When perfection comes the imperfect disappears

0/10 hated it. Do not recommend.

Ugh. She did great though. She's good. The nurse put a bandaid on her baby doll so they'd match. 🥹

I have once again been subjected to one of her sex scenes. 🙃

Can we normalize not marketing romance with explicit scenes? That would be great.

Saw a thread where they were saying it's good or fine to enjoy red flag/toxic behavior in books because it's fiction and we know it's not real.

So many people were like, "yeah! We're adults and we know it isn't real."

"fiction is a safe place to explore dark ideas."

And I thought about it a while and I think the flaw is that, yes, it is fiction, and yes, it's a fine place to explore some ideas, but ideas are real things. Your actual person, your soul, is interacting with these ideas and at some point you have to decide if they are good or bad and act accordingly.

If you know something is unhealthy and bad, it is probably unwise to routinely associate positive emotions with it. Because what we take in, shapes how we see the world. So yes, you know it's a fake story, but eventually the ideas will work their way in. Because you are teaching yourself it's good. It's enjoyable.

And I think if you are legitimately enjoying it, there might already be a problem.

That idea freaks me out if I am being honest.

I didn't notice with the other POVs clogging it up, but the main plot has major pacing issues.

I did what I thought worked as a time jump, but it is such a hard pivot of focus for the characters, it doesn't work. I have to show some more of what I skipped over otherwise it's just like "what just happened?"

It's not helping that like two years ago my sil decided to start writing and is publishing her third book this year.

I feel like, ugh, why is it taking me so long when so many people write so much faster?

Maybe not generally, but it's the nature, I think, of the addictions I have been battling. Getting lost in a book or a story I am writing or my social media and associated projects is a sort of false joy. It's just numbness, really. Whenever I surface and reengage in my life in any meaningful way, I recall what joy really is.