Day: November 13, 2020

NaNoWriMo Day 13

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The Words: 3514 words total for the day.

I didn’t have a chance to write until after supper, but
fortunately, my daughter was ready to write then too. We did 2 15-minute sprints and a 5-minute, then got her ready for bed. Then we did 2 more 15-minute sprints with the @NaNoWordSprints Twitter feed.

The Story: In another perfect example of how terrible I am at estimating word counts in advance of writing, I was really thrown off today. Yesterday, I finished storyline 1 (of 4) for this book, and it came out to a total of 30k words. I knew I’d be slimming it down a decent amount in revision, but still, I’d expected about 18k per storyline for the other three.

Today I started writing in storyline, which I already had written 2500 words of back on day 2. And in adding 3500 words to it, I’m already halfway through the outline for that storyline. So…hmm… I guess 12k words won’t be too bad, since I always knew storyline 1 was going to be longer…I’m curious to see how the other 2 storylines come out though.

As far as the story goes, I really enjoyed writing about this character, who is basically a prisoner of war, and a connection he’s making with someone in an adjoining cell. (Sort of strange to say I enjoyed writing about a prisoner, though.)

Total word count: 37,222

If you want to join me in my journey through the first year of NaNoToons (with a storyline), check out the NaNoToon from November 13, 2010!

Book Review: The Death Cure

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The Death Cure
The Maze Runner #3
by James Dashner

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: YA dystopian

Spoiler notice: The following review may contain some spoilers for the previous books in the series, The Maze Runner & The Scorch Trials.

The first thought I had after I finished reading this book was, “Eh.” And in a lot of ways, that accurately sums up my thoughts on it. It was…okay. Not terrible (better than book #2), but not great either. The answers in this book only solidified my theory that Dashner did not have the trilogy planned out when he wrote the first book and didn’t really know where to go from the maze.

The reasoning behind all of the trials and “variables” was mediocre at best. Terminology was strange and didn’t always make sense (like “killzone”), and in the end, most of what was going on was not any more grand, exciting, or surprising than everything I guessed at along the way. The ending was more of what I would call a “non-ending.” Not satisfying in any way.

The characters didn’t get much better in this book. The only character I really liked throughout the series was shafted in this book. Teresa was even more pointless in this book than in the previous. And I seriously don’t get any kind of a feel for Brenda. So many people like her, but she seems fairly lifeless to me. And something she said near the beginning of this book, now that I think of it, makes no real sense and barely came into play.

So in the end, would I recommend this series? No. Not to adult readers, at least. Maybe teenagers get more out of it, I don’t know. It seems like it’s one of those that you either love or just don’t care for at all. I liked the first book, but the rest of the series didn’t deliver on that set-up. And I have no desire to read the two prequel books.

Find out more about The Death Cure

See what I’m reading next.

If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!