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Okay, let me run this by you.  I was standing outside, staring up at the bare trees against the cold white sky, and I had a thought.  But I'll start with those that came afterwards, if that's all right with you.

Anyway.  Have you ever had an image, a bundle of words, in your mind, that you didn't use, put down, or speak?  These words are descriptive, interesting, but you've heard them before.  They're not a cliché.  Mine (the original thought) were "tree limbs like brittle bone fingers."  Maybe I'm wrong and someone else would consider those cliché, no matter.  I've heard those words, or similar, before, describing the same thing.  But I don't think it's done to death, not yet. 

However, I would never use those in a story, I think.  Because, and I only managed to put words to this a few moments ago, I would be contributing to making that image a cliché.  I would be wearing the rut a little deeper. 

This does not bode well for me at all.  Also I should have been in bed a few hours ago. 

Also also, I have used three different publishing devices to update my blogs tonight. 

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Just checking to see if this new program works at all. 

Blogged with Flock

"Out here in the fields / I fight for my meals / I don't need to be forgiven"

I don't believe I've updated this thing since well, since a hell of a long time ago.

I have been doing a lot of awesome -- that is, I've been writing, reading, and watching things. Also, actually seeing people, which is really weird, as I'm not in any classes right now.

I drove two hours to Richmond to return my apartment key on Tuesday, which took all of a minute and a half. Maybe I could have mailed it, but I didn't want it arriving a day late and dooming me to pay a month's rent or something. To mitigate that I bought books and hung out with people, visiting three apartments in the span of an afternoon and evening.

Then I went to Morehead to visit a friend, and I showed him several strange anime he immediately copied off to watch on his own.

I actually bothered to bring up the update window for two reasons, though -- the simpler is that I now have high speed internet at home, which is weird on its own. The guy came today, and hooked us up. I was not aware, actually, that DSL uses standard phone lines. My whole experience with high speed has been campus- and cablemodem-related.

The second reason was just to talk about all the books I've read since I got home. Because I have nothing better to talk about, and really, as I established yesterday with my friend, what you're reading is possibly the most important thing about you.

So.

The night before I moved out I started the second Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex novel, called Revenge of the Cold Machines. It's by Junichi Fujisaku (or Fujisaku Junichi, I suppose), and was interesting. It wasn't good, by my usual definition of the word -- it was very poorly written. And, as usual, I don't know who to blame. It was translated, obviously, by Dark Horse Press, which wasn't so obvious -- of course, I think DH has been publishing (and re-publishing, and... you get the idea) the GitS manga for years, so they nabbed the novels as well. So did they get a bad translator? Seriously, it reads like fanfiction, with lots of adverbs describing the way someone does or says something, and short sentences that punctuate nothing. One of the head scriptwriters from the show wrote the original, so maybe it comes down to him? No idea, and that bugs me, actually. If I don't like something, I wanna know who to bitch about.

Apart from the writing, which I don't think would even get published, anywhere, if it were just someone writing in that manner, it was nice. The story was interesting, and appropriately cyberpunk action. I mean, it features a scene where a guy's head pops open and an accomplice, riding a motorcycle, speeds by and ganks the brain case from the open skull before the police can interrogate him. Wicked cool. It's actually three related short pieces, and the middle story actually has a tachikoma as the narrator -- that is, one of the sentient, increasingly-aware AI-enabled tanks Section 9 uses.

After that was Read or Die volume four, by Kurata (writing) and Yamada (art). That's the end of the R.O.D. manga; at least, it's the end of the first version. It's sort-of picked up by Read or Dream, with different characters. It's the conclusion of the story, and really doesn't have any distinguishing features on its own. What I mean is, it's difficult to talk about Matrix: Revolution without mentioning the other two. Was that the name of the third? I never saw it. My example still stands, though, because I'm lazy. It's a neat series, which I was first introduced to several years ago in the EKU anime club, with the ova. It's about a woman who works for the British Library secret services, retrieving and protecting rare books. She can control paper, which is even more awesome than it sounds. She's also a bibliophile -- and I mean really philic, or whatever the adjective of that would be. The ova had several scenes where she was getting really flushed and, essentially, turned on by books. Now, I love books, but usually I need some content to get that excited. O_o

I never said these descriptions would be coherent.

Next up is Eric by Terry Pratchett. With this I've read all the Rincewind novels, save the Science of Discword stuff (I guess he's at least tangentially involved?). It's a Discworld parody of Faust, with some stuff about Biblical creation and the Trojan War thrown in. Oh, and also the Inferno. Very funny, as you would expect.

