Haunted Mirror

Draft of Seditious Intent done! Though it's a really crappy one, I've decided that's okay. I've got Story, we're good for the moment.

Two books I think everyone who ever drops through here should read:

The Face in the Frost (John Bellairs)
one line press? I just finished reading this and am now insanely eager to OWN a copy. Munnies must come first, munnies must come first...

Women Who Run With the Wolves (Clarissa Pinkola Estes)
a book about love, life, and stories from all over that teach us (especially women) about it.

I'll add reasons here once I'm done reading the chillens more Skulduggery Pleasant.
ETA~ I's back! So, without any further ado,

"AND HE'S THE GOOD GUY."

    So, I read this book in the last couple of hours. It was so. blinking. good.

I'd review it, but I'm incoherently happy with it. "There is too much. I will sum-up."
    ~   I read a lot of books I think are funny. I rarely laugh aloud. This kept me laughing consistently in a few different veins of humor. And Skulduggery himself was funnier than he's even made out to be.
    ~   It gets to the action-adventure movie kind of fights blocking...but not belaboured.
    ~   Stephanie, the heroine, has very unusually realistic ways of thinking.

If you can bear YA, try it. If it's not for you, I'll understand--or, not really. But I'm not so cool as to kill you.
Remember this now:

I had one of those awesome days that isn't anything but a string of good incidents which included:

~ sitting in the midafternoon sunshine on a stack of pallets (for scrap wood) with a fluffy cat in my lap and a fun book to write at hand
~ watching a tear-jerker movie in a tiny box and enjoying it
~ getting things done! Like planting spiny poppies.

People need to share more about these kind of days, as a Xanga-keeping friend reminded me.

It's the rants that give people something to comment on, though; noted that in the entries from last April.
So.
Rant for the day...
Why did I hold off on The Game just because it sounded so run-of-the-mill? It's Diana Wynne Jones! She's never doing run-of-the-mill--it's never been one of her faults, and I should have realized it.
This isn't quite the right sort of rant, since I enjoyed it all the better for waiting until it grabbed me off the pile.

Right. Just what I needed: a new, demanding story idea and opener!

Well, I wrote more of it than this, but for the Tuesday that is coming to a close I give you:
Jamie Duluth was considered to be in the world's top tier of Spirituals. He was also going to be a legacy student at Friedenheimer Institute of Higher Attainment. He wanted to be a normal kid. Honest.
...Oh, just leave me alone!

I'm actually in one of my idea-spurts, so this is not totally unexpected.
It is also totally explicable in terms of my reading:

There should be a special word for the agony a writer goes through when they realise what that other person is hearing/reading is No Good. Not something funny sounding (enough phrases for that already). Something that sounds excruciating.

In happier news,

I remembered a part I didn't write lyrics for in my Tribute Favorites poem of my last post, so here is what I made up when watering goats today:

Every cold dawn
On a long road
Winding on and on
I remember illusions
That I have loved
And I want to create
Some more!

[The tag...]

These are the sort of things you create and try not to think about what profound throughts you could have been thinking if you'd resisted the urge...
Guess the tributes!       [not really. spare yourself the "What If?" agonies of wasted time.]

Rainbows on bubbles and great winged horses
Snowdays with Tumnus and werewolf keen noses
Gamboling kitsune, sly leprechauns
My favorite illusions, once seen and they're gone

Kings born in exile with old broken sabres
Changelings and deep wells and candles and prayers
Angry steep mountains with snow to hunt dwarves
Mad wives in attics and those fey secret drawers

Time full of wrinkles, impossible heroes
Wrestling with Grendel and magical bureaus
Avatars running from demigod des'ny
My fav'rite illusions are running away with me.

Alphabets forming from thornbush and briars
Phookas that prefer to ride on two tires
Redheads, tea, dragons, elves, shoes, steel, owls, rain
Here let me tell you my favorites again...


Hint: I cheated.

So, this instead of finishing another major edit on Beastly. I will scoping out new guinea pigs predictably later than I like and sooner than is good for you.

40 books for 32 dollars is worth a lot more hassle than I had to get it. Look upon my riches and weep:



The stuff on the right is clutter collage, or riches from Panama with a backdrop of friends to find homes with all the other orphan books.

This could have been YOU at the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Friends of the Library Book Sale!
I could have spent only $30 by avoiding some repeats, but mostly it wasn't worth having to sort somewhere a volunteer would have to shag me out, or lugging my books much farther.
Blessings be upon the volunteer who decided that despite the thirty or so books in my bag, it was worth thinning out the regular check-out line to send me off to the Express Lane. I think I also looked pitiful. My arms were sore, and I had two sacks I was dragging along the floor like broken legs.
It is a tribute to my water-carrying side career that I'm not actually sore today.

Though I hate to play favorites I have to admit this was what got my blood pumping...



I really meant to buy a hardback. I even had one picked out (I should have kept it and taken the time to get rid of the extra Wind in the Door or Hobbit--$1.00! For a hardback of those dimensions, that soul, the probable historic import--) but this was too pretty to give up and carrying around two Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrells was by that time a glimpse of Perdition.

Someday a more perfect copy will come along. For now, I have this one--which, by the way, seems to be in perfect condition, why it was in the "Collectors" area with slightly higher prices.

I also now own Harry Potter books. I've never owned any except the Goblet of Fire I bought in Narita for my trip back out of Tokyo and then sent to Sofi, who I'd just dropped there to return to...Panama.

Mumma: You can borrow those boots, take them to your room. All my jeans are too
                tight on the bottom to go over them, and when they're inside--
Me:         --they rub.
Mumma:                     No. Too sexy for words.

