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Book Log #32: Unquiet Dreams, by Mark Del Franco

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.

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My muse demands bronzeriders, who knew?

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

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Jam Report #92–5/10/09: Dear Gods the Cake Edition

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”.

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Book buying update!

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!

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Trek trek trekity trek trek trek

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!

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Data transfer complete! Go me!

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.

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Hi all!

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!

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Wait, what, Chapter 19 is done?!

I should have actually posted about this on Saturday, only I was entirely distracted by the fun of going to see State of Play. Which of course leads me around to a traditional fallback of mine any time something sets back my writing: blaming Russell Crowe. (All my typos are his fault, you know.)

But I did actually finish up Chapter 19 on Saturday, one last little gasp through the final pages. Which means Chapter 20 is now finally on tap, and I began a cursory poking at it today. It is a measure of how long it’s been since I’ve actually worked on that chapter that I forgot completely about the opening scene in it, to wit, Ulima Secretly Plotting Secret Plots. But once I remembered that, I was able to mentally call up the rest of what to expect. Faanshi and Alarrah’s conversation scene is going to have to be completely redone, and if possible, I want to revisit some of the content I had to cut from this draft’s Chapter 17. Specifically, the bit where Kirinil actually checks Faanshi out magically for the first time.

So the beginning of Chapter 20 probably won’t change much, but most of the rest should wind up looking fairly different. I may have to write out a summary before I tackle it in prose.

And oh yes: pre-emptive thanks are going to have to go out to the spouse of one of my fellow Drollerie authors, who has kindly offered to beta read this draft for me when I finish it. For that matter, my editor at Drollerie also kindly offered to give it a once-over, although she knows I’m intending to fire this book at agents. I mention this not only to give them both public appreciation, but also to hold myself accountable for, y’know, actually finishing the draft. Note to self: YOU’RE ON NOTICE. GET WITH IT.

Edited up to tonight: -157
Chapter 19 revised total: 5,252
Chapter 20 revised total: 4,509
Lament of the Dove revised total: 121,904

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Drollerie Blog Tour: Catherine Schaff-Stump on poetry

This month’s Drollerie Blog Tour is shifting the schedule to earlier in the month to accommodate monthly themes in a more timely fashion; as of this month, we’ll be putting up posts on the 21st instead of the end of the month. You can find all of this month’s posts here!

For the month of April, our theme is “poetry”, and I’d like to introduce you all to Catherine Schaff-Stump, who is in turn hosting a post from me today! Here’s what she’s got to say about the poetry that’s influenced her as a writer.

The first poem that reached out to me was Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach. When I was a sixteen-year old kid growing up in Southern Iowa, my tiny school started sending me to community college two days a week during my junior year. Well, back in the day, in the hollers of America, there were no talented and gifted programs, so the district made it up as they went along. Relevance? I had a college text book to read in my spare time, and Dover Beach was in there.

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More on #amazonfail

Okay, so as of today the prevailing winds of opinion on the Net appear to be hitting three major points:

  1. It’s nice that Amazon did acknowledge their error, although from scattered reports I’m picking up, not everybody has had their previous sales rankings restored. I have not yet been able to confirm any specific de-ranked books that haven’t been restored, myself.
  2. It’s not nice that Amazon hasn’t actually come right out and said “we’re really, really sorry about this, yes, this was a screwup of the highest order”. I’ve seen at least one author outright demanding an apology since her writing is her only source of income, and Amazon screwing this up therefore adversely affected her.
  3. It’s also not nice that the mechanism for hiding items globally is there to begin with. Charles Stross ably expressed concerns about this over here.

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