February 2021 – rachel hall

Seeing as I’ve been reading so many books at a rapid pace due to one of the classes I’ve been taking, I figured that since I don’t necessarily have the time to write a book review right now, I could at least mention a few of my favorite quotes.

What you will figure out very quickly is this class’s selection is primarily disease or plague based (gee I wonder why.) The first book in that selection was, “The Hot Zone,” by Richard Preston, which is a nonfiction written in the style of a thriller. It’s a very detailed account of the origins of the Ebola virus and how it almost became a disaster in the United States in the 90’s. Granted, it’s a lot more interesting and definitely more terrifying than that, but I’ll save my thoughts on the book itself for the review.

I chose a lot of quotes (besides the entire first chapter) that terrified me the most. If you are not a fan of disease related content, gore, and/or horrifying content, I suggest you don’t read this seeing as some of these quotes are very graphic in nature.

This is the exact version of the book I used and a picture of the book by the time I finished reading and annotating it. If you continue reading this post you can see my annotation key that I decided to go by.

“The case of Charles Monet emerges in a cold geometry of clinical fact mixed with flashes of horror so brilliant and disturbing we draw back and blink, as if we are staring into a discolored alien sun.”

“…and from the moment Ebola enters your bloodstream, the war is already lost; you are most certainly doomed. You can’t fight off Ebola the way you fight off a cold. Ebola does in 10 days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish.”

“They were two human primates carrying another primate. One was the master of the earth, or at least believed himself to be, and the other was a nimble dweller in trees, a cousin of the master of the earth. Both species, the human and the monkey, were in the presence of another life form, which was older and more powerful than either of them, and was a dweller in blood.”

“The Ebola virus, in its Sudan incarnation, retreated to the heart of the bush, where undoubtedly it lives to this day, cycling and cycling in some unknown host, able to shift its shape, able to mutate and become a new thing, with the potential to enter the human species in a new form.”

“The mothers was dying of Ebola and had given the virus to her unborn baby. The fetus had evidently crashed and bled out inside the mother’s womb. The woman then absorbed spontaneously, and the nun who assisted at this grotesque delivery came away from the experience with blood on her hands. The blood of the mother and the fetus was radiantly hot, and the nun must have had a small break or cut on the skin of her hands. She developed an explosive infection and was dead in five days.”

Here is my annotation key. I tend to use sticky tabs and highlight key phrases or line in the paragraphs that stuck out to me the most. I tend to base my key off of what the professor says to look for, anything that I need more info on, and anything that keeps popping up and stands out.

“Isn’t it true that if you stare into the eyes of a cobra, the fear has another side to it? The fear is lessened as you begin to see the essence of the beauty. Looking at Ebola under an electron microscope is like looking at a gorgeously wrought ice castle. The thing is so cold. So totally pure.”

“If you bleed into the first space, you bleed into your lungs. If you bleed into the second space you bleed into your stomach and intestines. If you bleed into the third space, you bleed into the space between the skin and the flesh. The skin puffs up and separates from the flesh like a bag. Peter Cardinal had bled out under his skin.”

“Peter Cardinal’s parents and sister were stunned as they watched him being slowly torn apart by the invisible predator. They could not comprehend his suffering or reach him to give him comfort. As the blood poured into his third space, his eyes remained open and dilated, staring, bloody, deep, dark, and bottomless. They didn’t know if he could see them, and they couldn’t tell what he saw or thought or felt behind the open eyes. The machines hooked up to his scalp were showing flatlines in his brain. There was very little electrical activity in his brain, but now and then, the flatlines gave a spooky twitch, as if something continued to struggle inside the boy, some destroyed fragment of his soul.”

“To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. That is…a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so few very good officers. Although there are many good men.”

“In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan, and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions.”

“Whether the human race can actually maintain a population of five billion or more without a crash with a hot virus remains an open question. Unanswered. The answers are hidden in the labyrinth of tropical ecosystems. AIDS is the revenge of the rainforest. It may be only the beginning.”

Hello! Yes, I know that I have been absent. My classes for this semester have required a lot of reading, which leaves me very little time to take care of myself, much less make a blog post. I’ve also been dealing with some personal issues, which is still ongoing, but I will try my best to focus on those who matter to me and what I love to do, hence my return.

