Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the movie)

So I saw this last night (and just managed to squeak in reading the book for the third time before I went). I suppose I was bound to be disappointed; it is far and away my fave of the series (I'll let you know on Saturday night whether that is still true). This is the first installment by a director whose work I've not seen previously. He had an amazing visual sense; the Ministery of Magic looked fantastic, Harry's dreams/visions and the dementors were genuinely creepy, and the wizard fight at the end was phenomenonly good. In some ways the movie actually tops the book (what the director did at the end is so much cooler than statues coming to life to shield Harry, and having the Room of Requirement provide the mistletoe just when it was required was a stroke of genius). The screenwriter deserves some praise for masterfully condensing the longest book into what I'm pretty sure is the shortest movie.

Alas, in the end it didn't quite do it for me. The scenes without visual effects just really fell flat. They were staged funny, the actors didn't seem to know where to stand or which way to look (particularly Emma Watson, who never seemed to know what to do with her arms). It all felt so wooden; none of the emotional resonance carried over. None of the anger was angry enough. Harry should've been much more sarcasic in Umbridge's class, and the scene when Trelawney is fired really needed more, and should've been on the stairs. I have to blame the director here because I know these actors can act. Somewhere out there I imagine they're moaning "that's the take he kept? That one?" My favorite scene from the book didn't make it into the movie (when Neville's mother gives him the gum wrapper), but it's just as well. A bad rendition would have completely ruined it for me.

My boys didn't see it. From what I heard I thought it might be a bit much, and as they hadn't seen the Transformers yet they went to that one without me. They enjoyed it very much. Quin says that Oliver was on the edge of his seat, grinning, practically vibrating with excitement. I'll have to catch that one on DVD (probably about a million times...)

This and that

Mostly links here.

First off, check out the latest issue of Fusion Fragment, which features a certain "My Bonny" by a certain J.F. Peterson, a fine tale from one of my favorite writers. This story came from the same Backspace contest as my own "Tale of a Fox". It's always cool how the same set of parameters can lead to such varied works.

This is why Ursula K. LeGuin rocks. The whole review Ruth Franklin did of Chabon's book is full of chuckletastic quotes like the one that set LeGuin off. Frankly I stopped being bothered by this "genre is crap" rhetoric some time ago. I just like to point it out and mock it.

And posts like this are why I love John Scalzi. (Someone in his comments linked to this Gandhi quote, and on days like today I can totally agree with him. But then I would, because apparently I am Gandhi).

(You can see the incident Scalzi is referencing on YouTube here. I find it just sad and upsetting. Actually I find most of CSPAN sad and upsetting, except their coverage of British parliament, which is fun and engaging, although the fact that none of what they're saying is going to directly affect me could be a contributing factor there).

Here's something more on the fun side: a clip from Boondocks. I'm anxiously awaiting season 2 on this show; it's funny but unlike most of Adult Swim it's gorgeously animated. The reflections on the hospital floor, the detail on every person in a crowd scene, Huey's anime daydreams; it's all good. And I love these two characters, voiced by Samuel L. Jackson and Charlie Murphy:

Who reads this blog?

It's been a while since I checked in with my StatCounter (and I totally promise I am going to get some writing done today!). Myspace I like for having the little counter box right there in the corner, very convenient for obsessives. However, it doesn't tell you who stopped by or what they were looking for. I have StatCounter on my blogspot blog, so I do get that information. However, it's not particularly enlightening, is it?



All spanking, all the time. With just a hint of basketball (and the basketball searches are usually from Germany or Sweden. Actually, so is a lot of the spanking). (Hey, dude from Germany, if you find that Marko Jaric wallpaper, send me the link!)

I'm fairly certain the "Kate's blog" searches are looking for Kate Moss...

I've only just started getting stats on my website from Google Webmaster, and while it's not gotten very many hits, at least the hits in question have been for "Kate MacLeod", "Seagull and Raven", and "Fantastical Visions V". Those are probably relevant (although I hate the website in question. Now that I have the laptop paid for I'm going to start hoarding cash to pay someone to make my website look all spiffy. Me alone with Website Tonight just doesn't cut it).

My June Book Report

Many, many things slid to the wayside last week during my failed attempt to finish the WIP. For instance, Aidan was delighted to find that his assignment sheet for school this week was completely empty. That means he doesn't have to do anything! (Uh, no. It means mom flaked and didn't do her prep work last week for this three week school period. It was a long morning).

So today is all about getting non-WIP things done so I can plunge back into it tomorrow with a clear conscience. Ergo, this book report which is now 9 days overdue.

First off: the book I didn't finish. The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Now I remember why I stopped reading Gibson (although I never stopped buying him; the books just kept stacking up waiting for me to finish this). It's official: I give up. I want to like it; it has a lot of cool ideas in it. I think what it needs from me is a quiet afternoon with me, this book, and maybe a cat or two. When my youngest goes to college and I have quiet afternoons like that again, I'll take it back down. In the meantime, I'm moving on to books more amenable to my 10 minutes at a time reading style.

Namely, the sequels to Mona Lisa Overdrive: Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties. These I liked immensely. Gibson writes teenage girls who have no close friends very well (and I should know), and I particularly like the character of Rydell, who carries over from MLO. At the end of May, my favorite Gibson novel was MLO, but that changed to Idoru, and then to ATP, and in the end wound up being Pattern Recognition. PR doesn't tie in to any of his previous efforts. It is, however, dead brilliant. If you're cynical at all about the forces behind marketing, you'll want to check this one out. It also touches on 09/11, something I've been avoiding in fiction be it books or TV or movies. I know it's been nearly six years now, but I'm still not in a place where fiction about 09/11 doesn't really upset me. Gibson only touches on it, he doesn't try to explain it, there's no "this is what it's all about" moment. From a writing stand point, I think he handled it very well. It did, however, bring my nightmares back for a brief encore.

(And for those who make fun of me for shedding tears for characters who die in Harry Potter; yes, it is much worse when it happens to real people. This is why I don't watch the news).

I'm officially out of Gibson until next month, but I have Spook Country on preorder.

At that point I decided to take a break from sci-fi and read the latest Johanna Lindsey. Feel free to mock. It's like potato chips; I know it's not real food but I can't help myself. Plus, it only takes a day to read one of these. It's sort of the anti-Difference Engine.

Then I read The Ice Dragon by George R. R. Martin. Technically a children's book; it's very, very short. I liked the story, being a sucker for all things ice and snow related. No replacement for the long-awaited Dance with Dragons, though, and it sounds like that one is still more than a year off.
I read a bit of nonfiction this month, Parenting Beyond Belief, a collection of essays on raising children in nonreligious households. More of a "you're not alone" than a how-to, but being a secular homeschooler, I can never hear "you're not alone" enough, frankly. The homeschooling community is a lonely place for an evolutionist to be, I can tell you that. It has essays from Penn Jillette, Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, and Julia Sweeney. (Actually, that's kind of a litmus test for whether you'll like the book. Have no idea who Dawkins or Shermer is? Not for you).

