Monkeys and keyboards aside, one Random + CSS still doesn't make poop.

Our Bella got the flu, so we only got half the movie filmed. The rest should go fairly smoothly, though . . . well, as long as Oni continues to behave. He's mis/behaved wonderfully so far, and only managed to eat the toe out of a sock.

Don't ask. Yet. :D

~~

I finished Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book and am pretty sure I'm obligated to make the man cookies at some point. The end is a little sudden, but the writing is high-level for a kids' book and overall is one of the better ones I've read in a while. I recommend it.

~~

I finally finished Chelsea Cain's Heartsick. The book's main murder mystery plot seemed eclipsed by the side(?) plot of the insane yet beautiful female serial killer and the suicidally depressed cop she's Stockholm syndrome'd, tortured, and brainfucked into a scarred, divorced, and drug-addled shadow of his former self. I'd say this is probably because the latter is a pretty new concept, while the mystery/thriller section is overflowing with the former.

Either way--the book got off to a somewhat slow start, but once it started moving (and the WTF-y interplay of Gretchen & Archie actually got going) it was interesting. If anyone wants my ARC that I've been hoarding for the past couple years, let me know.

~~

I started reading Captain Blood, too--what can I say, I wanted something out of the ordinary--and was pleasantly surprised. The main character is a near-radioactive Marty Stu (an Irishman who's the best physician around, was an awesome soldier and is still an awesome fighter, speaks perfectly accented Spanish, is oh-so-physically appealing, plots the best & sneakiest plots to ever be plotted, repeat any of those a few times over, so on and so forth) but the story rolls along really well for its originating time period, and it's written on so much of a higher level than what I've been reading lately that I'm frequently astounded. I'm not mentally tripping on the sentences because the language is archaic, I'm tripping because it's such heavy-duty wording that I as a reader have to pay close attention to in order to properly get the feel and description of things. I still don't expect much from it storyline-wise--I'm willing to bet dollars and donuts that the titular character will break hearts, defeat everyone, find treasure, get the girl, and possibly fart roses by the time it's all over--but I'll probably keep with it for a little while longer. Or at least until I find something else entertaining.

Justine Larbalestier's book Liar is the antithesis of the current YA/urban fantasy/paranormal romance werewolf novels.

I can't go into it very much because the pathological liar narrator creates so many WTF moments, and you as a reader have to pay so much attention, that to start explaining it is guaranteed to start spoiling it. Hell, I've thrown a bit of a spoiler in with my intro sentence here.


I kinda get the impression it won't do as well with younger readers because it does require you to weigh and think and pay attention and make your own decisions regarding the ending . . . but fuck them anyway, I thought it was kinda neat.



Also: Angry owl will eat your face if you say "Orly?" one more time.

There's currently three vampire/werewhatever authors I can stand.

Charlaine Harris, since she doesn't tend to take herself seriously (despite style problems early on in the series and varying problems later on).

Kelley Armstrong, who writes messed up (if tending towards Sue-ish) characters and who's put some interesting work into her world-building.

And now John Lindqvist, whose book Let the Right One In took everything I hate about the standard human-meets-vampire novel and threw it out the window. There's no heavy-handed vampirey seduction here: the main characters are twelve and twelve-going-on-230. There's no epic "ZOMG I R MONSTER" angst. Hell, there's not really even gender. Eli, the vampire, goes about as a girl, then reveals s/he was once a boy who was genitally mutilated before being turned and goes about as a boy, then puts on a sundress and is a girl for a bit again.

And though the prose is a bit simplistic at times, and the ending doesn't exactly blindside you, the characters are all so staggering, show-stoppingly messed up that I wanted to huggle the book and carry it around with me. Oskar, the twelve year old main character, is bullied at school, accidentally wets himself on a regular basis, and wants to be a serial killer when he grows up. Eli, beyond gender, is also frequently beyond hygiene--but not beyond picking off the neighbors. Who, by the way, are all messed up. There's the young delinquents, the aging, dreaming alcoholics, the desperate divorcees and the edging-into-abusive cops they want to be with, and oh yeah the pedophile who lives with Eli, who kills people for blood so s/he can live, who steals the money from his victims' bodies, and who gives it to the kids he can't bring himself to molest because they're not Eli.

