Where Anna the Piper geeks out
This month’s Drollerie Blog Tour theme is “mothers”, and this time around, I’m hosting Drollerie Press author Meredith Holmes. Meredith is the author of Unseelie, and if you know me well at all, you can bet that this is a book I can support.
Y’all check out Meredith’s essay on her own impending motherhood, and how she feels this may affect her writing! Enjoy.
Continue reading “Drollerie Blog Tour: Meredith Holmes on impending motherhood”
And because of this, I’m going to try to post about assorted Things That Don’t Suck.
This past weekend: Street Fair. Got to go with 
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Also this past weekend: Starting to watch Season 2 of Life on Mars. This show is made entirely of Awesome, and I am sad that there are only two seasons of it, because next time I see the Master on the Doctor he totally will be DI Tyler instead. And that’ll be just plain weird.
Yesterday: Lots of new music purchased, including Carbon Leaf’s shiny brand new album, Nothing Rhymes With Woman. More thoughts on this will be forthcoming. Also, as a special side note to seimaisin
And oh yes: it totally fails to suck that I found an lj user tag parser for WordPress, so even though I’m doing a lot of crossposting out of WordPress these days, I can still do lj style tags. Because it totally messes me up when I can’t!
More later. I need sleep!
If you’re an urban fantasy fan, you’ll want to put serious consideration into checking out the anthology Mean Streets, which brings four stories to the table, two of which are heavy hitters long familiar to my recent book buying habits.
Harry Dresden fans will first and foremost want to check out Jim Butcher’s contribution, “Warrior”–as long as you’re up to date on the series. This story is set between the novels Small Favor and Turn Coat, and there are definite spoilers for the former. Still, it’s a solid, compact Dresden adventure, distilled down to the essence of awesome that is Jim Butcher. All the involved characters are note-perfect, and in fact, the only complaint I have about the story is the lack of Murphy.
Kat Richardson’s story “The Third Death of the Little Clay Dog” is also excellent. No real spoilers for the Greywalker series, since Richardon’s heroine Harper Blaine is taken out of her usual locale and goes all the way down to Mexico to carry out the last wishes of a client. There’s a lot of nifty, spooky Day of the Dead mileage in this, so if that particular holiday is your thing, you’ll go for this.
Simon Green’s “The Difference a Day Makes” was harder for me to get into. I’m not familiar with the Nightside novels, so I didn’t have the advantage of familiarity to ground me with the protagonist, and that lack of context kept bumping up against said protagonist’s penchant for telling the reader in great detail about how Weird and Badassed the Nightside is. He’s even called on it by another character, and yet, he keeps doing it. Sorry, Mr. Green; I have to agree with your other character. ;) Plus, the OHNOEZ Big Reveal at the end of the story fell kind of flat for me. I’ll admit though that Mr. Green does have a vivid way with a description, so other readers may find this story works better for them.
Thomas Sniegoski’s “Noah’s Orphans” intrigued me, though. Again, I’m not familiar with the novels this story comes out of, but the concept of an angel who’s been masquerading as a private detective caught my interest, and Sniegoski does good things with utilizing Biblical mythos in setting up this story. Remy Chandler, a.k.a. the angel Remiel, is a poignant character as well in his struggle to cling to humanity he’s learned from a loved one he’s lost. I may have to go check out the Remiel books just to learn more about him–which, I daresay, makes this story a win.
All in all this is a solid volume and worth checking out. Four stars.
Unquiet Dreams, Book 2 of Mark Del Franco’s Connor Grey series, is a decent enough followup to the first one. In this episode, Connor’s called upon to investigate the death of a human boy who has connections to local non-human gangs–a case which he fears is related to the gruesome murder of a high-profile elven community leader. Working through both these cases gives Connor a good hard look at the upper echelons of the Guild that turned him out after the accident that crippled his powers, brings him across the path of his brother, and may, just may, be handing him a further clue about what exactly has happened to his magic.
In terms of overall quality this series isn’t standing head and shoulders above its urban fantasy compatriots, but that’s fine; Connor’s character development arc as a previously arrogant man humbled by his magic’s loss is the interesting thing here for me. And I’ll also admit to liking the angle of dwarf and elf gangs in this novel, as well as the added data about the backstory of how denizens of Faerie came to live in “our” world. I could do with a little bit less of Connor trying too hard to convince himself he’s not an asshole anymore HONEST, but one hopes that as the series progresses and he becomes more comfortable with his maturity, he’ll stop that.
Still interested and will check out the third book when I can. For this one, three stars.
