(But I’m only talking about the last two, because I’ve been going through them too fast and they’re running together.)

Black Orchids (Nero Wolfe 9) and Not Quite Dead Enough (Nero Wolfe 10), by Rex Stout

These books are both two novellas glued together, but they did not warn me that they were. So Not Quite Dead Enough started and Lily was the prime suspect for the murder, and then Archie framed himself for the murder, and I expected all these dramatic shenanigans between them over this, and then all of a sudden it was over and there was still half the book to go, and Lily wasn’t even in it. Curses upon this book.

And upon the other one, but less so, because it only really stood out to me as an entry in my directory of books containing an Eccentric Rich Woman Who Keeps A Pet Monkey.

Silent Blade, by Ilona Andrews

This is a novella which I guess I should describe as a paranormal romance, though it’s sci-fi, not fantasy. Meli is a mutant cyborg assassin with special martial arts powers! Celino is a mutant cyborg CEO with special hostile takeover powers! They were engaged in an arranged marriage as children, but Celino ruined Meli’s chances of marriage and independence by breaking the engagement in such a way that no one else would ever want to risk marrying her. She is ready to retire as an assassin, until her brother offers her one last job - killing Celino! Exclamation points.

This is okay for what it is - I mean, if Nalini Singh had written it I’d be overjoyed! It’s a romance where it’s the heroine who might kill the hero! But it suffers a lot by comparison to the Kate Daniels books. I appreciate the novelty of a romance in which both leads are, basically, crazy bastards, but would have been more convinced by the premise if we saw more of them being crazy bastards. The genre requirements, however, force Andrews to waste time on sex that could have been more productively spent on violence. I don’t think this is either Andrews’ natural length or her natural subject matter.

Here is the paragraph that shows us why Ilona Andrews should probably not write straight-out romances: “I know the details of every assassination you have ever done. [...] I think the risks you took with Garcia were idiotic.” He knelt beside her. “I also kidnapped your father and your brothers. I would’ve tortured them if I thought they knew where you were.”

I just think this sort of relationship would have been more interesting in a story with a focus wider than the period of time surrounding the removal of garments.

Od Magic, by Patricia A. McKillip

This is definitely one of McKillip’s weaker books, if not her weakest. As is McKillip’s habit, particularly in her city books (this is one), there are several separate plotlines which come together in the end. Brenden is a shy young man with an uncanny ability with plants and animals, who, traumatized by the recent loss of his family, is invited to become gardener at a school of magic by its founder, a huge immortal woman named Od. Yar is a teacher at Od’s school who has recently begun to feel that the paranoid and joyless King’s iron grip over the school is irreversibly damaging its students, and perhaps the entire kingdom. Arneth is a member of the city guard who finds himself falling in love with Mistral, the daughter of and manager for a traveling performer he may have to arrest for illegally using magic without the King’s permission. Sulys is the King’s daughter, who is herself harboring illegal magic, and is being forced to marry Valoren, the humorless and socially awkward young wizard who is her father’s most loyal servant.

So, that’s four plotlines and five POV characters. In general McKillip’s very good about bringing together a lot of different plot strands in a way that feels organic to the story. The ending doesn’t really feel awkward or crowded here - but then it’s not entirely an ending, because one story is left unresolved. I think there just wasn’t any space left for it. It’s not a big enough issue to ruin the book, but for a McKillip book, it’s surprising. Sometimes writers leave threads hanging early on in a book without knowing whether they’re going to pick them up again, and presumably she does it just like everyone else, but she always seems to tidy up them all up before she finishes. This book has some visible loose ends. Example: Brenden repeatedly mistakes Mistral for his lost lover Meryd. Why? Do they have something to do with one another? It’s never explained.

I’m still probably unwarrantedly fond of this book, mainly because of Valoren. I just like dorky villains! McKillip doesn’t do many of them! He and Yar have a conversation in which Valoren can’t decide whether to threaten Yar for his seditious behavior, or ask him for advice about Sulys. “Why did she slam the door like that? What did I do to make her so angry?” Yar tries to explain!

