Challenge: Not Feeling Well

Prompt: What I read when I'm not feeling well

Comfort reads! The short, easy answer is that I tend to go back and re-read books that I enjoyed previously. (Or, alternatively, play video games that fall into the same general category.) 

That includes some stand-alones: 

• Martha Wells, Wheel of the Infinite
• Martha Wells, City of Bones
• Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light
• Jennifer Crusie, Welcome to Temptation
• Jennifer Crusie, Faking It
• Jennifer Crusie, Bet Me

It also includes some series: 

• Roger Zelazny, Chronicles of Amber
• Barbara Hambly, the Darwath Cycle
• Robert E Howard, various Conan short stories
• Martha Wells, The Books of the Raksura

And, as I mentioned, a couple of video games that occupy a similarly comfortable/comforting niche for me: 

• Infamous and Infamous 2
• Infamous Second Son
• Soul Reaver (and various associated)
• Star Wars: Battlefront (the PS2 version, not the newer one)

There are a few others that I might jump back to if I were feeling poorly and the mood took me, but these are my go-to list.  

* * * 

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)   

Challenge: Needs a Sequal

Prompt: Books that need a sequel

I really had to think about this one, but I did come up with an answer.

I don't know that it needs a sequel -- it does fine as a stand-alone -- but I'd love to read a sequel, or even a follow-up Novella, to Martha Wells' fantasy book Wheel of the Infinite. The story features an older woman, the priestess Maskelle, as the protagonist, though the occasional bits from the perspective of the foreign swordsman Rian are are also delightful, and... it's not that I need continuation or closure, it's just that I'd like to revisit those characters again. 

The one that does really need a sequel, though, is Lilith Saintcrow's Coyote Run. It's pure fun: fast-paced, fascist-punching, shape-shifting action. I want more stories about punching fascists!

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.) 

Challenge: Books to movies/TV

Prompt: Books I Love That Became Films or TV shows

The obvious go-to for me here is Murderbot, which will be available for viewing any day now. That said, and while I haven't managed to watch any of it, I was delighted to see the Wheel of Time books become a TV show -- and one that apparently doesn't suck. 

What I'd really like to see, though, is two other series. So, y'know, if anybody's listening out there who happens to make TV shows, I would love to see: 

• The Books of the Raksura -- a long-lost consort finds his way back to the matriarchal society of dragon-ish shapechangers that gave birth to him and has to adjust to suddenly having a home with them -- a home that comes with conflicts, privileges, and social expectations that he is entirely unprepared to deal with. 
• Banon and Claire -- high sorcery and inventive genius in the industrial revolution of an alternate London, with just the most amazing worldbuilding -- which would be so fun to put on screen. Plus, Lilith Saintcrow really deserves a chance to write the next trilogy in this series. Seriously, put the first three in a TV series and I guarantee that she'll write the next three. 

Make these shows, I am begging you.

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Challenge: Books to Discover

Prompt: Books I want youth to discover

Um. Good Lord. So, so many books. Where to even start? 

All right, let me just pick a couple of authors. 

Barbara Hambly: 

• Darwath series. Portal fantasy; H.P. Lovecraft meets J.R.R. Tolkien. Some elements are a little bit dated, but generally not problematic, and it pulls off some moments that I swear to God only a History major with a martial arts background writing fantasy could have produced. 
• Stranger at the Wedding. A spinoff from her Windrose Chronicles, this is the standalone story of a young mage trying to save her sister from a death curse. 
• James Asher Novels. Vampires in Victorian-ish London recruit a former-spy-turned-college-professor to find out who's killing them. The series proceeds from there. 

Martha Wells:
Look, I know Murderbot gets all the attention and I have no problem with that, but her backlist is equally amazing:

• The Ile-Rein books. Beginning with a sort of Three Musketeers but with magic (The Element of Fire) to a gaslight London murder mystery (Death of the Necromancer) to a trilogy of London Being Bombed in WWII (Fall of Ile-Rein, starting with The Wizard Hunters) and featuring portal fantasy elements. The Death of the Necromancer is particularly amazing, but the whole series is good.
• City of Bones.  A pair of hunters for relics of the ancient world are recruited by psychically-empowered Lictors to help solve an ancient mystery that should never have been investigated. Standalone. 
• The Books of the Raksura. Sword and Sorcery, except informed by the Nature Channel rather than the History Channel. Come watch a lost Consort find his place among a matriarchal society of dragon-like shapeshifters. 

