I found this pan completely covered in carbon. Ive gotten it mostly clean to see no marking besides the 0 and 3. Then I realized it looks exactly like this other pan I've had a long time (first one I ever redid by myself). I was curious if the 0 on the handle meant something
This isnt really causing an issue in my life as much as just a curiosity thing.
My kids are in the stage of having friends over and going to their houses for sleepovers.
My 8 year old has a few friends that frequently come to our house, and one of them has her own phone. When her mom plans on coming to pick her up, she will text her daughter and not me. Obviously I am in no way saying she *shouldn't* text her own daughter, but I would also like a heads up? Especially one instance when the girls were playing outside, and I happened to notice that her mom came and picked her up without saying anything to me or even coming in to say bye. I did see it out the window, so I know it was her own mom that got her and she didnt just dissappear, but if I hadn't seen it, I would have been a bit worried. Even when my 8 year old came in and told me her mom came and got her. On the other occasions when they have been inside, the girl will come say "my moms here." before she walks out the door.
I dont know, it just seems odd to me. I would appreciate a bit of communication my way when Im the one watching over their child.
My 11 year old, who has a phone, I will text her when I am coming, but I also give a heads up to the friends mom, so she knows to expect me.
Am I weird for this? Is there a certain etiquette for sleepovers? How do you guys handle this sort of thing?
Id like to start by saying I love SJMs ideas. The plots, the world building. I wish there was more of it. What I don't care for is her plot holes and ability to always seem to focus on the wrong thing, or how she manages to give away her own big reveals half the time.
TOG seems to spread itself too thin, being about 400 pages and focusing on a tournament, a love triangle, a murder mystery, and whatever subplot Kaltain is.
The tournament starts off a bit important, and then is quickly back burnered, where we get little snippets of "its been X days/weeks and X amount of tests have gone by so we're down to X champions."
The love triangle is interesting except for the fact where neither side of it really feels earned yet. Neither pairing has had any emotional moment of connection and I'm past 300 pages at this point. Dorian might be a little convincing at this point, but we wouldnt even know Choal was interested if it weren't for his forced POVs where we're told he is.
The murder mystery would be more interesting if she chose to confide in Choal and work together on it. We dont even know Choal is actually doing anything about it besides the passing line of him claiming to be in his PoVs. We never actually see/read anything progress on his part. And he questions why Celaena cares about the Wyrd marks even though it should be fairly obvious?
Kaltain is clearly important. The Black rings get mentioned constantly so it boils down to either the ambassador is controlling Cain with the ring, or Kaltain is controlling them both. I figured that out before I got halfway through the book and would be absolutely shocked if I'm wrong, and not in a pleasantly surprised way.
SJM had a lot of the same issues with ACOTAR (havent read CC yet). She spends a lot of time meandering and writing fanfiction scenes for her characters, without spending any real time developing the plot and relationships. Her characters feel that way because she says so, not because they've gone through the experiences to earn it. She's inconsistent with who knows what. And anytime a character figures out something important, its because another character told them, not because they found out in any interesting way on their own.
And Celaena happens to read a passage about the monster pages before she meets it? And now Nox is just now finding out who she is and then he gets to leave the castle like its no big deal? Even though the last guy who tried to leave got shot? Literally he finds out who she is and then we get 15 words of him disappearing. It would have been so much more interesting if she had confided in Nox before and worked together with him more.
Thats another SJM flaw. She waits until the last sliver of the book to just start burning through her reveals and big finale. Its the UTM in ACOTAR all over again. The big reveals and nail biting moments should start happening somewhere in the middle, not all at the end.
Am I going to finish reading the series? Probably. Like I said, I do enjoy her plots and the characters are fine. I just wish she had structured things differently and focused on other things more.
I started a web novel, posting to several different sites. I wanted the chapters to be uploaded weekly, but only got two posted before life kind of got in the way. If I had kept schedule, today would have been chapter 4. However, I only have half of chapter 3 written. I want to continue this story. I still enjoy it. But I'm worried readers will see my untrustworthy upload history and not bother to read it. So my questions are -
How do you help keep a schedule? I am a busy mom with adhd so keeping routines is quite difficult for me, but I knew that getting into this so honestly thats on me.
How do you grow your audience besides just posting the chapters? Is there a special subreddit to advertise web novels?
Would posting every two weeks keep an audience or is that too spread out?