Well, I've been home for a day and a half, and as you may have noticed, the blog entries haven't exactly been flowing like proverbial non-frozen water. Tuesday afternoon I was too overjoyed to see Malaya again to do anything but spend a few hours with her before heading off to Kali class. She picked me up at the airport and we headed home to unpack. There I enjoyed surprising her with an early b-day gift,
A Song of Ice and Fire volume 4,
Feast of Crows, UK edition, courtesy of D2 site co-webmaster, Rush. He brought it along from Scotland, per my request, and passed it off to me at BlizCon. It came out October 17th there, isn't coming out
until November 8th here, and yes, a week's headstart was greatly appreciated by Malaya.
We didn't want to wait the extra 4 weeks to start on the novel, but we weren't desperate enough (to get it early) to actually pay extra and order it from Amazon.co.uk, or have Elly or Rush buy it there and mail it over. But when BlizCon happened along in the grace period, and I knew a friend was coming to LA from the UK, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to get the book and to score some girlfriend points. Just so you know where things stand, she dropped the new print out of my latest chapter and leapt into
Feast of Crows immediately, so yeah, it's a good thing
Martin is 70, bearded, and happily-married.
I didn't do more than skim the first page of the book, but it looks pretty good. Malaya's up to about page 100 and keeps saying how brilliant the writing is; how well Martin works the exposition into flashbacks and memories and such, so the narration flows smoothly while the reader is caught up on what's been happening in the series, what's happened since the last book ended, and so on. Unfortunately there are some drawbacks to having the UK edition. Extra "u"s after most "o"s, the overuse of the adjective "bloody" and the book is called
A Right Jolly Good Meal for Blackbirds, but once you get used to the slight cultural differences it's not a big deal.
As for my reading needs, I'll get to FoC eventually, but it's now 3rd or 4th on my list, and my novel writing was brought to a halt by my rereading of books 2 and 3 in Martin's series last year, so I'll likely put off FoC until I finish things up later this year (I hope I hope) and want a bit of a break before I start rewriting. Martin's fantasy world is too engrossing, apparently, and I can't write in my own and read in his at the same time.
Shannara, on the other hand... I finished the Terry Brooks novel my last day in San Diego, and I guess it was okay. My opinion hasn't much changed from the
last blog entry, and while
The First King of Shannara was a vast improvement over the first two hack-tastic novels in Brooks' Shannara series, it still wasn't really any good. It didn't suck, and the writing and action and such was all passable, but eh... is mediocre teen fantasy really worth your limited reading time? (Don't answer that, if this is any indication of the sort of blogs you waste your online time perusing.)
In happier reading news, with FKoS out of the way, I finally started on Harry Potter 6 in the airport. It wasn't that engrossing right from the start, but it quickly had me more interested, and I have to give Rowling some props; she does write a very interesting and welcoming world. Her prose is never brilliant, but it flows very quickly (I can easily read 100+ pages an hour without hurrying.) and her characters and plot events and the world she's created are all very compelling. I find myself eager to read more, not so much to find out what's going to happen, but just because it's enjoyable to do so. It's a world you want to get into, and you want to root for Harry and Ron and Hermoine and you want to root against the bad guys. I'm usually very bored by good vs. evil stories, since they tends towards the simplistic and cookie cutter (See
First King of Shannara, The.) but somehow Rowling pulls them off without making it seem so black and white.
The problem with HP6 was that I had very little memory of what happened in HP4 and HP5, so for the first 100 pages of 6 I was half-lost, trying to remember what prophecy, who was in the magic duel in the end of the last book, how Voldemort didn't kill Harry when he had the chance in the graveyard, and so on. I didn't have a chance to read any Tuesday after getting off the plane, so Wednesday afternoon I got online and read summaries of HP3 and HP4, and realized that I had completely confused HP4 and 5. It's in 4 where he and the other triwizard tournament guy get transported to the graveyard. There is where Voldemort gets resurrected, and Harry improbably escapes. Book 5 had the big magical battle conclusion, where Harry nearly dies and Sirius isn't as lucky.
Unfortunately, I still didn't remember the particulars of the battle, who the known Death Eaters were, which students fought with Harry and so on. Reading HP3, 4, and 5 in about two weeks last year left them too jumbled in my memory, and since that lack of hindsight was cramping my style in book 6, I went to the library and checked out HP5. I'm going to reread it before I return to finish up book 6, but before I get into those two I've got to get through (
and add the review) of Jeffery Deaver's last Lincoln Rhyme novel. It also came from the library, and since I checked it out a week ago, and I can't renew it since it's on back order, and I had to wait 4 months for my turn to come around, I might as well read the damn thing.
Malaya read it while I was away at Blizzcon, and said it was okay. Mostly a thriller, rather than a mystery, since it's not one you are given any clues to solve. You just follow along as the brilliant detectives unravel the case, and hopefully get some thrills as you go. I've got to read a good old fashioned "who dunnit?" at some point, just to remind myself what they're like. All of the "mysteries" I've read in recent years are just thrillers or action stories, with no mysteries at all, or ones you've not given enough info to have any chance of solving.
As for Blizzcon writing... yeah. Nothing yet, though I did flip through the 100+ photos I took there. I have nothing to say about any of the games on display, since I didn't play them or pay them much attention. The crowd was somewhat interesting, though there was far less cosplay than I had hoped for. There were also virtually zero displays of Diablo anywhere there. I mean none, no monitors showing D2, no play stations for it, no artwork or action figure displays, no Diablo merchandise in the gift shop (one cinematic poster of Baal and a silicone bracelet aside), etc. I saw one kid in a home-made Necromancer outfit, and a couple of people in cow suits. And I had on my Bliz North D2 t-shirt, and a D2 hat. That was about it, in a sea of WoW and SC Ghost displays, and thousands of almost entirely white, male, 18-24 y/o fans who were wearing jeans and t-shirts that had nothing to do with Blizzard at all, unless they'd already waited in the long line for their gimme bag and put on the black BlizCon t-shirt found within.
There were actually two shirts; a white WoW one with a Night Elf on the back, and the black official BlizCon one. Both are pretty cheap, to be honest, with crappy silk screening on the graphics that make them look blurry and cracked; like the shirt's already been washed a few dozen times. Hey, what do you want for a lousy $120?
I will try to get to some photo cropping and sorting and such tomorrow, now that I'm all caught up on my mindless surfing and game playing and cat-petting. There's even food in the house since I hit CostCo, Trader Joe's, Smart and Final, and Concord Produce while Malaya was at work Wednesday. Now we've just got to do about eight loads of laundry tomorrow and we'll be back into our routines, and perhaps I'll even get some work done.
