HELLO AND WELCOME BACK TO EPISODE WHATEVER NUMBER IT IS OF IRISH TWINS WHERE I, YOU’RE FAVORITE HOST, WILL BE DISCUSSING A TOPIC OF INTEREST.

Said topic being…

Calligraphy fan art?

Okay, so, I was always kinda jealous of people who genuinely could draw and like… could make fan art and… yeah… all that…. But I mean, I'm an awful artist so like, I've never even tried… until I realized that I could turn my calligraphy sketches into fan art!

Like, take a favorite quote of the character, calligraphize it, add some details and voila!

You appear with something like thisss. This is fan art for one of my favorite authors, Allie Lynn and her mmc Reed who is like…. THE ABSOLUTE BEST. anyways, its basically just little pieces of him and one of my favorite lines of his hehe

As well as her fmc Chaya because y’know what, why nottttt

And this one is fan art for a snippet series i am currently reading on ydubs. I don’t even like romance that much but all of a sudden Aryanna (The author) had to start popping up in my feed and i realized i do like romance if she’s the one writing XD. this is supposed to be based off of her mmc, Jasper, don’t ask me why i chose to do males as my first fan arts it just… happened, it was jaxtons fault *nods in understanding of my mc being the fault of my random and not intentional choice*

Just ignore the irritating comma in the first image though and the still not so great art skills, but y’know i’m learning anywayssss, be prepared in the next many articles for calligraphy fan art by yours truly because why not?

So, because I’ve started this topic of fan art i’mma showcase two pieces of fan art i’ve received for my work plus a convo i had with this same person about some side characters *cackles*

Jaxton fan art:

Ky if he were middle aged fan art:

Random convo i had with the artist of these two about Ky and Ky’s sister:

I know its beautiful *fp* i couldn’t stop giggling.

Anywayssss now that i’ve dumped fan art galore on you lets move on to my personal thoughts on Rangers Apprentice, or at least what I’ve read so far.

*sigh* okay, so I don’t mind the series, don’t get me wrong, it's got a very engaging plot and normally as long a books plot is engaging I’m not too terribly picky and will fan girl all over said book, maybe i just haven’t read books like these before and thats why i’m struggling with them, who knows, but um, either way…

They aren’t really my favorite books. Here's why:

1. Telling rather than showing: Okay this wouldn’t even be a huge problem if it were just the matter of Flannagan telling you what has happened in previous books to make it so that you could pick up a book at any point in the series and now be confused, which speaking of, i honestly feel like thats an offense all its own cause like, you can’t just pick up a book in the middle of a series, that's cheating, but anyways, thats not why this is a problem GAH, STOP SIDETRACKING BRAIN. *clears throat* anyways, if that were pretty much the only usage of telling I wouldn’t have probably pointed this out, but… its not. There is some showing but oftentimes it's just flat out telling. He felt angry. He felt sad. He felt his heart shatter and jumped up. She wanted to tell him but brushed it aside because he looked nervous. etc. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled with authors who show moreso than they tell, but salt and sky, my poor writers brain who has been trained mercilessly by Mrs. Reid to show rather than tell has been hurting so badly at the excessive amount of telling in this series
2. Exposition and ‘ly’ words: okay, this is more of a nitpicky thought, but paired with the amount of telling in the book my brain wasn’t as engaged in the story so it picked up more on these two things. One was exposition. I recently read a book by James Scott Bell about revision and editing for publishing and one thing that is mentioned is to refrain from exposition and if you do need to do it don’t just dump it in a paragraph. Unrealistically. There were several places where there was just an exposition dump that technically was just said for the reader to know where they were going rather than something the characters needed to know. And in my opinion, having a character ask a ton of questions and be an inquisitive person for only half the book just so that the other character can dump some exposition… is kinda lazy of the author… cause like, it’d almost have been more appreciated to just have a paragraph explaining what he dumped in dialogue and made sound super cringy because of. Another time I got caught up was when he was going over where a fief was and its purpose and everything even though he’d just finished explaining that all of them had been well schooled in geography and the fiefdoms of Arulen. So yeah, not as bad as the telling but it tripped me up a few times which in turn made me notice how many adverbs were used. Every sentence pretty much. *sigh* don’t mind my nitpicky author's brain y’all. I’m sorry I really have tried to love these books but they just don’t even compare to some of the books I've read in my life.
3. Characters: something else I kept picking up on that was ringing my writers bell was the characters, their arcs, personalities and reactions to situations based on that. It's literally not there. The characters weren’t similarly feeling per se, but they were kinda flat. I felt like I couldn’t really connect with them, partly because of telling and partly because they just didn’t have a consistent personality. They were constantly changing to fit the story and plot rather than developing and fulfilling a character arc as the plot progressed. The romance also wasn’t super well done, I could have cared less if there had been any at all and the stuff that is there just doesn’t seem… idk.. Healthy? I like healthy relationships if I'm gonna read about a relationship and just the way it was talked about and acted out, eh, it just wasn’t really my thing.
4. Plot: this one kinda hinges a little on the last one, but the plot… okay it was halfway decent, the battles were sweet and the differences in enemies was awesome buuuut, there's the little problem of there never being any real danger. Flannagan doesn’t let his characters feel any real heat, sure they have big problems that could cause a lot of damage, but they don’t. They get stopped in some convenient way before they can make the characters anything more than uncomfortable. For instance, when Evanlyn followed Slagor onto his ship and then realized she was out to shore… nothing happened, she wasn’t discovered, conveniently the Temujai came to talk on board the ship so she heard everything that was said and Evanlyn didn’t get discovered. That's all fine and dandy but where's the tension? Where's the conflict? Where’s the suspense? Where's the meat of the story? Where's the problem that's gonna twist my stomach with dread and make me want to murder the author? It's not there.

