I finally got around to reading Diane Duane's short story collection Uptown Local and Other Interventions, which I grabbed when she was having that 50%-off sale on her ebooks (man, I hope she does that again sometime), and I thought I would discuss it for the edification of the YW fen around who may not be sure whether they want to drop money on it. Coming from the perspective of someone who is generally not too thrilled about short stories in SF (I don't know why, but I usually like my SF novel-length), I do think this is worth the money, although maybe you will want to wait for another sale.

As YW fans can probably guess from the name, there are Young Wizards stories in the collection -- two out of eleven, and both of them have been previously published, so you might have read them before. "Theobroma" is the only non-YA YW piece ever, I think, and as such it's interesting to see an adult wizard at work. (The difference between YA and non-YA fiction in this universe appears to be the age of the protagonist and the suggestion that people might, possibly, ever have had sex sometime.) It's actually a rather charming little story about a wizard in New York on errantry looking for a lizard-spirit who helps manufacture chocolate. Bonus points for the guy's PDA/Manual that he talks to -- in the Speech, if he wants. (It is possibly a sign of advancing technology that reading it, I thought about how if it were one of the current crop of iPhones this would not even be all that weird, except for the quality of the responding AI and, you know, the magic. The stylus input is possibly on the quaint side. I don't know; does anyone have PDAs anymore that aren't smartphones?)

The title story, "Uptown Local," is the only story in the whole collection I actually had read before; it was reprinted in the 20th anniversary hardcover of So You Want To Be a Wizard. (Obsessive completionist? Who, me? Not as completionist as I would like, sadly.) It's very cute. Nita and Kit are bored one day and go on a journey through the subway system to all the various alternate worlds of New York. Also there is Robert Heinlein. Which is maybe a little strange, but I assure you the whole story is very fun. Clearly I thought it was worth buying twice.

The rest of the stories, though, are not YW -- and they're excellent as well. The foreword calls it "the usual life-affirming stuff," and, well, if you like Duane, you pretty much know what you're getting. Stories are set in (a) Switzerland, (b) Ireland, and (c) New York, because this is Diane Duane we're talking about. (I facepalmed a little when the protagonists of the Ireland-set story STILL ENDED UP IN SWITZERLAND. Clearly the next YW book needs to be Wizards in Switzerland too. Because they've already been to Ireland. Maybe they've been to Switzerland and I forgot.) I mock because I love. Also a lot of the stories are about food. (Like the pair of stories where apparently the Sibylline Books still exist and are actually cookbooks. Yeah.)

My favorite stories were actually neither of the YW stories (though of course I liked the YW ones a lot because, you know, yay YW). I really liked "Bears," about shapeshifting bears in (go on! guess a country!) Switzerland. Apparently that's just my style of urban fantasy. But most of all, I think, I liked "The Fix," about a slave-boy at the Colosseum who dreams of coaching and training the gladiators (what, you think there's any reason I wouldn't like this story?), and then is given the opportunity to live his dream for a day after he happens into some money and offers some of it to Venus. Venus of course personally makes his dream come true in an awesome way, and yes, the ending is ridiculously happy and aww. Awwww. (Plus it even made me like gladiators, and gladiator stories are usually my least favorite. I know, I am weird.)

Up next: I was going to read some Sutcliff, but the library just emailed me that my ebook of Jo Graham's Black Ships (Aeneid remix, Sibyl POV) has come off hold, so I guess I'll be trying that out. I will let you know how the whole "checking out library books on a Kindle" thing works, and hopefully the book is good. Possibly I should have read the whole actual Aeneid first, because I think I missed most of the katabasis doing only the AP selections. Whoops.

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I am not sure I have ever posted with the "recumbent" mood before. Let's try it. Anyway, a post in three points:

(1) It sounds like, in the Great Delicious Exodus, Pinboard is going to be the way to go, mostly because AO3's bookmarking functionality ain't there yet -- and by "not there" I mean "will not let you filter your own bookmarks;" I got annoyed a couple weeks ago and deleted enough of mine so that I had a short enough list to browse. And then I put them on Delicious. *hollow laugh* And Diigo has Issues about sexually-explicit content. So, Pinboard, I guess. jmtorres has a lovely post recommending it. I am just kind of pleased and shocked that the Pinboard guy is ACTUALLY ASKING FANDOM WHAT FANDOM WANTS and is going to implement as is feasible (tag bundles! oh please oh please!). Now I need to, um, find $10.