I just finished writing 500 words or so about a bronzerider character I used to write for Telgar Weyr, the offline Pern fan club group I used to be in, and which is making noises about resurrecting itself lately. This is pertinent to my writing efforts because, for the first time in many months, I felt my brain leap at the idea of revisiting a lot of stories that I never did get to finish when the club fell over before.
So for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been distracted with that. Which is, I know I know, not exactly conducive to me getting Lament of the Dove done. But I can say this: after writing that snippet about J’marr, I felt a lot more sanguine about poking at Lament, and I fired up Chapter 20 and went through a couple of (fairly light) pages of editing until realizing I needed to bugger off to bed.
Apparently my muse has just been jonesing to write about a hot young bronzerider. If that’s what it takes to get my ass back in gear, I am happy to oblige it!
I’m still in Chapter 20, although my mental page pointer has moved ahead from page 4 to page 7. And now I’m in the good bit of this chapter–the scene with Faanshi trying to deal with what she’s discovered about Alarrah. Let’s see what happens next.
Edited tonight: Net loss of zero, actually, although I did take out a few words and put a few others in
Chapter 20 revised total: 4,509
Lament of the Dove revised total: 121,904
In which we have a tiny Jam but a huge Jam’s worth of tasty snacks; in which we expand our musical horizons by breaking out a little Queen; and in which we celebrate the new Trek flick by breaking out the most infamous filk song there is. Songs: “By and By”, “Captain Kidd”, “Goin’ Up”, “Elf Glade, “’39”, “Outbirds”, “Stars”, “Banned from Argo”.
Continue reading “Jam Report #92–5/10/09: Dear Gods the Cake Edition”
In addition to going to see Trek this past Friday, I also made a point of picking up more books over the weekend! Including:
The Pretender’s Crown, Book 2 of mizkit‘s Inheritors’ Cycle! Very much looking forward to this.
Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, which is pretty much self-explanatory! Had to pick this up after being a longstanding reader of Smart Bitches Trashy Books.
The Patriot Witch, by C.C. Finlay, which has been heartily endorsed by raecarson!
And picked up separately:
Tribute, by Nora Roberts, just because La Nora is awesome.
Total books purchased for 2009 now: 30!
So yeah, on Friday night, solarbird and spazzkat and I went to go have tasty sushi and see the new Trek movie. The sushi was undisputably tasty, as was the plum wine I had with it. We had a bit of a difference of opinion as to the tastiness of the movie, though!
Picoreview on my part: Big Stupid Fun. There are bits of science in it that make you go “wait, WHAT?” even by Trek standards. But here’s the thing: at least while I was watching the movie, I didn’t care. All the characters were Right and that’s pretty much what counted as far as I am concerned. Bonus points for Dara and I having fun geeking about the ramifications of events in the movie, and Dara telling me that say what you will about this new film, it’s gotten her Trekgeeking for the first time in twenty years.
Spoilers behind the cut!
I’d been being stupid–I was trying to manually type in all the old site updates out of my old annathepiper.org MySQL database, the thing I’d set up to really kind of be a blog before I had a blog. But I finally figured out what I’d need to do to just do a data dump out of MySQL and then an import into WordPress. I still then had to go through all the entries and put titles, categories, and tags on them, but that did at least make the whole process go rather faster.
So yeah, all my old updates are now here on the WordPress edition of this site, and you can see the tag cloud down on the sidebar on the left. Lots and lots of tags in particular pertaining to my various roleplay logs from days of yore.
Still to come: I still need to port the rest of the old site pages in, and eventually, I’m going to pull my archive of Two Moons MUSH logs back over into this logs archive as well, just to have them all in the same place. But this’ll do me for today’s round of updates.
It’s been a while since I bothered to update annathepiper.org, my original personal webpage. But as y’all who’ve been following my LJ know, I’ve recently learned how to use WordPress, and so I thought I’d give my original page a general overhaul too.
The vast majority of my active web attention these days has gone to my LJ as well as my new writing site. But for the sake of posterity I’m keeping annathepiper.org up too. It mostly serves as an archive for my history of MUSHing and some of my other favorite fannish things. (If the words “Great Big Sea” come to mind for you when I say that, they would be appropriate.)
I’ll be experimenting with trying to roll the pages from the last version of this site into WordPress, though getting the logs database accessible from here promises to be fun. And by fun I mean, “difficult to code”. But it’ll be an interesting learning experience to see if I can take the PHP I originally wrote to search my logs database and integrate it as some sort of WordPress plugin thingie. (Which I doubt will be interesting to anybody but me, since I figure there are maybe about three people on the planet who may actually still be interested in reading my logs, but hey! Who knows?)
Anyway, if you’re reading this mirrored off my LJ or one of my LJ-clone accounts, feel free to wander by annathepiper.org occasionally. But mind the dust. I’m cleaning up!