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Challenge: Books from Social Media

Prompt: Books I Discovered On Social Media

So, so many books. I don't even know where to start on this one, and honestly I'm not sure how well I can distinguish the ones I heard about on Social Media from the ones I might have found through other channels. But I'd guess that easily half and probably as much as three-quarters of the books I buy are one I first heard about on social media.

Looking through recent purchases or pre-orders... Let's see...

The Never List, Jade Presley. The four princes of Lumathyst need a mate, and everyone wants a chance...except for her.

The Fealty of Monsters, Volume One, Ladz. Winter 1917. After years on the run from a dangerous cult, twenty-three-year-old Sasza and his father have established themselves among the Odonic Empire’s ruling class. But there’s a problem: Sasza is a vampire, and vampires aren’t supposed to get involved in human governance

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, Sarah Wynn-Williams. Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.”

Twice as Dead, Harry Turtledove. Rudolf Sebestyen is missing, and Marianne Smalls is involved in an illicit affair with the shady Jonas Schmitt. Both cases converge when Dora Urban, Rudolf’s beautiful and mysterious half-sister, and Lamont Smalls, Marianne’s suspicious husband, hire Jack Mitchell, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking private investigator. Dora wants Jack to uncover what happened to her brother, while Lamont seeks proof of his wife’s infidelity. But Dora is a vampire, in a city teeming with creatures of the night.

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

 

Monday

Spent a big chunk of the weekend on the PS4 and just... trying to catch up on sleep. I'm still just tired way more frequently than I feel like I should be, and I desperately need to catch up on a bunch of things and start on some other things and to do that I have to have some energy. So I'm resting and trying to get myself back together, and that means that I'm not getting writing done. (It doesn't help that we've had a lot of real-life upheavals including people being sick.) Used to be I could just get moving and run on adrenaline, but that's not working right now; I think those reserves are exhausted. I think a few weeks of having a meltdown and stopping to recover would do me a lot of good, but somehow I still have to go to work at the same time. 

Also, how the Hell is it almost May? 

Anyway, I'm still here, I will get back to things, but May is usually the month when all my stuff goes right off the rails -- so if I don't update the blog or I drop off the Internet entirely, it's only to be expected. I'll pick back up when... well, when I pick back up, as it were. 

The one actual activity I undertook (aside from unloading the dishes and starting a new load) was to go see Abigail with some friends. It was fun, included everything I expected and then some, and generally made good on everything the trailer promised for it. I'd recommend it for anybody who enjoys horror movies, and vampire movies in particular. I wouldn't classify it as horror-comedy, but it does have some very funny moments.

Ugh

I hate to skip the weekly update to Dark Armor, but Firstborn appears to have given his head cold to myself and his mother alike, and my skull is now approximately 67% mucus by volume. It will therefore come as no surprise that also, I feel like I've been run over by a truck and I lack much of anything in the way of energy and concentration. So, instead, here are some things that might keep you entertained...

Videos:

• Veryovkina Cave
• The Lake Peigneur Giant Sinkhole Disaster
• The White Vault (series)

 Reading: 

• The Future of Work: Compulsory
• Wikihistory
  

Challenge: Favorite Fairy Tale

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: Favorite Fairy Tale or Legend and why.

You'd think with my interests and reading habits that this one would be easy, but I actually had real trouble coming up with something. It's much easier if I include myths in the mix as well, but I also think of those as a different category of things from Fairy Tales and Legends, so I'm not using any of them. (I think it's completely fair if anybody else decides to go that way with their answer, though.)

But while I have issues trying to come up with a favorite fairy tale, I do have a weakness for a well-done fairy tale retelling. And this particular one is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty, from the perspective of the hapless fairy who's desperately trying to keep her from awakening and escaping the tower to do horrible things... and has been stuck in the empty castle for centuries in the process.

The book is Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher, and I highly recommend it.