I still really have to wonder how AVOS came up with the redesign. In my head it went like this:

( AVOS versus the Delicious users, a play in one actCollapse )

Um. Not really sure where that came from. A place of rage, clearly.

(2) For today only, Diane Duane's ebooks are 50% off. I really, really, really should not be buying things, but on the other hand I do not think there will be another opportunity to get all nine Young Wizards books for $20 and the Tale of the Five books for $6. Possibly I will have to make Ill-Advised Purchases later.

(3) Speaking of ebooks, I am now also coveting the new Kindles, specifically the Kindle Touch. (Yes, yes, everyone but me wants a tablet. Whatever.) Though honestly, not as much as I covet Diane Duane ebooks. [ETA: Ha, okay. I am now $25 poorer but I now have all the YW books and a Tale of the Five omnibus. Eee. I think maybe I wasn't supposed to buy the "International Versions." Whatever, I bet the author gets more money this way. It just occurred to me that I have only read the last Door book once and I never even read the most recent Wizard book yet. Eeee, it is like a brand-new book for me. Yay present to self!]

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My mother offered to buy me Kindle books of my choice if I read a book she recommended. So I have now acquired a pop-sci book on conlangs that I have wanted for a couple years (Arika Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages). Yes, I like conlangs and auxlangs. They're fun. Someday I will invent one that violates every single universal I can find, has an entirely marked inventory, and has words for every color except black, white, and red. It will be awesome.

Also, combined with the books I already had (and buying a couple more), I now have all the Rosemary Sutcliff books that have e-book versions, as far as I can tell. This would be Dawn Wind, The Eagle of the Ninth, Frontier Wolf, Knight's Fee, The Lantern Bearers, The Mark of the Horse Lord, Outcast, The Shield Ring, and The Silver Branch.

I am, as you have perhaps guessed, soon to embark upon Operation Read All The Sutcliff. And so, O my friends list, I ask you: in what order should I read them?

(I have already read Eot9, obviously, and I am going to read Frontier Wolf next, because I told carmarthen I would only read it after I finished a draft of the army AU in case I inadvertently stole plot. She has been quoting bits of it for MONTHS very patiently and it sounds awesome. Plus I gather there are wolves? Other than that I have no idea what to read.)

(I mean, okay, I am ALSO writing a werewolf story, but I do not think that is similar enough that it should concern me.)

But first I have to make my way through the book my mom recced and report back to her. I am about a quarter through so far and have no idea what to tell her, because it is a New Age-y book written by a woman whose husband died on 9/11 about all the premonitions that the victims had before their deaths and all the messages that they have been sending their grieving families from the afterlife by, e.g., making the lights flicker, or making a lot of pennies and/or dimes show up. Things like that. It is, shall we say, not really my thing. It isn't my mother's thing either, as she pretty much reads the sort of short fiction that appears in the New Yorker or "literary fiction" (I have figured out that this is the kind of book where my mother complains if it has an actual plot to go with its characters). She described this as "the sort of shit your father likes," so I am still not sure why she insisted I read it. But I will persevere! I will be patient and endure! Someday this pain will be useful to me! Or something! I really have no idea what Ovid meant.

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Number of dead flies in my drinks, since yesterday: TWO. EWWW EWWWW.

Anyway. Um. Today it occurred to me that I should actually put a bunch more fanfiction on my Kindle. So I did. And while I was looking around for more ebooks to load I noticed that Baen now has a bunch of Frederik Pohl, and he is one of those SF authors I have always felt I should read, so I now have their two giant fiction bundles of his work. I guess I can see if the Heechee books are any good. So far I have read Black Star Rising and was underwhelmed, but I will give him a few more chances.

Also, yay Kindle. It is totally the best birthday present I have gotten in recent memory, and I wish to reiterate that lysimache is awesome. And I need to remember that it is worth putting AO3 fanfic on my Kindle, because, yay, good reading experience.

lysimache is also trying to convince me that this summer I should learn to read German. (Yes, we are the sort of people who enjoy picking up reading knowledges of various languages. Everyone needs a hobby.) She says then I can read The Neverending Story in the original, and will be a better and more-educated person, and she swears German is just like English. I am not sure I am convinced; dude, English isn't even verb-second anymore, never mind all the vocabulary from French. But, on the other hand, I like luck dragons.

