the deep moans round with many voices

I am not going to post my November reading list this year; instead, I will post a combined November and December list on January 1st or 2nd.

This is because of Yuletide. See, even though I did my best to obfuscate the issue by rereading several old favorites that I'd volunteered to write, I figure it's better safe than sorry, so I'd have to keep most of the entry private until after Yuletide reveals anyway.

So. I read some books. They were pretty good. I'll tell you about them later. :-)

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In other news, my life is boring and I like it that way. We haven't had any noticeable holiday rush at the store, which is nice; it gives me more time to get maintenance and the daily list done, or to read during slow periods.

I have Tuesday off this week. The current plan is to do laundry, make ornaments, and either bash out a new story as a family present or make a slightly expurgated version of The Sun and the Moon. (The current version has implied sex out of wedlock. I have evangelical Christian relatives with small children. You see the problem.)

I also need to do holiday cards. I may have enough mismatched cards to avoid buying any new ones, but I'm not sure, and I need to make a list of recipients in any case. *sigh* Holidays are such a pain. Fun, too, but a pain nonetheless.

It's time for the continuing adventures of Liz and her reading list! These are the books I read in October 2008. (Click on the cuts for summaries and reactions.)

Is anyone still reading these lists? Inquiring minds want to know.


New: 5
---A Member of the Family: Cesar Millan's Guide to a Lifetime of Fulfillment with Your Dog, Cesar Millan and Melissa Jo Peltier ( nonfiction )

---Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America, Garrison Keillor ( nonfiction )

---Reserved for the Cat, Mercedes Lackey ( fantasy )

---Star Trek Academy: Collision Course, William Shatner, Judith Reeves-Stevens, and Garfield Reeves-Stevens ( sci-fi )

---The Northern Crusades, Eric Christiansen ( nonfiction )


Old: 1
---Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J. K. Rowling ( fantasy )


October Total: 6 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a lot of fanfiction)

Year to Date: 92 books (62 new, 30 old)

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In other news, chapter 12 of "Secrets" is now at 12,525 words. That's 1,375 words written in one evening! (Okay, so I copied maybe 500 of them out of CoS, but I still had to play around with those to switch the POV from Harry to Ginny and work them smoothly into Ginny's thought process. Sometimes making Ginny's canon actions reconcile with any sort of rational internal character motivation is very tricky.)

...And after all that progress, I am still not done. *headdesk* I only got half the key scene, because it has decided that it really wants to be two scenes -- one where Ginny works up the nerve to follow a certain course of action (and fails to carry through), and one where she scrambles for a fallback plan (which goes horribly wrong).

It's time for the continuing adventures of Liz and her reading list! These are the books I read in September 2008. (Click on the cuts for summaries and reactions.)

New: 6
---Fullmetal Alchemist vol. 16, Hiromu Arakawa ( manga )

---Hostage to Pleasure, Nalini Singh ( romance )

---Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky ( nonfiction )

---Cod: The Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky ( nonfiction )

---Song of the Beast, Carol Berg ( fantasy )

---Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), Tom Vanderbilt ( nonfiction )


Old: 1
---Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll ( children's book )


September Total: 7 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a lot of fanfiction)

Year to Date: 86 books (57 new, 29 old)

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"The Affairs of Dragons" is currently at 4,650 words, and I still have not gotten Kazul properly on-screen, though at least Morwen has now seen her around a corner. Such are the perils of following a story when it veers away from the outline. *grumble*

The thing is, while the outlined version would have been much funnier, it would not have been nearly as good a story. And also, I never really liked Wrede's casual dismissal of princesses and princes -- they may be mostly silly and rather useless in her world, but that's no reason to be rude and condescending toward them. So I am writing a princess who, while not at all used to the real world, is intelligent and reasonable, and while her knight is incompetent at being a knight, he's a good man and clever in other ways. And this allows the conflict to be a true misunderstanding instead of a couple of idiots doing something stupid and annoying.

(Also, it felt somewhat counterproductive to write a female idiot for a ficathon meant to celebrate female characters. Morwen and Kazul do not need me to artificially disable the other characters to help them shine. They're awesome enough to shine on their own.)

It's time for the continuing adventures of Liz and her reading list! These are the books I read in August 2008. (Click on the cuts for summaries and/or reactions.)

New: 9
---The Art of War, Sun Tzu, trans. and ed. Samuel B. Griffith ( nonfiction )

---The Snow Queen, Mercedes Lackey ( fantasy )

---Wild Adapter vol. 5, Kazuya Minekura ( manga )

---The Sea Gull, Anton Chekhov, trans. Fred Eisemann ( playscript )

---Jhegaala, Steven Brust ( fantasy )

---The Devil's Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe, James Chambers ( nonfiction )

---Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers, Michael Barone ( nonfiction )

---Victory of Eagles, Naomi Novik ( fantasy )

---The Dark Knight, Dennis O'Neil ( film novelization )


Old: 0


August Total: 9 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a lot of fanfiction)

Year to Date: 79 books (51 new, 28 old)

It's time for the continuing adventures of Liz and her reading list! These are the books I read in June 2008. (Click on the cuts for summaries and reactions.)

New: 6
---Dark Needs at Night's Edge, Kresley Cole ( romance )

---Furies of Calderon, Jim Butcher ( fantasy )

---Academ's Fury, Jim Butcher ( fantasy )

---Cursor's Fury, Jim Butcher ( fantasy )

---Captain's Fury, Jim Butcher ( fantasy )

---Saiyuki Reload vol. 8, Kazuya Minekura ( manga )


Old: 3
---The Vor Game, Lois McMaster Bujold ( science fiction )

---Borders of Infinity, Lois McMaster Bujold ( science fiction )

---Mirror Dance, Lois McMaster Bujold ( science fiction )


June Total: 9 books (plus several magazines, a few newspapers, and a lot of fanfiction)

Year to Date: 64 books (40 new, 24 old)

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I was late getting out of work tonight. At about 7:30pm, I realized the fax machine cartridge had run out, halfway through printing an invoice. So I opened a replacement cartridge, but couldn't install it until after I'd closed the store, counted my drawer, and put everything else away. Then I spent twenty minutes figuring out the instruction sheet, fighting rolls of carbon paper, slicing a new notch in one heavy cardboard roll because the pre-existing notch was off-center, and trying to get the cartridge back into the fax machine without letting any of the parts slip and undo all my hard work.

There are times I badly wish I had an extra hand.

Anyway, I had to code an extension on the main floor alarm, since I didn't get out until 9:35, rather than my usual 9:10-9:20.

But this turned out to be a good thing! You see, as I was walking home along Cascadilla St., I saw the beginning of the Ithaca College fireworks display, which I'd assumed I wouldn't get to see. So I stopped and spent the next twenty minutes leaning on a rail at the edge of Cascadilla Creek, watching fireworks and listening to the sound lag several seconds behind the lights.

Serendipity is a beautiful thing. :-)