My Goodreads Reading Challenges, part 1: 2020

 A few years ago, the end of 2018 to be precise, I thought I would have an easier time reading and finishing many of the many, many books in my To Be Read pile. The reason was, I was no longer a full-time employee anywhere, but freelance, and given my lazy approach to finding work I thought this would mean more time to knit, more time to read, more time to Do Things that were not directly employment related. For example, I finished writing a second novel, and kept working on my third and fourth! And started cleaning out our crowded apartment of superfluous things. And pampering my plants.

As for more time to read? Once upon a time I read short stories voraciously, subscribed to all the SFF mags and bought collections and anthologies. But my tastes shifted over the years, and I began craving longer and longer stories practically to the exclusion of true short stories. The quality of available reading material had nothing to do with it. Just personal taste.

Things didn’t happen quite the way I imagined. During 2018, when I still commuted an hour each day by bus, and often spent lunch time at my desk, and we flew on lengthy trips several times, I read a lot of books. Seventy two! Same as 2017! And back in 2016 I read 77, perhaps an all-time personal best. I’ll write about those books some other time. (And yes, I’m using Goodreads to track all that.)

In 2019, I made the same modest goal of reading 50 books that I had for years past. And read 55! I blamed it on shorter bus rides, not traveling by air as much, and having generally more stuff to do.

Then…pandemic. Surely, even the distraction of having Spouse home all day working from home could not prevent me from continuing to tackle my book-reading goals head on. Surely I’d get lots of knitting done, lots of reading done. I once again set a goal of 50 books, which seemed eminently doable.

But I read only 39 full books in 2020. Many were but novellas, or even shorter. Graphic novels, with not much dialogue. I know now, that between pandemic and politics I wasn’t alone in struggling to concentrate enough to get through some very anxious periods. I thoroughly enjoyed what I read. But I worried about my aging brain, and set the same goal of 50 books for 2021. Which I missed. By a lot.

(I will report that thankfully neither I nor Spouse actually contracted Covid that year. Nor since, so far.)

2020 books included:

The Death of the Necromancer, by Martha Wells
Rogue Protocol, and Exit Strategy, and Network Effect, by Martha Wells
The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders
Paladin’s Grace, and A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher
Life of David Hockney, by Catherine Cusset
Stormsong, and Midnight Bargain by CL Polk
Gideon the Ninth, and Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow
Beneath the Rising, by Premee Mohamed
The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djeli Clark
Color, by Victoria Finlay
The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie
Blackfish City, by Sam J. Miller
The Empire of Gold, by SA Chakraborty
The Vinyl Detective: Low Action, by Andrew Cartmel
Rag and Bone, and Slippery Creatures, by KJ Charles
Storm of Locusts, by Rebecca Roanhorse
The House of Sundering Flames, and Of Dragons Feasts and Murders, by Aliette de Bodard
Solutions and Other Problems, by Allie Brosh
A Pocketful of Lodestones, by Elizabeth Crowens
The Morning of the Magicians, by Louis Pauwels
Daemon Voices, by Philip Pullman
The Physicians of Vilnoc, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Girl Genius: Queens and Pirates, by Phil & Kaja Foglio

(I am omitting several things I read mostly for research purposes for my own writing.)

TO BE CONTINUED...

Welcome to My World: The Magpie Prince Tales

Books help soothe us, inspire us, inform us, distract us, thrill us, terrify us, amuse us. Etcetera. I love to read all sorts of stories. Turns out I like to write all sorts, too, all within what I'm calling The Magpie Cycle, or Tales of the Magpie Prince. 

SEVEN FOR A SECRET, the first novel I finished a couple of years ago, is not soothing. It's a story about trauma, hubris, psychological abuse, misuse of authority, the urge to violence, and the terrible burden of trying to love one's family no matter what. The characters are nearly all demon-bred witches with varied magical powers, none of which keeps them from making terrible mistakes. There is bloodshed. Children suffer PTSD. It's set in 1955, in postwar northern England, and things that happened during WWII are still fresh in people's minds. The story is narrated by Gerry, the child most affected by events in the books, describing events from the perspective of an older man looking back.  

I don't think I realized quite how nasty all that was, when writing it, but it felt right, given the set of characters I'd created. They are likeable and also dangerous. Some of them have done terrible things but it's brushed off by those who love them, owing to social expectations. It's okay if this person has done terrible things...the results were worth it! They did it for the best reasons! And children take that in, and some of them learn to also accept it, and others do not and never will. 

This is the descriptive for the sales sites:

Gerry Llewellyn's mother is teaching him death magic, and his grandmother thinks he might help their family take over the world. He's eight. 

