BOOK REVIEW: Akula (Arnar Vik)

 

What a ride. A fast-paced, gripping espionage and political thriller that stands too close to reality.  The plot revolves around a power struggle to get hold of some evidence that could lead to international conflicts and wars.

 

There are so many details in the first part of the book, including some unfamiliar terms. It takes a while to learn their sides, roles, and parties involved, but once the story moves along, everything falls into its place. All the intertwining incidents from various POVs are the strongest factor in this book. New characters appear throughout the span of the story, but they fit well into their roles, and no one overstays their welcome.

 

Unfortunately, the book is not easy to read because of the lack of formatting. The jumble of words without paragraphs and chapter breaks makes it a strain in the eyes. Fortunately, the story is very engaging and well-written, with a lot of real-life information to learn from. The submarine and what happens inside it led me to have a new favorite villain.

 

The ending is realistic, and everyone with a good head on their shoulder would know that this kind of cover-up exists. While the fate of one main character is very questionable and feels like plot armor, it opens up to the possibility of a sequel.

4 submarines out of 5 search parties

The Freezer Cat

 

I knew I wouldn’t last long in that office a week after I joined. In half a year, I was out after clearing my probation. It was just my stubbornness to prove I was good enough for the company I didn’t like, but they were kind to me (except for one thieving mentor who stole my work and passed it off as his own). That was my shortest working period in a company. This was the year 2012.

 

As I tendered my resignation in November, I could only leave in December because of the one-month notice. Therefore, the time would fall around Christmas.

 

Besides the working style that was opposite to mine, which was one of the main reasons I quit, I also couldn’t stand the party culture there. They celebrated every birthday and event, which probably doesn’t sound like something terrible, but it was for me. They were distractions, and standing around awkwardly, clapping, and singing off tune were not my cup of tea. There were fewer than 20 people in the company, but I swear it happened at least twice a week. We had to fork out extra money every time for food I didn’t like, and for times I didn’t enjoy. I was so relieved to quit before my birthday month because it was something I dreaded. I’m not exaggerating, it actually gave me social anxiety, and I’d do ridiculous things to avoid it, including wasting my off day to escape my birthday in another office. Attention. Party. Celebration. It sounds ridiculous to be scared, but trust me, there are many like me.

 

Back to the story. Since it was December, of course, the problem was Christmas parties outside office hours. They had many planned along the way (yes, multiple Christmas/New Year celebrations), but there was a particular one that was purposely timed before my leaving date. While I had become an expert at avoiding this kind of social situation, this time I couldn’t escape because of that. It was some sort of dedication to me, well, except for another painful farewell in the office.

 

The barbecue party would be conducted in one of the project managers’ home, a female who stayed in an apartment unit with a small balcony for outdoor barbecue. There would be over ten people, so the place was quite cramped.

 

As usual, if I had to attend a barbecue in this kind of awkward ‘I don’t know or like you well enough’ office setting, I would volunteer and park my ass in front of the grill to make myself busy so that I didn’t need to socialize too much.

 

While it sounds like torture for me, I have a unique memory of this party. So, before the barbecue, we helped prep the food. Taking them out of the freezer, and categorizing them nicely for the flaming execution. There was a small kitchen for that, with a medium-sized fridge that held all the food. Everything went well. The food was okay, and the people were nice, giving me well-wishes. After the barbecue, we sat around chatting.

 

The host, let’s call her Anna (just in case she reads this one day, since the story is quite unique), told us she looked forward to her boyfriend's visit. Anna was in her thirties, so we are not talking about teenagers here. The conversation flew from there, and someone asked her about her cat. Apparently, this person was close enough to Anna that she knew about her cat.

“My cat just died.” That was Anna’s answer, and it happened a few days/a week before. Of course, we were shocked and offered our condolences. I understand the pain of losing a pet. Anna then explained that it was unfortunate that her boyfriend was away because she would like her boyfriend to see the cat one last time, since he also loved the pet a lot, therefore she had put the cat in the freezer.