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Finished reading The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and, wow, um. I have a hard time believing it's up for a Hugo. It is... really not my style. The worldbuilding feels kind of cheap and easy and imitative, like the sort of thing I would have come up with at fourteen. (For reference, the last fantasy whose worldbuilding I remember liking a *lot* was the Doctrine of Labyrinths series; sure, okay, there I spent a fair amount of time saying things like "it's really kind of insulting that the in-universe word for tops/dominants/sadists is 'tarquin' (which is kind of weird in a world that seems not to have had Rome and therefore no Tarquins) and that apparently the only explicit sex scene that would have portrayed kink as actually enjoyable and not part of fucked-up magic rituals was excised from Corambis" but at least Sarah Monette clearly did her worldbuilding homework, yo, and tried to make it evident that Felix's fucked-up-ness was based on him generally being Felix, and not what he liked to do in his free time.)

Plus, Hundred Thousand here is one of those books that strikes me as (a) deeply deeply het and (b) requiring you to instinctively understand the Sexy Appeal of Bad Boys (okay, Bad Gods, whatever) who could very easily kill you. I wasn't really into either of those, while reading. Maybe I should just stick to the queer SF. (Or also SF where sexuality isn't particularly relevant; the main relationship in Feed was siblings and, man, I liked them a whole lot better than Yeine and... everyone here.) It's the kind of fantasy where apparently the only same-sex-attracted people are (surprise!) pedophiles (oh, also, and a creepy relationship between divine beings that does Bad Things to the planet) and the villains are coded as villainous partially because they keep people collared and chained presumably for their Perverse Kinky Things. And this is up for a Hugo. I just... come on, people, it's 2011. Can't we do better than this?

Sigh. Well, I'm hoping Feed wins. Looking at the other novel nominees (hey, I've read four-fifths of them this year! whooo!), I think I even liked it better than Cryoburn (though I liked the sphinxes, and the drabbles, it is sure not my favorite Vorkosigan book), but I did like Blackout/All Clear an awful lot. Possibly more. Hmm.

In better book news, you can apparently now buy the Sime~Gen series (Sime-Gen? Sime/Gen? whatever!) as ebooks at Amazon and Fictionwise. At Amazon, at least, they are $5 each, which seems reasonable to me, and apparently there are three new books. Yay! I don't think I even managed to find all the old ones in paperback, so this is fun. But sadly, the covers are all lousy.

Hooray, SF tentacle romance! (Though it has always irked me that same-sex tentacle pairings are less awesome, by worldbuilding fiat. But I did like the one piece of fanfiction about the gay channel.)

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So the other day I picked up Feed for the Kindle, because (a) it's up for a Hugo, why not?, (b) the beginning is set in Santa Cruz, and (c) Amazon had it for $3, which I thought was pretty good. (You can also get N. K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms for $3, and I grabbed that too, but I have heard faily things about it so I decided to read it second. And I don't know if it's still on sale -- I am having strange DNS errors and can't check -- but the first of Iain Banks' Culture novels was pretty cheap about a month ago.)

Anyway. Novels about zombies are not generally my thing. Political blogs are really not my thing. Therefore, when I say that I was absolutely glued to a book in which zombies in a near-future world try to eat hip young political bloggers, I say it with a certain amount of... bewilderment. Also praise. Because it's really really good. Gripping, in fact. Could not put it down. (Feed also gets points for its cover, because really? The RSS logo done in dripping blood is a pretty cool idea, honestly.)

It's first-person, and it does a little too much telling and not showing (although I'm willing to accept this as a deliberate way of writing a blogger character), but the plot is good and it certainly does a good job instilling terror at the idea of living in a zombie-filled world even (or maybe especially) with all this technology, and there are some fun thinky hard-SF bits about epidemiology and how the zombie thing works as a virus. Sadly, the bit about it being in Santa Cruz at the beginning mostly read as OUR PLACE NAME IS PASTEDE ON YAY and not very believably SC. Or Watsonville or Aptos or Berkeley. There were a couple good lines about Sacramento, though.