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yuki_onna, aka Catherynne M. Valente, author of The Orphan’s Tales, is suffering from a sudden and sharp Expedia-related financial crisis. She also has a donation button. (Scroll down to the bottom.)

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Dad: So you need to email your sister and ask her if she wants to come with us when we go down to Nashville - tell her she has to drive down and meet us, it’ll be Friday the 13th - is that right? We’ll be leaving on the 13th?

Me: Do you want your youngest daughter driving all by herself on Friday the 13th!? You’re a terrible father!

Dad: I don’t know, maybe not… I’m going to have to think about this now…

-

Interviewer on TV: [name], who is running for [office], says he’s not a politician, he’s just a concerned citizen who -

Me: *mutes the TV*

Dad: Sarah! Don’t mute this guy! He’s a concerned citizen! He’s running for office, he’s got the IQ of a small bird - he’s a great American!

-

Me: *repeatedly mutes commercials*

Dad: *repeatedly unmutes them* You’re as bad as your grandmother! She muted commercials and black people.

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Text of the sign I came up with for my door:

エホバの証人になりたくない。

(”I don’t want to become a Jehovah’s Witness.”)

チーズをたべることができない。　ピザショップのチラシが必要ない。

(”I can’t eat cheese. I don’t need an ad for a pizza place.”)

日本に住んでいるから、　形態をもう持っているよ。 買うわけがない。

(”I live in Japan, so I already have a cell phone. I’m not buying another one.”)

-

I just thought of this because Jehovah’s Witnesses actually showed up at the house a couple days ago, which never happens because we live in a place sufficiently nowhere-like as to have at one time had ostrich farmers. Mom possesses the ultimate weapon for repelling Jehovah’s Witnesses, which is, being somebody who used to be a Jehovah’s Witness. She can’t be converted a second time, so they’re not supposed to talk to her.

She held her hand, and just told them, “I’m not interested.” It’s sort of like how Battle Angel Alita doesn’t pull out the solenoid quench gun for every little thing. Being an ex-Jehovah’s Witness is too dreadful a power to be used lightly.

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Several months late, I reveal to you Tokyo’s very soul!

It’s basically a grumpy cat in a chair.

I hope you’re not too disappointed.

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^ TV! I have lived mainly in places without TVs for about six years, so I’m frequently startled by the stuff that’s on there when I’m home.

My 15-year-old cat has been creating obstacles to foot traffic forcefully and with great conviction in many inappropriate places. The vet put her on a special prescription diet, which has thus far only caused her to space out her intestinal comments a little bit. I don’t think this is entirely due to a lack of bladder control, because she seems to be particularly interested in modifying the surface texture of bathmats, towels temporarily serving as bathmats due to actual bathmats all being in the washer, and a long carpet remnant we put in the hall.

What is her objection to movable floor covering? Is this what she has been trying to communicate with the campaign of plaintive meowing she began around her thirteenth birthday? Have we ignored her arguments for so long that she has chosen this politically-charged moment to take her movement to the streets? Maybe I should have said “movements” in that sentence, but it seemed forced. I have seriously been sitting here Googling phrases like “pants for cats.”

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I think I was at least six inches shorter the last time I went swimming in the ocean. The experience hasn’t changed: there are many different sizes of waves, and some of them can knock me over, and some of them cannot; and some of them make me go under if they come when I’m floating, and some of them just rock me slightly; and after a few minutes of floating they will drag me out to a depth at which my feet cannot touch the sand. I do not think there is any human large or small enough that their experience would be much different. Maybe I will make a diagram.

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The ridiculous moral imperative associated with copyright law in the minds of western men, women, and otherwise (and those others whose cultures have been affected by us in this respect, and those whose cultures have affected us), and the manner in which the indignation which this alleged imperative generates impedes legal progress in an era whose technology has long since rendered much of said law nonfunctional and at times dangerous to civil liberties, particularly when said law inconveniences me personally.