 

At this moment, my eyes were bulging, but fortunately, I sat in the corner, obscured by a potted palm tree (nice spot). Unfortunately, I didn’t mishear it. Someone asked, “In the freezer in your kitchen?” and Anna confirmed it while continuing to share stories about how his boyfriend loved the cat without missing a beat. The story moved to their relationship, and Anna was a talker that nobody had the time to process the freezer cat information. I just noticed people who were still holding on to their plates had stopped chewing.

 

I have to give credit to my fellow co-workers here, they were nice and politically correct, but it also drove me nuts. No one commented anything, although I saw some weird expressions. Me? I always try to be invisible in this kind of social situation. The party went on.

 

To be honest, it weirded me out. Her fridge was a normal fridge with a common freezer that held the food we ate that night. I don’t know about the potential health risk, but the idea itself sounds nuts to me. So there was a dead cat next to our marinated chicken wings. I probably made an eye contact, and grateful I didn’t take the wrong thing out for barbecue. I also don’t think anyone would prefer to look at their frozen pet in their last moments, but I could be wrong. I have seen two delayed pet funerals (when the pets had to be kept in a freezer first), and in those cases, they looked okay, but they were handled by professionals and kept in freezers dedicated to that purpose. I deal with frozen food a lot, and they don’t look good after staying in a home fridge for a while. Tiny ice particles would cover the surface, along with many other undesirable details.

However, since I didn’t want to ask anyone there what they thought about it because I didn’t want to gossip or invite unwanted conversations, I spent my last few days in the office without pursuing my curiosity. Maybe it was a normal practice that I wasn’t aware of, so I brushed this aside in my memory.

 

Until one day, which was actually quite recent, just a few months ago, I found a similar story in Reddit. I can’t access Reddit where I am, but a YouTube video about it appeared in my algorithm. One of the stories was about a cat in the freezer. The story only involved family members, and it weirded them out. The comments agreed that it sounds nuts. So, after fourteen years, I get the confirmation that the freezer cat is not a normal thing to do! Not to mention the bigger scale of my story, when the food was served to multiple people who had no prior knowledge about it.

 

So, this is my freezer cat story. I’m not sure why I didn’t tell it to people around me back then (which I’ll do now). I guess the party itself was too overwhelming, and after that, I dealt with moving away for my new job. It was forgotten, and now I have been collecting inputs about the story. Do you think it’s normal/weird?

 

I’m sorry I haven’t been posting for a while. There were some personal matters and family reunions to attend. All good.

Wishing you a good one as well. With a blink of an eye, 2025 and the holiday season had come and gone. For me, as long as my loved ones are happy and healthy, I consider it a good year.

Just like Die Hard is a Christmas movie, Freezer Cat is my holiday tale.

 

I parallel post my newsletter here. In my main one you’ll get free short story or you can get them here The Freezer Cat.

Thank you for being here.

Koala Quill Review

 

I promised myself I would write about Koala Quill once I had tried it long enough to understand how it works. I don’t want to ramble, so I consolidate my thoughts in bullet points to my best recollection. (It still ends up like a ramble!) 

Koala Quill is a website made to motivate authors. The goal is to write every day, to monitor and consolidate progress, to challenge oneself, and to manage the effectiveness of one’s writing session with some incentives.

Interface

KQ is one of the cleanest and most effective websites I have ever encountered. I like the easy interface, and I have read through everything, although I still misremembered things and had to bother Philip a few times.

The mobile version works great as well although most of the time I can’t see all participants in popular guilds (same with desktop version, the expanding arrow doesn’t always work), but this is minor.

It’s not perfect for some other factors I will mention below, but overall, it still works well for me.

 

Free to sign up and ‘gamble’ with house money

This is the best factor to start. With all the scams going around and scammy ‘free trials’ that require bank details and the sacrifice of the firstborn, it’s easy to have trust issues. This (bank detail, not firstborn) would bounce me away before I start. KQ is free to sign up and you can also use a Google account.