After that was Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny. He's another of the writers I read who seem to get ignored way too much now. He very nearly changed the face of sci-fi back in the seventies, and no one knows who he is anymore. Damnation Alley isn't his best piece, but it's a cool disaster fiction sort of novel, about a guy trying to drive cross-country after the typical nuclear disaster.

Then I finally got around to the second volume of Fables by Willingham, titled Animal Farm. Fables is about the fairy and nursery story characters we all know (and, as it turns out, some we don't), after their desperate migration to our world following an invasion of theirs. The basic set-up of the series is that Snow White is the vice-mayor, or whatever, of the "city" Fables, and she really runs things (Nat King Cole can't be bothered). She's estranged from her sister, Rose Red, whom no one has really ever heard of (the version of their story is more interesting than the version cannibalized for the Disney crap, really). The first volume follows Bigby Wolf as he tries to solve a murder. The second follows Snow as she tries to deal with an insurrection (oh, and apparently Goldilocks is a gun-toting Marxist revolutionary -- hilarious).

Then Monday night I started Legends II: Dragon, Sword, and King. It's a collection of fantasy novellas edited by Robert Silverberg. It's meant to collect brand new pieces by the authors of famous fantasies known for their unique worlds, or something like that. The first Legends featured Robert Jordan, Terry Pratchett, and some others I guess. I really bought the first one for the Pratchett piece, which was my first exposure to Granny Weatherwax. So let me break this collection down by author:

George R. R. Martin This is actually amusing, as I spent a lot of the weekend discussing Martin's Song of Hyperbole and High-falutin' with my cousin. Martin is not as bad as Jordan or Goodkind, he is tolerable. The story from the collection, called The Sworn Sword, highlights this. It's good, but could have been shorter. I developed a metaphor about writing after reading this and the following story, actually -- weaponry. Martin's writing is a hammer. It works, it kills the dude in front of you, but it's tough to carry around all day (for reference, Jordan is a club -- even harder to deal with, and often just doesn't do anything useful). This story is a continuation of his first Legends piece, The Hedge Knight. It stands alone, though. It is a good introduction to the setting, what with the worrying about lineage, arms, heraldry, and such. It doesn't have much in the way of magic, though, which sets the tone for the collection as a whole.

Orson Scott Card This one was an entry into Card's Alvin Maker series; it's The Yazoo Queen. Alvin Maker is about an America in the 1800s (I think) where the Revolutionary War didn't happen, and magic exists. It's really neat, and among other things, Card didn't toss his writing skills to go for the huge novels, they're all in the two hundred to three hundred range. This story features, along with Alvin (an adult, which was so much nicer than the book I've read, where he was seven), Jim Bowie and Abraham Lincoln (trivia: David Bowie is supposed to be a reference to the frontiersman, but the musician got it wrong -- it is supposed to be pronounced "Boo-ee" [buoy]).

Card's classification in my newly-minted weapon nomenclature, by the way, is a rapier. Fine control to do exactly what the person wants. However, the finest control, the most wicked killing, is knives, which would be Zelazny and Gaiman, Clarke and Pratchett.

Diana Gabaldon wrote Lord John and the Succubus which, like Martin's entry, doesn't really feature magic (though there's something that might be a real curse and may be a joke at the end -- I mean, a gypsy curses someone, isn't that what they do?). It concerns a side character of Gabaldon's Outlander books, Lord John Grey. It's neat primarily for the protagonist, who is a gay British liaison officer in the mid 1700s. The writing was better than Martin's and not as good as Card's.

Elizabeth Haydon wrote Threshold, set in her Symphony of Ages series. It has something to do with world trees (neat) which are the origins of time, but each is a different time, yet they all exist at the same time (huh?). It's got some cool looks at what it means to swear oneself to someone (similar to Martin's, but a bit better), and some of the writing is nice. Other parts of it drop down to the workaday writing of the hammer, but never quite to the club -- though there are some clichés sprinkled throughout that even Martin generally avoids. Often they have to do with horses, which hints that maybe the writer should go see a horse up close sometime (maybe she has, but it just felt like typical romantic fantasy ideas about horses -- not the extreme "like the wind" stuff, but basic crap).

