50 Shades Shadier: Chapter 11

tldnr:
Ana goes back to work and her boss is creepy and her boyfriend stalks her all day.

So earlier I was dividing up these chapters into parts pretty consistently. The sequel, you see, is even longer than the first book, which was itself almost impossibly long. (Editor's note: try as we might, though, we haven't been able to track down a word count for 50 Shades of Grey. Shadier is about 159k which makes it a pretty long book. As in, it's longer than most books any of us have read. The first books is somewhere in the neighborhood of 150k. FYI: our analysis of the book checks in at about 125k because we are thorough.)

But, when so little actually happens, that allows me to condense just one of these super-long chapters into one quick essay. I think I'm paying less attention to the prose as we go along because it's just all the same dumb problems again and again. EL isn't improving as she goes. I'm just not worrying as much about it or bringing it up that often because why bother?

Well. We're off to a pretty depressing start, aren't we? Kinda. I'm finishing up a writing class in which I was supposed to write a complete first draft of a novel and I totally didn't. I wrote a lot, which I find pretty pleasing, considering I kept up my schedule here more or less. But I didn't write a novel. I just wrote a bunch of words about stuff and nothing much happened.

But you know what? I know how good books work, and so I'm not sharing any of that project with you. Because I'm not going to just take a terrible non-story and add in a bunch of redundant sex scenes because I respect you too much for that, gentle reader. Anyway I'm in kind of a bad mood about that so I can't wait to just really torch chapter 11 with some sick burns.

Now just to look over at the first page and oh shit. I'm sick of it already. Ugh. I started with such promise and enthusiasm, too. Damn.

This chapter is, on the one hand, super dense with "stuff" but of course, almost none of it matters at all. Basically, it's just a lot of Ana being mad about Christian stalking her while she's at work, and then they make up when she gets home. The only other part of note is that Ana's boss is super creepy, which is extra obnoxious because it kind of "proves" that CG was right. He's still not justified in monitoring every little detail of Ana's life, nor is it reasonable for him to dictate what she can and can't do. But because CG's stated reason for stalking Ana--Jack's creepiness--is an actual fact, CG kind of ends up looking better than he deserves. Gross. But yeah--nothing is going to happen in this chapter. The only thing that "matters" at all is that Jack outs himself as a creep, whereas up until this point, he was just a dude who gave Ana kind of a weird vibe. Scintillating!

Our story thus far:

 

50 Shades of the Complainist: Chapter 22

tldnr
Ana flies to Georgia and then Christian flies to Georgia.

Warnings:
Christian does the stalker-type stuff that he always does.

I declared in the beginning of 2013 that I was going to spend too much money on stereo equipment and write a book. I have, effectively, accomplished both of these goals (Editor's note: "predictions" might be more fair here.) although not quite in the manner I expected. You see, I have basically written an entire book about Fifty Shades of Grey.

In total, I've written about 125,000 words about this dumb book. Has anyone written more about it, by volume? I don't know. I mean, probably, but I only say that because I just seem an unlikely person to have written the most criticism about 50 Shades. I have no evidence. I'm sure that there are plenty of people who've written a million words or more of 50 Shades fanfic, and I see from a quick check of Amazon that there are a number of digital-only parody versions and a surprising number of tangentially related cookbooks. But I don't see anything like a readers' guide, which I guess I'm kind of working on in my own bitter way.

Now all I have to do is convince some risk-taking publisher that the inevitable movie-backlash is going to make my brand of snark a lucrative investment. This thing is probably worth hundreds of dozens of dollars, right? I'm assuming that the price of the paperback version of this book (Editor's note: the only print version.) will be ten dollars, and that it will sell more than 200 copies.

I'll also clean it up a bit, make it a little less bloggy, and not mention as often how much I'm drinking while doing this. Or maybe that's what people want? Even more cocktail recipes? Not sure! But in any case, that's what I'll be up to in a couple weeks when our heroes have concluded the first third of their adventures: trying to get in on some of that sweet, sweet, 50 Shades cheddar.

But first! A trip to Georgia!