I saw this over on Meeghan Reads, and given that my tired ass brain just labeled this post “book tag”, I clearly was hoping that I’d find a tag before it went live, so huzzah! I did one of these a couple years back, but the questions were totally different, so I’m excited to argue with myself again and cheat on a few of these.

Read on the bed or the couch?

As Meeghan said, I’m very much an armchair reader, but I don’t have the luxury of that anymore, so the bed. More often than not, most of my reading is happening in the car, which I don’t think I’ve ever properly explained before. I work for a start-up, and our kitchen can fit about three people while standing up and smashing elbows, so we all eat outside when the weather is good and in our cars when the weather is not. It’s so not ideal, but that’s the nature of a start-up, and it is what it is. Thus, I both eat my lunch & read in my car, and it’s almost messy, but somehow ultimately not, every time.

However, I do read at night before going to sleep, and that’s in my bed with two pillows to help my lumbar and Grace curled up as close as she can physically get in my lap, and it’s wonderful.

Read at night or in the morning?

If I had my way, both and all day long, but the truth is at night. There were a few weeks way back when I was being unhealthily psychotic about my fitness where I chose to read when waking up early to workout, and it was just so lovely. I really prefer writing and blogging in the morning, though, because I don’t like to be on my laptop at night, so, if I had to pick, I would read at night.

Sweet snacks or salty snacks when reading?

Salty! I love popcorn, pretzels, and chips at pretty much any given moment, and the only time I’m going to swerve toward sweet is if I need a quick fix of chocolate, and that’ll be something small that I eat on the way from the fridge to my bed to read. If I am eating while I read, though, which isn’t all that often (we’re ignoring the car lunch reading), it’ll be something salty.

Male main character or female main character?

Male, which should come as no surprise given that I’ve written an entire post about why I want this, but I’ll do a tl;dr real quick. If I were to pull every single fantasy book off my shelf, 9/10 would have a female main character. And that’s fine! It just gets very repetitive very quickly, and while I’m all for having women in fantasy, it feels like we swung wildly away from male main characters and into only female main characters, and I’d just like to see some young men fumbling their way through figuring out how the hell to survive in a fantasy world.

First person POV or third person POV?

Third, always. I hate first person POV. I’ll read it if I have to, but I don’t want to, and it especially grinds my gears when it’s first person fantasy. That makes no sense! Fantasy has so much external world-building that needs to be done that can’t be done in a cohesive way in first person! Stop it! I’m also a huge fan of multiple POVs, so third person even more, but even if it were a single POV fantasy, I’d still want third person. And honestly? I don’t even really like first person contemporaries because I just don’t like first person.

Trilogies or quartets?

Can I be that person and say duologies? I also wrote a post about why I like duologies better than everything else, and while I’ll 100% read trilogies & quartets, they’re never as good. I can probably think of less than five trilogies that are actually good, and there’s definitely only one quartet that comes to mind because y’all. Duologies are where it’s at.

Libraries or bookstore?

Bookstore. Though I went to the library as a child, I really do not thrive reading under pressure. If I have a due date, I just literally won’t read. I don’t know why, and I’ve never been able to change it. If it’s a self-imposed due date, that’s a totally different thing, but if there’s an outside source telling me that I have to read a certain book by a certain date, it just won’t happen.

Obviously, this might have been a bit of an issue given that I was an English major, but, by the time you reach college, your professors have kind of given up on giving you due dates for books and are instead just assigning papers for certain dates, which is the same thing, but also not for my batshit brain. If a paper was due on a certain date, great, then I’ll set self-imposed due dates on how many pages need to be read by when until the book is finished.

But yeah, all this is to say that I can’t read a book if I’ve got to give it back by a certain time, so I just buy them instead, which I am very fortunate to be able to do.

Books that make you laugh or cry?

I’m gonna say cry, but that is cheating because 10/10 every book is going to make me laugh at some point. I think everything is funny. I think my own books are hilarious, though many of them are written to be that way, so I guess that doesn’t really count. But I consistently laugh at dad jokes and puns, so even if a book is solely aimed to make me cry, I’m probably going to laugh at something.

Black book covers or white book covers?

Oh, huh. I don’t know that I have a preference? I guess I’d say black book covers because they look sleeker and are usually fancier, but I have nothing against white book covers. What I don’t like is pictures of real people on covers.

Character-driven or plot-driven?

Character-driven, 1000000000%. I am here for a story that has the bare minimum of a plot. Only Lovers Left Alive? I will take seven more of those, please. There’s absolutely nothing going on except two vampires wallowing around, and I love it. One of my novels is literally just watching a vampire go through 2000 years of life, falling in and out of love, and like? There is a plot? Kind of? Because history happens? But it’s so not the focus, and it never will be, and the more I write historical fiction, the more this is happening to my books, and I’m so happy. I love characters. I almost always have characters fleshed out before I’ve even given any kind of thought to a plot, and the plot grows organically out of however they all fit together.