Waning magic in their land, and a legendary curse, meant British demon-bred witches were unable to enter the Otherworld, source of their strongest magic, for 200 years. Gerry and his father are the first seventh-born witches in all that time, a signal the curse may soon end, heralding a new era of greater power for them. But even his family can't agree whether this is a good thing. They have peaceful lives, blending in with the rest of humanity, doing much as they please in the more tolerant postwar years of the 1950s. Are vague promises of fabulous divine gifts worth upending that?

Already scarred by family secrets and politics, precocious Gerry hates being treated as a miracle child. And now Gerry's eldest brother is getting married, so the Llewellyn children have lots to do besides dealing with their emotionally damaged parents, death demon siblings, and a sundry lot of fractious relatives.

They are all about to learn that seventh sons are special all right, but it's their mothers you really need to watch out for...

THE RAGE OF CALIBAN is, I think, more amusing and inspirational.

I won't include spoilers, but will explain a bit. The book takes place ten years after SECRET, and includes many of the same characters. SECRET is set in 1955, CALIBAN in 1966. Lots and lots of things have happened to those characters since then, both good and bad. Gerry, the narrator of SECRET, is mentioned as “Morgan’s baby brother” but not by name, and does not actually appear. That was deliberate, as Gerry tends to take over a room. His brother, sisters and father are major characters, however, and his Manchester aunts and uncles, and even his grandmother. 

CALIBAN's main character, Phoebe Starwood, marries Gerry's older brother Morgan in 1964. She alludes to the wedding having been a bit of a disaster because of Gerry, but they remain happily coupled and now have an adorable and very loud infant daughter. 

I’m working on what may end up being three VERY long stories that happen between SECRET and CALIBAN. All are told from Gerry’s POV, and document his adventures between 1960, when he turns thirteen, and 1965, when the massive mess he’s made of his life really catches up with him. LUCKY THIRTEEN, GIRLFRIENDS AND BOYFRIENDS AND OTHER BAD HABITS, and HELLHOUND ON MY TRAIL will show up…eventually. Most of the story is written, but not properly stitched together. I'm writing as fast as I can. 

Phoebe and Morgan’s wedding takes place in GIRLFRIENDS. Other characters in CALIBAN, including Lizzie and Daphne, show up in HELLHOUND. Saying anything else would be spoilers…

I'm also working on a related book that takes place at the same time as CALIBAN, with other characters we see in Gerry's stories and who are mentioned in CALIBAN. I'm tentatively calling it THE STINK OF MAGIC. 

My explanation for my (extremely fictional) demon-bred witches is that long ago, demigods (offspring of humans and godlike beings, see many ancient mythologies) kept mating with mortal humans gifted with a certain amount of fortitude. Some of those offspring went and did great deeds in the mortal realm—both good and bad—while others withdrew to the Otherworld of wherever they lived, and marinated in magical power and became what many mythologies think of as demons. A lot of magically gifted people ran into all sorts of trouble, and over the centuries their numbers rose and fell and rose. They learned to escape persecution, they developed new cultures within their families and clans, and now and then mated with demons to bring fresh magic powers into their blood lines. Non-human magical beings also exist, but are largely unseen by non-witches. I have a lot of fun with this idea.

I do also have a LOT of fun designing my book covers. Art school had to be good for something. 

The Rage of Caliban: NEW BOOK FROM ME!

The world is burning down. Other people have terrible, true stories to tell. I am astonished I have the nerve to write fiction and try to finish it and hope other people will like it. 

 I bloody well did it. I finished a second novel. I have self-published it as an ebook on all major platforms available. I am very bad at marketing and self-promo, but I'll do my best. 

Available: Kindle Amazon, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, Apple iBooks, Scribd and some library apps. 

"Never, never ever make a witch annoyed with you. Just…don’t.

Painter Phoebe Starwood-Llewellyn is struggling to create an art career despite specializing in portraiture, which simply wasn't fashionable among mid-sixties English art critics. A young woman, and a mother, she is also a witch, part of an ever-growing tribe of people with demon ancestry and inherited magical powers.

Phoebe doesn't consider herself particularly skilled in magic, but a wealthy art collector tempts her with a lucrative if morally questionable challenge requiring spells her fellow witches think impossible. She becomes determined to see if she is up to creating a version of one of the most famous pictures in English fiction: The Picture of Dorian Gray.

As you may already know, there’s never any telling what a witch might do."

No spoilers for my own book, duh, but I'll say there's LGBTQ characters, an adorable and very loud infant, adult smooching (no graphic sex, which simply didn't belong), and stuff about painting, art critics and art collectors (hey, I was an art major). Phoebe was a lot of fun to write. She is quite level-headed for an artist, probably has a touch of ADHD, and just enough self-confidence in her talent to make a serious art career. The question was, did she have enough confidence in her magical abilities to meet a mad challenge? 