Upon starting, user will be prompted to write, and as they write, they'll start earning. I didn’t know what to do, and I just stopped as soon as I could. If I remember correctly, I had 30 cents or something. Then I went into a panic mode again because I had to join a guild! Hold up, I'm not ready to commit, and I only had 30 cents! I was not ready to sell my kidney, and my neighbors were not around.

Fortunately, the cost of the guild would be on the house. If I lost it, it would be house money and my 30 cents. If I won it, I got it. Sounds great, right? The problem was that the available guilds might not be ideal for new users. It might have been ongoing for a while, which was the case for me. It’s not a pro-rated time you need to chase, but you are considered to be starting late with the same goal. I burned the midnight oil trying to catch up, and to my calculation, I had to be alive for 36 hours a day to catch up properly. I emailed Philip about this, and he added time for me, which made it possible for me to finish the guild on time.

 

Free Visionary plan trial as the start

Visionary is the highest tier, where you can earn one dollar a day just by writing. As a struggling indie author who is inept in marketing, this helps me not to bang my head against the wall, at least there is something. In all seriousness (although I was dead serious with my previous statement), it's effective to motivate me to write. More on this later.

Free Visionary Plan lasted for one week, but I was given another week's extension. It wasn’t enough for me to earn the cost for Visionary membership (but it’s possible if you want to get a lower-tiered membership, Scribe), but it added up to something that doesn't look bad without any commitment.

 

Guilds

I have joined many guilds, but soon realized the options were not great. There was one that required users to write only one minute a day, and another that will only start in a year. I thought they were generated by the system, but no, they were created by the users (These two must have been created by some loony toons). A guild is some kind of ‘contest’ with ‘wager’ where you hope that your opponents are too lazy or too busy to fulfil theirs. The rules are clear. The easier the guild is, the more likely you won't earn anything.

As mentioned, I'm almost always part of guilds, and I have been here two and a half months, currently in four simultaneous guilds. I have created multiple guilds as well, but there were a few that passed by with no takers (chickens), mostly because I set a very high goal, like 40 minutes of writing within a short amount of time commitment, but I had a few popular ones as well. Low goal guilds attract a lot of sign-ups, but tbh, they are not attractive because you will likely lock your money for a long time without a payback, as everyone can easily fulfill the requirements.

In my experience, it’s hard to earn anything with guilds. I think I’ve only earned a few dollars with many zeroes or pitiful payouts in cents. Maybe I haven’t found a magic formula yet, and everyone is still very keen, which is a good thing, of course.

Just take note in case you have the same problem as I did. Guild follows my time zone automatically, which I assume follows respective users’ time zone as well. However, it gets confusing for me because by the time my guild ends, it hasn’t ended for others yet (since I live in the future, duh). I learned this the hard way when I celebrated my win over my sole opponent in a guild, which meant I was the winner, and I took a decent amount of winning! But nope, apparently, that sucker at the other end of the world still had plenty of time to finish it, and he did! There goes my dream of getting rich from a guild. Sometimes I fell behind as well because the day ‘changed’ without my knowledge about the actual timing.

I asked Philip about this and received the information that KQ operates in ETC/UTC, and most users use time zones such as America/New York, America/Los Angeles, and America/Chicago. I can change mine in the settings, so at least it’s easier for me to follow with the actual timing when a guild starts/ends. Some mixed-up might appear when you change your time zone, like the wallet breakdown so take note of that, but it shouldn’t affect the overall.

  

Warning Emails

One thing that drove me nuts the first few times was the warning emails. I think it’s a template of something that doesn’t actually reflect the accurate progress in the guild. The first time I got it (or maybe I had missed the previous ones), it said that I would lose my money because I was falling behind. At that time, the guild was already over in my time, so I didn’t know what went wrong. I was sure I had finished it. I went to ask Philip, and he assured me that I was right. I still got the ‘inaccurate emails,’ like a few days ago, it warned me I was starting to fall behind with my guild, while I was actually 250 minutes ahead (around 8 days ahead and am close to the finish line. I have learned to be confident and ignore them, but it would be great if it reflected actual timing and didn’t try to send me into a panic mode.