Music: Valhalla Calling

VoicePlay feature J.NONE:

Return and Collapse

So I've been away at a software conference all week, which has been both educational and stressful. Naturally, we've had some ongoing issues with another piece of software while I was away, and also school started, and also I missed the tour of our new office space. I'm sure it's possible for that conference to have been scheduled for a more inconvenient time, but it's difficult to see how. 

Nevertheless: a lot of good information, several things to follow up on (in my copious free time), and a relatively trouble-free bit of travel to and from. I even managed to participate in the weekly D&D game; the Internet is truly a thing of beauty. 

Today, of course, I'm exhausted and not good for much of anything. I have a work project that I need to look at again, but I think it's going to have to wait until next week; I don't have the brain for it right now. 

Meanwhile I'm reading L.J. Smith's The Forbidden Game trilogy, which I can best describe as a YA horror take on Jumanji with hints of Labyrinth here and there. It's amazing, not only for the writing and characterization but also for the sheer amount of fucked-up shit that the story just leans into. These books go hard, as the kids say these days. (I think. Maybe. I don't actually know what the kids say these days.) Anyway, would definitely recommend if YA horror is your thing.

How are the rest of you holding up, Dear Readers?

Challenge: Recent Songs

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: A Recent Song I've Loved

I actually have two that are recent songs that I love. The first one is by Taylor Swift -- apparently I'm a Swifty? -- and it's called "Anti-Hero".

The second one is by Miley Cyrus, and it's called "Flowers". The video, um, may not be entirely work-appropriate; our girl Miley does like herself some skimpy outfits.

What songs have you been enjoying lately?

Challenge: Bad Day, Good Films

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: Films to watch when you're having a bad day

Okay, I kind of love this prompt. So let's see, where to start? Ah. Yeah, here we go:

Last Holiday, with Queen Latifah. It's just... such a sweet and fundamentally kind movie. 

Big Trouble in Little China, with Kurt Russell. Because sometimes what you need is just to watch Kurt Russell beat up the bad guys. And of course, the absolute genius on this particular film is that the protagonist, Jack Burton, has no idea that he's actually the sidekick.

The Fifth Element, with Bruce Willis. Sometimes what you need on a bad day is a grand, silly, outer-space adventure with gunfights and explosions and flying car chases and a chance to face off against the Ultimate Evil. 

Better off Dead, with a very young John Cusack. The humor here is a little darker, and it's very much a product of its time, but... I don't know, the absolute absurdity of the whole thing just cheers me right up. 

John Wick, with Keanu Reeves. Because sometimes you just need to know that somebody is having a worse day than you... and everybody else is about to have a worse day because of them.

The Muppet Movie, with Kermit the Frog. Hey, sometimes you just need something fun and funny and musical and sweet instead.

Recommended Reading: The Dark Powers Of Middle School Girls

I've got nothing for today, and apparently I'm not going to suddenly come up with anything. So, instead, I'm going to recommend that you go read The Dark Powers Of Middle School Girls. Isabel Cooper also writes books, and they're well worth reading.

Challenge: Best Nonfiction Book

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: Best Nonfiction Book I've Ever Read

That's a tricky one. I don't read as much non-fiction as I should, and there aren't that many that stuck with me well enough for me to recommend. Still, I do have one: 

You're Stepping On My Cloak And Dagger, by Roger Hall. It's an autobiography written by a fellow who was assigned to the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) during World War II -- how he got there, his training, and eventually the missions he took part in. It's not what you might expect: not a lot of grand deeds, or the horrors of war, or important victories. What it is, more than anything else, is an insightful and humorous perspective into what it was like to be involved with the United States putting together one of its very first spy agencies.

Challenge: Pleasant Book Surprises

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: Books that pleasantly surprised me

This one's interesting mainly because books don't generally surprise me all that much. I usually have at least some idea of what I'll be getting before I start reading. The surprise -- and the joy -- is all in the journey. In fact, some of the most pleasantly surprising reading for me is going back and re-reading some of my own stuff and thinking, "Wow. This is actually pretty good."

