What I read: April 2022

LHC #163: "Mycroft Holmes" by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse. Sherlock Holmes' smarter brother written by a basketball genius? What could go wrong? Not enough girls, but whatever.

LHC #164: "Passing Strange" by Ellen Klages. Delightful!

LHC #165: "The Angel of the Crows" by Katherine Addison. By a weird fluke, this is another Sherlock Holmes, this time where Sherlock is an angel named Crow, and Watson is a doctor who was maimed by a fallen in Afghanistan named Doyle. I was thinking there weren't enough girls in this story, but changed my mind later.

LHC #166: "A Stranger in Olondria" by Sofia Samatar. I read the first 20% thinking nothing was ever going to happen, it was all just going to be sunshine and light. I don't know why this bothered me; it's a complaint people make about my stories all the time, that nothing happens. Anyway, plenty happened in the end. I liked its attitude towards humanity; most people came off as mostly good.

Best TW feedback ever

Over at the dayjob, SMEs are feverishly trying to get documents back to me all marked up, in preparation for the release that's supposed to happen the week I'm back from VP. Today's best comment: Unfortunately not true. SMEs, they're so cute.

Moraine

So a couple of days I thought I was done with this short story, and I wrote the last line of the story. I even dated it (that's how I can tell it's over). It was a little long, at 6600 words (I was aiming for 5000). But then I was walking to work, and I thought, "My, that was a lame ending. My endings are all crap." So yesterday morning, I scribbled out the date and wrote a bit more. And this morning I wrote a bit more again, and I dated it and called it done. And still, that ending seemed lame. So a few minutes later, in the last paragraph, I scratched out "the Oak Ridges Moraine" and wrote in "that stupid moraine". Much better. Now I can move on. But in the meantime, I was doing a little research about the Moraine, and I discovered that EGTourGuide lives on it. Only by one or two hundred feet, but I thought it was funny. Good for you, EGTourGuide, with all those excellent plants growing on that substandard soil, where in the olden days (you kno...

What I read: March 2024

LHC #240: "Vita Nostra" by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey. All I knew going in was dark academia. This was a neat thing to read after A Deadly Education last month. The students can leave this school at summer and winter break, but maybe they shouldn't. Also, interesting education method, providing Sasha with a CD player and punishing her if she leaves it in the mode where it plays all the tracks in sequence. "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman. When I finished Ragnarok by AS Byatt (last month? January?) I was thinking it might have made more sense if I had any knowledge of the subject matter. The boy had left this lying around, and it was not a tough read. LHC #241: "Science on a mission: How Military funding shaped what we do and don't know about the ocean" by Naomi Oreskes. I deferred this once because it was so long. History of science is challenging for me to read, because of the need to get a grasp on dispr...

Robynettely

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