Robynettely

"The Magic Thief" by Sarah Prineas was on the Cybils 2008 . I was on a waitlist for ages at the library, but it was worth the wait. The first hundred pages took me a while to read, but then I totally got into it and read the rest of the book in basically one sitting. The beset scene for me was when Conn was at school memorizing spells, and he noticed an error in the spell. He called the teacher on it, and the teacher said that was on purpose, so students wouldn't accidentally turn themselves into animals. Conn accepted this, and began memorizing the next spell, wondering what the mistake in this one was. Fabulous character-building. Tastes like chicken: Skulduggery Pleasant. "Horsemen of the Esophagus" by Jason Fagone was listed in a top-10 underrated books list linked to by Jeff Vandermeer . I loved the title, so I requested it from the library. Sadly, there was virtually no wait. This book brought together so much fascinating stuff -- social media/connecting...

To Viable Paradise. I still have not solved the problem of Chapter 12 (apparently every chapter is going to be a problem). However, I know how to fix "unicorn, Drake, Missing Uncle" (short story, workshopped at OWW) now! I hope everything goes smoothly enough that I can fix it tonight.

So in my ongoing plan to, you know, become a published author, I thought it would be a good idea to go to a FSF convention. Every few weeks I think of this, and today I went to the locus website to check out if their Convention listings had been updated so I could find one that I could go to that wouldn't cost me a lot of money (I've kind of blown my FSF budget for the next little while, with VP and the netbook, etc.). And in fact, there was a listing for Ad Astra 2010, April 9-11, and I clicked on the link and it's within a 20-minute bike ride of my house. And has been probably since I moved there (I didn't actually look in archives to find that out, but still). And then I went poking around in the "other guests" section, and there was the name David Nickle , apparently a horror writer. And I thought to myself, hey, is that the guy who writes articles and opinion pieces about city hall in the Toronto Community News, with such a wry sense of humor? He's th...

I finished the sweater, anyway.

After being accepted into Viable Paradise, I had planned (well, actually, after sending my submission, I had planned) to take the 63 chapters that are the remainder of the novel (after the rather worked-over submission chapters) and make them more closely resemble the synopsis I sent in. Yeah, not so much. I got stuck most recently at chapter 11 or 12. Also, after being accepted into Viable Paradise, I decided to make a VP commemorative sweater. Its name is Space Invaders, and I made it out of two shades of left-over yarn from other projects. I finished the knitting on Friday last. Oh, and then I was thinking, on my way to work today, about when I'm going to find time to sew the underarm seams and tie in the (maybe) 12 danglers before blocking. I guess that will be tonight. Another evening of not working on poor Apocryphal.

Two weeks to Viable Paradise. Yesterday I bought luggage.

http://wordsmith.org/anagram/ How can you go wrong with an anagram like "Labyrinth Moon". Obviously I should write fantasy.

Why I read it : Ed got got it out of the library and read it and loved it, and kind of pressed it on me. What made him so happy was the way the ending tied everything up. I bought him two other books by LMB for his birthday. Bookmark : Library receipt. Tastes like Chicken : I read a book a long time ago that had Crom Cruach in it, that this reminded me of. I can't remember what that book was, though, and I couldn't find it at Amazon.com. It was quite a while ago, probably 15 years. And Crom Cruach didn't come up in this book at all. What I liked : The magic system was cool, and Ed was right -- it wrapped up nicely. The characters and their situation were interesting. Not so much : I haven't read that much high fantasy lately. Maybe it's all like this. When I was reading, I was kind of wishing the author had found some way to set the story in a mythical Ireland or present-day something, so there wouldn't be the need for some of the world-building core-dumps. Les...

Why I read it: Recommended by the librarian when I was taking out "Troll's Eye View". Saturday, when I was on about page 185, and I'd left the book sitting on the reading nook while I read the entire internet at the dining room table, Ed picked this book up and started reading. He'd read the whole thing by dinner. Bookmark: Library receipt. Tastes like Chicken: There was a little bit of Narnia, I suppose, because of going to another world, and the WWII associations. It's sort of a meta-fairy tale, because you'll enjoy it much more if you know at least some of the fairy tales that David, the main character, encounters on his travels. What I liked : This book was written for grownups, but it had that texture of something that will find its way into the hands of whatever people should read it, regardless of age. The main character is a youth, but I've never really seen that as a criteria to make something a kids' book or a grups' book. The fair...

According to the Oxford dictionary on my desk, this means plundering or pillaging, but according to the corporate records retention course I just passed, it's about shredding documents that should have been retained. Now I know.