I finished off the month with two new releases. The first was Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell. I quite enjoyed Crystal Rain, and this is a sort of sequel (although it introduces all new characters and only picks up the old ones when the story is well underway, a structure I quite liked). Ragamuffin is even better than Crystal Rain. There are lots of cool ideas in it, the story is fast-paced, and the character of Nashara is very well done, especially when you find out who she is. As you can tell from the cover, she kicks ass, but she goes deeper than that too. You know, I've often been bugged by the scene in the movie The Matrix when Neo and Trinity blow away all the security guards in the lobby before going up to save Morpheus. These are security guards, not agents, so they're human beings who are stuck in the Matrix and have no idea of what's really going on. Do Neo and Trinity have to kill them to get to Morpheus in time? Almost certainly yes. But does it really have to be such a rah-rah moment? Or am I the only one thinking, you know those are really innocent victims if you think about it. No one is offering them the pills. Which is all to say a similar situation faces Nashara at one point, and she sees it like it I would. She does what she has to, but there is no rah-rah about it. Of course that moment is sort of a footnote to a scene that just happened to stand out in my mind. The whole book is both cool and fun (you know, there's just not enough fun around these days. The fun quotient is really what divides the two Stars Wars trilogies in my mind. I like to go to dark places as much as the next person, but having fun has real value too), and I would recommend this book just for the names the ragamuffins give their ships. And like with Crystal Rain, Buckell put the first third of the novel up on his website so you can read it for free.

The last thing I read in June was the little number I mentioned buying because I loved the cover: Mainspring by Jay Lake. Another fast, fun, cool read. (You know, I think I needed these two books to come back from the movie Pan's Labyrinth, which was marvelously well done, and I adore Guillermo Del Toro, but that movie left me seriously bummed out for days) Lake takes the idea of a clockwork universe with God as the ultimate clockmaker and really runs with it. If we're all very, very good, maybe Hayao Miyazaki will make a movie of it.

(You know, I'm tempted to call both of these last two perfect beach reads, but "beach read" calls to mind books with pictures of some woman's feet on the cover. Have you walked down the book aisle in Target lately? They carry nothing but books with close-ups of women's feet, bare or in flip-flops. What could these books possibly be about? I couldn't tell you, the feet are such a turn-off I don't pick them up to read the back copy. But books with airships and gigantic gears or burly women in free fall with big-ass machine guns? That's what I want to read at the beach!)

Nope, didn't do it

Didn't finish the novel. Got real close, though. I added in the subplot elements, revised the two chapters, and wrote one and a half chapters. I only have a chapter and a half left to go to reach THE END. I'm really hoping I get to it by next Friday. The mood swings are killing me: I either think I've created something really, really cool, the book I've always wanted to read but could never find because no one was writing it, or I absolutely hate it and wonder why exactly I've given 18 months of my life to something no one besides me is ever going to want to read. (You can probably pick which one I'm feeling right now, can't you?).

Well, time to set it aside for the weekend and get cracking on the job that pays.

Sprinting to the finish line

...which I'm still hoping will be this Friday. It's a vacation week from homeschool, and we have no plans for the 4th (quite intentional, I assure you). Still, lots left to do. Three chapters to write, two chapters to majorly revise, and a certain subplot thread that needs to get woven in all over the place to tie it all together.

Man, I'm tired now! I blame the cat who mastered opening the screen door; I've only half-slept while listening for him to come back a couple of nights this week, and he seemed to prefer 4 a.m. for that. There's a bolt on the screen door now (and boy is he pissed!) but I haven't made up that sleep yet. Not to mention like a dope I volunteered to work extra to cover other people's time off, again, which is going to cut into my writing time.

On a completely unrelated note, this blog is rated:

With only one use of the word "crappy". I was hoping for a nice respectable PG-13. I should unleash my inner Tarantino and write something like this.

Maybe next week. Well, wish me luck!

(PS - I have my June book report half finished, but you probably won't see it until the WIP is done and put away.)

Things that bring me up when I'm down

1. Shiny new laptops. Or shiny refurbished laptops. Whatever. I should have caved a long time ago. Not only is this going to help the writing, now I won't have to print chapters posted on my critique group, read them and mark them up promptly, then have to wait days to find enough computer time to type up the notes and line edits. I can do it all on the laptop in the kitchen, while I'm waiting for this or that boy to finish his math. Sweet! Also, paper-free.
2. Only having three chapters left to go to finish the WIP, and these are the three chapters I know exactly what to say since they've been in my head since the beginning. My only fear: there is a big emotional moment coming up, and I have a tendency to go all Marti Noxon on the emotional moments. I'll probably just let it all go full drama mode (frankly, it's fun to write, all over the top, you know?) and then dial it back in on the second pass.
3. My husband saying that when I reach THE END the whole family should go out and celebrate, because it's a big milestone. I've heard so many horror stories lately of writers with spouses who don't support the time-suck which is writing (or the time-suck which is homeschooling), that he would just volunteer this is frankly very, very cool.
4. Andaz Apna Apna, a Bollywood movie I've watched about a hundred times now. It's hard not to feel uplifted, what with all the singing and dancing and bizarre comedy bits. (Nothing on YouTube except a few of the comedy scenes, which won't make sense as they don't have subtitles, so you'll have to take my word on this).
5. A certain 6-year-old who filled my office window with flowers from the clover in our yard, poking the little stems through the screen (he seems to have gotten a disproportionate amount of Irish blood in him; he loves his ma).

On an unrelated note, I just bought a book based solely on the cover. Well, I read the description and I've read enough of Jay Lake's short fic to know I like his style, but to be frankly honest, I knew I'd be buying this as soon as I saw the cover:

A sort of survivors guilt, I suppose...

As a solution to various problems you may encounter upon the way, let me suggest this: Make Good Art. It's very simple. But it seems to work.
Life fallen apart? Make good art. True love ran off with the milkman? Make good art. Bank foreclosing? Make good art. - Neil Gaiman

To which I'll add: "A third of your department laid off with no warning because the Filipinos are cheaper? Make good art."

*Sigh.* Rough night. Well, at least it wasn't me making anyone cry at the department meeting this time. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to finish the novel, listen to some Nick Drake, and have some wine. Maybe not in that order.

In Which I Cave In

I hate making major purchases. Hate it. I cried the day we bought our Subaru, and the negotiations for buying that TV were extensive (spread out over several months, but in the end I got built-in bookshelves in trade. Plus it helps that Quin's bonus check was enough to cover the TV he wanted and the new fridge that I was pushing for. Our electric bill has taken a noticeable drop since we got the new fridge, confirming my suspicion that the other one only looked like it was shut most of the time).

