#so much wrong

Bucky’s about 10 years older than Peter and Peter is so damn anxious because he thinks his dad will freak about the age difference.

So he tells his dad nothing about his husband (not even that he’s married) and he tells his husband nothing about his dad (even that he’s Tony Stark) (he uses Parker instead of Stark because it gets him a lot less attention).

So yeah, Thanksgiving arrives and Peter is invited home to where Tony’s happily married to Pepper and they have adorable 3yo Morgan who thinks her big brother Peter is the bees knees.

Tony and Bucky just stare. And stare. Because they fucked for months after Tony’s divorce to Peter’s mom.

Que awkward weird thanksgiving dinner where there’s so much tension and everyone but Morgan feels it.

Morgan doesn’t care all she’s having the time of her life because she hasn’t seen her big brother since summer.

IDK some sick part of me wants Peter to find it hilarious that his husband “has a type” and it’s a Stark.

Pepper can’t be pissed either because her husband loves to be pegged, something he just cryptically told her he “picked up a liking for” after his divorce.

It really is a massive ding to the plot, I suppose there could be some justification in characters not being able to join in on short notice, but still, some of the most fun scenes in Xrd were seeing characters fighting alongside each other. I mean, the beacon scene with Leo and Johnny back-to-back while the Jellyfish carried Faust, Robo-Ky and Venom vs Bedman, and the massive Gear fight where basically everyone got to do some ass kicking (even if it was a little cliche it was at least a lot of fun, plus Slayer and Gabriel's scene was spectacular), all of those were entertaining and let other characters have a spotlight moment, even if Sol was still the protagonist. Having such a limited story cast made the story feel a lot more narrower and small-scale, at least to me. Even if it wasn't perfect, at least in Xrd they could manage a few small sideplots and give other characters some development, like obviously Ram learning her individual value, May running away from the Jellyfish, and Venom deciding to sacrifice himself for the guild.

Yeah that bit with Ram and Leo did seem a little odd to me, though considering the rest of the game it feels more like a harmless gag (I mean, she even says she's not sure why she likes him). I was personally hoping it would be more of a paternal relationship, though not like we got to see anything in canon, anyway.

I awoke hours later and prepared to leave as I rarely stay with a woman until morning no matter how comfortable I am in bed or how accommodating she is. They’ve always understood and accepted this.

I’ve learned to choose the women I take to bed carefully. I’ve dallied with widows, divorceés, single women who’ve wanted to step outside the societal norm, and even some of royal status but I’d never been with married women or prostitutes. 

The latter being entirely too messy for my tastes and, I do have a sense of decency. It was her chestnut hair that first caught my eye when I first saw Agatha walking ahead of me. 

My trained eyes had traveled the length of her body assessing her hips and posterior through the shapeless dress. If she knew what I was thinking she would positively blush.  The only part I missed was seeing her face but when I did I knew I would have her.

 High cheekbones and a lush mouth are a titillating combination, one that even I can’t resist. After observing her for a few days to make sure she was unattached I’d introduced myself and she has been my companion these last few weeks.  Agatha has made my stay here much more palatable.

A Highland Ghost for Christmas Ranty Review - Part One

Hi everyone! This review is going to be a bit different from our normal reviews... this is going to be ranty. It’s going to be rave-y.

That’s because I got pissed off at this book early on, so being the kind, caring person that I am, I decided to share my pain with you. This is going to be image-heavy. That’s because I am going to be sharing snippets of the novella with you.

That’s right... this short book managed to piss me off so much that I needed to rant about it for a long time.

Let’s begin, shall we?

I want to state that I did not go looking for something awful to read. As a point of fact, I desperately want to read good indie-pubbed stories from authors I’m not familiar with. I get annoyed when bloggers/reviewers only rec the same three or four authors/stories and most of them are trad-pubbed. It’s disheartening as an indie, so I tend to give indie authors a lot more slack than I do trad-pubbed ones.

This book has a lot of things that I like...

Ghost romance? Check.

Highlanders? Check.

Cute dog? Check!

Mysterious matchmaker? Check!

It’s like this book is tailor-made to fit my tastes. But it failed in so many ways that I wanted to scream.

Let’s start with the easy... the technical.

This is the title of the very first chapter. The very first thing that people see when they start reading. And it’s misspelled!

At first I thought they meant Santa Clause like the Tim Allen movie. But no... no clauses. No loopholes. Nothing like that. Just a good old fashioned misspelling that any proofreader worth their salt would catch.

And it happened again.

Then I started noticing other errors. Homophones. Random commas. Missing commas and the like.  Here’s an example from page 1.... trust me when I say there’s more in this 59 page book.

My general rule is that I allow for 1 error every 10 pages. People are human. Editors are human. People make mistakes. People miss things.

She used up 4 errors on page one alone.

And it only got worse. So based on pure punctuation alone, this book was down a star.

And she had an editor...

An editor who missed the spelling of acknowledgments!

ARGHHHH!!!!

As I read, I started noticing other novice storytelling errors. Things like harping on something but then never revealing what that something was.

In this case, it was an agreement with her friend Ellie. We never find out what she agreed to. What the quid pro quo was. That’s not good. Worse... Ellie only really exists for this ONE scene and then never shows back up. One scene wonders are fine, but it speaks to the heroine that her supposed best friend is not part of her life other than to be the catalyst for the two romantic leads to meet... or supposed romantic leads... I’ll get to that later.

Even the main character’s dog was barely a footnote. I, a dog lover, forgot that she even had a dog multiple times during this story. A good rule of thumb for writing is to keep the number of characters small and consistent.

And to save your screens, I’ll stop here for now. Tune in next time where I start ranting about all the problematic tropes and poor characterization.