Fiction: Ghosts and Psychics in the Laundromat

This month's Words for Wednesday prompts are provided by Sean Jeating and posted at River's blog over here. This week's prompts are: cudgeling, remember, language, translated, coined and/or dead, heirs, between, existing, episode.

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Fiction: Ghosts and psychics in the Laundromat
"Today, you will get shot but some fool will save you but you'll still feel some pain," said Carl Simon a few feet away in his Psy Booth in the Quick Mat, one of two laundromats with that name. People called it the Ghost Mat because of laundry being done by invisible hands as it was documented on Youtube. The Mat mostly ran itself with anyone following wall signs in many translated languages.
   

Book Rants: Oct 2025

Time just sped by so quickly. Already the year is almost over and it seems like I haven't really done anything. But at least I read some books. Here are all the books I read in and a movie I watched in October.

01 - There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, translated by Polly Barton
What's it about: jobs, work, work relationships
This read like short stories (book is divided by jobs) as told by a nameless, thirty-something woman testing temp jobs to get an easy one because she was burnout from her previous job. She gets very involved with whatever job she was doing and is very competent at it which might make you hate her and yet, you don't. She cares about people and yet, she seems a bit aloof about relationships. But somehow she made us care about the people she cares about. Some of these jobs had a bit of paranormal to them, like a touch of whimsy.
    There was a scene where someone left a threatening message 'Die alone' and she interpreted as someone saying, 'I rather die than die alone!' and I don't know why, I just laughed at this and it's like funniest thing to me but it probably isn't funny at all.
    This is under the category of 'cozy Japanese reads' but I wish they wouldn't use the F word because that somehow took away the cozy. I enjoyed this book very much and the translation is wonderfully un-American.

Books I Unfinished - Oct 2025

I want to say these books aren't bad but I would be lying. But these are my opinions and you know what to do with opinions,right? Some of these books aren't bad, they are just bad to me as a reader. These are the books I stopped reading because I either lost interest or I simply didn't like it enough to continue. Sometimes I do finish a book even if I didn't like it because my brain sometimes refused to listen to the rest of me. Here are the books I unfinished lately. 

01 - Meet Me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich
What's it about: short stories, fantasy, science fiction
Quit at: 17%
Why I quit: I was enticed by the cover art but the oddity, craziness, weirdness was too much for me but mostly because there are no resolutions to these short stories. I know short stories usually don't have resolutions but these were so short, they wouldn't have fit in a resolution. I didn't read them all so I couldn't say if they get longer.