Not that I'm particularly frugal; my book spending borders on the out of control. But that's just ten or twenty dollars at a time. Spending hundreds of dollars all at once... I guess I'm always paranoid that some major disaster will befall us and I'll desperately wish I'd held onto that money. Or something. This isn't rational, I know.

All of this is just to say that I made another big purchase today, and the very worst kind, the kind that is something just for me and not the family. I bought myself a laptop. It's a refurbished Dell with no bells or whistles of any kind, as cheap as I could go and still get tech support (which is why I didn't pick anything up on eBay, although I could've gone cheaper there). I haven't actually gotten it yet; perhaps when it's here I'll be all excited and not low-level nauseous that I just dropped a load of cash all at once. I've been debating buying one for more than a year now. The last week's worth of writing time spent copy-typing from notebooks kind of clinched it for me. I think it would behoove me to find a more efficient way of doing this. Now I'm very fond of writing longhand, I'm not sure if I can be creative the same way with a keyboard (and that worry is fueling the nausea, I'm sure), but now that the homeschooling is taking more time than before, my writing time is feeling the pinch. So I pooled my quarterly bonus and some of my overtime money and took the plunge.

*sigh*

At any rate, I have four chapters left to go on the WIP plus some things I need to go back and add in earlier chapters. I've had this problem with integrating the two parts of the story, and there needs to be more conflict and foreshadowing earlier on. After much stewing I think I know what I need to do now. I'm on track for my July 6 deadline, then I'll let this whole thing sit for Harry Potter Month before giving it one last hard edit and then it's off on the query-go-round.

I've never submitted to agents before. I think that nausea just slid up a notch...

It probably doesn't mean anything...

But The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which usually only takes ten days to get a rejection back from, held onto "Blood and Ink" for more than a month. And the rejection is from Mr. Gordon Van Gelder, not the Slush God.

Yes, it probably means nothing. Still, I like that feeling like maybe, just maybe, I got a little closer. And now I have a story free for this quarter's Writers of the Future (I was beginning to think I'd have to give it a miss; I don't feel short story brilliance in me at the moment, plus the deadline falls before my self-imposed novel deadline).

My foreign language addiction

So I've mentioned before that I have this little addiction to learning new foreign languages. Now there's a limit to how far one can go with no one else to talk to in that language, so I usually pick up a sense of the mechanics and a feel for the pronunciation and then move on to the next one. I have at one point or another studied Spanish, German, Latin, Japanese, French, Norwegian, Swedish, and Icelandic. I'm not remotely fluent in anything (one could make a pretty convincing argument against my fluency in English on same days), and my phobia against talking to anyone I don't already know pretty much limits my chances of ever practicing any of this in conversation. But I do like to read things in foreign languages, and the internet is great for finding stuff not in English. (I've read novels in Spanish and in German, although it's been so long since I've used my German I don't think I could do it now).

Mostly I do this because I find language tapes more diverting than TV shows when I'm treading the mill (a necessary but tedious 30 minutes I try to get in every day). The Pimsleur series in particular is excellent; it's all oral so you don't need to be holding a phrase book at the same time or anything, and rather than being a listen and repeat the phrase type thing, you have to come up with responses on your own to questions in the language you're learning. It really taxes the memory; a challenging kind of fun. The problem for me was that they only go up to 10 lessons in most languages (hence my mere smattering of Swedish and Norwegian). About a month ago when I was choosing which language to do next, I decided I wanted to really delve into one of the languages Pimsleur had more than 10 lessons in, and I wanted it to be something really challenging.

It came down to a coin toss between Japanese and Mandarin Chinese (I have tons of movies in these two languages, and it would be fun to understand them without the subtitles. Sadly, Cantonese is one of the languages Pimsleur only does 10 lessons in. I have more Catonese than Mandarin movies). Well, Mandarin won. This certainly has served its purpose as far as treading the mill goes; I've quit finding excuses not to do it because I look forward to the Chinese lessons. But the problem was as I've mentioned above, I largely use my foreign language skills to read, and this is strictly an oral program. Plus, Chinese? Well, I don't need to tell you their writing system is a bit of an intellectual Mount Everest. Luckily, it's my kind of rock climbing. I went out and got myself a book on Chinese writing and a monster stack of index cards.

And actually this plays into my whole being an example to my sons thing. Seeing mom learn something which is quite challenging for her by drilling flash cards is a much better motivator than just promising it really helps to learn that way. Aidan is learning Latin with flash cards pretty much on his own. I only go over them with him once when he gets his new words to make sure he's pronouncing it all correctly and then he drills them on his own while I drill mine.

I only recognize about 100 words so far (pretty good for a month's effort, though). It's enough so I can page through some of my books that have Chinese in them and pick out characters here and there I know. Then I found the coolest thing on YouTube: Wilber Pan karoake. (Wilber Pan is another one of those acts I saw on IMF, fell in love, and then had to buy his stuff from some guy in Hong Kong on eBay because it's not available here. Honestly, IMF is evil). Not only does this video have the written Chinese to match what he's singing (in Mandarin, not Cantonese, since he's from Taiwan) (actually he's from West Virginia, but that's not important now), they light up as he sings them. It's like the world's coolest teaching tool.

But my favorite video of his doesn't have the karoake feature. Which is a shame. But it does have subtitles, and it does feature Wilber Pan in a sort of kung fu epic pastiche. Cool.

My May book report

OK, my house is back in order (I would post pics, but to be honest it doesn't look any different. When the shelves are finished and the doors are on, I'll post a pic), I'm all caught up on critiquing I've been dreadfully negligent with (sort of, there's that stack of short stories for the Backspace contest I haven't even started on yet), and I only worked 19 hours this weekend instead of 21 or 22, so I'm feeling pretty good! I finished up working early enough on Sunday to take the boys to see Pirates of the Caribbean. I liked the second one better than the first; I now like the third better than the second. There's no way to craft an ending that will satisfy everyone, of course, but I have to say this ending satisfied me very, very much. I particularly appreciate the care they took to give every character a nice ending, whether it be Admiral Norrington or the characters I refer to as the Pirate Rosencratz and Guildenstern and the British Navy Rosencratz and Guildenstern (if they have actual names, I don't know them, but I bet you know who I mean).

My only complaint: I could have had a little more Chow-Yun Fat. On the upside, I got a new toy yesterday which should meet all my Chow-Yun Fat needs:

(There was also a specific image in that movie that is nearly exactly something that happens in my novel. Gave me quite a chill. I could probably describe mine better. Well, that's always true. Still, very cool movie.)