THE RAGE OF CALIBAN is, I think, more amusing and feel-good than my first novel, SEVEN FOR A SECRET, which is kinda violent and filled with traumatized kids.

I'll discuss the relationship between SEVEN FOR A SECRET and CALIBAN in greater detail in another blog post. Suffice to say this book contains many of the same characters, but ten years older, taking place in 1966. CALIBAN also alludes to things that happened in SECRET, and to things that are still unpublished in the greater cycle of Magpie Prince Tales, the story of Gerry Llewellyn and his large family. Phoebe was a relatively minor character, aside from marrying Gerry's older brother Morgan, but I always knew she was an artist. 

I truly appreciate who read this and liked it, and those who helped make it better, and 

SEVEN FOR A SECRET is also available from all major ebook sources:
Kindle Amazon, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, Apple iBooks, Scribd and some library apps. 

Reading is Hard

 I used to read something like 50-60 books a year. 

I never thought I would burn out on reading. Or just find it difficult 

I have burned out on knitting, a couple of times, for varying lengths of time...once for nearly two years, more recently for about a year. Odd, how that coincided with my reading burnout. But I'm not alone, in that people who have taken the pandemic seriously have often found it hard to concentrate on things that were once enjoyable pastimes. Many of my friends have complained they can't focus on reading fiction anymore, or finish simple knitting projects, or paint, or...whatever they do. My plant growing friends seem to be an exception: the plants need care, and abandoning them seems cruel. Um, likewise. My orchids are doing pretty well. New shelf arrangements, new light fixtures, new plants via online order. 

The knitting is still going v e  r   y    s   l   o  w  l  y  these days but my once-a-month knitting group helps a bit, I actually made progress on a new piece the other day. And I'm nearly done with a super-super simple garter stitch shawl I only work on during long phone calls. 

But finding myself unable to dig into books properly, and read for several hours on end like I used to, is a whole other world. I began hitting a few roadblocks several years ago, even before pandemic times. I started to fall asleep while reading. Didn't matter what book, what subject, how fascinating...after about 20 minutes, zzzzz. Self hypnosis? Annoying as hell, whatever the reason. I get plenty of sleep! I don't work in an office, I sleep late if I need to! 

I used to read a great deal while commuting to/from work, on city buses that often got stuck in traffic. Yay, more time to read! Tore through a lot of paperbacks that way, then started to read ebooks on the move instead, with the Kindle app on my phone. If I wasn't knitting knitting knitting on a longer trip, I was reading reading reading.

Then something happened. Was it writing my own stories that absorbed all my reading desires? Was it just a shift in mindset? I still WANT to read. But starting a book...stopping after a few pages...not returning to it for days...that just wasn't ME. And the sleepiness thing often curtailed my stubborn attempts to dig into a new book. 

I came up with strategies. Read shorter books! Read novellas! Fortunately several favorite authors (Ursula Vernon aka T. Kingfisher, Premee Mohamed, CL Polk, KJ Charles, Martha Wells) are also prolific authors of shorter works. Other faves came out with new books I absolutely had to read (Becky Chambers, SA Chakraborty). I caught up with several rock musician memoirs, finally started tearing through the Johannes Cabal books (Jonathan L. Howard), finally read The City We Became (NK Jemisin), Piranesi (Susanna Clarke), Song of Achilles (Madeline Miller) and some older novels, as well as some pretty interesting non-fiction. I tore through both of Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb novels as soon as they were released, so there's that, too, and hope the third will be equally easy to devour. 

So I'm feeling a bit better now about my reading pace. It's MARCH dammit and I only just finished four books so far this year! Two of which I started LAST year! 

The two big things on my reading plate: The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (Seth Dickinson) and Perhaps the Stars (Ada Palmer). Tyrant is third in an incredible trilogy, a masterpiece of worldbuilding and character development, and I TORE through the first two books. This one is still sitting moribund in my Kindle queue. I haven't been confident enough to attempt it. But I will. 

The Palmer book is fourth in a series. I hardly ever buy hardcover fiction, but I made an exception for these books. The long wait between each one was no obstacle, for the first three. But now...I opened the new book and my heart dropped. I'd FORGOTTEN everything. I couldn't remember the salient details of what happened in the third book, or the others. I read five pages in a total fog, and realized to my dismay I'd have to go back and at least partially re-read the third book. That's fine, as I loved it. A lot happened in it. But oh, the delay in gratification...

NaNoWriMo 2019 OMG

WHAT HAVE I DONE

I wrote 40k words of a NEW NOVEL in one month. I did THE THING.

