A little common sense, please

I am losing time.  Seriously, one minute I’m writing the blog for mid-August, when I go to write the next blog—I think—a week later, I find three weeks have passed.

Life in lockdown is a blur of work, exercise (still doing Ringfit), and sleep, even on the weekends.  The days are running together, with little to no writing done.  Many days I don’t even go outside.

I don’t check my personal mail often.  It’s mostly spam at present, and I’m sitting at the same computer all day every day.  When I’m done I just want to get away there.  Hence, if you send us an email, it may take longer than normal to answer.  It’s not intentional.

I have made some time for reading—usually at night when I drop into bed, exhausted, and can’t sleep.  Which of course means I’m exhausted the next day, too, but that’s another matter.  And hey, if someone has come up with a solution for laying down in bed and reading with glasses on, I want to know about it. Falling asleep reading is a luxury I can no longer afford if I want to keep my glasses in good shape.

Amazon had a three-month no-pay option on Kindle Unlimited, so I took that up.  I have found some good books there, some bad books, and many in between. 

Somewhere along the line I hit a patch of, “Hey girl, you’ve inherited property and powers from a relation you’ve never heard of before, here’s the key,” urban cosies. I like wish fulfilment books as much as anyone, along with inherited powers, but please, please, make the protagonist work for those powers.  It’s not super-believable when your former non-powered, no-idea I had powers heroine is suddenly able to overcome bad guys who’ve been evil for hundreds of years.

(It reminds me a lot of Ringfit, actually. The computer exercise game I’m playing. You’re up against a super-buff supposedly-bad dragon who exercises all day every day, and you still manage to beat him. I think not. One hit from him and you’d be dead, even if he knocked you accidentally.  Truly.  There is no way a newbie like me could beat him in reality.  But I digress.)

Not only that, in age of scammers and identity theft, authors please don’t write stories where the protagonist takes someone’s word without verification.  Not without setting up a plausible background for it, anyway.

Five of the stories I read and discarded (nowadays I only read as far as I want to) started with the protagonist losing everything—job, home, boyfriend and/or family.  (Very convenient if you’re about to up sticks and cross the world.)  The doorbell rings.  The visitor turns out to be a lawyer, with the protagonist’s unknown [insert relative here]’s will, and the keys to the relative’s house.

Let me tell you dear author, I would think that person at the door is a scammer. I would shut the door in his face (it’s always a him) so fast he won’t finish talking.  If you come to my home and tell me you are a lawyer, I won’t believe you.  A legitimate lawyer would contact me by letter or phone first, set up an appointment, and I would go into his office to talk to him.  Only then, maybe, would I start to believe.

And if I was the lawyer, I certainly wouldn’t hand over the keys to the house and the bank deeds to a total stranger two minutes after knocking on the door, without verifying who they are.

I probably come across as hypocritical here, because I’ve said before, over and over, that I don’t expect my historical fantasies to be abide by ‘how we thought it was back then’, but I find it harder to suspend belief when it’s current time and my own country (two of these books were set in Australia.)

I’d like my protagonists to have a modicum of common sense.