I've posted half my cards and the others should go out today, when I find my stamps. Yo, kanzenhanzai! I got my card with the naked Roger and Rafa inside! It was awesome, thank you. puddingcat, kispexi2 and moshesque, I got yours too, thank you! There were no hot naked men inside, but I can forgive you for that. This time.

Other news: short review of Bentley Little's 'The Walking': IT'S SHOW NOT TELL, BENTLEY. Why is the horror genre so disappointing? It makes me sad. Also, he is called Bentley and that really set up my expectations. This book had some intriguing blurb on it, and then I read it, and... not so great. There was a good central idea, spooky, but everything else was flat.

I peevishly abandoned it on the train, swapping it for a book that was lying on an empty seat. Perhaps left by some other similarly cheesed-off reader? The book was called 'Of Merchants and Heroes' by Paul Walters, a historical novel set in the third century BC and it's about a rather unhappy fellow called Marcus. The style reminds me a lot of Renault, but that's no bad thing for me.

There's a new challenge up on saiyuki_time. I really want to try and write something for it this week.

I miss tennis. A lot. Just fyi.

Health news: ( cut for boring )

We went to Oxford yesterday, partly to mooch about the bookshops, partly to go to the botanical gardens. It's 20 minutes on the train from Reading, which seemed the perfect travelling distance.

So we mooched a lot and found a new second hand bookshop, where I scored heavily in quality if not in quantity: one copy of Dracula, Prince of Many Faces by my old friends Radu Florescu and Raymond T McNally. It's their follow up, many years later, to In Search of Dracula

( cut for shocking images of books, cakes and art )

Bye bye daegaer, who is leaving our fair British shores today, and by shores I mean Stanstead airport. It was truly a joy having you to stay and thank you for the giant pile of socks you left me in a rainbow of colours! A sockbow, as you called it. I am wearing some yellow ones today in honour of, well, having a lot of new socks.

In other news, Gaywyck continues to be fabulous. Robert, our troubled hero, is deeply in love with Donough Gaylord. He has found secret diaries in the writing desk in the art room, has investigated a secret dark passageway (!), has been stalked in the abandoned cottage in the grounds, had his letters stolen and has fallen into a miserable slump over the cruelty of winter and is tormented by nightmares. But! Just as he is about to expire of despair into Brian's beautiful spice cakes, Donough has arrived, bringing with him Timothy Goodbody and Eugene Mortimer who wear Persian lamb and sing Mahler. (for my selected excerpts, see this post)

Weirdly, there were a number of punctuation typos in this book, particularly towards the end. Full stops instead of commas, odd things like that. Various people have recommended Tanya Huff to me before, but I kept picking up her novels in bookshops, thinking 'am I really going to enjoy this?' then putting them back down. But this one sold me on having Tony the gay production assistant working on a show about a vampire detective. Coincidentally, Tony's ex is an actual vampire detective, called Henry. Who is the bastard son of Henry VIII.

So, plot ensues, with an evil wizard from another world who sends his evil shadow minions to attack the special effects person on the show, who also happens to be a wizard and his enemy. Tony and Henry get sucked into it.

The plot is very frothy and camp and I enjoyed it. It clunked in some places, mostly where exposition was necessary to explain character backgrounds (this book is linked to a whole series of other books featuring some of the same characters). There are also a couple of charming fandom jokes: the second lead on the vampire detective show is called Lee Nicholas, and has green eyes an dark hair, and when Tony and Arra are in the car driving somewhere, the only tape in the car is The Best of Queen, Vol 1.

Tanya Huff does a nice line in cracktastic scenarios. This isn't a book to blow you away, but it's amusing and intriguing, and has some nice observations that bring her characters to life.

LJ, I does not understand you. Why are you showing me posts from 16 May on my friends list?

Anyway. I finally saw Brokeback Mountain. I'd avoided it up until now because the story is such a slice of unremitting grimness that I was scared of what the film might be. And in fact I'm sorry I didn't watch it sooner because it was quite beautiful, drawing out the yearning and romance between them more than the book ever did. I liked the sense all the way through that the lives they were leading with their wives were essentially a replacement for the kind of domestic life they could never lead together, and that they might be imagining each other in those roles - it made everything all that much sadder.

I have had a spurt of reading...
Victorian Sensation by Michael Diamond. Laid to rest any further notions I had that people in the Victorian era were any more stuffy and repressed than we are. He looks at the notion of 'sensation' and how scandals and gossip would absolutely grip the nation, and for weeks on end. It's also interesting to learn how outspoken the music halls were about everyone and anything, particularly their 'betters'. He does a sort of review, going through: royalty, murder, sex, politics and the 'sensation' novel.

Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel, about a psychic medium and her traumatic life. 'Beyond black' is how she refers to the afterlife, the details of which she keeps secret from her public because it would upset them too much. Her banal life of being overweight, eating leaky sandwiches at motorway service stations and moving into in a 'new build' is undercut by the presence of her appalling spirit guide Morris. He lives in curtains and draining boards and likes playing with himself. Colette, her assitant, is aggressive and stony faced. I'm hugely enjoying it so far.

Vikings: Wolves of War by Martin Arnold. He writes in a very engaging and non judgemental way about the Vikings, who were basically a race of entrepreneurs, as far as I can tell. Rather violent ones, when they weren't farming. It's fairly short, so obviously there's detail lacking, but for an overview of who they were, their expansion, culture and the (sometimes scarily violent) change from paganism to Christianity, it's very good.

Holy crap it's so windy - 90 mph winds in some parts of the country today, although they're about 30-40 here. The wind is roaring about the house. I'm concerned about our garden wall, which leans at about an 80 degree angle because of the yew tree growing next to it. Cycling across town the dentist was not fun and I was bright pink and mithered when I arrived. My nice new shoes got splattered with mud too. Humph. Cycling back down the Oxford Road, I was almost at a standstill against the wind. But Joel said my teeth were healthy and I don't need anymore work. A milestone for me - a ten minute, problem free check up.

For those of you that need to waste some quality time, spotted via grendelity: Nun Lander- land the nun safely or she goes to hell. I failed dismally every time and all my nuns crashed and burned. Sorry, nuns.

I've been reading Lucifugous by Elizabeth Bear - a very slashy zeppelin-and-detective-based novella (is that a genre? It should be), downloadable for free here. Lucifugous means... actually it's more fun if you look it up yourself.

I'm going to see the film on Thursday, which from what I can tell seems to have made quite a few changes to the novel. Anyway, various people have been telling me for years that I would like the The Prestige if I read it, so I finally took it down off the shelf. Here's some notes, before it all drains from my memory in time honoured fashion: ( Read more... )

Okay, so it looks like I will defintely be going to squee_fest_uk, and in the company of the illustrious daegaer, yay! So, perhaps now might be a good time to find accomodation, yes? I must remember to sort out my connotations booking too. And decide about Yaoicon this year while I am at it. And find a nice cheap holiday on a beach somewhere.

In other news I am working my way slowly through Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman, and enjoying it. I like the style and the tone - it reminds me a lot of Neverwhere, but seems far more solid somehow.

I have been writing screeds of fiction, but none of it is in a postable state, or often even properly finished. But about a 1000 words a day on various things, which I am pleased with. This morning on the train I began an original short story that I hope to send off for a deadline at the end of this month. I don't know if I can meet the deadline, or if 23 days is long enough to write and edit it, but seeing as it's going to be about 6000 words long, it seems enough time if I don't let myself get too distracted by other things, by which I mean manporn. Shut up. Speaking of which, I need to start editing my chapters of the epic porn novel. There are just so many things I want to write, aargh. Frustration. I wish I had more time for them all. But at least I have a plan, even a vague plan.

So, June looks like it's going to be fairly busy, and here I was thinking it seemed quiet. My parents are insisting on taking me to a boat show on Sunday, and the weekend after that is a family party in Kent. The week after that I hope to have off and was planning on doing the face-down onna beach thing. Thankfully work is not too demanding at the moment, or I feel like I might pop a gasket.

Finally, have a photo of my garden:

( big giant poppy )

Two Cromwellian soldiers in love-- As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann. I would say, read this book. ( Some thoughts that will spoil you for the end )

I didn't enjoy Robert Harris's Pompeii. The premise is good: a volcano-based thriller! Sounds bloody brilliant. But the protagonist was hopelessly Mary Sue-ish and an enormous, smug prig.

But it was saved by the revelation that Romans dressed their favourite eels in jewellery. And the rain pf pumice at the end. Read it just for those things.

I can't think of anything else sensible to write about life. The world has gone mad. Nothing but Popes for bloody weeks on end and now look what they've gone and done; the Daily Mail telling us we're going to die one of three ways: beaten by thugs, eaten by MRSA or poisoned by terrorists;  Howard - shut the fuck up, I can't bear another word of your miserable stinking scaremongering;  Kennedy - well, convince me; Blair - he's going to win because the Sun came out on his side today and also, if the US election showed us anything it's that floating voters will go for the person who can most sound like they believe what they saying.

Fannish things

In other news, I wrote some drabbles where Hakkai, Gojyo, Sanzo and Goku are British teenagers,  here and here.  I make my own fun.