National Novel Writing Month has become quite a phenomenon among young writers. I do NOT say would-be writers, as all writing counts. I don't care if you only write fanfic for personal consumption, or share it on AO3. I don't care if you only write blog posts twice a year. I don't care if you have dozens of short stories that still haven't sold, or have sold only one story of those dozens. Writing is writing. Art and self-expression matter. If you're not a writer, maybe you draw or paint or knit or sew or bake cakes or sing karaoke or dance or weave or make your own soap or take pictures of birds or collect cat figurines. If you're not hurting anyone with your art -- including yourself -- then enjoy it.*

And even if I didn't already believe that with all my heart, meeting a lively group of fellow NaNoWriMo participants last month would convince anyone. These were terrific folks who love to read and want to write but need some extra incentive to sit and commit words strung together into stories. Some were doing NaNo for years already, and had never finished anything, or worked on their novels the other 11 months. That's ok. Others had finished novels of varying lengths but hadn't done the cleanup necessary to try and find an agent or publisher.

Some of these folks are incredibly busy working and raising kids and managing elder care and facing all sorts of other challenges. Some are just young and still finding their voice. Others are trying to find the right idiom for their expression and aren't thinking about being published.

All of it is good. NaNo is a great challenge to just SIT and WRITE and get a story told. I'm glad more and more people take the challenge. Now, I do hear that agents and publishers get absolutely inundated with barely-finished, sub-par 50k novels every December and January -- that a lot of NaNo folks feel their stream-of-consciousness masterpieces are DONE once the calendar ticks over to December 1. Well, those folks are unfortunately delusional, and are cluttering up the lives of publishing professionals with unprofessional work, and that's a shame.

Very few people who write ever get published. That's a fact. That's why there are millions of self-published stories and novels out in the world now (hey, including mine). Publishing is a very weird business and not everyone can stand the weirdness. Lots of writers have one published novel and then are never heard of again -- sometimes its the publisher's fault, sometimes the agent's, sometimes the writer just can't produce more good work, sometimes the next work gets rejected. It's disheartening to hear the stories writers can tell about this.

BUT ENOUGH ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE. Here's what I did: I took what I thought was a pretty good short story, took my writing group's advice on making it much much better, and then started looking at SFF genre short story markets. They are incredibly hard to sell to. There are thousands and thousands of really good writers selling short fiction and I've realized I'll never be one of them. I don't think in 1000 - 10,000 word bursts. I'm one of those elaborately wordy bitches who can't build a world or a story that short. The story I wrote, "The Rage of Caliban," takes place in the same world as Seven for a Secret, with many of the same characters (now about 10 years older). The group thought it was a great opening for another novel. NOOOOOOO. I was already working on three other novels in that story cycle!

But I thought about it for a few months, and ultimately gave in. So in September I started expanding the existing 8000 word story, and by November 1 I had 23k done. I plunged into NaNoWriMo with great enthusiasm. It seemed the ideal way to approach just getting the whole darned thing done.

And it worked! I fell short, I only achieved 39k on the scoreboard. Tacked onto that original 23k I ended up with 62k of a nearly-finished novel. I've kept going, I have no intention of NOT finishing this sucker. The Rage of Caliban will probably end up around 80k, a respectable length. I've started back-editing as a way of correcting some continuity issues, and shuffling characters around,

Seven for a Secret is about the angst of a young demon-bred witch boy born into an impossibly damaged family confronting an impossible situation. Gerry's not a "chosen one" among his people, he's the thing that allows someone else to do the thing a chosen one customarily does. And that's much worse, from his point of view.

The rest of his story cycle -- four more novels and novellas, if I'm dogged enough to finish them -- takes Gerry on his life journey towards adulthood. He's not nice. He's scarred, selfish and arrogant, thoroughly an asshole, though he tries to be better. He loves deeply and hates fiercely. He makes some terrible mistakes that ruin other people's lives. Everything good he tries to do goes wrong. The people around him try to forgive and forget -- he was born special, after all, and they can't quite shake that -- but eventually the mistakes pile up and force him to humility and responsibility. This arc covers 1955-1965, mostly in northern England. The cast of characters is bloody enormous, and I refuse to apologize for that. It's still smaller than that of Game of Thrones. I also really enjoy all the British Invasion blues and rock research I continue to do.

The Rage of Caliban takes place in 1966, with Gerry's older brother's wife as the focus. (Gerry doesn't appear in the story at all, except for a couple of mentions.) I adore Phoebe Starwood, I created her years ago but didn't do much with her--mainly, she stood by rather helplessly as Gerry and his girlfriend unintentionally wrecked her wedding. I knew she was an artist. She liked snapping pictures of family events and travel scenery, and made the best of having fallen in love with a member of the most notorious (and dangerous) coven in Britain. When a story idea popped into my head, I knew she would be the POV character, and would deal with the situation with stubborn intelligence. I knew I would really enjoy torturing her! It was also really fun to get myself out of Gerry's head, and into hers instead. Unlike her terrible brother-in-law, Phoebe is not an asshole. 😁

I really hope I can finish Rage by the end of December...I'll definitely do a new round of agent queries with this one. Wish me luck.