At any rate, I have this monthly book wrap-up to write, then that stack of short stories to read, then it's back to the novel. It's been tough finding time to write these last three weeks; homeschooling a fourth grader and a first grader is a lot more work than homeschooling a third grader and a kindergartner was. We're working together as a family to find a way of doing things that still gives me time to write, because apparently I get a bit shrewish when I'm not writing. (I wonder, if I say "shrew" is that going to up my "Kiss me Kate spanking scene" hits? Probably not as much as putting "Kiss me Kate spanking scene" in here. Well, lately my biggest source of activity has been the "Which Avatar character are you?" quiz and not spanking. But I digress).

May was a banner month for reading with 13 books. Sadly, many of these were either new buys or from the library, so it didn't really take that To Be Read number down much. Actually, since I put everything on Library Thing and labeled my TBR stack, that number went up (apparently I'd missed some things on my first tally). It now stands at 273.

Now the largest reason the homeschooling is more work these days is that first grade is a big change from kindergarten. The other big change is that Aidan moved from grammar stage to logic stage in the trivium (which is how we homeschool, classical style refers to the trivium. For the wildly curious, here's an essay on what that means from the woman who wrote the book which I've been using rather loosely as a guide). Part of that is that he's added logic into his course load (he loves it, but if you know Aidan that's not in the least surprising). Another part of that is he is learning to work more independently. I now give him a list of assignments on Monday that he has to have finished by Friday and he decides when he does what. Which has led to some very long Fridays, but it's an important skill to learn. The other big change is that his literature-based history program now has him reading chapter books and short novels rather than picture books.

Which of course means I have to read those books as well. As a student I had an uncanny ability to pretend to have read a book I hadn't (I got an A on my Robinson Crusoe test and paper in college without ever getting past page 30, and that was sans Cliff Notes or ever seeing the movie version. It pays to stay awake in class). I don't think I can fake it as well as a teacher. Plus, there's the whole setting a good example thing.

So three of the books I read were for history: The Door in the Wall by Marguerite De Angeli (dull, dull, dull! Strangely enough, Aidan liked this one better than I did), The Trumpeter of Krakow by Eric P. Kelly (I quite liked this one. Bonus points for trusting us on "Philosopher's Stone". Am I the only one who resents that American Harry Potter is "Sorcerer's Stone", as if Americans cringe at the word philospher?), and Beowulf: A New Telling by Robert Nye, which I also quite liked (not as well as the Seamus Heaney, but that one would be a bit much for a 9-year-old. He'll be reading it in high school for sure).

Four of the books I read were from the library. Two were Robert Zubrin books I read for Mars research for the novel: Entering Space and First Landing (technically a novel, but in actuality the more helpful of the two for my purposes). I also have been toying with the idea of writing a YA novel next (keyword: toying). To that end, I've been combing YA book lists and putting stacks of them on hold at the library. Most I only really skim through. I'm trying to get a general sense of content, length, and that. They are overwhelming fantasy; what I'm toying with would be straight-up sci-fi. I haven't had much luck finding current sci-fi YA. I did find YA steampunk which I liked enough to read all the way through: Airborn and Skybreaker by Kenneth Oppel (the one is the sequel to the other). If you like airships and ornithopters and steam power, I highly recommend them. As with all YA, it's not just for kids.

The last Hellblazer finally turned up from my Christmas batch: Reasons to be Cheerful. Perhaps it was just reading it on its own after reading all the others back to back, but it felt very disjointed. It didn't really have a beginning, and it definitely didn't have an ending.

I got books for Mothers Day as well: Hellboy: Wake the Devil (Hellboy is one of my favorite comic book movies; the source material is of course quite good as well), and John Scalzi's trilogy Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony. A very satisfying read. He gets compared to Heinlein a lot; I think he's better than Heinlein. Scalzi's women actually act like real women, just for starters. (This is a long-running argument in my house, Heinlein's women. I do give him points for trying, but I don't really like his women characters).

That just leaves the book I read first in May: Virtual Light by William Gibson. That was the third time I've read it. It's my favorite Gibson novel so far. I have a few I've not read yet, and those I'm tackling next.

You know, after I finish the novel. I'm knocking that deadline back a week. I expect to be finished by July 6. This will give me one more homeschool vacation week to get things done but will still have me done before all the Harry Potter things start coming out (there was a trailer before Pirates that had more scenes than the one I'd already seen. I'm beginning to suspect that my favorite Harry Potter book is about to become my favorite Harry Potter movie).

At the expense of seeming like I spend too much time on You Tube...

Look, I was a die-hard MTV fan back in my teen years. You know, back when they used to play music videos. These days, I'm just grateful that my favorite band has so many Brazilian fans who post crappy copies of their videos on You Tube or I'd never see any of it. (Music videos are basically advertising for records, yes? So why don't more bands put them up on their websites? You know, like OK GO does.)

Now, it would not be the weirdest thing I've ever seen on You Tube to see 20-year-old concert footage of my favorite band cut to a John Lennon song (at the very least, it loses out to the scenes from The Matrix cut to "Lifelines". Most a-ha songs don't really mesh with The Matrix; that one really doesn't). Imagine my surprise, that's not John Lennon singing! How is it possible that an a-ha cover of a John Lennon song exists, and I don't have it?

Just one way: it's part of an Amnesty International compiliation which won't be out until June 25 (which just happens to be someone's birthday; however, I don't think this is on his wish list).




(Look, my house is still in disarray as that quick finishing of the bookcases that was supposed to be done in one day still isn't finished. My computer is all-but-inaccessible. Perhaps next week I can write a blog that takes more than five minutes. Like my May book report, for instance. Soon. Soon.)

Well that's interesting

I didn't think anyone saw what I saw in a Keanu Reeves performance. Apparently someone else does, and it's Joss Whedon. Go figure.

Library Thing

I've spent most of this week moving books around. Quin is going to spend the long weekend sanding and finishing the built-in bookshelves. (I'll be spending this weekend working. All three days. Don't even get me started on that one. The really sad thing is I volunteered for it...)

The project still won't be done. The shelves need to be sanded and finished separately and have the front strips added to them, and the bottom cabinets will still need doors, but this is the last time I'm going to be moving all my books around. And I did pretty much move everything to make room for the living room books. I don't like stacking them on the floor in my office since it's a basement with a tendancy for wetness (although all of that drainage work Quin did last summer seems to have done the trick, so that's good news).

As long as I was touching every book, I decided to go ahead and tackle that cataloging project I've been meaning to get around to. Those of you reading this at Blogspot will notice a new sidebar feature, three random books from my library. I probably shouldn't admit to how much time I've spent refreshing the page just to see what combos come up. So now if you go to my Library Thing page you can see all 1906 books I own (no making fun of my extensive Johanna Lindsey collection, or my role playing games, thank you very much). I went through and added a few tags as well. I've cordoned off the books which really belong to my boys and books which are sheet music and not actually book books (actually, I'm not sure why I did that. I'm thinking with sand here these days). I also tagged the books I use for homeschooling (it's possible to do this homeschooling thing with fewer books, of course, but those massive encyclopedias are just so cool).