I say this because the Shounen Jump-style exercise’s magical battle system (I would hope that no one would doubt the presence of a special magical battle system in a thing I call “the Shounen Jump-style exercise”) is mainly about quoting poetry at your enemy. There is an End Boss character called Death in whose name one group of guys fight, while the other group of guys are rebelling against her. So obviously I am thinking that it would be ideal if I could employ the works of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

But I think they’re still under copyright, and I don’t know how her estate would feel about such a business if I ever tried to publish it.

I’d also like to use the New Pornographers.

-

(How would this harm the sales of poetry anthologies, or MP3s? It would not! The only argument for forbidding me from doing this to people is a belief that they have a right not to be made ridiculous by association with my bad ideas, which right I deny to all men, women, and otherwise, living or dead! Nowhere among the universal rights of humankind is “the right not to have our art look silly or cheap!” If it was in there then we couldn’t have an internet or televangelists, and Baen books wouldn’t be allowed covers.)

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Dr. Balthasar Hearne and his wife Telmaine Hearne are Darkborn, a blind people who are cursed to die if they come into contact with light, and navigate via sonar, which they call “sonning.” Their roughly Victorian-era world is populated half by their own people, and half by the Lightborn, who are vulnerable to darkness in the same way the Darkborn are to light. One night Tercelle Amberley, a woman Balthasar once knew, comes to him about to give birth - and her children, incredibly, are born sighted. Meanwhile, Telmaine meets the battle-scarred, traumatized wizard Ishmael de Studier, and finds for the first time that she may have met someone from whom she can’t hide her darkest secret - that she is a powerful wizard, something shunned in Darkborn society.

The setting of the book was interesting, particularly the strange ways the Darkborn and Lightborn find to communicate. I appreciated that Telmaine, who in this sort of story would usually end up staying at home cheerleading, was by far the most active of the main characters, and the driving force of the action for most of the last part of the book.

I liked the idea of a race of people who using sonar, but had a lot of issues with the execution, when Sinclair made it just a little bit too much like sight. For instance, there’s a scene where one character sonns another character’s face “framed in the open window.” …what, exactly, are all these blind people likely to be framing? It’s nitpicky, yeah, but little details like that make or break a book’s ability to convince you of its world’s reality. I was never convinced of this one.

The characterization suffers a similar problem with consistency - except for me, this one is much worse. Cut for a spoiler:

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I’m at the beach with Papaw. The beachhouse we’re in ticks me off every time I go into the bathroom.

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And I Have Just Picked You Up From The Vet.

1) Have a huge open wound on your neck where the vet drained an abscess. Also, a pathetic expression.

2) Run outside the moment I get the carrier open.

3) Stay outside even when it starts pouring rain, running away in a panic when I open the door to let you in.

4) Eventually come in and let me pet you for a second, leaving me with the sinking knowledge that I still have to get antibiotics down your throat later.

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There is something beeping loudly at random intervals in the living room, and I can’t figure out what. The dog feels that this may have very serious consequences - every time there’s a beep, she comes to my door and scratches.

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I played Yume Nikki for fifteen minutes before dinner, and I still feel weird.

In between then and now I reread Fire Logic. This book is very convinced of itself and its own aesthetic and moral completeness, so it’s usually good for the purpose of frightening off stubborn bits of other systems of internal logic. Unfortunately, Yume Nikki seems to be too tough for it. I had a few moments of panic around midnight upon glancing up and, noticing that my bedroom door was closed, realizing that I had no way of determining whether I was awake or asleep.

I got an invite for a Google Voice account a few minutes ago, which I think means I have voicemail for the first time since my answering machine in college. It’s an alarming prospect.

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I’M READING ANNE BISHOP AGAIN apparently I suffer from masochistic tendencies.

So I’m about 3/4 through this book. And there’s this guy Lucivar, and he’s explaining evil magical roofies to his zombie-vampire father, Saetan SaDiablo, the High Lord of Hell. And this is the third time he’s talked about the evil magical roofies, and Saetan SaDiablo is shocked by the cruelty of mortals and has to sit down on his dark throne, and Saetan SaDiablo has been shocked by the cruelty of mortals and had to sit down in every single scene he’s been in. Except for the one where he was pretending to be a pedophile serial killer to trick the other pedophile serial killer into coming into his bedroom so he could kill him.