*"Harm" takes many forms. Endorsed bigotry and racism and misogyny in a story is harmful, as opposed to your narrative making it clear why those things are bad and have bad consequences. Harming yourself or people around you can happen if you begin to ignore the real world and its responsibilities, and possibilities -- you might start acting like a dick without even realizing it or getting therapy or other help. Don't be a dick.

Why I HATE the current crop of Republicans

Some leading Republican politicians think poor people still aren't poor enough. Hence their redoubled efforts to take yet more money away from the mass majority of Americans, and fork it over to insurance company CEOs instead. Never mind that actual human beings -- including children -- will go hungry, or suffer pain and hardship because of untreated illness, or end up sleeping in their cars because they can't pay rent. Here's a lovely list  by John Scalzi, of so many of the effects of poverty on a person. (And here is a followup post he made, too.) 

My family didn't have much money when I was a kid; we lived with my grandparents and aunt and uncle, we made do until I was in 3rd grade. When I was 5 I didn't know that my supermarket meltdown over a box of heavily advertised cereal -- that I then refused to eat -- meant we did without other things that week. I didn't know why we bought bread at the Silvercup day-old store instead of across the street at the supermarket. I didn't know fabric and thread for homemade clothes were cheaper than store-bought clothes. I thought shopping in bargain odd lot stores was fun, not just necessary. Things got much better after my dad got a new job. When he got very sick -- twice -- and needed hospitalizations, operations and lengthy recuperation, the union he belonged to made sure we had health coverage, and made sure his job was still there once he recovered.

And, I didn't know how many of those poverty habits were left over from my father living through the Depression, or my mother surviving as a teenager in a Displaced Persons camp after World War II. They never took good times for granted. Ever.

I become absolutely ENRAGED when smug Republican shitgibbons try to suggest poor people are just stupid, or unworthy, or a lower class of animal. Poverty can happen to anyone because bad shit can happen to anyone. 

Yes, I'm one of the privileged now: we don't have to choose between a smartphone bill and a grocery bill, we have health insurance, renters' insurance and we have retirement funds. But not a lot of things have to go wrong for us to upend us. And I have too many friends who truly live on the edge of disaster, through no faults of their own, to ever feel comfortable enough to not worry about growing old in a society being overrun by these hypocritical shitgibbons who lack sympathy, empathy and humanity.

There's a lot of poor-shaming going on. A lot of well-off people think poverty is somehow a "choice" or that poor people aren't being inventive or aren't "thinking positive" or praying hard enough or whatever shit they use to excuse their own lack of caring about other people. There are people who think they are Christians who go to megachurches and pray very loudly, but don't actually pay attention to anything Jesus or his disciples were quoted as saying. These "prosperity gospel" fatheads aren't Christian. They belong to a much older type of religion in which the gods were sometimes kind and sometimes cruel without reason, much like the view of god in the Book of Job. They're basically pagans with a Biblical veneer. 

I'm not a Christian either, so I can wholeheartedly say, without fear of burning in hell, that I hope those smug smiles get wiped off their faces by Fate someday. I hope they end up dumpster diving for their next meal someday. I hope they have to buy an interview outfit at Goodwill. I hope they feel desperate someday. I hope they learn humanity. 

I Have a Tumblr

Ha, even old ladies like me can eventually figure out stuff like Tumblr! IT CAN BE DONE. Laugh all you want, kids, just not on my lawn!

And so now Tales of the Magpie Prince is a Tumblr thing, and I will update it fairly frequently with musical, magical and folklore asides that add some background to the story: stuff about magpies, British blues music, seventh sons, counting rhymes, totem animals, potions, and other things I encountered in the course of my research.

I knew in elementary school that I wanted to be a writer someday. I wrote a bunch of Star Trek fiction in high school and college. That was how I discovered that RESEARCH is like the best habit to develop in school for being a writer. Good thing I was good at it.

Also, and this is important, if the research isn't engaging and absorbing and totally fun to do, then DON'T WRITE THE STORY. I discovered this when years ago trying some sci-fi world building for a (terrible) story idea I had. There are now books on how to do this, but I went about calculating planetary orbits and climates and food and animals and putting a whole world together...and didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I thought I would starting out. The parts I enjoyed most were inventing food plants, recipes and clothing styles for my aliens. Never stuck with it anyhow, but I suppose I could still salvage that story with an emphasis on cookery...

A Book A Week, 2015, nearing the end...

So at of the beginning of June I'd only read 18 books of my postulated 52 for the year. Not bad for most people, but well short of my goal. I determined to do better! Crack down  and make more time! But...but...knitting! Bird watching! Orchids! Cooking! Sleeping! Yeah, yeah, excuses.

