6 August 2004

I have a little tiny voice today. This is better than no voice at all, to be sure, but it's not yet enough to, say, make audible phone calls. The cough is better, though still present, and I'm still taking the cough suppressant: it's bad enough in the hour or so before I take it that I figure that's a decent indicator. Besides that, if I stop taking it before I get a little more voice back, I may relapse into lack of voice. Nobody wants that. It's annoying for everybody. Everybody here, at least, and several people who aren't here. Energy levels are still pretty low; dizziness is still off-and-on pretty bad.

I finished Move Under Ground yesterday morning and picked up Orson Scott Card's The Crystal City from my library pile. I mean, after all, if you had to pick one person whose writing and general biography were most like Nick's...right, anyway, I put The Crystal City on the library return pile after a few chapters. It was not getting any better, and he's just going to keep writing them. The buck stops here, or something like that. So I picked up Analog and breezed through that (things go much faster when you don't read the entirety of the novella or any of the serial), and then I tried The DaVinci Code.

HORK. Why was this a bestseller? Why was this an anything-seller? I couldn't get past the prolog. If I had been able to scream, I would have screamed. It was like a Turkey City Lexicon mashup, a combination of all the things one is not to do with prose, lest the prose gods smite one. And it was an example of how sometimes breaking all the rules does not make you brilliant. Sometimes it makes you bad and stupid and awful. Sometimes rebellion is so overrated.

I wouldn't even have picked it up if Mark's grandma hadn't offered to lend it to me. I wanted to return it to her when we go to Grand Rapids for her birthday next week; now I'll just pass it back with a "not really my kind of book," I suppose. In her defense, she did not praise the prose.

So downstairs that went, into the "give it back" basket, and I read Tim Powers's Forsake the Sky with some relief: not the best Powers novel, but not the worst book in history, either. Now I'm in the middle of Will Shetterly's Chimera. I'm not sure if there really are parallels with War for the Oaks or if I'm imagining them because I know Will and Emma are married. Anyway, it's entertaining me, hurray for that.

Good Lord willin' and the creek don't rise, I should hit 100K words on Sampo today. I should be able to pass that up easily, actually, but with the way my body has not been cooperating lately, if I get the 500 net words for that, I will be happy. Happyish, at least. Quasi-happy.

I'm not in very good brain for this book, is what I'm saying. But I'll do my best.