Not his bedroom in Hell, his bedroom in the Shadow Realm. The Shadow Realm’s someplace else.

Lucivar spent 2/3 of the book enslaved to a rapist, and his father Saetan SaDiablo (third-most powerful male wizard in the world) and his teenaged adopted sister Jaenelle Angelline (most powerful wizard in the world) know that, and stuff, but they kinda don’t do anything about it. I guess it’s not that important? So there are all these scenes where Lucivar’s being tortured, and then there’s a scene where Jaenelle shows up at Saetan SaDiablo’s grim palace with a unicorn or an adorable telepathic wolf cub and Saetan SaDiablo goes “OH MAN IT IS A UNICORN AND/OR TELEPATHIC WOLF CUB AND THAT IS NOT OKAY FOR MY IMAGE” and people smile and offer him a drink, and he’s sitting down in his dark throne again I mean I don’t know why he bothers to stand up. And then Lucivar escapes by himself and shows up, and they say, “Oh, hey! You made it!” And Lucivar hangs out with the unicorns and things are basically fine. He isn’t mad about how, you know, they didn’t rescue him! He knows they were real busy.

(I came up with a new way to describe Anne Bishop today: “Laurell K. Hamilton writes licensed Disney Princesses books.”)

It is because Anne Bishop is not good at remembering what the plot is. She also forgot how Lucivar has a brother named Daemon Sadi - alias, The Sadist, other alias, Hayll’s Whore - and Hayll is also a different place from Hell - who is a 1700-year-old Warlord Prince sex slave with the second-strongest magic powers in the world, and is impotent (and random people just up and start talking about his impotence because everyone knows - stuff gets around in 1700 years, it’s just a thing - even though people periodically forget that he generally kills the women he sleeps with), and who was the protagonist of the first book and spent half of it being sad that he was an impotent sex slave unworthy of the woman he loves (Jaenelle, his then-twelve-year-old adopted sister), and the other half being angry about the same issue, and killing people in many ways.

Anyway, she forgot Daemon was there. This book he went insane in a way that makes him weep all the time and occasionally refer to himself in the third person, mainly to keep him out of the way so we can get this big important The Unicorns And Telepathic Wolf Cubs Move In With Saetan And Wacky Antics Ensue thing established. There are also some scenes where Jaenelle goes clothes shopping and doesn’t get along with the other kids.

I totally forgot about how, in this book, there is an evil queen named Dorothea who wants Daemon to father her children. There’s also an evil priestess named Hekatah who used to be married to Saetan and wants to kill him. I think sometimes Bishop forgets which one of the two has which set of motivations.

I like how it’s possible to forget about things like that in this series.

-

Unrelated note to the internet: Nobody buy a Samsung Magnet, please. Dad bought one and I just spent three hours trying to get the drivers installed so I could sync up his address book. At least for Vista, there are no working drivers for this phone.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

I looked at the JLPT website Monday night, saw I needed to register by Friday, and saw that all the test sites were at least seven hours away. I thought, “I’ll figure out which site’s best in the morning.”

GUESS WHAT I DID

I wasn’t too late to register for the Canadian test, so I went ahead and did that. So now I’m registered at Toronto, which is eleven hours away. Way to go, me. I have no idea if it’ll even be possible for me to get up there.

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Reading the Huffington Post thing about the census worker story, I got to this line:

“I don’t think distrust of government is any more or less here than anywhere else in the country,” said Silver, a sociology professor at Southeast Community College.

My first thought was, “I bet the guy doesn’t have tenure.” My second one was, “Well, maybe he’s just kind of sheltered.” My brain was not being snippy or anything! It didn’t have time to be snippy.

You seriously do have to be pretty out-of-it to think that. I also note that this happened two frigging weeks ago, and I have no recollection of WYMT (local news station) covering it at the time. This place is just two hours away, and it’s not exactly a normal crime. This should have been on TV. There’s an article on their website as of today, and the comments are so far unusually short on the right-type craziness and long on the left-type - there’s only one person in there saying stuff about ACORN. I guess the strategy is to ignore it and hope it goes away.