Including graphic novels/collections like Saga 4 and Saga 5, Rat Queens 1 and 2, Sex Criminals 1 and Fun Home, I've managed to start & finish -- in some cases just finish -- an additional 14 books, making my total for 2015 a measly 32 so far, with only 6 weeks to go. I just finished Tananarive Due's My Soul to Keep, not as quick a read as I first thought. I finished it thanks to a long bus ride midweek, despite also having a lot of seasonal knitting to do and a scarf pattern to write.

Finishing The Story of Spanish and The Emperor of All Maladies, which I read a few pages at a time for months and months, also count for 2015. I also finally finished Moonwise, both delightful and maddening; it went easier when we were staying in the country for a few days, where the setting of the book blended better with my mindset. Funny how that matters more for some books than others.

Reading Jazz Singing in bits and pieces as well -- it's history blended with Will Friedwald's opinions, in sometimes weird ways, but overall I'm glad I grabbed the book from a thrift store bin on impulse. It's hard to learn about the history of jazz from just liner notes and encyclopedia entries, and being partial to vocals I'm enjoying learning the stories of the men and women who shaped the genre. Good discography recommendations above all.

Hild and The Martian were both amazing, in very different ways. I picked up a copy of Hild just a week before we went to Readercon, with author Nicola Griffith as Guest of Honor. I wished I'd read it sooner!!!! so I could have appreciated her even more. Many have remarked on the book's power to transport you to another time and place in ways most fantasy authors wish they could, even though there really isn't any fantasy going on. I entirely agree. The Martian is about as different from Hild as two books could possibly be, but has a similar power to transport you to another place, inside another mind. I loved both books a lot. And I'm very happy Griffith is writing a sequel!

Three more of the best were "more of the same" books: The Magician's Land (#3 of that series), Last First Snow (#4 of Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence) and Ancillary Mercy (#3 of Ann Leckie's deservedly highly-praised series). I dearly love a good trilogy, a good quadro-trilogy, a good long series of stories sharing characters and universe. (Seeing the news on Gladstone's blog that he intends a total of 10-12 Craft books made me squeal with unholy glee.) I also finally read Scalzi's Old Man's War, but I probably won't read the rest of that series anytime soon.

I'm a little bit awed by authors who manage to world-build within the confines of a single story or novel and then -- just walk away. How do they do that?? How do their brains work so differently from mine and George R.R. Martin's and Robert Jordan's and Anne McCaffrey's???

Working hard to finish Roboteer by my friend Alex Lamb, this is his debut novel and it ROCKS. Hard SF with great characters and riveting action. I'll be posting reviews!

Seven for a Secret: My book, it is ALIVE!

Seven for a Secret on Amazon Kindle.

Seven for a Secret on Apple's iBooks.

Seven for a Secret on Barnes & Noble NOOK.

Seven for a Secret on Kobo.

Seven for a Secret on Scrib'd.

Seven for a Secret on Inktera/Page Foundry.

Thanks to the miracles of our modern digital age, I was able to get my book published to several major ebook markets in just one evening! Still waiting for notifications from a couple. But this is pretty cool, I have to say. I was able to check the Amazon Australia site and provide a link to a friend down there. Amazing. Love it!

And, the book is also on Goodreads already, which totally surprised me. I intend to find out which market caused the entry to be generated.

Now I have to catch up posting reviews of my friends' books on Amazon and Goodreads! And return to my read-one-book-a-week attempt for the rest of the year. I was doing OK with that until I hit a few big ones...looking at my to-read pile of actual books, and the huge Kindle queue, I think I'll try to get to the shorter ones first!

Belated Rhinebeck 2009...

Still not sure exactly what happened, but I suppose into every blog a temporal gap must fall. Or appear. Perhaps I had a sense that my life was entirely too leisurely, and chose to focus on other things instead. Harrumph. Well, now that life is no longer leisurely, now that I've returned to a 9-5 job for several months, now I can force myself to find time to blog again. Of course.

To catch up on one thing at a time, my 2009 Rhinebeck trip yielded yet another treasure trove of fantastic yarn goodies. See above. I figure, if you're going to a place like Rhinebeck Sheep & Wool Festival, one might as well support true fiber artisans making really nommy handmade or handpainted stuff. ("Support" of course means in this context "hand over large sums of cash".)

From the above picture, I have actually begun a whopping uh, two projects. Two! And neither is finished. I might have to partly frog one, only 1/4 done.

But the good news is that from Rhinebeck 2008 I actually finished knitting 1 entire skein of yarn! The bad news is...Rhinebeck 2010. Next post....

Ada Lovelace Day Blog Post!