Still, it was a good read and now I think I might have to buy the second one when it comes out next month, which is of course the goal, right?

Also: zombie palominos.

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Today I sat around and stared out the window at the ice and wrote fanfic. I always feel so much better when I write. It's like I accomplished something. Well, sort of; I mean, I didn't finish the story yet. Almost, though.

In Eagle fandom news, you can now actually buy The Eagle of the Ninth on your US Kindle (previously it was only in the UK), for the sum of $9 (WTF, publishers). It took me forever to find it, because can you believe they changed the title to match the movie? (What's that, you can?)

Must... see... movie... again.

Also I has an Esca icon. *beams* Not that I personally made it, but still. He is pretteh.

Why, yes, I did spend today writing Marcus/Esca pr0n. I thought I was going to write something, you know, quiet and contemplative, but no, a PWP. Whoops. Maybe the next one. I am writing a nice quiet K/S story, though. Or I was, before the Marcus/Esca distracted me. Come play in this fandom, it is shiny.

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Whew. All of my ebooks on my Kindle are now in Calibre (including the ones from Amazon that I actually care about having bought; I download an amazing amount of lousy Amazon freebies that I have not yet included), and my Calibre library is now located in my Dropbox folder and is therefore in the cloud too. Yay, backup!

...now I just have to add all the ebooks I've obtained in the meantime that aren't on my Kindle yet. Bah. Like, I don't even know if I like Cory Doctorow's writing and yet I downloaded all his work from Feedbooks because he's offering it for free.

Obligatory personal plug: If you haven't signed up for Dropbox and you think you might enjoy having a synchronization/backup service, my referral link is here. Dropbox is fun and easy to use: whatever you put in your Dropbox folder gets sent to the Dropbox folder of any other computers you have. You can also view/update the contents on the website or using your iThing, so you don't have to carry USB flash drives around. Plus, hey, backup and versioning and sharing files easily, etc etc. (If you sign up using my referral link, we both get extra space. Then I can back up more of my computer, because I worry about its health.)

Everyone else in the Points fandom has probably already heard this, but Melissa Scott is going to write more Points novels. No, really. Really. Really really. Squee. The next book is apparently Fairs' Point, and she says she's going to write a novella (Point of Knives) set between Dreams and Hopes. Sadly, it does not appear to be called "Point of Hearts," which is what lysimache and I independently concluded ought to be the title of the epic story of how Rathe and Eslingen got together. Oh, well. I can live. Because, squee squee, more Points novels. I can't imagine how Melissa Scott feels able to write them after the death of her partner, but I'm really glad she does. I read the first two and loved them to bits (*coughs, points at Yuletide output*) and then figured there was never going to be any more and was sad. But now there will be!

Today's nail polish: Zoya Midori, part of lysimache's recent order of free Zoyas. (I haven't actually worn any of my free order yet, but lysimache liked Ivanka.) Midori is a very bright, yellow-y apple green with a golden shimmer. I am trying to get it to be spring with the sheer power of my nail color. Unfortunately, as we appear to be getting another foot of snow (and sleet, and ice) starting tomorrow, I don't think it's having any effect.

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I seem to be addicted to Every Word, the free Boggle-clone game Amazon has for the Kindle. lysimache showed me it, and now I am hooked. Yay anagrams. I was cheating and looking for an anagram generator on the web when Google asked me if I meant "nag a ram" when I searched for "anagram." I think someone at Google must have a weird sense of humor.

Also I finally, finally got around to watching Burnt By the Sun (um, depressing) that I have had from Netflix for a month and reading the latest Donald Strachey book (Cockeyed), which was kind of lousy, because they spent a lot of the book completely hating on the exceedingly fabulous gay people that Don was working for. Seriously. The characters kept having conversations about how they were making the rest of us look bad by having promiscuous sex, etc., and it seems that Don and Timmy have become big proponents of assimilation. Which, you know, I'd be more okay with if they hadn't been doing the exact same things in the first couple of books that they are now denigrating the other characters for. It was a little strange. And disappointing.

Also the dog has an ear infection. :(

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Books I was unaware I can now buy on my Kindle: The Catch Trap, by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Whee.