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That’s what I’m going to do.

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Whitewashed casting again wheeee.

Today I make a solemn vow before my patron saint, the internet: on the remote chance that I ever sell a book, and then get an offer to have it optioned it for a movie/TV show/etc, I will allow it only if there is clear language in the contract stating that,

1) the characters be cast the same races they are in the books,

and 2) that the non-white ones’ roles will not be minimized in favor of the white ones.

There will also be language stating that they have to remain the same gender and sexual orientation. And that there won’t be any un-called-for rapes or rapping or suchlike. (Called-for rapes and rapping and suchlike are fine, they just can’t be applied to female and black characters for whom it would be inappropriate. For instance, the deaf psychometrist pro gymnast raised by a former Chan Buddhist monk whose long-lost father is, like, somehow Longinus.

If that were an actual character, rapes and rapping would not be appropriate there.)

Should I break this vow, may my very soul be forfeit, and may the internet dogpile me in whatever manner seems reasonable given the technology of the future. Like, I’m assuming that by this time HTTP protocols will support physically slapping you for things like a particularly bad YouTube comment. Presumably the technique will be applied to my own situation in sort of the era’s equivalent of a Rickroll. Also people can refrain from buying my book.

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Shortly after I made this post theorizing that Dad might have caught swine flu at a legal conference, Papaw got a call from Uncle Tall. Uncle Tall told him that two people had died of swine flu in the town where the legal conference had been.

Languishing pathetically in bed, Dad told me, “Now, when I die of swine flu, you’re going to have to go to law school and take over my firm, so there’ll still be a Pin in “Pin, Fork and Spoon Law Offices.”"

Me: “You’re not going to die, you’re not even in a high-risk group. And I’m not going to law school. And it would be “Fork, Spoon and Pin,” because I wouldn’t be the senior partner.”

Dad frowned.

Some time later, he called me back into the sickroom. “Sarah! When I die, they don’t have to change the name. A lot of firms leave the name of a dead attorney in there. I can still be in there even when I die.”

“You’re not going to die, Dad -”

“So it’ll be Pin, Fork, Spoon, and Pin. Except you need to fire Fork, because he’s pissing me off, so it’ll just be Pin, Spoon and Pin.”

“I’m not going to law school, and I can’t fire Fork. He’d have seniority over me. And that’s not how law firms work anyway.”

Dad frowned again. But he could not come up with any way out of this quandary. He had the same conversation again later when thegeekgene called.

But he got better within two days, so, probably not swine flu.

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This is the best manga ever you guys. The title means Alexander the Great - The Kingdom of Heaven! The exclamation point is strongly implied.

It’s all froofy angsty old-school-style shoujo manga where Alexander and Hephaistion look like twelve-year-old girls. Alexander gets ambushed and clutches his sword and thinks “Hephaistion!” And Hephaistion is twenty miles away and goes “The Prince - the Prince is calling me!” “Prince - whenever you need me, only say my name in your heart, and I will be there… to protect you!” Hephaistion is also telekinetic.

And Alexander flies into sudden violent rages and kills his own men, and Hephaistion looks fearfully into the distance, his hair blowing in the wind, narrating about how he is feeling a sense of deep forboding.

Oh! And Queen Olympias is draped in snakes all the time.

( Read more... )

This manga is fabulous.

A mercenary captain with one of those special manga helmets that covers your whole face but still apparently allows you to see to whup somebody shows up and challenges Alexander to a duel, but it’s only to test Alexander to see if he is fit to be King of Rhodes! He offers Alexander his sword, and takes off his helmet, and he’s a girl! Who looks like Hephaistion but with curly hair and eyelashes, and she spends a whole flowery-screentone-bedecked page declaring herself “Saanu of Rhodes.”

( Read more... )

Alexander is immediately enamored of her; Hephaistion feels a deep forboding. Later Alexander and Saanu will wear matching helmets, except his is white and hers is black, and they consummate their union with sprays of blood out of their enemies’ shoulders and rainbows, though unfortunately not simultaneously.

In short, this manga is so great and I wish I’d bought more than just the first volume.

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