Terry Brooks rounds out the collection, with a Shannara story -- Indominable. It was good, actually, probably the second-best piece in the collection. Now, this is weird, as several of my friends back in high school used to try to get me to read Brooks. I avoided him, because he seemed terribly derivative -- and still does, actually, but this story wasn't too bad. It is, in a way, the aftermath of the typical fantasy quest -- in fact, the protagonist thinks back to the stuff he did before, and his friends he traveled with were a "killing machine" (used more than once to describe him), a borderman, an elf prince, a dwarf, and a gnome. Of course, the protagonist is the illusionist. It's like a second edition DnD party. Of course, I've had a few people accuse me of writing DnD sessions, which isn't what I'm doing, but I have to parody something common, and all the common themes have been written up into modules. Anyway, that's why I may be overly sensitive. This piece, though, doesn't feature the by-the-numbers group, and uses an interesting effect of using illusions on oneself. I read it faster than all the others, in part because it's readable, and in part because some of the bits were common, though not molar-grindingly so.

The best piece, in my opinion (which you might have gathered already) was Card's. It had the best writing, and the most original setting.

Just today I started the sixth Slayers novel, Vezendi's Shadow by Hajime Kanzaka. I really like Slayers in all its forms, though actually the manga has always seemed a bit odd -- it works better as novels or anime, I think. The writing is better than the GitS novel, though it's still a translation. This one is by Tokyopop, and holds no real surprises. The neat asset of the series is the first person narration; it is very casual, and (in the translation, anyway) makes liberal use of phrases-made-into-terms-with-hyphens, as well as pauses, asides, and some good-natured snark. Lina is also a bit of an unreliable narrator, always describing the simplest of plans as amazing, provided she thought of it.

So that's what I've been up to. I'm just about halfway through the Slayers novel, which is sad in a way -- Tokyopop, for some reason, has only licensed the first six novels, despite Japan having like fifteen. How do you license six? It's not as though they worried about profits and just did a few. That's two, maybe three, depending on price. When you do six you must be sure you're getting your money back, which makes sense to me. Seems like there's a built-in audience for the novels, given the show is/was pretty popular in America.

Whee. This is a big picture post, because I wanna. First, I thought I'd finally get around to a picture of my knife set and bartending kit. Here they are on my counter in the flat.

Now, moving on. I drove up to Lexington today, to the Japanese market. It was odd -- almost nothing was in English, but for what I was looking for it wasn't a big deal. I bought some nori -- toasted seaweed sheets for sushi and onigiri (though I think it's actually algae, and not seaweed, I dunno -- and some neat bits and pieces. Like this bento box and chopsticks. They didn't come together, but they match pretty well. The box is smaller than I'd like -- I actually bought two, which turns out to be too much space, so that's like eight bucks wasted. I'm sure I'll figure something out. Here's the box open, with my lunch for tomorrow in it. It won't actually be lunch, I suppose, as I plan to eat it at the class break tomorrow. I always get hungry during night classes. You should be able to see blueberries, blackberries, and some fried chicken chunks in the top tier, on the bottom of the picture. The lower tier has some olives, half a hard-boiled egg, and an onigiri. I made the onigiri before I bought the box, so I it's actually a bit too big. It's got fried salmon in the middle. Mm.

I also got some supplies for serving sake. Here's a small tokkuri and a matching choko (flask and cup). Here's a larger, dish-type guinomi. I liked the color and flower pattern. Here's an awesome guinomi. Bunnies are cool. That's it. Bunnies are cool.

Finally, I've meant to post a picture of my pitiful bookshelf here in the flat since I moved in. Now I finally am. It's a bit empty, I know, but I forgot all my textbooks at home, so I'll use that space directly.

That's pretty much it.

I thought I should take a moment to mention this site I just ran across, called For Always and For Always. It's a Jonathan Strange fan site, but apparently focuses more on the Raven King (which is perfectly acceptable, in my opinion). Now, that's not a link to the front page, but to what the keeper calls "Mathematical Formulae." Here's an example:

5.) The Gentleman with the Thistle-down Hair = (Legolas x Lucius Malfoy) / (Dumbledore + Voldemort) = Yes, stop thinking about Legolas and Lucius Malfoy having sex [1]. Well, all right, go think about it, I'll wait. [...] Back now? Okay. The Gentleman with the Thistle-down Hair is a fairy (yes, a "fairy," and not a "faerie," which is a term that was made up by Spenser in an attempt to look all cool and ancient, which was then appropriated by idiots all over the world in the centuries to come who were striving to look all cool and ancient, too; Clarke's failure to use it is Reason #409,871 to love her fiction, as far as I'm concerned), and a king, and a total ass. He possesses many of the traits we associate with both Legolas and Lucius, such as preening vanity, blind hubris, excellent hair, vapidly exhibitionist magic, and opaque, overwhelming self-love. The Gentleman is both darker and brighter than you expect, and responsible for more than he -- or anyone -- realizes. He's also basically completely evil. Basically. Completely.

