Catching up

Bad month for blogging, or any writing for that matter. Our upstairs computer (the super-fast one) was Trojaned. Since this is the computer the whole family uses, we have virus problems quite a lot, so everything is always backed up, no tragedy. Quin brought it in to work so his IT guy could wipe it for us, but somehow the Trojan was still there so I wiped it myself last week. Yep, nothing more fun than reinstalling all the software on your PC, twice. My downstairs computer (only used by me and strangely never gets viruses) is very slow. It's basically a wordprocesser with iTunes. I can surf the net on it, but that's a test of patience. Hence my absence.

I haven't been writing much either, around weddings and birthdays and holidays. I did get a ton of reading done, though. Here's what I've plowed through:

A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin. Excellent addition to the series. Here is a guy that doesn't know the meaning of cruise control. The books don't have definable individual arcs like the Harry Potter books; they are really all parts of one big story. But unlike Robert Jordan, the momentum is always forward (Jordan writes like I drive, in a series of circles as I continue to miss all my exits). Cersei gets some POV chapters, which is cool since we haven't seen the world through her eyes yet, and there was one big surprise I didn't see coming. The downside is that this book only focuses on half the characters. The next book will focus on the other half. So the cliffhangers at the end of this one will be left dangling until the book after the next one. Ugh!

We're All in This Together by Owen King. It's his first book (you may be familiar with his father's work, most folks are). It's not a novel; it's a novella plus some short stories. The review I read liked the novella but not the stories. I also liked the novella, but the short story "Wonders" was my favorite piece. But then I'm kind of a sucker for a story with circus freaks in it. I think Owen's best work is still before him, but his writing has a big-hearted quality I'm really drawn to. I've had enough dark/cynical takes on the world.

Across Arctic America by Knud Rasmussen, Arctic Sky by John MacDonald, and The Frozen Echo by Kirsten Seaver. OK, these are all for research. But if you need lots of info on the Inuit or Norse Greenlanders, they're great! An interesting thing I learned from Arctic Sky: Apparently in the Arctic regions it's nearly as hard to see stars as it is in cities. They don't have light pollution, it's just that their sky is always full of blowing snow.

I'm also halfway through the latest WOTF collection. It's tougher reading them this time around; this is the first collection featuring the quarters I had entered stories for. So every story I read is a story that beat out mine. It's hard to read the stories as stories and not be comparing/contrasting to my own entries in a "how is this better?" kind of way. But there was one with people living in hedges that I really liked ("Needle Child" by M.T. Reiten).

I have written one short story for the latest Backspace contest. It was flash in one sense: I wrote it all in a night then typed it up and posted it the next morning. Since my average short story goes through ten or more drafts, you can see how this is a bit of a change for me! I hadn't intended to enter this time around because of my busy November, but then this idea hit me out of the blue and had to be commited to paper. It's not my favorite thing I've ever written, but the responses have been good so it can't suck that bad. I think I'll post it here when the contest is done so my non-Backspacer blog readers can have a taste of my writing (with the caveat that there is a reason I'm posting it on the net and not submitting it for publication).