Most significantly, I tagged the books on my To Be Read list. All 277 of them (yep, that number just keeps creeping up). For those of you so inclined, now you can see what I'm neglecting and chew me out for not getting to the Niven or the Zimmer Bradley or the Dickens.

I showed this Library Thing page to Quin, the author cloud and author gallery are particular favorites of mine, and statistics are always cool. Not only did he not particularly share my geeked state, he noted that this probably meant I haven't written anything this week. Which is pretty much true (I eeked out about 500 words over five days).

I have nothing much to say...

...working hard on that thing I'm working on. I did want to post this video I saw, possibly the funnest music video I've seen in a great long while (it's not in English, so you'll never see it on MTV). These kids must go to hip-hop dancing cram school; they've got the moves. I saw this with the family on IMF the other night. During the middle bit, Quin remarked he didn't think they had any open fields in Japan. I said I think there must be just the one; I would swear that's the same field the Prince of Space lands on in that classic movie.

My youngest is now six!

And he came home from the barber's with a faux-hawk:

It's a bit short for a faux-hawk, but he's enormously proud of it.

I installed the DVD drive in the PC yesterday, but the software that came with it does absolutely nothing unless you buy the $60 upgrade. I mean it, nothing! It won't even play the disc. So it will be just a bit longer before I can post clips here (I'm exploring options that don't involve giving money to companies that enjoy raping their consumers. What, me pissed?)

I have been doing the two-man kung fu forms with Quin again, watching them on the video to fill in the gaps in our collective memories. I remembered more than I thought I had. You can totally tell I'm starting from a non-kung fu state, though; my arms and shins are covered in little green bruises. Once I get used to blocking punches and kicks again I'll toughen up and that won't happen. It does remind me of the last time I started out, and one of my classmates at lab tech school was convinced I was being abused but couldn't think of a way to broach the subject with someone she'd just met.

Right, well, back at it. For some reason when I'm writing I keep hearing Michael Biehn's voice in my head: "Ease up! You're just grinding metal!" I'm sure it doesn't mean anything...

This and that

Time to start week two of the writing sprint. Wish me luck! Some things to clear up first:

Reading report for April: I read seven books, but four of them I'd read before. I read two more LeGuin novels (The Lathe of Heaven, which used the Tao idea of the uncovered block in a really cool way and also contained the word "odiose" (Backspacers will get why I'm geeked about that), and The Eye of Heron, which was a bummer). I had a few more to go but wanted to get away from Tao novels while I'm reaching the Tao part of my own novel. So I picked up The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke. If you loved Dr. Strange and Mr. Norrell, definitely pick this one up. It's a collection of short stories, some connecting to the novel and some not, but all very good. (I'm totally jealous; I would kill to write something that was illustrated by Charles Vess). Then I decided to dig back in to Gibson. I read Gibson like I read Harry Potter; every time I want to read a new one I'm compelled to re-read all the prior novels first. Which is probably how I came to have four of them stacked up unread. So I read Neuromancer, Burning Chrome, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, and I'm working on Virtual Light right now, which is the last one I've read previously.

I admit, I'm a heathen. While I'll admit that Neuromancer is his most important work, I actually like MLO and VL better. Kumiko and Chevette are deeper characters than Molly, I think is what does it for me. I particularly like Kumiko and how she wears her mother's expressions.

To be read stack now stands at 253. Yes, I'm moving backwards.

One other thing before I start my daily sprint. I've been nagging my husband for months and months to go back to our kung fu class and record some of the instructors going through the forms. I can only half remember them, and my favorite form, 18 point, I can't remember at all. He finally went and filmed one Sunday in December (when I was of course working), but he was using someone else's camera (it was nicer than ours).

I finally just this weekend got to see that tape (my husband lives in a different time stream then I do, I swear). I'm working out a way to get some of it on the PC so I can post some clips. I might have that worked out by Wednesday. In the mean time, here are some clips from You Tube to whet your appetite.

The first one is just Toph, the Earthbender who practices Kwong Sai Jook Lum, the style of kung fu I've done and hope to do again. The clip is long and very roughly edited (basically, someone took my favorite episode "The Blind Bandit" and cut it down to just the fight scenes). Toph's stance, the way she holds her hands, the way she walks her horse, are all spot-on for our style. And I love when she does the three point strike.

(Some would argue that I worry too much about the details when I write. I generally don't argue, but secretly I know how I geeked I am when someone goes through the effort to get something right. I would guess the number of people who watch AVATAR who can appreciate what they got right with Toph is in the 50s, maybe. Was it worth the effort? See, I just don't think the creators think of it that way. I don't think of it that way. It's a labor of love; it's all worth it).

At any rate, here's Toph:



This one doesn't have as much Toph in it, but it's set to "Kung Fu Fighting". There's another on their set to "Mortal Kombat", but this one won by a hair with me:

It's now the end of week one

So here's what I've accomplished in week one of my three week marathon:

Monday: 3495
Tueday: 2736
Wednesday: 1542
Thursday: 3353
Friday: 1158

Which is about 4000 words short of my goal for this week. Of course there's always the weekend; I might get time to write on the weekend (I think it's a tad more likely that the Swedish Bikini Team will stop by and bring me some really great beer).

Still, that's a nice chunk more than a usual week's worth of writing. In the normal flow of things, I average 1000 words a day. To give a sense of perspective to my non-writer friends, Stephen King in his book On Writing recommends writing 2000 words a day. Now Stephen King doesn't also have another fulltime job and homeschool two kids. But I also strongly suspect that Mr. King puts out more than 2000 words a day.

On a related note, Neil Gaiman recently posted some pictures on his blog of the notebook he's writing his current novel in. It's a gorgeous leather-bound Italian number and mine are just artist sketch books, but mostly I'm jealous because that bastard never crosses anything out!

So I thought I'd share my own pics. So far The Tao of Troth is in three notebooks, thusly:

The kirigami decorations are there because otherwise I have a hard time figuring out which is the front cover and which is the back. My usual inability to grasp simple things becomes even more hampered when I'm in write mode, so...

At any rate, the notebooks aren't all straight-up writing. I put a lot of things in there for reference. This page is a list of every member of the Norse village by family and age, which room in the house they sleep in, a table with all of the Norse dieties in Old Norse spellings, and a diagram of the Nine Worlds, just in case I need to know where Jotunheimr is in relation to Asgardhr.

I also have notes in there on Chinese alchemy. One of the characters from the last half of the novel is a Taoist alchemist. I very much doubt any of this will come up, since it's not really relevant to the plot, but it did help me understand the way he thinks:

This is an example of a page when the writing is going very well. Only a couple of cross-outs, a little "ooh, say this too!", and a Post-It clarifying something I thought was true when I was writing but saved the actual looking up for later (that the Spanish and Old Norse for "Greenland" is almost identical).