He is a bit manic, and I disagree with his statement that the Man with the Thistle-down Hair is evil. He is, more simply, amoral. But still, quite entertaining.

This is a bit of an experiment, but I'm certainly enjoying it. Despite the tedium in several of the stories, I have enjoyed Irving's The Sketch Book. So I borrowed a bit of the concept -- and some fun references -- to start this short story. It's called "A Sketch on the Wickedness of Dueling."

(From the sketch-book of one Edward S. Irving.) The passage from Boston to Londinium was treacherous and wore mightily on the nerves. The sky was always a blank grey, and few fish attended our passing, which the sailors took as a very ill omen indeed. But in the end that is not so strange. We toiled up the Thames and landed safely in one of the English harbors so famed in worrisome verse and heated prose.

This passage of water seemed to have disconnected me from my home, and grouped in with my memories of the rambling old house were my father's plans for me, which mostly amounted to my studying under a Londinium newspaper man he knew and bringing back to Boston the many merits of good English journalism. However, the distance made me restless, and I hovered in the water-worn recesses of the metropolis for just a week before leaping aboard the first boat I could find destined for France.

This new passage was much more pleasant, with the sun burning away the mists each morning and blazing away as it drooped into the west. We landed safely in the capital of the new revolutionary French government, that shining island protected from the ravages of the continent. Brittany is strange indeed, for the son of a colonist's son. Men roamed the streets in packs, scratches and bruises displayed for best effect on faces and wind-whipped bare arms. The ladies glided past alone, or in pairs, their dresses concealing feet and their sharp, quick faces doing nothing to hide their wit and slyness.

All the men wore swords, and so for once I did not stand out – it had been my mother's habit to dress me with an iron dagger dangling from my breeches. My brother Francis tells me she started soon after I could walk. As I grew taller so the little weapon lengthened, until, when I stepped off the ship-planks at the Brittany port, a long, devilish hanger of some considerable weight thudded against the posts and greatly offended a youth – younger than me, at least – with a rapier sharp as fire in his hands seconds after I thumped his knees. It was only with a promise of a night of drinking at a public house of his choice that I got away with all my skin.

Later that very night I met him again at the Point d'Accorde. “Eduard,” my new companion said at the door, “entrez-vous. Come in, come in.” He was most cheerful, and his bright green eyes flared from the dimness of the eaves as a cat's visage might, the creature just awaking for a night's pleasures. The pub was crowded, in spite of the heavy sun still looming along the western waters. The pub jack hoisted barrels behind the bar, great sloshing canisters of ale and small, prim wine vessels. My erstwhile dueling-partner-made-drinking-chum, whose name was, he said, Fairfax – which didn't seem very French to me; given its status as an assumed name (a habit many in Brittany keep up, I found) it was understandable – beckoned the jack over and bid him scrape the refuse and dried drink from the bar. He did so, large, blacksmith-arms slashing a rag over the battered surface. “Maintenant,” Fairfax said, “bring us melomel.” He reared back on the stool, smiling his wide, fox-smile, and said to me, “young American man, you will be glad to have struck me, as it has brought you to this.”


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That's a bit less than half what I wrote today. It may not be all that interesting yet, but I'll (hopefully) deal with that in the second draft. I'd like to hear from some of you, concerning this bit, though.

"I'm guided by a signal in the heavens / I'm guided by the birthmark on my skin"

So. I'm on my own, again (obviously), but am far more cheerful. I've already written over 1,000 words on a new short story, read nearly half of The Ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories.

What, then, do you imagine I did with myself this fine, foggy evening?

If you said "meet some cool people," you are, of course, wrong.

No. I fried steaks and made a fancy pan sauce, which involved brandy, mushrooms, and brown sugar. Then I ate same while watching re-runs of Good Eats. It was good, but a little too sweet. I can't make it with my parents around -- at least, and expect it to be consumed -- my dad hates sweetness with meat. Even ham, apparently. Anyway, I made too much of the sauce, as the recipe was for twice as much meat. Oops. Anyway, here's a picture of what I ended up with.

Now, I'm probably going to go for a drive, make a really dry martini (after the drive, dummy), and maybe write more. I'll probably post some of said writing once I think I'm done for the day.