, you psychopath.

Also, the submissive members of Anita pack are now scared to death of her. Even the text acknowledges it's because Anita shot Elizabeth. Anita hates that they all have to be scared of her. Here's a tip, Anita baby: LEARN HOW TO LEAD WITHOUT SHOOTING YOUR PEOPLE.

We get a list of what everybody looks like and what everybody's wearing. And then Anita decides to try to heal Gregory with the munin. Specifically, by summoning Rania, the woman who did terrible things to every single leopard in the pard.

Yes. Let's summon the one female character more psychotic than Anita so that she can heal one of the people Rania brutalized in the first place. And it's all about sex with this character. So yeah, this is a GREAT idea. Especially because, like Nathanial, Anita views Gregory like a child.

They keep talking about Rania. Meanwhile, Gregory is still deaf and everybody is still worried. And there is one part where Anita says, basically "I want to protect him, not screw him, and this is a bad thing."

This book is like a septic tank.

We get more submissive=victim bullshit. Stephen says "call Rania". Anita reminds everyone that Rania thought the Saw movies were soft-core porn, and maybe bringing her into this situation would be bad. Everybody shrugs and says "So what? We need to heal Gregory." And Anita locks eyes with Stephen, who will do anything to help his brother.

So basically we have Stephen offering himself to be tortured and raped as a surrogate for his brother, because Anita can't force herself to  feel aroused by Gregory.  And that, mercifully, is where the chapter ends.

I am now SO glad I stopped reading this book where I did. So very, very, very glad. The plot collapsing under its own weight way back when Asher and Narcissus got it on was the WARNING, boys and girls. It was God's way of telling us "GO BACK. GO BACK NOW."

There is almost a third of the book left. I am TERRIFIED.