DNF.
I feel very sad by writing this, but I have to. First, I’m going to say something that you all, as fellow reviewers and readers, already know, but I have to say that regardless: this is just my personal opinion.

I really wanted to like this book, and I really thought it was going to be an exciting experience and a great opportunity to learn and practice. But this isn’t for me. This is not the first book about the writing process I’ve read (I read On Writing, by King), and this is not my first practical/technical guide on writing either (I’m currently reading Writing Fiction, by the GWW), so it’s not a new topic for me and yet, I just couldn’t connect with this one.

I did read many exercises and did most of those but I couldn’t feel immersed on them, so I decided to skip some of those and try to find one that interested me and attracted me. And yeah, it has a pretty interesting exercise about “word choices”, and it explores how we can call the very same thing using different names. I found that one pretty amusing because in Spanish that’s a never-ending fight (is it called Aguacate or Palta?), but still it was just one out of forty.

I do think IMMERSION is the most important part of a practical book like this one. Because it’s not just about reading; it is about reading and THEN put into practice what we just read.
Yes, the book has a lot of work behind, it has a lot of research (I think the Links and references and further reading is about 25% of the book or something like that), but the structure and the way that that research was used is not appealing for me.
It doesn’t matter if the book has 40 games and if it has a whole investigation behind every one of them, if the VOICE of the author, the structure and the analysis of those 40 games fail to catch our attention then we are not going to experiment doing those games.

I'm not trying to criticize the author for the way the book is structured, because maybe the problem is on me, but I read that he is a teacher in creative writing and my guess is that maybe this book is structured to be a schoolbook for his courses more than a standalone reading. And if that’s the case, then I don’t see how it could work for the rest of the world, the people that would read the book but not would be part of his course, without him tutoring the experience.

Books like Writing Fiction by GWW, or even Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger, are immersive because the narrative tone is so good and so personal that you feel that, more than reading a book, you are holding a conversation with the author. And when you feel that, is when you decide to put the book’s lessons into practice. In Master the Art and Craft of Writing by Leon Conrad I didn’t feel that urge collab with him.

About the book cover… it says it’s not final, but I really like it.