So, there is now just 1 week left until Furry Book Month is finished! Time is running out.
Once everything is said and done I’ll probably make a post laying out my thoughts about the process of running Furry Book Month, and how I think it could be improved in the future. For now, though, I am actually quite pleased. I’ve really enjoyed watching twitter to see all the people promoting the event.
I ended up buying 4 books that were being promoted (Legacy, Off Leash, Flower’s Fang, and The Dragon Tax). Also ended up giving a review for Huntress, which I had read before and forgotten to give a review to. One of the books (Legacy by Hugo Jackson) I’ve already finished reading in fact. I’ll be writing a review of it in a day or two after I finish processing my thoughts on it, but might as well share some immediate impressions.
One thing that is always an experience for me when reading is that I always inevitably compare my skill to the person I’m reading, most noticeably when I see them doing things better than I do. This is an embarrassingly common occurrence, but I do my best to take note of what the author is doing when it happens.
In this case, I noticed that Hugo Jackson spent far more time describing his primary protagonist than I tend to do. Generally I try to keep character descriptions on the light side other than a few pertinent details. I like my characters to be identified by how they behave and act, and trust the reader to come up with an image that they like using the key physical descriptors I give.
Hugo Jackson, by contrast, managed to go into a fair amount of dept about what the protagonist was wearing, something I would avoid for fear of interrupting the story flow for something like an info dump. He made it work, however, and I was impressed by how effectively he managed to portray a fairly intricate outfit. It has made me think that perhaps I need to do some exercises where I focus on describing characters without becoming boring.
