I rarely read the blurb of the book and just jump into a book when I get them, Well, it has been both good and bad for me. I did the same with Eliza and Her Monsters, after reading so many positive spoiler free reviews about it.
I needed to read something easy and light hearted after reading a serious classic like The Picture of Dorian Gray. How did that turn out for me? You will have to read ahead to know.
Eliza is the creator of the popular online comic, Monstrous Sea which has a tremendous fan following. She goes by the LadyConstellation and is frankly a virtual super star. In real life, she is quiet, shy, and avoids people as much as possible. Her family doesn’t understand her or her online business but let her be to an extent.
She suffers from anxiety attacks and has no friends in school, where she usually spends her time drawing for her comic. She has two online friends who help her navigate through life and family issues. She feels safer online and prefers to keep the real and virtual life separate.
When Wallace, a famous fan fiction writer of her Monstrous Sea, joins her school her worlds collide. Eliza being Eliza, misses all her chances to come out clean to him about who she is.
But is it now too late now to tell him? What would it take for him forgive her when he finally realizes the truth? Did she overcome her personal fears and monsters at the end? Read the Eliza and Her Monsters to know more.
My initial thoughts
Well, it was definitely not what I expected at all. But don’t worry you freaks, I meant in a good way. I suppose. Well I will try and explain better. I thought the book Eliza and her monsters was about her own inner monsters, like her mental illness. I was not happy to find it was not about her anxiety but about her comic.
And then I realized it was indeed about her mental illness. So I guess it was a roller coaster ride. Just what I wanted. So I am happy again I guess.
Another thing that stood out for me was the portrayal of online friends. Like any of you, I have and love all my online friends and I probably will share my dark deep secrets with them before I would with my family and friends. You all get that right? Finally there is a book that puts across that it was okay to do that and not all virtual friends were creeps and tricksters.
YES to showing how online friendships that can be real and time zones can be pain in the butt.
I loved how well the pressure and her desperation to finish the story were depicted.
The Eliza-Wallace friendship turned to relationship was realistic and the growth arc was spot on.
If you hate the ‘Love conquers all’ trope, you will love the ending.
Things that didn’t work for me
While the stories within story worked for so many of my friends, it failed to impress me. It maybe due to the fact that I don’t read fantasy books.
Bottom-line
If you are looking for a book that deals with mental illness or about online community with a bit of romance, Eliza and Her Monsters might be your pick. If you love books like Fangirl and Radio Silence, do not even think twice, you will completely adore Eliza and Her Monsters.
Pin me!
Let us chat
Have you read this one? Do you read fan fiction and what are your favorites? I am definitely in the mood to read a few after reading this book. Let us chat.
The last leg of the #DubaiLitFest got done yesterday and I have not still out of the stupor. I have a lot of pictures to be uploaded but I am gonna keep it for the Instagram. So if you are not following there, you might as well.
But that doesn’t mean I am not gonna tell you what did happen, because let’s face it, who else would enjoy reading about me getting excited over authors who might never remember me? My family sure doesn’t. They are still getting over the idea that would rather volunteer at the literature festival from 9 AM to 9 PM than sleep in during my weekend.
Anyway, I got the sneak peak of the session with the Chinese best seller and literary award winner Cixin Liu, whom I had never heard of before. The LONG queue of people who stood for an hour or more to just greet him and get their book signed and the fact that 3 different people whom I met during the session insisted that I should read him make me wanna read him.
I even asked the Twitter world to help me!
Twitter, tell me why I should read #CixinLiu ? I had 3 different Asians tell me I have to but they might read it in Mandarin. If you have read the translation, tell me how did you like it!
I also met Sandhya Menon of the “When Dimple Met Rishi” fame, who was so sweet and kind to everyone around. Unsurprisingly she is funny as well. Did you know she also hates the “love conquers all” trope just like many of us?
We also got to meet Pierce Brown of the Red Rising fame. And we kinda crashed his dinner and clicked weird pictures with him, and he didn’t tell us off, which was so nice of him.
Oh I am in love the passion, energy and words this man brought on and off the stage! Lionheart is my new obsession everybody!! You should all go search him right away and stalk through all his social accounts.
Let me reel it up a little bit! So Lionheart is a spoken word artist and the author of the Mute’s rebellion and I will have to dig for his videos and will post on Instagram soon.
