Status Updates From Walkaway. La Vida por Defecto

3. Each chapter is from a different perspective. There seems to be a struggle between character development and having the appropriate setting/setup for specific philosophical musings. For example, in the first chapter Et Cetera is quite taken with the rich girl. In the second book, Et Cetera is suddenly all about one of the walk aways and seems to forget about rich girl

4. Really like the political and philosophy contained. Why do the walk aways still use so much technology? Romance surprisingly well done, but gets a bit tiring after some time

Starting

Sentences I hate pt 4: "The girl was not more than sixteen, cute as a cute thing, round face and full, purplish lips. Tam thought she might be Vietnamese or Cambodian. She had a bit of acne. Her jet-black, straight hair was chopped into an artful mess."

Oh, now he learns how to describe people -- but only ethnic, attractive ladies, CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER.

“She was beautiful, tall with a shaved head, a wasp waist and wide hips, and skin the color of burnt sugar. Iceweasel and Gretyl had both snuck looks at her when they thought the other wasn’t looking.” BRO THIS IS THE FIRST TIME YOU DESCRIBE SOMEONE, AND IT HAPPENS TO BE A SEXY ETHNIC FOR YOUR CHARACTERS TO OGLE, oh my god, break your word processor, Cory, I fucking hate you.

Sentences I hate Pt 3:
"She's got good diagnostic tools, and she's running them on the system to get integrity checks on the firmware and operational code. Of course, I'm totally inside all the system calls she's making and I'm giving her the checksums her diagnostics expect to see, because fuck you, all that base totally belongs to me."

This book is making me hate computers.

What a novel way of developing character. "Would you tell me your backstory, please" says one character, and then the other expounds for uninterrupted pages at a time, no matter whatever else it is that they're supposed to be in the middle of (like now, when they're supposed to be running away from the army that is hellbent on ridding the world of their kind).

Sentences I Hate Pt2:
"The whole thing. Kidnapping, infiltration, pwnage. It's terrible. It's terrifying. It's also badass, all that pwnage."

I cannot wait to read something written by a woman, my god.

Hark! A main character (heroic) has arrived on the scene and she knows the answer to the thing these side characters (pitiful) have been struggling with. Amazing! However does she do it! It's wonderful what you can achieve with the powers of technobabble and the advantage of being a main character!

Sentences I hate: “He was comprehensively pwned, metaphorical pants down.”

This flashback has gone on so long and Doctorow is so wrapped up in it that he forgot that it’s a flashback and forgot to conjugate the verbs in past perfect for an entire paragraph, and then went back to the past perfect, and no one caught it.

This absolute fucking schmuck, jesus christ.

Time for my book to have some conflict, what should I do. I know! I’ll do a time-jump so that I don’t have to waste any time with any suspense, and I’ll have it be a rando that was never mentioned before. Need a flashback to explain who he is though, to assure my readers that in fact he has a very long history with one of the main characters! Hell yeah, there was no possible better way to structure this!

This is a book for software engineers who don’t read other books. This is a book for the people Tyler Durden would have stuffed in a locker after worldwide societal collapse. This is a book for people who know how to code an app but not how to work a sewing machine. I hate this book.

A character sits down with another character and opens the conversation with "Do you think human rights are more important than property rights" -- bro, I promise you none of the less-than-mediocre men in this fucking book are Socrates, what the actual fuck are you doing.

A character praises herself for being good at remembering names after another character clarifies his name, after referring to two characters (INCLUDING THE ONE WHOSE NAME WAS CLARIFIED) as "the sarcastic one" and "the girl" in her inner monologue the whole time.

And then on the next page, she gets wrong the name of the character to whom she literally bragged about being good at names to.

I'm crashing out.