The downside: Ten whole dollars for an ebook of an out-of-print novel. That I already own in paper. Sigh. But... gay acrobats!

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So one of the features of the Kindle is that it lets you have your books in "Collections," which are basically tags. (You can't have sub-collections, but you can have the same book in multiple collections.) Until yesterday my categories were boring genre lists, but lysimache said I should just name SF "spaceships" and fantasy "dragons" already. (I like to claim that I do not read books unless they contain spaceships or dragons.)

So I changed the names of those categories, and then I figured I should change the rest, and I'm sharing mostly because I think I am the funniest person ever.

Buy Me Someday When You Have Money (samples from Amazon)
Dragons, and People Who Want to Be Tolkien (fantasy)
Eldritch, Squamous, and/or Rugose (horror)
Free and Therefore Probably Crap (free books from Amazon)
Get Off My Lawn (YA and children's fiction)
I Dare You to Copyright This (public domain)
im in ur canon, transf0rming ur workz (fanfiction)
In the Conservatory with the Revolver (mystery)
One of These Things Is Not Like the Others (unsorted books, the manual, games, dictionaries...)
The Past Is a Foreign Country, Usually England (historical)
Probably Not Stranger Than Fiction (non-fiction)
Spaceships, Aliens, and a Sense of Wonder (science fiction)
We're Here, We're Queer, We Write Books (GLBT fiction)

Some of them could probably be better, if anyone has any suggestions.

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I see that today the Archive of Our Own has finally added the "download" feature to stories. Click on the button, get a story in HTML, PDF, Mobi, or Epub! Whee! Now my Kindle will have even more fanfiction on it!

Today's nail polish: CG Mummy May I, also part of the China Glaze fall (Halloween-themed) collection. Black-purple with pink-purple glitter, and it is very awesome, except that I am never going to be able to get the little bits of glitter off of my fingertips. lysimache, who is still not posting, is wearing Essie, After Sex. It is red.

Also, a question: Can anyone explain to me in what way Weird Al's Everything You Know Is Wrong is a reference to They Might Be Giants? The internet informs me that it is supposed to be some kind of early TMBG pastiche, but I am not sure what makes it so. I'll give you that he's clearly trying to sound like someone, but does it really sound like TMBG to you guys? (Okay, okay, the bridge is pure TMBG, with the accordion and guitar and that bass... thing... solo. Al maybe plays accordion better than John Linnell, though.)

(Yeah, yeah, the song title itself is probably a reference to Everything Right Is Wrong Again.)

[ETA: Oh, yeah, forgot to say that, like everyone else, I have one (1) AO3 invitation. Let me know if you want it.]

[ETA2: Invitation all gone.]

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Because I am a big dork, I spent the hour and a half glued to my computer screen reading the liveblogs of Apple's iPad announcement. Woo, it's a big iPod touch, not that I have one of those. (My iPod is, um, in black and white.) It looks pretty, but I'm not sure I need anything in that size. It isn't as powerful as an actual computer (so it shouldn't be a computer replacement), it's not pocket-size, so it wouldn't be a very good iPod replacement, and there's no way it will replace my Kindle.

(I know it's supposed to be a Kindle killer, ooh, backlight, ooh, page turning gestures, ooh, looks like a real book. The thing I will say is that everyone but Amazon appears to be ePub, but I'm sure Amazon will go ePub only if that's where the market's heading. I really think the e-Ink is much easier to read on than backlit anything -- and dude, it's not like books are backlit! -- I like the battery life on the Kindle much, much better, and from an accessibility perspective I can read with the Kindle using only one hand, which is absolutely awesome, let me tell you, and it makes reading a lot easier to be able to do this. The iPad seems really optimized for having a two-handed reading experience. You know, like books. I just like hitting "next page" with my left hand on the Kindle. Why, yes, I do wish we printed books with pages the other way, but the Kindle is way easier than even that would be.)

So I'm not really sure what it's competing with, except the netbook market, and so far I've resisted that, except if my Mac up and dies I might replace with a netbook, which is good enough for basic web and word-processing, and it sounds like Apple wants you to have an existing computer to hook the iPad up to. Yeah. So I guess I'm not the target market.

