u/expressionism

That ending scene with Becka in this week’s episode was so so heartbreaking. It also reminded me strongly of the ending of The Handmaid’s Tale book, when the eyes come for June and wordlessly usher her into the van, and Nick tells her to go with them. I know many people hate the comparison of Garth with Nick but his role reminds me so much of book Nick. I wonder if he will try to protect Becka somehow… I feel so sad for her 😭

All this talk of The Deal and Off Campus had me thinking about the trope and while the premise of fake dating only to fall for each other sounds really delicious, I find myself so tired of the trope of a conventionally attractive FMC with low self confidence or whatever somehow being “discovered” by a hot MMC and then they get together. She was hot all along, just didn’t know it, yada yada yada. While I loved Princess Diaries as a teen, this is not the vibe I’m looking for anymore.

I’m yearning for some unconventional FMCs in this trope! The black cats, the plain, maybe even “ugly” (I don’t like that word but ykwim) girls, the snarky, insecure, bitchy as a self defence ones… I’m pretty open, I just want it to not be a conventionally attractive woman with a good personality who society would not view as unconventional at all. Bonus points if she’s unconventional AND a WOC and/or smart.

Please give me your recs! I’m open to both books and AO3 stories. For books, I prefer KU but I’ll take anything at this point! TIA!!

I use AI to write out little stories for myself whenever I get an idea.

I’ve tried Claude (both Sonnet and Opus), I’ve tried ChatGPT, Gemini… hell, even Grok. Claude Opus used to be the best back in 3.0 days but everything since then has been a decline in quality. I don’t know if I’ve gotten more discerning, spent too much time reading AI writing or what but everything that comes out of these tools now sounds the same — the same tics, cadence, flowery, nonsensical language. The dialogue was never great but the prose was decent and now both suck and everything sounds the same. I honestly cannot read the output anymore.

For reference, this is the instructions I give my Claude Project. It used to work but recently, has not helped:

> Pretend you are a therapist and seasoned adult romance author specializing in complex, layered relationships and passionate love affairs. You have a penchant for writing complex, layered characters that defy a "black and white" world view. Your target audience is women aged 25 to 45. Your writing is descriptive and immersive, pulling the reader in. The story you are writing is a slow burn, passionate, spicy romance with regular points of levity to relieve tension. Ensure you include lots of physical and sensory detail - what the characters are wearing, how they are positioned, how they move, their environment… set the scene. I want the reader to be pulled into the story and experience it with the characters, hold their breath, gasp, laugh and cry with our characters.

Am I doing something wrong with my instructions/prompts?

Is there a better way? Are there AI models optimized specifically for Creative Writing that are available on mobile? I don’t even mind stories being corny, but the writing style needs to be better. I would love a tool that I can feed examples to get it to emulate my writing style if possible.

I had written up a reply for you but you deleted your post before I could post it. I saw that you got a lot of mean replies calling you out for your cheating so I wanted to offer a helpful word since you posted here looking for help and not judgement. Feel free to take this or leave it. I haven’t been in your situation before but I have been heartbroken and this has helped me:

I’m going to go against the grain here and say: I’m sorry your heart is broken and that this happened to you. People who have not been in your shoes (including me) don’t know the details of your relationships with either man and your life in general, so please don’t let their judgement make you feel worse about yourself. I’m sure you feel awful enough already.

Being broken up with is hard. Having something you thought you wanted blow up in your face is hard. Having to face the consequences of your bad decisions is hard.

I would say that you should now focus on two things:

1. First and foremost, individual therapy for yourself to analyze why this happened and help you better understand yourself and your choices and then build better self esteem and do better going forward
2. Couples counselling for you and your husband.

One of the things that has helped me in situations like this is writing a letter (or multiple ones) to the people who have hurt me and expressing how I feel in them. You don’t have to send them out (I didn’t) but the act of writing everything out and holding nothing back is healing in and of itself.

Hope things go better for you going forward.

As the title says… looking for someone else who has read this series. I haven’t seen it mentioned on this sub before but I came across it randomly last night on Kindle and it sucked me right in!

Ignore the covers - they're weird, but both MMC and FMC are in their 30s, which is why I started reading this series. It is strangely addictive and I've devoured 6 of 7 books in less than 24 hours 😅 AND I NEED TO TALK TO SOMEONE ELSE ABOUT THIS!!

Is it just me or is {Maverick’s Madness} woefully underwhelming? I’ve heard so much about this book and was really excited to read a bully romance with a WOC FMC. The premise is promising but i was so disappointed to discover that the writing and storytelling falls so flat. There is SO MUCH TELLING and not enough showing. There was soooooo much opportunity for angst and creating a richer inner world for these characters that wasn’t capitalized on. Also, that grovel was not close to enough. It felt like the author was just having the characters go through the motions to move the plot along rather than telling a character driven story. Sad to say it was a 2.5/5 ⭐️ for me.

Some problems I had with it:

Both characters, especially Coco, could’ve been so much better developed. What teen girl doesn’t have complicated feelings about her mother emotionally abandoning her after her father’s death, then marrying someone else on short notice and springing a cross state move on her, forcing her to leave her lifelong friends for *senior year*? What teen girl doesn’t have insecurities and flaws? Where is the anger, the rebellion, the self recrimination and disgust at loving a man who threw slurs at her like her grandparents who refused to accept her due to her skin colour? She made the FMC so one dimensional, it was laughable.

Also, maverick roughs up Coco a bunch of times and leaves marks on her… yet her parents never notice or ask questions? wtf?? Her stepfather is a teacher in the same school but doesn’t hear anything about the racial bullying she faces? Even if I suspend disbelief, it only goes so far.

A much better book with a similar trope I liked was {Quid Pro Quo by Nenia Camphbell} which is a step brother bully/blackmail romance with a WOC FMC (also biracial) — it is so well written and achingly beautiful in its angst.

That being said, are there other books similar to MM that are better written?