And we had so much fun in the after party. We even did a long conga line during the author dinner party. Well, I guess it was worth all the tiredness I am feeling now.
So how has your week been? Do your family and friends understand your bookworm problems and eccentricities? Who is the last author that you met and made you all giddy with excitement? Let us talk!
It is Friday and that means I come bearing some exciting news about travel. Yes it is time to announce where we will be travelling for this month’s Flyaway Friday feature. So are you all ready? We will be travelling off to Netherlands.
So if you are still wondering what we are upto, let me give you a quick tour. Every month on Fridays, I take you all virtually to a different country, recommend books set in that country and the most exciting part of all, to have a blogger from that country to tell us more about living there and help us compare what we read or see in books or movies with the reality as they see.
Netherlands is located in the Northwestern part of Europe and shares border with Germany to the east, Belgium to the south, and the North Sea to the northwest, with maritime borders in the North Sea with Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom. To be more clear I will attach a map, alright?
Credit:picturetomorrow.org
Some basic facts for y’all!
More trivia
Here are some fun facts about Netherlands for you
1) While most of us use the names interchangeably, Holland (consisting of North and South Holland) is just a part of the Kingdom of Netherlands. Next time catch yourself from making that mistake.
2) Netherlands has one of the healthiest diet in the world. In fact it is one of the leading countries in happiness and high per capita income in the world.
Credit: Flickr
3) It legalized same sex marriages in 2001 and was the first nation in the world to do so.
4) While Amsterdam is the capital of the country, the government of the Netherlands is seated in the Hague.
5) Orange is its national color and the monarchy is from the House of Orange.
6) Netherlands is the third largest agricultural exporter, despite their size.
7) The Dutch men and women are some of the tallest in the world with an average height of 182.5cm for adult males and 169 cm for female.
Have you ever visited Netherlands in person? Do you know any fun facts about the country? Do you have any questions for the Dutch guest blogger about their nation, habits, stereotypes etc? Let us talk.
One of the most asked questions that new bloggers have is how to get more comments on their blog post. Especially when you have not yet made as many friends in the blogging world it might seem like a difficult task. I talked about how to comment on other blogs, even if you are an introvert on my earlier post, so I promise this is gonna be much easier than that.
How do some of the bloggers get so many comments and have so many friends who dote their posts?
Let me break it out for you right away. There are no shortcuts to receiving 100 comments per post. It takes time, patience, and efforts to build those relations. Commenting and blog hopping goes much beyond ‘I will scratch yours if you do mine’. And that is why many ‘follow for follow’ groups fail.
Get More Comments On Your Blog
Here are all the small things that we all can do easily to motivate, help and enthuse the readers of your blog to comment.
Let us face it, not all of us want to leave comments on all the posts we read. And most of us are still too anxious to start a conversation on the internet with a stranger, even if we love their content. So why not make it easier for them right?
[toc]
End with a question
Many of us write posts between 500-1200 words and our content is usually so awesome that we often leave the reader baffled on to what to say. I am not even exaggerating. Okay maybe a bit. But seriously it is on us to prod the reader to leave a comment and then tell them what to comment about.
My posts usually end with a ‘let us chat’ section where I ask some relevant questions for the reader to answer or share their thoughts on. Of course they are welcome to talk about anything they want, but a little guidance never hurt anyone, right?
Just make sure these questions are generic and open ended so it is easier to get a variety of comments.
Make it a dialogue
Do not forget to respond to those comments when you receive them. Do not leave the other person hanging, make it a dialogue. This will help the other blogger to remember you and maybe visit again. If you can you should visit their blog and leave them a comment as well. As I said earlier, this is beyond being reciprocal. Who knows, you might make a new friend even!
If this is something that interests you, you should consider joining the Comment 4 comment Challenge. The goal is to make sure we return every comment we receive on our blog. You think you can do that?
Make use of relevant plugins
Okay this is kinda specific for self hosted bloggers, but hey it might be useful for others as well some day right?There are nifty little plugins that I love and I know a lot of bloggers who swear by them. I am gonna keep the descriptions short and will provide a link if you wanna read more about them,
A lot of bloggers use this plugin to let their commenters leave a link to their latest post. I love how some of them have set it up to bring up the last 10 posts so that the commenter could have a choice.