I'm grateful to my parents for many things, but foremost might be that they never once told me there was something, anything I could not do just because I'm a girl. They might've been horrified if I took up football or skydiving or international banking, but it wouldn't have been because "girls don't do that." ("Sane people don't do that" would be more like it.) Dad was an engineer, he worked for the telephone company for years and knew how to climb telephone poles -- still could at 62 and how cool was that??! -- and spent WWII and the Korean War in the Signal Corps. Mom was artistic, wanted to paint and loved to sew, but she also could take apart radios and wield power drills.

So I took after both parents, and ended up a graphic designer using Adobe PageMaker and InDesign and Photoshop. I was pretty good at math, in 10th and 11th grade, and by then I'd heard of Basic...so in college, in 1980, I took my first computer programming class even though I'd already declared an art major. PL-C. Piece of cake! Assembler was a bit less cakey...and I stumbled blindly through Fortran hating every minute of it. No more programming classes. Painting and printmaking, much better. I still liked computers though. I admired a college screenwriting teacher who admitted she wrote several novels so she could afford a computer and printer in order to write more novels. (Is that tech-ie? Maybe...)

So I learned to use word processors, and bought my first (Radio Shack) PC (no hard drive) in 1986. Bought my next one (30 mb hard drive) in 1987. Cruel irony had me doing both DBase IV programming and PageMaker classes for a job. And even crueller irony that in a corporate role as a graphic designer/business communications guru I now and then ended up using my old nemesis Fortran on the VAX system to gather data. Irony complete when I, a designer on PCs, married a man who programmed on Macs. I'm writing this blog entry on my 7th lifetime owned computer.

But all this is everyday stuff. I'm just a geeky, nerdy female human who is not scared of math or technology, and make use of computers my everyday life. I admire everyone of my generation, and older, who has done this, same as I admire everyone who incorporates art in their everyday lives (by playing music or drawing or writing or taking pictures or dancing, whatever moves them).

I'm dedicating this (uh, mostly autobiographical) Ada Lovelace Day blog post to ladies of my personal acquaintance: Dr Margaret McMahon (rocket scientist) and Lori Bechtold (aircraft engineer). Fellow alumni of Hunter College High School, class of 78/79. We bonded over a mutual love of science fiction. They do stuff I can barely wrap my brain around, and they do it well, and I am extremely glad we live in a world where they and other women like them were encouraged and able to make the most of their talents and interests. You rock.

And also honorable mention to Barbara Krasnoff, who writes so well about techie-computer matters and makes it accessable to many other people over the years. And who also entered my life through interest in science fiction. And, Happy Birthday, Barbara!

May all of us be so fortunate as to find their bliss and follow it.

Reading again

Two new old books this week:

The Curse of the Giant Hogweed, by Charlotte MacLeod. I read this book when it was new in 1985, as at the time my father was still hauling all new mystery books home from the library quick as they were stocked. It was delightful, one of the silliest things I'd ever read, a horticultural fantasy romp full of British myth and daunting Welsh names, and I remember absolutely nothing else about it. With a glad cry I pounced upon a copy in my library's book sale room. I shall begin re-reading it immediately.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Anita Loos. Everyone knows "diamonds are a girl's best friend," and might vaguely remember Marilyn Monroe in the movie. I never finished the book years ago, so I'll be having a new go at it.

A great passage from near the beginning:
And Mr Eisman likes me to have what the French people call a "salo" which
means that people all get together in the evening and improve their minds. So I
invited all of the brainy gentlemen I could think up. So I thought up a gentleman who is the professor of all the economics up at Columbia College, and the editor who is the famous editor of the New York Transcript and another gentleman who is a famous playwright...so Sam asked if he could bring a gentleman who writes novels from England...and then we all got together...and the gentleman brought their own liquor. So of course the place was a wreck this morning and Lulu and I worked like proverbial dogs to get it cleaned up, but Heaven knows how long it will take to get the chandelier fixed.

Lud-in-the-Mist

Finished "The Singing Sands," Josephine Tey. Love. Need to read/reread all other Tey.

Finished "Lud-in-the-Mist," Hope Mirrlees. What an odd little fantasy novel! The writing is wonderfully approachable, even when it goes off into wild flights of descriptive fancy of the weather or flowers or the characters. The style very much follows convention of the time of Tell Don't Show, but I found it delightful nevertheless. I have little to add to Michael Swanwick's excellent analysis, but that I wish more modern fantasists would take heed of her lesson and follow unconventional models in world building.

Finished "Soon I Will Be Invincible," Austin Grossman. This book is prominently displayed in many B&N and Borders. BUY IT. The casual asides that tear asunder the tropes of comic book villainy and heroism...page after page that demand to be read aloud...it does not matter whether you know or even like comic books. If you've ever seen a Superman or Batman or Spider-Man movie, you will love this book. Seriously.

