Reading

I keep forgetting to make notes of this stuff.

Books I have recently read and am pondering:

THE FALL OF THE KINGS, by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. This has so many beauties and delights I'd have to write another book to list them, but for much of it just the same I felt there was a glass wall between me and the characters. I'm going to read it again sometime in the next few months, since that will be no trouble whatsoever, and see if the reaction was just something wrong with me, or what.

WHAT HAPPENED TO LANI GARVER, by Carol Plum-Ucci. Courtesy of Sharyn November, the brilliant editor who is reissuing the Secret Country books. The writer is a good writer. The characters are good and believeable and quirky; parts of it are very funny and parts very moving and parts frankly terrifying. I didn't want to put it down, but I stopped reading at bedtime several times because I knew Bad Things were going to happen and I didn't want to sleep on them. However. The book is one of those is it or isn't it borderline fantasies, squint this way and it's a goblet, fantasy, squint the other and it's two faces, not fantasy. I don't like where the line is drawn. It bugs me a great deal. Must compost.

I'm presently in the middle of C.J. Cherryh's EXPLORER, the last of the Foreigner series. I love this series, I love the characters, and I am in awe of how she seems to be reiterating the same old thing and then pulls about a hundred and fifty really big toothy pink rabbits out of a hat I didn't see. I'm having a great time and am genuinely not sure of the outcome. The book was badly proofed, however, which is very annoying. You'd think in these days of spelling checkers a publisher could at least not put out a book that keeps saying, "resistence."

Pamela

Writing

I keep forgetting to make any notes about this, either. I'm still laboring away on Chapter Three. I seem able to do about two or three hundred words a day, and don't reliably do more if I schedule more times for staring at the computer. This is okay for the moment, though things will have to speed up soon. Raphael has read the book chapter by chapter; Eric is reading it in smaller rougher bits, which is very useful to my decayed confidence; and David and Lydy, plus people not in my household, will read the entire thing when there is one, a matter -- the existence of a finished book, that is -- that I am more confident about now than I was a month ago.

I'm most pleased about the way that lines from invented plays do come to mind when they are needed, although the tendency of the characters to sneer at some of them is probably going to have to be damped down at some point.

I'm a little worried that the number of viewpoint characters is going to multiply uncontrollably. My last three books were all tight-third, one viewpoint, so using three different ones for this book seemed quite a stretch. I have ended up with four already (a habit taken from my Liavek short stories; somebody I had not planned to use is somebody whose viewpoint I am very accustomed to using, and suddenly there it was, and I could not resist), and can dimly foresee a point in the plot where another two might be useful. Eeeeeep.

Pamela