Aurora Dimitre's Books and Rambling

 

 NOTE: What makes this different from my end of the year count is that I do count re-reads, thank you very much, in this list. But! As of the end of February, these are my best ten and worst five books of the year (so far).  THE BEST: 10. Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson, 5 stars What the hell! It was great! Fuck me, right! 9. Night Shift by Stephen King, 5 Stars I still love this collection. It's just wacky in a way that a lot of King's later short stories aren't ; at this point, when you think short stories and Stephen King, they're almost literary. This one isn't literary. The laundry machine eats people. 8. Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun 1 by Izumi Tsubaki, 5 stars Still the king. 7. A Special Place by Peter Straub, 5 stars Real talk, I finished this last night and it was so goddam good. Apt Pupil WHO???? Keith would eat you alive, Todd. 6. The Dark Half by Stephen King, 5 stars Still a great one. I feel like this one almost leans more Bachman than King, just ...

 I don't know what it is. I mean, I love a good flashback, because I think they're very fun and if a character becomes my favorite I want to write everything that happened to them ever, hence why the Aughts Boys series is like that , but this is going to be the year of flashback books, I swear to God.  Guillaume is coming out March 3rd. About halfway through the book, we get an extended flashback sequence for like twenty thousand words or something. I mean, I couldn't write that book and not include the island parts, right? Like, they were necessary.  Class B comes out sometime after that. About a third of the way through the book, we get what is essentially a rehashing of Beyr , except this time from Beyr's POV. But like, the first draft of this book used to have random flashbacks and I think I like this better? To be decided as to whether it will stay like this or like, I'll start spreading them around??? I don't know. Currently writing the second draft of Pro...

 

 

 This series is never going away, I swear. I'm coming up on the end of Class B , soon, which is sort-of spin-off, sort-of- Pentalogy-of-Hell number six, basically just, wait, Casey's my favorite character and he sorta just disappeared out of the last book in the series, so let's wrap him up and also I LOVE doing Casey backstory so let's shove some of that in there. That one. I'm almost done with that one. It's going to take a good chunk of work, but it'll be done before May is out is my guess. This is not the end of the POH-verse... oh do I have novellas a-coming.  Reminder to pre-order Guillaume if you have not yet done so! If you liked Lord of the Flies but really wished that Roger could like, REALLY go nuts, this is the book for you! March 3rd! It comes out March 3rd!

 

This year has been a Stephen King year so far. I'm not saying I haven't read only Stephen King books; I am, however, saying that I have read five of his books so far this year, most of them re-reads, and it is only the end of February, so, like. You know. And I've been having fun! Let's look at the ones I've read this year! Currently, I'm re-reading Under the Dome for the first time in a long time and fuck I love this book. FUCK I love this book. So fun! Also huge, and so all of my fifth graders were like "what the hell" what I pulled it out during silent reading time.  Most recently, I re-read The Dark Half , which is historically one of my favorite King novels... and you can tell it's so Bachman-inspired it's insane. It's gorier than other King. It's more depressing than other King. It's like "if Richard Bachman wrote a Stephen King novel", lol. Still love it.  I re-read Night Shift! Super old fun stories. I do love his ...

 

 

 I just came off a four-day reading stint of People of the Wolf , which, much to my mother's chagrin, I did not enjoy, and what does the book wall do? It gives me a breather by giving me a fucking DEADTIME STORIES book and then fucking WARBREAKER. WARBREAKER BY BRANDON SANDERSON. I WILL BE BEHIND ON MY READING CHALLENGE UNTIL THE DAY THAT I DIE.

 

 I like to put one out a year! So let's talk about TRUTH OR DARE. First up, cover: So, what's in here? More short stories than essays, but, you know, I write more short stories than essays even though I'm better at the essays.  UNDERSTUDY is a very short, flash-fic story.  OHIO IS FOR EMO KIDS is an Aughts Boy s story! Read it for the ship you didn't know you needed. Also, I guess, spoilers for the Matt book .  PIT STOP is an old, horror-y surrealist mess. I could've sworn I had this in a collection before but I looked through all my collections and I did Not.  THE HORROR AT CAMP JELLYJAM: CAT NUMBER ONE is an essay about my cat, which I wrote the day after we got our cat. See cat below TRUTH OR DARE, the titular story, is another Aughts Boys one. If you ever wondered HOW THE HELL ZEKE AND QUINN GOT TOGETHER BETWEEN ONE MORE SAD SONG AND HIT OR MISS , THIS IS THE ANSWER. Also, got rejected by Taco Bell Quarterly! MATT KLEIN is a character sketch of Matt Klein,...

 

 

 Two sales, actually. I sold two eBooks at the beginning of February: One More Sad Song and Spahn . Ladies and gentlemen, I have made SEVENTY CENTS so far this year. So, in honor of that, let's talk about some of my books. Five, how about. Let's talk about five of them. Five is manageable. First up, Guillaume is up for pre-order. I got a blurb, even, and it's below: "I've had the pleasure of knowing Aurora Dimitre across her entire writing career, and Guillaume is a sort of zenith of all of her strengths. In the days of Lord of the Flies and Stephen King fanfiction, Aurora was somewhat famous for out-there characterizations that went beyond the source material (some of which still exist in those corners of the internet) and Guillaume is a natural outgrowth of that. Where it outshines its inspiration is in the friendship central to it---Though it has its share of macabre and gore, the real tension comes from Ashton and Guillaume's dynamic. That's what...

 

One of our fourth graders is a little horror guy. I understand him, because I am also a little horror guy (first book I remember reading was Monster Blood by RL Stine, my bible as an upper elementary student was Encyclopedia Horrifica , started in on Stephen King at twelve), but some teachers understand him less. They're concerned about this.  I teach grammar to all of the third, fourth, and fifth graders. Fourth grade recently did adjectives and, of course, they had a page where they could go crazy and add adjectives to nouns and this is what he came up with:  killer bee robber store demon dog bloody shoes I'm wandering around, as I do, and this kid normally needs a lot of attention, so I'm stopping by frequently, and as I'm walking past, he looks up at me and goes, "Can I actually write these?" And so I thought about it. And I thought about his homeroom teacher. And I thought about having to deal with the possibility of discussing all that shit when, really,...

 

 

 So, Lord of the Flies is my favorite book of like, all time, currently about to put out a book inspired on it ( preorder GUILLAUME here) and this year I started teaching elementary school. And there have been people talking about how, how there have been instances about kids pulling together and working together and well.  Well .  As someone who does currently teach ten year old boys, well . I teach a Jack. The boy holds court in the lunchroom and is generally in charge. They split him up from his Roger this year (his Roger is my favorite even though he does cause Constant Problems and Sometimes Looks Like Jack Nicholson From the Shining In Pictures) but the boy is a Jack. The Roger! Teaching elementary school has made me convinced that I could fix Roger from Lord of the Flies.  I think that one of the biggest strengths in Lord of the Flies is just how realistic the interactions are between the kids. I don't think I fully appreciated it until my most recent re-read...