Let me give you a little bit of background before I jump right in. Wattpad is a website where you can read free ebooks, specifically made by other users. It is similar to other websites such as fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own (AO3), which I also posted this story on. I mainly wanted to focus on Wattpad because I found it easier to post my chapters on there, so most of what I wrote is on there. Wattpad is particularly known for cringey One Direction fanfictions (kidnapping and adopting comes to mind), as well as those smut one-shots that definitely should not be looked at by 12 year olds. (I can never look at a lemon the same way ever again.)

I made an account there around 2016. I was 16 at the time, on a ton of medications and my dreams day by day were crashing and burning. Seeing as I was mostly at my house because I thought someone was out to kill me at the time (turns out I’m not that special), I figured I would mess around and post some short stories on there. They started mostly with cringey mental illness hot takes, which was me projecting to the internet my problems with a hint of, “graphic design,” on the cover.

This is the Wattpad I remember. When I first saw this, I thought the website design-wise was very sleek.

But what really got a lot more response then I was expecting was a fanfiction I wrote about BBC Sherlock. It started off with a few chapters with little to no planning, and slowly evolved into what I was planning to be a trilogy. Unfortunately, I still have the ending planned for book two, I have for years, but have not published it as of yet, seeing as my love for BBC Sherlock died as the seasons got worse and worse as Moffat had more and more bullshit excuses.

Granted, at the time, I was just goofing off, writing chapter by chapter and thinking it was garbage. I still think it’s garbage. But apparently Wattpad is full of racoons because they loved it. Last time I checked, I had around 10k reads on there and a few hundred likes. I still get notifications from Wattpad on my email, which is a constant reminder that my teen self is being perceived (much to my displeasure) and the cycle of obsession continues on to this day.

The first thing I notice immediately is that Wattpad has one of those sliding screens on the top featuring their publishing company. Which honestly, I’m unsure how I feel about it. I know when I was younger, I was desperate to have something published, hell even a Wattpad award of some sort (like a Watty), but as a publishing company, I can’t imagine them being taken seriously. Now keep in mind, this isn’t me talking badly about writers as a whole online. I’ve read some very great stories and fanfictions on there. But with a lot of these kinds of websites, they tend to be a dime a dozen. Every fifty fanfictions about Louis Tomilson marrying a fan (who is aged as an adult but is definitely a 12 year old’s self insert) there’s one good fanfiction that’s better then the actual content it came from.

Wattpad now, design wise, is better. But it definitely shocked me as an old-timer.

I also notice there is a premium function and…coins??? I have heard of this before, but I can’t imagine paying for premium to buy a book instead of just going online to buy an e-book membership of any other major book company instead. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of the FREE books I read on there cost “coins,” now. Now keep in mind, some of these writers definitely deserve it. It takes a lot of time to write a novel, especially if you’re expected to post on a weekly basis. But I think the real whiplash isn’t the authors trying to make money, but Wattpad taking itself too seriously.

I’m aware that 99 cents isn’t very much, but considering I can find similar if not better content on fanfiction.net and AO3 for free, is it worth it?

It says here that I have two messages in my inbox and 365 notifications. Even now, after all these years, I still panic when I see notifications on there. Because it isn’t just someone liking an instagram post. These people are reading what I wrote at 16-17 years old, and commenting on it without knowing me at all. I literally feel sick as I’m scrolling through the notifications. This is what I get for being a people pleaser.

The first fanfiction I wrote has 26 chapters, 35,200 reads and 1,300 likes. The second one of that series was not completed, but has 11 chapters and 1,000 reads. Although it was very common for me to feel anxious a lot due to the open criticism aspect of my writing there, I also felt immense joy seeing how much people enjoyed it. Writing online actually made me feel like I had a purpose when all my plans were falling apart, which was a huge reason why I’m still alive to this day. As I’m even writing on here and scrolling through Wattpad, I feel an immense pain in my chest and I’m struggling to breathe but at the same time feel immense nostalgia.

I’ve been blogging on this website for over a year now, and to be quite honest, I struggle immensely with not only learning online marketing, but also feeling like I’m, “good enough,” or if writing on here is worth it. At some point I would love to invest more time and even some money on writing online, but the mere idea is a lot.

I would love to write more than just book tags and reviews. But with college, constant doctors appointments, friends, family, and more, there is only so much I have time for at the moment.

If anything, looking through this Wattpad account has taught me that I should, at the very least, keep writing online. Maybe even look through my old works and publish it on here too. It’s not because I’m the “best,” at it. I don’t have to be the best. But because I like to do it.