Finished "Black Powder War" and "Empire of Ivory" by Naomi Novik. Nice dragons, babe. I do like Temeraire. He's like a large precocious child challenging everything his human companions hold dear, and yet they learn nothing at all. And will Laurence for heaven's sake please finally quit acting on his pre-judgements as they are always wrong? He's always wrong but so damned pleasant about it that Temeraire still hasn't eaten him. Maybe in book 5???

Currently reading: The Flanders Panel, by Arturo Perez-Reverte. Spouse found this book used, and because it involves chess he had to have it. On his recommendation I began it. I am hooked. Hook-ed, like a fish. It's extremely Euro in style, and I have no idea if the translation is any good but I really like the descriptions of art and the way the characters interact. The author's other novels sound interesting but I doubt I'll get to them any time soon.

Besides, I have lots and lots of knitting to do. Lots and lots. Before Christmas. Gotta go.

Whither July?!

I really don't understand where the past 2.5 weeks went. We kept busy enough, we were even social -- good grief, we attended seven separate social events, some of them involving more than one person! -- and yet I scarcely can account for the time without my datebook. Besides visits with friends and lunches, Spouse also played a lot of chess and saw the dentist twice. (I saw the dentist once, but that was Only Yesterday and the memories will surely linger.) I saw a friends' photo exhibit opening, saw "Wall-E" and visited Dave & Busters with another friend, saw the Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, and generally had a pretty good time (aside from seeing the dentist yesterday).

Food and wine have been a bit dull, as poor Spouse has been avoiding alcohol and chewy foods as part of his ongoing dental treatments. The prospect of a summer without corn on the cob depressed him, but I promised corn every other which way which cheered him. I have a dozen lovely ways of preparing fresh corn. I eagerly await the first full-sized ears at the Greenmarket.

Been knitting, of course, lots and lots of knitting, mostly baby stuff for my twin-laden friend. I have discovered I adore using sock yarn, but I am sooo not a sock knitter. Knitting socks is...well, at the end, I've got something to wear on my feet and frankly I'm really hard on my clothes and especially on socks, tending to shove them into boots and shoes with less delicacy than perhaps some people. My nice thick warm angora-wool blend socks from the Gap collect pills like mad. Lesser socks simply go holey. And as I really prefer very lightweight socks and stockings anyway -- the days New York goes utterly sub-arctic these days can be counted on the fingers and toes of one side -- and the socks are utterly hidden by my pants legs and shoes or boots, well what's the point in knitting them?? I know lots of people walk around their house in socking feet, but with cat fur and litter a constant threat I prefer slippers. So lovely handmade socks are not for me. Besides, I really hate knitting in the round at the diameter of a sock. The needles get in each others way. The yarn gets tangled. The circular needles method is too complicated for my poor aged brain. So no. It's cheaper and easier just to buy stuff!

But I did make a very happy discovery that avoided wasted knitting: in digging up my oldest yarn stash the other month, I unearthed a pair of ribbed pieces still on needles, made of Encore DK, that were an actual if reluctant attempt to create ribbed flat-knitted socks (to eventually end up in the round as the heel approached). This ridiculous project, entirely in the wrong yarn and gauge, sat unmolested and was about to be unravelled until I realized the width of each panel was perfect for infant hats! And so I only undid a couple of inches of each panel until the proper height (length?) remained, put the panel back on needles, did 4 rows of k2tog decreases, and viola! Near-instant snug little hats! By "near-instant" I mean "about twenty minutes" including unravel and final stitch-up.

Been writing my novel too, chugging along, weaving together sub-plots and finishing chapters and coming to blinding realizations such as one particular character holding the key to a more satisfactory conclusion if only I make him the son of X & Y instead of nobody in particular. Amazing. Working at novel length is entirely new for me, even after two and a half years of this project. My years of dedicated if misguided study of "how to write a novel"-sort of literature didn't really prepare me for the reality of characters who pop up out of nowhere, say Ahem and proceed to take over scene after scene in utterly ruthless fashion. Or for subplots that invade my weary head after I thought I was done for the night.

All my most satisfactory Trek-zine experience was humorous short stories. The one time I attempted to work at a bigger story, a three-part series, the results were...mixed. I had a tendency at that time in my late teens to zone and drift through life, sometimes for months on end. I wrote and we published part one, I worked diligently on part two, sent it to my zine team for the next issue...and um they had to break it to me gently that I'd already written part two and it was in the previous issue. The previous issue I'd also forgotten existed and added to the pile of stuff on my desk without a second thought. Huh? But dang, they were right. There was part two, following one, just like they said. Dang. And of course, the two versions of part two were entirely different! And the second one was a bit better. So with a few tweaks that became part three and all was once again well. And I woke up a bit. And I mourned that the only computers I had available were the highly-sought terminals at school. Re-writing all those pages would've been sooo much easier on a word processor...