I skip the boring bits

How is your social distancing going?

If we ignore the big issues, like not being able to go anywhere, and the general craziness of what’s happening, so far the hardest thing about the enforced isolation for me is remembering when to put the bins out.

Bin night is Thursday night, which I’d normally remember because it’s the day before Friday (last workday of the week, hooray) but because we’re at home all day, every day, I’m losing track of the days. Not only that, our little two-person bin, which we normally don’t fill, gets full.  We’ve already forgotten one week, which meant that the following week the bin was almost overflowing.  Thank you, garbage collectors, for still working.

I’ve not set a reminder on my phone.

I read somewhere that people should write down how it is for them in this time of pandemic and send it to the archives.  Not sure which archives, but it would be an amazing thing for a scholar of the future. One thing that is so hard to glean from historical records is how normal people lived through times of crises because often the records are newspapers and reports and government records, rather than everyday life.

Anyway, on to other things.

I convinced Sherylyn to read T. Kingfisher’s Paladin’s Grace* the other day.  “It’s great,” I said. “Lots of repartee between the characters, emotional support, and other things. And you’ll love Bishop Beartongue.”

Partway through the book Sherylyn said, “You like this book. All they do is think about each other.” (It is a romance.)

“I’d forgotten those parts,” I said.  “I don’t read those bits.”

“But it’s half the book!”

“Ah, I skip those bits.”

Sherylyn did agree, that in between the parts where the two protagonists kept thinking about how much they like each other, the book is a lot of fun, and the characters are great. (Especially Bishop Beartongue.)  But it is only half the book.

I confess, I skip a lot of the romance in books.  Sex scenes, especially. You write a sex scene then I’m not your audience.  I’m there for the story and they get in the way, so I skim them at best.  That doesn’t mean to say I won’t read your book. I will.  I’ll just likely skip those particular scenes.  And I won’t even remember they’re in the book when I’ve finished reading it.

Having said that, I do like a good romance.  The romances I love are the unstated ones. Like Wei Wuxian and Lang Wangji in The Untamed. The tv show, not the original novel, where you knew how they felt about each other, but tv show never explicitly spelt it out for censorship reasons.  Where you know how people feel about each other in everything they say and do, even when it’s not romantic.

Those, to me, are the best romances.

Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay healthy.

* I do like this book, by the way, and recommend it if you like fantasy romance. It’s fun.