Anyways, those were my biggest issues with what I’ve read in Rangers Apprentice so far, and frankly, maybe i”m just picky, maybe these books were written like this intentionally and i’m just not the target audience but whatever the case, I was kinda disappointed after hearing so many good things about the series only to find that it was lacking in several extremely large factors of a good book. I’m going to finish out the series because I would like to see if it doesn’t get any better but who knows, XD

Okay, well, now that I’ve poured out my negative review i’mma list some things that I did really appreciate about Rangers apprentice, XD

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1. Worldbuilding. Okay, this one kinda encapsulates a lot but seriously, this dude's worldbuilding was awesome. I was blown away by how organized and plotted it was. I've never been one for worldbuilding so reading and being able to understand it was phenomenal. Not to mention, like, who wouldn’t love the Skandians? Like, what the salt, they were the absolute best hehehe, more specifically Erak was the best, but y’know, can’t pick favorites here. I think Skandia was also the most ingrained in the country I’ve gotten so far, like, I could picture everything perfectly
2. The battles: Alright, this is similar to the last one, but oh. My. word. Those battles were so cool. The way Flanagan can keep you engaged while you’re reading pages of fighting is wildddd. Plus, I loved the ingenuity of them, someone did his research, XD.
3. Ranger elements: okay while I did find some of the ranger elements a bit lazy in certain situations, you can’t help but appreciate how he came up with something like having 50 specially trained rangers spread out across the 50 different cities of Arulen, and then adding a bunch of details, coming up with a bunch of the training that would go into it, yeah, that was awesome.
4. Character voice: Even if the characters themselves were kinda flat, I will say that the character voice was wonderful, I could always tell who was talking and when and honestly? I sometimes preferred Horace's voice to Will’s voice, XDXD.
5. Humor: okay, this one might not count just cause it almost doesn’t matter the book, if there's humor, almost guaranteed i’mma like that humor. Halts humor in particular oh my word *cackles* it was great, and poor Horace who was so oblivious half the time *dies*

Alright, now that you’ve gotten a huge review/critic dump, I’mma sign out now *bows dramatically* Of course, I will be sure to drop some memes first, but farewell fellow humans, until next time!

“I don’t need a recipe for disaster, I usually eyeball it.” -random pintrest pin i found

~Megan 🖋️🎶💣😇