3 April 2005

Despite feeling nauseated and nasty for the last few days, I've managed to send Thermionic Night to alpha readers. Hurrah, hurrah, out of my hair! They can help me figure out how to fix it, because I know it still needs it, and I'm at that stage where I keep thinking, "What's probably wrong with it is chapters one through fifty-three. And possibly the epilogue and the author's note, too." So, yah, parallax. Perspective. Definitely.

Writing for grown-ups. Harumph. Who needs it.

So I'm hoping to get around to some short stories while I wait for the distant signals to come in. To that end, I'm hoping my bad mood about short stories dries up a bit soon. If not, I'm sure I can cheerfully come to four or five mutually contradictory conclusions about what novel I'm going to write next. That'll be fun. (I don't actually mean that sarcastically. The stage where I'm poking long, sharp sticks at several things and trying to see what falls out is a good stage.)

I've been reading a lot in the last few days, not feeling good enough to do much else. As I look at the publication information on the book I jut finished, I discover it's not due out until August. Oh. I suppose that's what happens with Advance Reader's Copies. Still, the book is Colin Cotterill's Thirty-Three Teeth, and come August, I think you want to read it. It's...er...mystery and magical realism, I think they'd call it, though I think mystery and fantasy is probably just as accurate. It's set in Laos, and I think it's really well-done. I don't know -- maybe this is a subcategory of mysteries, and some of you are yawning and saying, "Oh, not another Laotian magical realist mystery featuring the national coroner." I somehow doubt it, though. There's at least one other, to which this is a sequel, but my guess is that's it.

Then I picked up Laura Anne Gilman's Staying Dead, and it's entertaining, though nothing about it jumped out at me particularly. I can say that I don't like the sans-serif font it's printed in. Who knew I had an opinion about serifs in book fonts? Evidently I do. So okay then: Luna. Cut it out with the sans serif fonts. I'm already overcoming my prejudice against romances when I read Luna books (they're a line of fantasy romances, for those of you who haven't been keeping track); don't make me overcome my prejudice in favor of serifs as well.

And -- still being sick -- I read Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which was good stuff, well-done and all that. And now Anthony Price's The Hour of the Donkey, but I don't think I'll get very far with that, because I both cooked and ate tonight, and the cooking and socializing bit was about as much as I could handle. I'm going to crash pretty soon here. Hope all of you had a good weekend.