Quill Mate

Okay, I have a strong opinion about this one, but I'm open-minded enough to admit that I could be wrong.

Whenever my brain is on fire, I write very quickly. I also have this insane competitive trait that I want to perform well. After looking at it (and reading about it), I decided to try one day. I clicked Join on someone looking for a quill mate. She had a ‘good’ star, so we started to write. I wrote a lot, and it ended up with me writing 20% more than her. I was happy with it.

The second time I tried was when I swore it off forever. This person had an okay star but not great, and asked for 20 minutes quill-mating. Again, I wrote quickly and realized it took a very long time, and the progress was not great. I could be reading it wrong, but I think I wrote 17 minutes while the other person wrote 2 minutes. I tried to slow it down to see if that was the case, but it still didn’t end (because he didn’t seem to be writing!). I finally wrote the last minute and we concluded it.

 

Quill mate warning

Of course, at this moment, I was pissed enough, I got some ‘report’ that I wrote 160% more than my mate for that session. This was okay, lesson learned. However, when I checked on his profile, his reputation had risen significantly, bright and shiny with the same score as mine, which should be impossible, that he was a generous quill mate, while it was not the case at all. Tbh, this annoys me a lot, which means it was not his actual performance and that stat would fool his next quill mate. Again, I could be wrong in interpreting it, but I’m very sure he barely did anything during those 20 minutes. So, no more quill mates for . I do better on my own. I wish there were an easier way to see how this works.

 

Koala Maze

As mentioned, when I am in the zone, I write quickly. Sometimes I had the pop-up with a green bar, which means there is more resting time as a reward, but when it happened, I would freeze and have a stage fright. However, more often than not, a koala maze would appear. I have to navigate the koala to pass the test that I’m not a bot. The thing was, I didn’t know what the koala liked! Strawberry? Car? Log? Joking. It’s easy enough, although it’s a true story that I got it wrong a few times because I was confused.

 

Payout

This might be everyone’s question. I am a very skeptical person, and I have trust issues with everything. I have read that KQ is legit, but it was only one or two articles, and to my knowledge, this is quite a new site. After my free trial ended, I thought I wanted to just stick with the Apprentice plan. However, I soon missed my daily motivation and the ability to join multiple guilds. I don’t have much hope of earning anything from guilds, but they are good motivations to write. I am not in a good financial place, but I want to invest in a good site and a good habit. The yearly plan was scary for me so I signed up for the monthly Visionary first, which cost $22. I want to verify and confirm that this is a legitimate site.

After a month had passed, I decided to upgrade to a yearly membership. Before that, here came the ultimate test: I’d try to cash out some amount of money through PayPal to see how easy or tedious it would be before I pulled the plug (or installed the plug?). It went well, so I went ahead with the yearly plan. Along the way, I also added to my balance so that I could join guilds for my 100k challenge motivation, and everything worked smoothly. Up to now, I can attest that this is a legitimate website and a good one to keep me motivated, which brings me to the next point.

 

Motivation

Writer's block be damned. There were times when I stopped writing altogether or just wrote a pitiful amount of words and called it a day. Personally, KQ raised my competitive self from the ground. I plan my schedule around it and would write much more before my busy days, so I wouldn’t fall behind the guild targets. I wrote during exercise, during walking like those phone zombies that I almost hit my forehead on an electrical pole. I avoided that, but then I hit the bottom of the escalator (true story) to fulfil my streaks. The 100k word challenge occurs during my busiest month, so I’m trying to write as much as possible before the holiday. It’s hard at times, but it really helps to get my butt out there.

Just like other users, I also realize that I’m too easily distracted. The amount of time I am in front of the screen and actually typing is horrible. Now that I have a time indication and a way to monitor it, it helps me to focus as well.

I would dig up something, a long-neglected WIP, a barely interesting competition (because I don't have good story ideas), and I actually started a new book because of this. I have been consistent, and according to the Koala on the top left, I have written 107k words since I joined in September (I have 71 streaks, so most likely that is the number of days I have joined), which is quite crazy because I remember dying a lot during multiple NaNoWriMo and only won once.