That said, a topic like this seems incomplete without at least one recommendation, so I'm going to make one -- and one that's at least a bit outside of my usual reading material: 

Finlay Donovan Is Killing It

Just how badly would things have to go wrong to turn a divorced suburban mother of two into a contract killer? Well, given just how much was going wrong already, it turns out the answer is: "Surprisingly little."

Challenge: Book I'd like to visit

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: What Sci-Fi/Fantasy book you'd like to visit

This is cheating a little bit, maybe, but I'd like to visit The Chronicles of Amber. Sword, sorceries, primal powers, magical tarot... but what really does it for me is that the setting contains everything. Amber is the heart of things, of course, but Amber casts shadows of itself and it's possible to travel through those shadows. With some way of controlling your journey and a bit of imagination, you could find any sort of world you like. Want to spend some time a lone in the middle of nowhere? Easy. Want a high-tech world with plenty of challenges? No problem. A magical kingdom where you're the long-lost monarch? Walk to it. It's all out there. 

I said this might be cheating, because this strikes me as the equivalent of wishing for more wishes, but there it is.What book would you like to visit?

Challenge: Fan-Fiction

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: Thoughts on Fan Fiction

I'm going to resist the urge to define fan fiction (fanfic) here, because surely anybody reading my blog knows already... and if not, Google is easy. And based on the prompt, I'd assume that this is looking for us to address the question of whether fanfic is... I guess I'd say "legitimate" art, since that seems to be the usual debate around it. You're writing stories about the characters and settings and world of somebody else's stories; is that Art, or is it merely Derivation?

...And that's not a debate I particularly care to have. The idea is that writing stories that feature characters/worlds/magic systems/settings whose traits are already well-defined is arguably easier than coming up with your own characters and world and etc. I'm not honestly certain that that's true. But even if we accept for the sake of argument that it is, well... staying true to those well-defined characters/etc. while going your own way is its own challenge, and very easy to get wrong. And trying to make that work is also an excellent way to develop critical reading skills, not to mention writing skills. 

And on top of that all art is ultimately derivative. There is no new thing under the sun. Creativity, as they say, is the art of hiding your sources. No small number of creative works exist as nothing more or less than reactions to, or expansions upon, earlier works. Northanger Abby really isn't a terribly interesting book if you don't know any of the other books it's making unspoken remarks upon. Robert E. Howard's stories of Conan the Barbarian share the same world as H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horrors, though admittedly that was more collaborative than "derivative" -- the two were contemporaries, and correspondents. Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber have an entire role-playing game based on them -- so does The Wheel of Time -- so anybody who plays either of those is arguably engaging in fan fiction. Or, more directly...  Heck, the books of the Bible build upon and argue against and exist in a sort of constant, fraught dialogue with each other.

So I guess where I'm going with this is that my main thought on fan fiction is that the line between fan fiction and other fiction is waaaaaaaaaaay more blurry than a lot of the modern dialogue or debate would have you believe.What we call fanfiction nowadays is a brilliant and elaborate way of engaging with an author's works (even if, for legal reasons, they aren't allowed to read it themselves). Stories written in reaction to existing works -- or building on them -- may have the serial numbers filed off, but they're awfully close cousins to fanfics. 

And I just finished reading a pair of stories, where the second author had written a story in the same world, with the same characters, exploring a possible situation that the original author never intended, which is published as a legitimate piece of literature. (This eBook includes both the original and the follow-up, and the follow-up is both a perfectly good story in its own right and also fanfiction by any standard definition of the term.) 

So many people start writing because they love reading. It seems abjectly silly to criticize them for writing about the story-worlds that they love.

Challenge: Auto-Buy authors

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: your list of auto-buy authors

It's not actually that long a list, but here we go:

Martha Wells has been a must-buy author for me for years now; I first stumbled onto her when I was working in a bookstore and purchased her City of Bones, then went back and picked up The Element of Fire, and I've purchased pretty much everything she's written since then. 

Lilith Saintcrow is next on the list; I first encountered her when she was being interviewed about her Bannon & Clare books -- mad science, magic, and mayhem in Victorian England, with some particularly intriguing worldbuilding -- which I immediately purchased and read before diving into her entire backlist. I'm still not sure I'm 100% caught up, but I do my best.

