A shy public reference librarian, and a college dropout who was disowned when she refused to submit to conversion therapy, encounter each other in a bookstore. He's been waiting his whole life for her. Meanwhile, she's starting her whole life over...
You know you've made it when other people make FAN ART of your characters for you.
Okay, full disclosure - I requested the art. Still, it's fan art, and it's awesome. I love to see how other people visualize my characters and setting.
Rather than do this in chronological order, I'm going to start with a brilliant parody cover made by SadCoati. Remember my "There, fixed it for you, James" comment from the dedication? My Magnum Opus started out as a simple spitefic to put E L James and her fifty shades of misrepresentation, misogyny, slut shaming, romanticized abuse and sexual assault, intellectual plagiarism (as "Snowqueen's Icedragon," she ripped off the alternate universe Twilight fanfics of other AU Twilight fanfic writers), and above all, dreadful prose, in the proper place: the rubbish bin.
How appropriate, then, that I received this as a belated April Fool's Day present:
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Bonus points for how she worked in Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged, no less. That's her worst work.
I've actually read everything Rand ever wrote. Her early books were better. I didn't agree with the ideas behind them, but they were well-written and, more importantly, well-edited.
Once Rand started refusing to allow any kind of editorial assistance, her work went to hell.
The Fountainhead was okay, if you ignored the libertarian economic message, and the hero, Howard Roark, raping the female lead, Dominique Francon, resulting in her falling in love with him and eventually becoming his wife. Also, it helps the reader to overlook the fact that Ayn Rand had a parasocial, hybristophiliac crush on serial rapist and killer William Hickman... Aside from all that, The Fountainhead was a pretty good read. It's the perfect thing for a socially awkward, gifted, hopelessly weird outsider of a teenager to read who wants to know that it's okay to be yourself and to not compromise on that. (I was that teenager).
Atlas Shrugged sucked, though. It was absolutely all over the place. Good grief, it rambled even more than I do. And that's not even getting into Ayn Rand's philosophy.
I nearly died of laughter when I saw this book cover.
Priceless.
Oh, and from what I read in interviews when the movies came out, apparently Jamie Dornan did not like playing the part of Christian Grey, and he and Dakota Fanning did not get along at all. Things got so bad that they both almost dropped out before the second and third movies were made. I'm glad they resolved their differences, though, because the Fifty Shades movies launched Dakota Fanning's career, and she's a good actress. She deserved better acting gigs than Fifty Shades.
On to the next bit of business, which is a book trailer made by made by
