Daily Adventures

I made a little review for this on Good Reads, and thought I'd try using their "Blog This" button. r0ck3tsci3ntist recommended the book to me, and I really enjoyed it a great deal.
( Cut for a picture of the book and the text, no spoilers. )

I edited the scribbles entry to say that anyone that guesses at all gets a drabble. *grins* It wasn't about people getting it right so much as *me* getting as much as I could right.

Uhm, yeah, the chapter(s) are now off, as you can probably see, due to the relative flood of drabbly goodness.

And, uhm... yeah... I read all of the first "Dogs" series so I'll add Dogs to the list, as I'm really likin' Mihai (and the short shot of Ian), Badou, Haine (I really like him a lot for some reason), and Naoto (far more than I should, perhaps, the knife fight against the katana had me analyzing each move... *laughs*) and I'm a little ways into the longer series.

Uhm, and, yeah... I also read Bones of Faerie. Twice. I'm on a third read-through but Jet's having his all-day birthday party today and we did our taxes. So I have excuses. *laughs*

It is hauntingly, painfully good. About a girl growing up in a post-Apocolypse world where Faerie and Humans annihilated each other, where all magic is deadly, everything suspect, and her father makes sure everything is "safe". There is violence, some of it which made me flinch (unusual for me), and it reminds me of just how much kids want and need to read things that are "older" than they are.

It's also the first thing I've read that never made my new-fledged internal editor cringe, and, in fact I was like... wow... I want to something like *this*. It's so densely packed I think even gogoangelgunboy would have a lovely time with it, if I could actually tempt him with fantasy... *laughs*

amberley gave me my copy, so I'll happily give a copy of Bones of Faerie to the first person that asks for a copy in a comment.

[Edited: The offered copy has been accepted!]

It's been... probably three or four years since I've voluntarily seen or read much of anything that smacked of hard realities. Admittedly I went to Biloxi and New Orleans and got smacked over the head with them, but I could DO something about that, even an infinitesimal amount of something, but it was something. On the most part, I've been only watching and reading more escapist stuff, and probably needed to.

But in the last week, I read 1 Dead in Attic and saw Slumdog Millionaire and I really enjoyed both a lot. They're feeding all kinds of things I realize, now, that I might have been really hungry for.

( No spoilers, but definitely longer. )

Hm... I think I like being middle-aged.   I had a really great day on my birthday and a good day after, too...

( Read more... )

Spent the morning on Monday trying to sleep in... and then John and Jet and I hit the waterfront to eat at Ivar's and feed the seagulls. The seagulls were loud enough to be mildly intimidating, but it was really nice to just sit in the sun and eat and feed 'em. *laughs* Fish and chips, the clam chowder, and I had a pile of the clam and chips.

( Cut for the length of what Jet called 'a busy day'. )

Since I owed amberley for giving me a copy of Old Man's War, he asked me to donate it to a good cause. And since I was feeling bad yesterday, thought I'd give/lend more than that to someone on Kiva and donated the cover price towards their operating expenses. It's micro-loans person to person, rather than the Graeme method of getting a lot of money from donations and having the people local to the situation make far more informed decisions on who gets what loans. Graeme is really effective. But I guess I wanted to make a choice for myself this time.

Uhm... yes, now that you mention it, I did just finish reading The Ghost Brigades. *grin* It was a really, really excellent read and agonizing at the end. *sighs* Cathartic, too, for someone that's known for 40 year what they were for.

incandescens introduced me to Kiva, and I'm still a little baffled about how it actually works... but I'll trust it does.

If you don't know about micro loans... just ask in a comment or something and I'll expound.

Thanks to amberley I read all of John Scalzi's Old Man's War, and plan to ride my little bike to Border to pick up all the other books in the series as soon as I can lay my hot little hands on them.

Old Man's War starts with 75-year-old John Perry, as he visits his wife's grave and then goes to enlist in the Colonial Defense Forces (CDF). It's a one-way trip, he knows it, and has no concept as to exactly what's going to happen, other than he knows that he's enlisting in an army to defend human colonies and he's signed a waver that allows them to do whatever they want to his body and mind to make it possible for him to fight.

r0ck3tsci3ntist, remember when you pointed me at your friend's blog? And the first thing I really got out of it was that if people want to go to the stars, the whole super-human/transhuman metamorphosis would be hand-in-hand with getting to those stars? Well, this novel has exactly that, but so solidly written that I just had to sit down after the first two scenes. Just the first two #$@)(*! scenes. And I kept having to put the book down just to digest not just what I was reading but how it was written.

( And oh is it solidly written. )

Read the rest of Rainbows End last night. It's a science fiction novel that amberley recommended and I'm very glad he did. Vernor Vinge being really really good again. Just that one step further into the future (maybe five or ten years?) that's still really understandable, but still really amazing to just see.

I loved it, utterly, for the characters as much as the world and the main thrust of the plot line. I love how well Vinge slices through his storyline, leaving everything that supports what his characters do, and using the cumulation of all that development to make the ending work. It's really astonishingly good writing, and I really enjoyed it at that level, too.

I also gulped down all of Saiyuki Gaiden last night. I love the way it expanded the characters, and I found myself with a much deeper appreciation of all of them from it. I thought Kenren (Goyjo) was really astonishingly cool by the end of it, and I fell in love with Tenpou as someone rather different than Hakkai. That was interesting to find out.

One of the things about Tenpou that I loved was his habit of working until he passed out. I used to do that. Literally. 72 hours on a project and I finished enough of it that when I passed out under the lab desk, no one bothered me until grading time.

( Cut for various spoilers. )

Wow. Thank you, incandescens!! I have come home to 15 beautifully edited pages from her, and I'm really happy to get back to writing hard at the 20th Chapter to Twin Souls.

I finished a book called Elements of Writing Fiction -- Beginnings, Middles, and Ends by Nancy Kress. amberley loaned to me, and I bought a copy as soon as I got home. laughter A lot of it is beginner stuff, but a lot of it is just stuff I've been doing on instinct rather than with the deliberation and thought I now really want to put into any story, and I can see why I want to. It's general enough for nearly any fiction one would write, but specific enough in the exercises that I could see how each section of it could really hone ones point, no matter what that point is, in any kind of work.

I haven't actually read anything she's written. But now I'm tempted.

( Babbling about how Twin Souls was shaped before I even knew some of the theories in the Kress book. )

I was very surprised to find Judge Dee taking justice pretty much into his own hands, once he was convinced of the guilt of a guy he would never, for political reasons, be able to get in court. Wow. Not even a shred of the Western "you have to trust the system and use it even if you know it's not going to work" kind of thing one sees in all the police dramas.

He just tricks the bad guy into a room with an angry bear and says, "It's in a higher court than mine. I'll let Heaven judge you."

This is in The Haunted Monastery, and wow... I really enjoyed it. There's something very different about the stories, and a lot of it is the whole set of assumptions, from his three wives to his constables and the whole basis and crux of his authority. It's pretty intriguing.

I also got to watch two of the three Mushi Shi disks that amberley sent, and they're utterly gorgeous, lush, intriguing, and while all the bit players look nearly identical, each of the stories, themselves, are wonderful and so different and haunting in many ways. I'm looking forward to the last one quite happily.

I've also gotten to watch a few more episodes of Bleach and now understand why they want to go to Soul Society. *grin* It's going to be interesting.