This small plugin sends an email to the blogger when you respond to their comment on your blog. This helps them to continue the conversation by hopping back to your blog, if they want to.
Thanks to Evelinah for recommending me this plugin and I totally depend on it these days. This plugin adds another tab on your WordPress comments section and shows only those comments that you have not responded to.
I am too ashamed to show the number of replies pending.
If you don’t have these plugins, do consider using them. They make the commenting life much simpler.
Build relationships
Find out who are your regulars and form a relationship with them. Of course you don’t have to force yourself to do that. But the fact that they are visiting your blog regularly means you have something in common with them, so why not explore that?
You might want to take a look at Bloggers’ comment junction if you are interested in forming long standing blogging relationship and a community that will support you through comments and shares.
Make commenting easier
This sounds like a no brainer but it is kinda very important. Make it easier for the other bloggers to comment on your blog. Ditch all the things that complicate their lives. I mean Captchas and excessive authentication questions.
As I have mentioned on my earlier post, blog engagement is a two way street. Commentors may not flock to your well written post just because it is up there you actively promote it on your social media and keep linking it everywhere. You will still have to make an effort to talk to other bloggers through their comments.
I love how responsive Cait from Paperfury is to her comments, even when she must be receiving 100+ comments on each of her post. We should all make a start somewhere and just start leaving comments, despite what our introvert self says.
What are your secrets to receiving lots of comments on your blog? Do you use these plugins? Are you struggling to get more comments on your post? Share us your favorite plugin or trick to boost the number of comments on your post. Let us talk.
I am back with some exciting news from my week y’all. Are you ready for some February updates?
Remember me yapping about the Emirates Literature Festival for a while now? So it finally started this Friday! And I volunteered both on Friday and Saturday (the weekend here) and I may go again the next weekend as well.
I met Cassandra Clare and Holly Black, and they are definitely one of the nicest authors ever.
And just seeing the younger readers piling onto the long queue to talk to her or get their book signed was a treat by itself.
We also had Jeff Kinney, the author of The Diary of a wimpy kid series, making the little ones jump, and scream during his session. He was an entertainer all round.
I met some awesome bookish friends during the festival and we had some quirky breaks during the 12 hour shift. And I can’t wait to met them all next week again.
Quick February updates
I read 4 books in the last month, And that is one less than last month but I am okay with this.
I got done with my TV and Netflix ban and I binged watched so many movies and series during the month. So many that I let that creep into my reading and blogging times even. Guys I am not proud of myself about that at all.
On the other hand I got back to running and I think I might start to enjoy it again.
I tried my hand at crochet and I should maybe accept my defeat. It takes so much time and patience, y’all!! BUT, I ended up with this not so perfect heart at the end of the day. So what do you think?
I have been reading the 5th and 6th books for about 10 days now and I have not yet completed about 50 pages on them put together.
What I watched:
I watched the Unbreakable and Split again last week so that I will not miss anything for when I watch Mr Glass. But I guess it went futile. I liked the movie but I didn’t love it.
And I am so late to the Bohemian Rhapsody and I confess a sobbing mess during the end of the movie. Why I did that? We’ll never ask!
My monthly top picks
Now that I have spent a lot of time watching movies and series, why not put it to use for my blog? So here are my top five picks
I have not been able to hit all the blogs this week, but I have a quick round up of the ones I loved here.
I found myself agreeing with a lot of the points that Lena from Lena’s Notebook mentioned on her post on book snobbery.
Do you feel bad and ashamed for the things that you do or don’t as a blogger? I do, constantly. Sam fro WLBB wrote an entire post on blogger shame just to say that we aren’t alone on that.
Do you love audiobooks? Then you need to head on to Nicole’s post on why audiobooks are important and join the discussion on Feed your fiction addiction.
I loved Dani’s post on how and why Urban Fantasy is her favorite subgenre on Perspective of a writer.
If you are a writer, you have to join the discussion with Clo on Bookwyrming Thoughts on writing realistic characters right away.
I added a few books to my TBR from the post on list of books for Slytherins by Malanie from Malanie loves fiction.
Pin me!
Let us chat
How was your February? Was it as fun as mine? Who are the authors that you want to meet some day? Let us talk.