I know my family is pretty chummy, but sometimes I wonder how in the world anyone could connect me with her unaided.
Not that I don't have my mouthy moments. Those times I'm just pretending to be a Crowe, though.
I do have her boots.
The zipper's busted on one, so while I was going to try, there will be no overpowering the masses with my footwear.


Loreena McKennitt...I really wasn't fond of The Visit because Lady of Shallott sounded monotonous, and the Tom Wait's style Greensleeves was far from my style, not to mention to the eerie tone being so accentuated. She really grew on me, though. Part of Aolon's soundtrack, definitely. Wish she'd gotten involved earlier in the process, too. Enya is fun, but she lacks the texture to be perfect for a spiritually charged (or so attempted) story.


I'm reading Queen's Play, after discovering my library had it after all! Just not marked as Vol. 2, or something to set me off the track. Somehow it's just awesome to hang with Lymond now I know his whole backstory. Or somewhat of it. I'm still a bit chary--I wouldn't marry him, which I can't say about many leading men in literature with such feeling--but he's got it bad when it comes to glamor.


Ah, the wailing of pipes... I have Outlander to prepare for Diana Gabaldon as Conestoga's Guest of Honor. I did not do this for Laurell K. Hamilton. ^_^

So, this is not books that came out this year, but ones I've read this year. Last year I just journalled this for myself, but making up categories to award books I want to talk about is really fun. Tell me about yours, too!

( Haven't heard enough about my reading this year? )

So I'm at 56000 words in Vol. 4. I've been creeping for the last 5000, but it's more than I realized.

I think there's still more story than I'm allowing, too, so that's half the uphill work.

Once more into the breach!

~For the end and for freedom!~



Today, interspersed with Useful Things, I read Blade Dancer. The title made me pick it up despite my immediate rejection of titles so cool they must be gimmicky or too popular for me. I enjoyed it a lot. Though I have a feeling it was twaddle.
It was all the overused elements I have a weakness for, I guess.
I mean really, it features a bicultural big-talking jock who goes in over her head at a battle school of sorts for assassins with a motley crew of other halfs that bond and become better than the individuals they are despite themselves.
Gah.
It was a day well spent.

And speaking of battle school:


I returned Castle Cant, to ignore. I still have Enola Holmes and Across the Nightengale Floor for a good old college try. Name of the Wind I will get to again. Someday.
But I've been crossing books off the library shelf-list quite a bit lately.

I need to start on my purchased books shelf pretty soon.
For now, survival.
Tomorrow ought to be calmer.
The aged next-door-auntie should be going home, as electric has been restored to all the people we've been helping support in the crisis, I've got packages off, I only need major sewing done and...well.
The list is still long.

But I'm here!

5579 / 50000 words. 11% done!
This is not going well.

Just sayin'.

Random Red's Life Fact:
My younger 3 sibs are doing geneology for history right now. Today my mom got us back to the ancestor on her side that came over from Europe/UK, and one of the other lines was on PEI at one point. (Nova Scotia is home to many slightly distant cousins; PEI is just a little cooler.) She also had an aunt corroborate a suspicion our German Catholic Grandfather Brinkman was Jewish. See, apparently the real Germans are Brinkmann. My mum's suspicions were more along the lines of Semitic noses, certain family traits, and the fact that a German Catholic was likely to be hiding something.
If you ever read my timed-out supers novel, this bit of history in my family comes up in an unexpected place. ^_^ I love writing.

Whooosh. I'd forgotten, not how Two Towers ended, but how much of a cliff-hanger it was! The emotional investment of the Tower of the Moon sequences is just really strong; I love how Sam just unfolds in that fourth volume. The way he mimicks Gollum is just a beauty to behold. Grim Sam=priceless.

I was much struck with how taking The Ring was "against his nature"...he thinks he's made a dreadful mistake, but that's when we have the inkling that while not quite so fey and fell as Frodo (take that alliteration and stick it in your hat), he's a fair stout Hero himself.* The foreshadowing of that talk they have before they come out of Ithilien (Tolkien, like good storytellers everywhere, knew the value of letting up occasionally), of the story they're in is so hobbit-like, yet very much suited to the high task, just as Pippin and Merry's banter is suited to the extremes of their natures. Can wear armor about the Shire without being ridiculous because they have a high sense of humor about it, you can tell. Back to Sam and Frodo's talk (I dearly love a digession or two), in the movie I don't remember it coming so early, so I was surprised it WAS a foreshadow.

And back to the beginning in a merry round of mummery,

I was surprised, the first time, how the Two Towers movie did not end on the slamming of the doors. To me, it seems a perfect ending to a Volume Two of Three. Then again, it had to tie things up. But the pacing there was pretty much the only thing that threw me into "Wait; the book was different!" mode. {Besides the Legolas stairs surfer/Oliphaunt slayer thing. But we won't talk about that.}

{I was thoroughly shocked to find the counting game between Gimli and Legolas in The Book, on that note. Pleasantly surprised, actually, to think the humor was to be credited to Tolkien.}

Tolkien r/labu-r/labu...

*Funny, how he thinks he's ruining everything—Heroes do tend to ruin things, if only for the antagonist, but realistically...that's a little simplistic. Sam is only ruining himself, though the whole mess with Gollum does come about. The fact is, the breaking of Gollum's trust is what ends up getting them rid of the One Ring after all. The trouble he causes in that way (taking the ring, and before that in his unsubtle suspicion) all serves the purpose. Ruining himself, in that wearing the Ring, for that time, means Havens for him after all, when I think...Sam should have been buried and become part of the soil of the Shire.

But prices must be paid. If the Gollum made everything right in the end, and if Frodo was always a little too elven for his own good, Sam is a price—for the Shire, and Frodo, and Sam himself.