I found Ursula Vernon under her nom de plume of T. Kingfisher, in the delightful fantasy short story Nine Goblins, and I've been hooked ever since. Disturbing horror, cozy romance, a good many stories that are a mix of both. 

Finally there's John Scalzi, whose particular flavor of cheerfully deranged science fiction adventure has done a very great deal to cheer me up at various points where I needed to be reading something that could do that. I'm not sure where I first ran into his work, but after The Kaiju Preservation Society I'm pretty well locked in.

Blogging Challenge: TBR

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: what's on your TBR list

I mean, it's more of a collection than a To Do list, but this sounds like a great topic and I can't wait to read everyone else's responses. 

1. The aptly-named four book (so far) fantasy trilogy This Trilogy Is Broken, by JP Valentine. I finished the first book and just started the second one, and I'm really enjoying them so far. (I'm a bit cautious about recommending it, because it falls into the LitRPG subgenre: fantasy tales where the heroes are aware of [and discuss, and are measured by] roleplaying stats like their character classes, hit points, abilities, etc. I enjoy that sort of setup in small doses, but not everybody does.) 

The setup is basically this: once every eight years, the Stones appear at each city, town, and village in the land. When they appear, everyone above the age of ten visits the stones and receives their Life Quest, and with it the character class that will allow them to (possibly, maybe) achieve it. Quests vary in difficulty; character classes range from common and mundane to adventurous and powerful. Evelia Green is sixteen when the Stone return, and she presents herself along with the other candidates from her village... and receives the quest "Purchase a loaf of bread at the next village over." Should be easy, right? Half a day there, half a day back, and her life's quest will be complete. Except this life quest has a Legendary difficulty rating, and working bakeries are starting to seem frighteningly elusive...

2. Scout's Honor, by Lily Anderson. Sixteen-year-old Prudence Perry is a legacy Ladybird Scout, born to a family of hunters sworn to protect humans from mulligrubs—interdimensional parasites who feast on human emotions like sadness and anger. Masquerading as a prim and proper ladies' social organization, the Ladybirds brew poisons masked as teas and use knitting needles as daggers, at least until they graduate to axes and swords.

Three years ago, Prue’s best friend was killed during a hunt, so she kissed the Scouts goodbye, preferring the company of her punkish friends lovingly dubbed the Criminal Element much to her mother and Tía Lo’s disappointment. However, unable to move on from her guilt and trauma, Prue devises a risky plan to infiltrate the Ladybirds in order to swipe the Tea of Forgetting, a restricted tincture laced with a powerful amnesia spell.

But old monster-slaying habits die hard and Prue finds herself falling back into the fold, growing close with the junior scouts that she trains to fight the creatures she can’t face. When her town is hit with a mysterious wave of demons, Prue knows it’s time to confront the most powerful monster of all: her past.

3. Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, by Charlie Jane Anders. It's the second book in the Unstoppable series,  and I'm very much looking forward to it. While technically YA, the first book was eminently readable for adults and features a group of teens who pull together to try to save the Universe from very evil adversaries -- in spite of the fact that none of them are quite what the aliens who recruited them were expecting. 

So those are my next three. What are you looking forward to?

Challenge: Favorite Podcast

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: Your favorite podcast

I... honestly, for the most part, I don't listen to podcasts. At all. It's nothing against them. I've had some really brilliant-sounding podcasts recommended to me, and I know people are doing some really great work out there. It's just... well, for one thing I'm way more visual than auditory, so the format isn't really ideal for me, and for another thing there are only so many hours in the day. 

So the closest thing to a podcast that I do regularly is join The Analog Demon for his Wednesday night horror movie watch parties. (He hosts them through Twitch, but you'll need to have an Amazon Prime account connected to watch along on the movies.) Maybe that even counts as a podcast; I dunno.

Shows include an appropriately-themed suggestion for an alcoholic drink, a certain amount of background and commentary, and then a bit of commentary as he watches the movie. The audience can participate in the chat. Sometimes he does blind watches of movies he hasn't seen before, and sometimes he uses audience picks, and for me it's just a fun time to take a break and hang out with a friend online.

(Seriously, if you're going to be friends with a demon, make sure it's a demon who's willing to host online movie nights.)