 

Other small stuffs

• It’s not easy to copy and paste a section of the draft (especially the middle part of the draft) using a mobile phone, as it would get chaotic in the same way as trying to move an image in Microsoft Word.
• Users have to be online to use KQ. Tthis is obvious, but a factor to consider because I love to write offline or if users visit a place with bad/no internet connection. There is an option to activate holiday mode.
• There is no actual community except for a limited chat function during a quillmate section which I never used. I don’t mind at all. Personally, it’s tiresome and it’s hard for me to keep up. Not everything has to have a community.
• When copying and pasting a draft from Koala to other software, sometimes the paragraphs are lumped together. Even publishing in KQ itself messes up the paragraph spacing. (Update, this still shows up as a big lump despite my effort in editing and fixing the spacing multiple times. I think it’s major enough because it affects readability).

So, here is my long-winded ramble.

Koala in shining armor

Oh, there is one best point, Philip will appear like a knight in shining armor to help with any issue. I have asked some stupid questions, but he helped me all the same. I always advocate this kind of service because it’s irreplaceable. I think it’s great and one of my biggest reasons to be here.

Overall: I really recommend Koala Quill.

You can use this referral link: https://koalaquill.com?rr=1877

 

 

In Lost Country and Other Divergences (Damir Salkovic)

 

In Lost Country and Other Divergences exceeds my expectations. The last two stories are nightmarish and might haunt me for a long time, but I’m glad I read them. They are not for the faint-hearted. Everything is shown in excruciating detail and beautifully, or should I say, grossly well-written. 

Each story has its own uniqueness and readers experience it through the characters, which I think says a lot about the author’s skill in looping them inside the stories. It makes them feel attached and invested. Some tales are so close to home and realistic, they feel poignant, and it adds to the ‘feels’ after reading them, which is the power of a good book. Even when the ending is not what I expected or hoped for, some because of supernatural factors, and there are tales with similar types of endings, it’s the journey to the revelation that is the strongest factor for most of them.

The Pale Man is one of the good examples of realistic built-up and the struggles of ordinary people, similar to the haunting Garuda, which is an interesting choice for the title because Garuda is also a fictional symbol in both Indonesian and Thai culture.

I applaud the level of knowledge shown by the author, and the captivating story ‘showing’ style that elevates this book in my opinion. It’s a five-star read throughout.

5 stars out of 5

 

The Hostile Future

 

The world is getting more hostile for the older generation. I’m looking at it from my parents’ perspective, and partially from my own. While I’m still capable of following technology, I am not always a willing participant. Why does everything need apps to function? Why do we need to log in to do things? Why does everything have to be digital? Why don’t we stick with printed-out menus instead of QR codes? It’s for convenience, and possibly other reasons, such as sustainability, etc. I GET IT. It doesn’t mean I agree with all of them, and it doesn’t mean everything is as justifiable as what we are told.

Scanning menus with QR codes is easier when we eat with a group of acquaintances, so that there is no awkwardness for splitting the bills or fuming because we eat a chicken’s toe, while Joe eats the whole cow, and the bill is divided equally. I’m channeling some of my work lunch frustration scenario here. Order separately, pay separately. Done. However, I can feel the helplessness of my parents when they are unable to do so, and they are considered advanced among their peers. Many people we know, younger than them, still use their phones for incoming and outgoing calls only.

When they eliminated the manual top-up for transit cards and replaced human cashiers with self-checkouts, it was a struggle for everyone who was not accustomed to technology and had to relearn everything, especially since the transition was not smooth at all. According to my dad, when he asked for help, the staff told him to ask fellow commuters. It was ridiculous. They eventually installed back a lone human to cater to people who need assistance and one manual machine option.

There was a time when we went to the barber and had to order a haircut through the screen menu. There were multiple errors with some registration problems, delayed responses, and missing OTPs (why do we need all those?). The staff was one meter away from our noses but insisted that was the only way, so we eventually gave up and walked out. It was a freaking haircut, less complicated than shaving my dog’s butt hair. What is wrong with accepting the money manually and being done with it? I know. I know. There is some payment authorization system there or some shit, but I think it’s stupid if this cripples the business.