And here's a page from a more typical day. The "No. Dammit, no. No, not that either. Argh!" kind of day. (I don't remember this particular day, but statistically the little trailing off line marks the point when I was suddenly compelled to unload the dishwasher, or clean the bathroom, or start learning Swedish).

OK, it's time now to make dinner and then begin the endless drudgery which is the weekend.

Day 1 of my three week writing marathon

As mentioned previously, I'm trying to write the last half of my novel by June 30, with the plan that I'll tackle the majority of that in the next three weeks while we're on a break from homeschooling.

Now last week was a very good week for writing. I finished a short and submitted it to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress XXII (for which I got one of those nice rejections where it seems like the editor really is regretful that they can't buy it; they already have something else too similar. The story in question has already moved on to the next slush pile). That one I had been working on for a week before, had my critique group give it a good go-over, then rewrote it to fix the problems. You know, my usual writing thang. I was working on that in the afternoons during my writing time.

But I also had an idea for the latest Backspace contest that I really wanted to commit to paper. But that MZB story was taking up all my time. So I broke from my usual way of writing by staying up til 2 a.m. two nights running to write the whole thing out, then getting up early on Friday to type it all up, give it a rather rigorous edit (it was 800 words over the parameters, I had to lose an entire scene plus a lot of adjectives it probably didn't need in the first place).

I must say, I was very pleased with how it came out, considering. I might even consider changing up my writing habits (except I'm still feeling sleep lag; the problem with my schedule is that there is never any time to make up missed sleep. I have no "weekend" to sleep late, it's school or work every day of the week).

But the other thing about writing that short is that I was writing at a sprint, and I didn't edit it much before posting. Which makes me wonder how the novel would come out if I wrote it the same way.

So the plan is to write all the way to THE END in the next three weeks, a first draft commited to paper at a sprint. I'll wait until the end to put in the computer and start tweeking. Since I religiously outline, I know exactly what needs to happen and when, so this should be doable. Barring collapsing from exhaustion, of course.

So, Day 1 (yesterday): 3450 words. Pretty much all of chapter nine (although I did stick a few Post-Its on there, so that for draft 2 I remember to actually describe a few things which need describing). Now Monday is the one day of the week I never work (unless someone specifically calls me to ask me to), so I'm not expecting to hit that number every day. Still, not too shabby.

Since Quin was in Ohio I rewarded myself with a Jet Li movie: The Legend. I laughed my ass off, but I think the writing sprint had me a little punchy. Still, any movie where a man says "The man who can beat my wife can marry my daughter" is by definition my kind of movie (and when the man who beats his wife is actually the hero's mother in disguise...)

On a totally unrelated note, here's a little quiz I picked up from Written Wyrdd:

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

The same web site had another quiz which I took:

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

You know, it was a lot of the same questions, and I answered the same way. How I ended up being both Gandhi and Apocalypse Now I don't know. Didn't see that coming...

Energy Absorb Skill!

It's possible I've gone off the deep end with the wuxia. My boys are starting to think I'm nuts, but there's just something about watching a ton of these movies that makes you want to not only do kung fu, but shout out your moves when you do them. "Swinging sword!" "Shadowless kick!"

I think if I could say them in Chinese it'd be cooler, eh?

Novel research is so much fun (especially when you really bend the definition of "research").

Well, the real point of this post was to make a personal goal public. I intend to finish the WIP by June 30. Since I started last January, that would be 18 months from start to finish, much shorter than the 5 years the previous novel took to write (although in my defense, infants are horrible distractions with no sense of boundaries or personal time). I think it's doable because summer in general gives me more time to write, as the boys go to the park every night and stay until it's completely dark, and also because I'll have a three week chunk of no homeschooling, as it will be the boys' between grades break. The further along we go on this homeschooling adventure the less grades mean anything; the only thing that marks fourth grade different from third is the math book, everything else just continues along at its own pace. Still, since we school year-round (three weeks on and one week off every month - we're not nuts!), the three week vacation in May is always nice, especially since the two weeks we take off in December are usually desperately needed for cranky, too-much-overtime-at-work Mom.

Note for Blogspot readers: If you notice that the Zokutou word meter in the corner of the blog isn't moving, that doesn't mean I'm not writing like a madwoman. It just means I haven't copy-typed out of my notebooks. Having spent last week's writing time copy-typing short stories and a bit of the novel out of my notebooks (did you notice it bump up a little? it did!), all I can say is that's a lot like work! I suppose I shouldn't wait so long and then have to do it all at once (or maybe get a program that can read my handwriting off scanned notebook pages - that would be cool).

At any rate, wish me luck!

Here's a meme with pictures

I saw this on Andrew Wheeler's blog, and it was so cool I wanted to play. (You realize of course these blog posts which are all pictures are actually more work than the ones where I just type a bunch of stuff, right?).

Image meme: Plug your answers into Google Image Search and post the first image that comes up.

1. Your age on your next birthday:










2. Your favorite color:








3. Your middle name:
It's Ann. I'm not sure who she is; the world's most popular Ann, apparently.








4. The last meal you ate:
It was actually a bowl of oatmeal, not a plate of oatmeal cookies. It pays to be specific when Googling, I suppose. It was also a lot of hours ago; I'm doing this while I'm waiting for my very late lunch to come out of the oven.



5. Your bad habit:
I'll leave it up to you to decide what my bad habit is...





6. Your favorite fruit or vegetable:









7. Your favorite animal:
Why the suitcase? I don't know. It just came up first for "cat". But then again, cats universally do this, don't they? My cats fight over which one gets to sit in the suitcase.



8. The town you live in:
Minneapolis, MN of course.






9. The name of your pet or last pet:
OK, technically he's name for Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop, but there is a reason why I've been known to call him my little blondie bear.




10. Your SO or best friend's nickname:
My husband is very anti-nickname. This is what came up for "Quin". Weird.







12. Your crush's name:
My first response was more "as if! Happily married, thank you!". Then I remembered that my habit of watching stacks of movies back to back which feature the same actor has led Quin to refer to these actors as my crushes. (I could probably word that better if I weren't so stinkin' hungry - three hours at the dentist!). In that vein, Jet Li is my current crush. As soon as my chicken's done it's going to be the start of a ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA marathon.


13. Your occupation:
That's even the same style of Dictaphone as I use! I actually prefer this picture, most of the runner-up images were insanely happy "workers" fake posing for the camera. She looks like she really does this for a living (although what she's doing with her hands there, I'm not sure. Waiting for the doctor to finish that cellphone call he answered without stopping the recording, I bet).

14. Your birth city:
Since this would be the same as #8 (and doesn't that just make it seem like I've never been anywhere!), I Googled just "Mineapolis" this time. I'm probably biased, but I think it's the prettiest skyline ever, especially when you're looking at it from across one of the lakes.



