alfvaen | Moody

Dear Diary: I know that I haven't written you in a long time!!!

Okay, sorry about that. My brain has not been focused in a LiveJournaly direction. I lost several hours of sleep on Monday because of Luke waking up at 4:00, and the bedroom being too hot, and I seemed to be operating on a sleep deficit all week. And then there was the movie we watched, and the LiveJournal meetup, and my NaNoWriYe writing quota...

The movie we watched was "Cube", which I mentioned in the last post. It was pretty decent, for an indie film. It had vaguely science-fictiony elements to it--certainly a high level of unreality, but not in a way that is intrinsicly SFnal. My wife pointed out that it had significant horror elements too, like the high body count and occasional grisly scenes. Recommended, though. I've heard conflicting things about the sequel, "Hypercube", but if it explains anything about what the heck was really going on...

Of course, sometimes an actual eplanation for what's going on is just a letdown, because it doesn't live up to what you were thinking. That's why I often try to avoid it in my writing...but that leads to people calling it "unfinished", so you can't win. But some writers, like Robert Charles Wilson and sometimes John Stith, are better at coming up with cool situations and not as good at following through on them.

Anyway. We're also four episodes into "Angel" now, and it's not really growing on me the way "Buffy" had. I'm sure we'll finish out the first Angel season, but after that I'm hoping we can splurge on Buffy Season 5.

I'm officially on holiday now, until the 10th. We're mostly going to be hanging around the house, though, which is my idea of a perfect vacation. We are going down to Con-Version in Calgary, and trying to bring the kids, which will be fun. George R.R. Martin and Spider Robinson will be GoHs, which will also be fun, even if I have seen both of them before. We're springing for an actual hotel, and an actual babysitter on Saturday afternoon, so we'll see how that goes. Otherwise we'll mostly be trading off, one of us with the kids while the other goes to a panel or something.

With respect to the Robert Jordan vs. George R.R. Martin concordance thing, I've made the only rational choice: I'm doing both books. I've done the prologue of The Fires of Heaven, and the prologue and first chapter of A Game of Thrones. The latter poses a few problems, because unlike Jordan's, it doesn't have chapter titles or numbers, just a header indicating the viewpoint character. I'm going to have to assign numbers to them anyway, and probably mark the page number too.

I finished Magic's Price, which was okay, if not stunningly spectacular. I've finished two Mercedes Lackey tirlogies now, that one and the "Arrows" one, and am in no particular hurry to read more. Now I'm onto the incredibly compelling The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson. I'm being slightly sarcastic there--Hopkinson is, I think, not really to my tastes, but I consider her a high-probability Aurora nominee, so I thought I'd get the book out of the way. Parts of it remind me, right off the bat, of The Colour Purple, and not necessarily in a good way. It's very woman-magicky, and somehow I find that off-putting. For some people this may be a selling point, I don't know, but it's not pulling me in.

That may explain why I've been rereading "Grimjack" comics instead. I'm through the John Gaunt issues, about to start the Twilley ones--that's 54 issues, plus a few "Starslayers" and related books. I actually started them during Magic's Price, but I've been avoiding The Salt Roads with greater dedication. Ah, well. I will try to read more of it tonight, so that I can finish it before it and all my other library books are due back.

More posts to come tonight, probably, now that I'm back in a posting mood--this is the general catchup, but there are some specific issues I want to dedicate a more focused post on.