Well, I guess it’s only time before I’m becoming a grumpy antique. I think there should be a manual option for EVERYTHING. It’s ridiculous that appliances have to be connected to Wi-Fi. It’s stupid that printers or some extra features in cars require subscriptions to work. It’s idiotic that we have to navigate the menu on the screen that costs us limbs to replace instead of turning the button to adjust the radio in our car. Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, after all, I feel ancient, but mark my words as I shake my fist to the sky: Our reliance on technology will damn us one day.

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The Hostile Future

One for the Money, Two for the Soul (Brent Lindstrorm)

I didn’t have high expectations when I began reading this, but it has become one of the best books I've read this year.

It hooked me from the start, and although I drifted a bit in the middle, the build to the climax was amazing, and it was a very satisfying read at the end.

During a botched body and soul snatching operation, something went awry as a girl found half of her spirit gone. This is not a Bart Simpson-esque gig of selling his soul for five dollars to his friend, but it’s the literal meaning that something is missing from her head.

To be honest, it was hard for me to read about her antic, and this part felt a bit dragging. The character became much more endearing later on, but it was hard for me to believe that someone could put up with her for years while struggling to keep the children's home open, especially when her own father fell into despair, which was heartbreaking.

Her other missing soul went on a totally different journey as someone at the other end of the trait, where it was put inside a boy's body and trained to be a soulless assassin. While this sounds like a type of Michael Bay movie, I assure you that the characters and stories go much deeper than I had hoped.

Each character has their own distinction, even Theo the fat-flowing turd and great toadstool (love those) has his own depth, despite the limited screen time as the bottom feeder. Nome is a very interesting villain as well. I like getting inside his head, and he is not the typical mustache-twirling villain, while Burt and Cotton unexpectedly shine at the end.

The shenanigans when everyone comes together in a messed-up situation, the story idea, and the intriguing questions it poses make this a brilliant read. As a dystopian Sci-Fi writer myself, this is up my alley, and I hope to see this made into a movie one day. All the actions and tensions are above the industry standard nowadays, and we need more of this instead of the stale products we have out there currently. The multiple PoVs work well, and this is a very well-written gem.

 5 out of 5 stars

BOOK REVIEW: Round the World: A Life of Jeanne Baret (C.R. Hurst)

 

Round the World A Life of Jeanne Baret is a historical fiction about the character Jeanne, as she embarked on the trip that brings us along around the globe.

I applaud the amount of research that was dedicated to this book. This is the trip that many would never experience, even in modern times, so one could imagine how important it was back then.

While I understand that it was probably done to maintain accuracy and details, I wish the character were more relatable because instead of experiencing the journey through her eyes, I felt detached. There was barely any emotion, consideration, turmoil, but systematic thoughts and actions. I had no idea what she feels, her motivations, and what keeps her going, but the day-to-day, trip-to-trip technicality. People who are supposed to be important from her past are barely mentioned and seem to influence nothing along her journey until she is back with them. For example, I had no idea who Hubert was when he was mentioned again at the end of the book after one mention in the beginning. For his importance, especially when she reflects on her past with him and her decision to come back to the place, she never thinks of him throughout the other milestones of her life, which, imo, should be a very important detail.

There is also a mention of a particular flower that is very identifiable as Amorphophallus titanum as a huge, tall, green and red flower with a yellow pistil and a putrid, rotten cheese smell that is found in Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio de Janeiro. However, Tirta Arum, the common name of this flower, is endemic to Sumatra, Indonesia, and was first discovered in 1878, almost a decade after the time period of this book. I wouldn’t discount the possibility that it is only the official record, but one would wonder that for someone as famous as her in her field and a plant as peculiar as this one, this should be at least documented. While this is a small detail in the book, it would catch the eyes of people who might be familiar with it.

Having said that, readers to enjoy exploration journeys would find this book informative and inspiring.

3.5 stars out of 5