15. Your favorite song:
It's not everybody who's favorite songs are made into movies starring the Coreys. Actually, this movie isn't bad. The idea and the set-up are really quite cool, but the ending is a total hackjob. And the sequel? Complete waste of time. This is one of those movies I like to watch as a writer and try to figure out how to fix it.

My March book report

Technically, tomorrow is the last day of March, but since the weekends are an endless slog of work for me without time to read let alone blog, I'm turning this in a day early.

For those of you playing along at home, I set myself a goal of reading all of the books I own which I haven't read yet. There are 252 of them, so I have my work cut out for me.

Trips to the library are not helpful in attaining this goal; alas, the first book I read in March (after the ones I've already talked about from my vacation) came from the library. It was Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress XXI, a collection of fantasy short stories with female protagonists. I liked quite a few of them (Lee Martindale's "Necessity and The Mother" about an inn run by ex-mercenaries was my fave). This was mostly in the interest of research; they are accepting admissions for Volume XXII and I wanted to see if the story I'm working on fits in or not. It's sort of a faux-Sumerian setting, and these are largely European, but not exclusively. Well, we'll see how it goes. From the stand point of a reader and not a writer, this was enough of a taste where I'm curious to read the first 20 volumes. I shall abstain; I have 252 books to read first, right?

So I'm a huge fan of Ursula K. LeGuin. I've read the Earthsea novels over and over, and her books on writing are a constant resource for me. I'm particularly fond of the Tao te Ching she did (I have quite a collection of Tao te Ching translations, and they are all a bit different. Of course the multiplicity is itself a rather tao thing. The Tao that can be translated is not the true Tao...). I've been remiss with her sci-fi, though. I did buy nearly all of her sci-fi novels over a couple of Christmases (ah, gift cards), and I read The Left Hand of Darkness (still my fave, actually, for sentimental reasons. Which means it made me cry, and books generally don't do that to me). I got halfway through this one:

Worlds of Exile and Illusion, but stopped for some reason, then got all distracted with Miles Vorkosigan books (and there are a ton of those, and they get better as you go so there's no stopping until you're done). So the first thing up was to finish this off. It's actually an omnibus of three short novels: Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions. They're minor works from her, really, but they all had touches I liked. The sci-fi version of the faery story in RW, where the woman goes under the mountain and what seems like an evening to her is decades to the rest of the world when she returns (because she was travelling at relativistic speeds); the years-long winter of PofE; the taoist ideas which culiminate in the MC becoming two people and yet one at the end of CofI (I liked that one the best).

Still, if you want to see what LeGuin can really do, start here:

From a nonemotional point of view, I would say this is a better book than Left Hand of Darkness (although, as I mentioned, that's still my fave, what with the crying and with the wintery landscapes. I bet you never knew I loved wintery landscapes...). Certainly it made me feel completely inadequate as a writer. There are so many ideas here. She blends physics, politics, and philosophy together, and she does it with real, human characters who are not cardboard cut-outs fronting for various ideologies. I don't like utopia stories, and I seldom like dystopia stories; they are often just novelizations of straw man arguments. This is not that. There is ambiguity here. If the anarchists on Anarres have a utopia, it is one that requires its members to constantly fight against the pitfalls that group dynamics will inevitably fall into (although I'm suddenly intrigued - what would a pro-bureaucracy novel look like?)

(Monkeying around on Wikipedia led me to a new phrase "libertarian socialist". I've never heard of such a group. The human ability to divide groups into subgroups and sub-subgroups never ceases to amaze me).

Next up: The Word for World is Forest. I've always adored this title; apparently it wasn't LeGuin's choice. She called it Little Green Men, which actually fits the story better. And yet the title it has now (which Harlan Ellison came up with, from a line in the book) is so evocative, it would be a tough call. This one is very short, I think technically a novella. The ending is killer. I managed to convince my husband to read it (if you knew how little he reads these days, you'd appreciate what that means; I think it helps that this is so short).

It's not hard to see that this is a book about the Viet Nam War, but I didn't find it dated at all. I'm almost ashamed to admit, but I liked the character of Davidson. Now, if I met this guy in real life, I wouldn't have such positive feelings, but as a character he's really a guy that lives in his own skin, if you know what I mean. And the way his self-delusion builds as the story continues is quite a trip to read.



Last Book: The Telling. This one is basically a thinly veiled novelization of the last century of Chinese history, when the People's Republic of China took over. The old ways are outlawed, there is a push for one unifying language and an alphabetic writing system. There were a lot of little touches I liked: the way everyone pretends to like coffee because they're supposed to, the library in the caves high up in the mountains. But in the end this is a book I admired without really engaging in it much. I might have had a different impression if I hadn't read it right after The Dispossessed and The Word for World is Forest. It was good, but not great.

I thought I might just be Ursula'd out, but then I started the book I'm reading now, The Lathe of Heaven and knew from page 1 that was definitely not the problem. "...as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea." See my arm? Goosebumps.

So the tally at the end of the month (and I have it on an XCel spreadsheet because I am such a geek): I now have 249 books left to go. *sigh* Yes, a couple of books sneaked in the door so I didn't net much. Still, there's always April and six more LeGuin books to go. I'm debating where to go next: Diana Wynne Jones or William Gibson?

Check it out!

Linda Cambier (a member of my fantastic critique group SFFEditors and a fellow Backspacer, so you know she's cool) has a story up at Quantum Kiss. It's called "The Ultimate Vacation" and is well worth the read. Click the link, you know you want to...

Marie Brennan is the coolest

She's practically making my mission statement here. And she sounds just as pissed off by these attitudes as I am (it's a good thing, that pissed off feeling, it fuels the writing). Key quote for me:

How much future-oriented SF out there (as opposed to, say, alternate history) includes religion as a part of the daily lives of the characters? How much of it involves religion for the protagonists, instead of the aliens or Those People Over There? Some, but the prevailing idea seems to be that we'll have gotten over the religion thing by then.

I also like what she has to say about the magic vs. technology fallacy (have I mentioned I love the way she does magic in her novels? Oh yes, I have.). Although it doesn't get directly stated in my current WIP, one of the underlying rules of the world my novel is set in is that magic and science can achieve the same goals (for instance, time travel), they just work the problem in different ways. (The novel I wrote a few years back which is sitting quietly under my bed will potentially someday be reworked as book four or five in this series, if it ever goes series. I mention only because this is how I know the world setting of the WIP so well; I've been immersed in it for eight or so years now).

Well, I just had to share that. Back to work!

It's a good thing I like to read

I mentioned in my last post my desire to get my to-be-read stack down to a manageable 50 or so books. That got me wondering, how many books do I own which I haven't read yet? It's a metaphorical stack, you see, I tend to shelve things right away because I'm anal. So I took out a yellow pad and went shelf by shelf, counting everything I've not read which I intend to read (so this isn't counting reference books or my husband's architecture books or my boys' books unless I'm intending to read them cover to cover).