Also the name iPad (a) makes me think of sanitary napkins and (b) is going to be really difficult to distinguish from "iPod" in languages that have one low vowel where we have [æ] and [a]. They've just given their products the same name. <nelson>Ha-ha.</nelson>

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So I'm totally not going to get this Mc/C story finished by Monday because I am busy reading free books on my Kindle. La la la la. See, Amazon has a bunch of the first books of various series available for free on the Kindle, presumably so you will then be hooked. So I am downloading a bunch of odd things, many of which I would not ordinarily read or pay money for, but, hey -- free! I'm sampling the free ones and downloading anything that doesn't totally suck. Did I mention I'm really enjoying reading on the Kindle? It is totally easier to hold/turn pages than books. I can read one-handed! This is awesome!

(Minor annoyances: many books do not have their cover art. Many public-domain books have the author metadata entered incorrectly, with dates in the middle of the names, so they format weirdly in the by-author listing. It irks me. Dude, Amazon, pay someone to fix the metadata. Do it on Mechanical Turk. Whatever.)

1. Naomi Novik, His Majesty's Dragon. Still awesome, in case you were wondering. It's making me want to buy the rest of them on the Kindle, even though I already own them in paper. (Someone tell me this is silly.) In case you haven't read it (because perhaps you are unaware of the author's Sekrit Fandom Identity), it's basically the Aubrey-Maturin novels, but Stephen Maturin is a dragon. I hope that helps. And you should really definitely read this.

2. Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice. The first book about FitzChivalry Farseer, a prince's bastard, who is trained as an assassin. There are, um, nine books set in this universe. I didn't much care for the middle trilogy, which was about talking ships, and I was exceedingly angered by what the author chose to do to the Fitz-Fool relationship at the very end. But that's not this book. This book is actually still pretty good, although I think I appreciated it more when I was fifteen -- Fitz is a little bit whiny to me now. But it's a good story, and it's one of the few first-person fantasy novels I've found that was decent, and it's making me want to reread the rest, which are, of course, three thousand miles away. Hmph. Warning: bad things happen to animals.

3. T.A. Pratt, Blood Engines. T.A. here is clearly a boy, because his heroine, Marla, is super-special and a kickass magician and bisexual in the "making out with chicks is hot" way, and is generally a lot like Honor Harrington. Yeah, that sort of female heroine. I think this is the guy's first novel; the exposition was so clumsy that I kept having to check to be sure it was the first in the series (it is). Nonetheless it is a reasonably engaging read, and is an urban fantasy set in San Francisco, which is mostly what kept me reading -- the author clearly likes SF, a lot, and there are fun little SF-y trivia bits scattered here. Yes, of course Emperor Norton gets a few mentions. Not really a fan of the fantasy worldbuilding, which was kind of haphazard, but it did the setting very well. Warning: contains brief scene at badly-done unsafe BDSM club that I'm sure the author thinks from his learnings is perfectly SSC. It isn't, and if even I can tell, you know it must be bad.

Up next is Her Wiccan, Wiccan Ways, which despite the title is actually cute YA fantasy. After that I've got a couple of random SF books, a corporate-espionage techno-thriller (really not my usual genre, but hey, free!), and I'm trying to decide if I really want to read Red Mars. (Yes, it was free, too.) Am also trying to decide if I want to pay money for some shiny new m/m historical romances, a non-fiction book about conlangs, or John Scalzi's Old Man's War, which looks totally awesome. Decisions, decisions.

(Did you know that if your local library lets you check out Mobipocket ebooks, they'll work on the Kindle with a bit of finagling? You need to have Python installed and run a couple of scripts you can find here. One script turns the Kindle serial number into a licit ID for Mobipocket, and the other sets a flag on the downloaded book so that it'll work on Kindle. I have access to my library's regional system, and the Boston Public Library, but I can't find anything I want on either of 'em. Bah.)

my kindle is shiny and it is totally like reading a real book and i never realized how much eyestrain the computer gives me and there is free web access that i am using to post this right now

it is difficult to type punctuation as you may have guessed and the refresh rate is slow

but it is free and also awesome

Oh boy, I wonder what is in this package that UPS just delivered! It is from Amazon.com and it has "Kindle" printed in large letters on the front! I have no idea what it could be!

It's, um, probably a good thing that I already know what lysimache is getting me for my birthday, huh?