The final tally: 252.

Good lord.

OK, lest you think I'm a total impulse buyer in bookstores, a good chunk of those are books of my husband's which I didn't buy myself but do intend to read (the Niven, Heinlein, and what have you), and an even bigger chunk is books that my mother-in-law gave me a year or so ago: all her books from college. It was a wealth of riches, particularly for someone like me with an interest in history and period literature, especially from ancient Japan, China, and India.

Still, 252. You realize if I read a book a week (which is about my average), it would take me five years to read them all. And that would be assuming I didn't buy anything new (which isn't in the realm of possibility; I have five things on preoder from Amazon.com coming in April-August). Plus there are all those China Mieville books I haven't read yet, and I'm dying to check out John Scalzi (his blog rocks). Then there's this novel I'm supposed to be writing...

At any rate, I intend to make updates at the end of the month of what I've read and what the to-be-read count stands at now. You all can help keep me honest. I've got my work cut out for me!

...in which I go to Las Vegas and bring the snow with me

So I'm back from my weeklong vacation. I didn't read three novels in a week like I did last time, but I did read two and some change.

As mentioned previously, we had some blizzard-type weather just as we were leaving town. It dumped on Minneapolis a few more times while we were away, but now that we're back it's in the 40s and it's all starting to melt. Yep, we missed all the fun. Happily, one of our neighbors quite unexpectedly snowblowed our driveway for us, which is really appreciated when you get home at 1:30 in the morning because the flight home was delayed and you've been dreading hauling suitcases seemingly full of bricks and sleeping children (they always seem heavier when they're sleeping) over a couple of feet of snow into the house. So thank you, Patrick!

Of course the flight out of Minneapolis was more delayed than the flight in, although this apparently had nothing to do with the weather; we were waiting for our plane to make it up from Mexico. We spent nearly four hours in the airport play area watching our departure time get bumped back again and again. This play area seemed designed to magnify any sound made within it, and the little girls waiting to go to Orlando were playing some sort of game that involved lots of shrieking.

But that's OK, because I was on the banks of the Mississippi, eating catfish and biscuits in a house on stilts listing over the water. In my head, anyway; I was reading Jon Clinch's Finn. It's based on Huckleberry Finn, of course (it's about his father), but stylistically it's something else entirely. It's dark and completely engrossing. I was particularly fascinated with the dialogue. Not only are there no adverbs in the dialogue tags (she said gleefully), there are no tags at all. And the punctuation for dialogue is all periods and question marks, no ellipses or dashes even when someone trails off or is interrupted. It's all implied. Very minimalist, very cool. I would recommend reading it just to enjoy all the nuances contained in the words "I know it".

I was halfway through with that before we even landed in Phoenix (did I mention we waited in the plane for an hour before even taking off, waiting our turn to get our wings deiced? I'm just grateful this all happened now that my youngest is five and capable of dealing with it. If this had happened when he was two or three, it would have been a complete screaming nightmare.)

I finished Finn in snatches while we were on the road. We went to Hoover Dam and took the dam tour, took a lot of dam pictures. The boys were quite impressed. We also saw the work they're doing to build a bridge so traffic can bypass the dam. It's way too far up there; there is no way you're ever getting me to drive across that thing once it's done. It needs to be built, though, and apparently it's quite the feat of engineering. No trucks have been allowed on the dam since 9/11 and all other traffic passes through a security check first. The horse trailer in front of us had been inspected, but the door hadn't been latched properly afterwards, so we drove through the curves and turns of the road leading to the dam watching this door loaded with tackle swing open then shut, open then shut. Nothing got that guy's attention; not flashing your headlights or pedestrians gawking and pointing. He crossed the dam and kept going past the parking lot; I have no idea when he discovered his door was open. For someone like me who can't go to bed with the closet door cracked open because it's supposed to be closed, it was an exquisite form of torture.

Then we went to Vegas. As we crossed the pass and started down into the valley we could see clouds hanging over the city. As we got closer it started to rain. Then the rain got slushy. Then, just as we pulled onto Las Vegas Boulevard and got our first glimpse of the Luxor, it honest to god started to snow. It only lasted a minute and of course it didn't stick to anything. I just have to say, I went to Vegas and it snowed for me.

We spent the next two days running around Vegas. It's like Disneyworld for grown-ups, only it doesn't cost anything to roam around, provided you never get thirsty or hungry or buy anything in the shops. Everything costs twice as much as a midwesterner like me thinks it ought to. I can put Michael Jackson's million dollar Las Vegas shopping spree in some context now (I mean, it's still nuts, but it's nuts in context). We went through the Venetian, which has a canal running through it complete with bridges and gondolas, false fronts on the buildings and a ceiling painted to look like the sky. The Luxor was cool too, all done up like Egypt. There was someplace else that was all Roman (yes, already it's all starting to blend), and lots of things were covered in decorations for Chinese New Year.

In short, it made me really want to play Tomb Raider again.

(You're getting the edited highlights here; we also drove down some parts of Route 66, which is Oliver's avowed favorite part of our vacation, and we saw a replica of the London Bridge in Arizona which is certainly a cooler tourist stop than the biggest ball of twine).

So then we were back in Phoenix and had a few days to just mellow out. I specifically had left this book on my unread stack to bring with on vacation. I had read Marie Brennan's first book, Doppleganger, on my last vacation, so I wanted to bring the sequel with this time. The cover is an improvement over the last one. The book is a perfect follow-up; it widens and deepens the world in lots of cool ways. I like a well thought-out magical system, where the way things work makes logical sense, but where the people using it don't necessarily understand every aspect of it (like physicists working on string theory, for instance). The first book hinted at things which are more developed in this sequel about where their magic comes from and how it works. All I can say is: wow. I like the sense of magic as where science and religion meet; if you're intrigued by that idea you're definitely going to want to check out Marie Brennan. 'nuff said.

I mentioned I only read two and some change this time, the "change" was the first chunk of Temeraire. This is actually a 3-in-1 from the Science Fiction Book Club, a compilation of Naomi Novik's series of dragons in Napoleonic times. Sort of Master in Commander meets Eragon. I was intrigued by the idea and had her name on my "to be bought when I've worked the to be read stack down to a manageable 50 or so books" list for a while now, but when SFBC offered it as a 3-in-1 I caved and bumped her up to the top. Also, Peter Jackson is making the movie version. Apparently he has a thing for trilogies. I'm only 80 or so pages in (mostly read on the plane back from Phoenix; the upside of night flights, it's easier to get some reading in when someone is sleeping on your shoulder rather than asking to go pee every 15 minutes). It's already caught my fascination. Lucky me, I still have another week off of work which should be enough to polish this off.

Then back to my own novel. Sadly, I can't polish that off in a week...