Strangely enough, even with the pedophile and Oskar's vague interest in porn and the eventual rapacious zombie with a permanent hardon, the underlying 'ship story, of a young boy and the genderless monster who really may or may not eat him one day, comes off as strangely pure. They play with Rubik's cubes, they tap secret messages to each other in Morse code, they snuggle, they wrestle, Oskar has to explain to Eli that when he says he wants them to "go out" that he doesn't mean they have to do anything besides what they're already doing . . .

But when Eli starts acting more like a little kid and less like an extremely old being in a little kid's body, and the pedophile starts to freak out because it's harder for him to justify lusting after an extremely old being that just happens to look like a child, and by the way the crazy cat man in the next building saw something that looked like a kid kill one of the local alcoholics . . .


. . . I think I have to buy this one now. :P

The co-worker and I were taking bets on just how bad Terry Goodkind's new novel would be. After all, it was being touted as a thriller, not fantasy. We started off betting on whether the main character would be a businessman (to go along with Goodkind's Randroid-esque philosophies) or an ex-cop (for the blindingly cliche angle).

The main character's an artist, so we were both a little off-base. So we started taking bets on whether or not Goodkind would obviously tie this novel into his other novels--or whether he'd just write the same thing over again.

Turns out we were both right.

Gigantic sensitive-souled thick-haired fighter-type guy, last name Rahl, rescues a mysterious and beautiful and "obviously" intelligent stone cold bitch woman from out-of-control bad guys. She has a mysterious mission for him, and people want to kill him because of his name. Sound familiar?

Sorry, shikomekidomi--I don't know I can make it far enough in to find if another character has as bad a name as Penis Panis. But if you can make it past the first chapter, maybe you can let me know. To me, though, this just looks like Sword of Truth fanfic written by a teenager.

(For the record, I don't know if the dozens of typos are to be blamed on Borders, or a faulty c&p'd ARC. Some look like page breaks were missed, but some are repeated a few times. But even fixing them wouldn't fix the writing itself. That'd take a miracle.)

Is this a branch of Racefail, or is it just outright race & gender failure?


Justine Larbalestier wrote a YA book called Liar, about a mixed-race, dark-skinned, short-haired character--a book where the character's race and appearance factor heavily into the storyline. Publisher Bloomsbury Press decided the best cover to put on this book was a shot of a long-haired white girl.

Now, plenty of covers fuck up character descriptions--but when official people from the publishing house defend their choices with things like this:

“The entire premise of this book is about a compulsive liar,” said Melanie Cecka, publishing director of Bloomsbury Children’s Books USA and Walker Books for Young Readers, who worked on Liar. “Of all the things you’re going to choose to believe of her, you’re going to choose to believe she was telling the truth about race?”

And tell the author things like this:

Since I've told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don't sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won't take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can't give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA-they're exiled to the Urban Fiction section-and many bookshops simply don't stock them at all.

Yeah, not cool. Seems it's too strange a thing to have people of color on book covers, and no one wants to try to acclimate the general public to the novel idea of integration.

At least, not if a potential monetary loss is involved.

~~

And while we're at it . . . An anthology is coming out entitled The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing Sci-Fi. People checking out the book noticed that the list of included "mind-blowing" authors contains no women or people of color.

Not only has at least one of the authors come charging out of the woodwork to make an ass of himself:

Every single commenter here seems to me to be committing a logical fallacy of tremendous dimension, one so big it distorts entire worldviews:

DEMANDING THAT EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE OF EVERYTHING COMPOSITE SHOULD BE ABSOLUTELY STATISTICALLY REPRESENTATIVE OF THE COMPOSITION OF THE ENTIRE COSMOS

You know what: a potato field is not likely to contain corn plants. A pine forest might feature an oak or three, but be 99% pine trees. The Beatles were 4 white guys. Sonic Youth has no people of color! My ream of copy paper is all white, with no sheets of lettuce included!

(...)

But I have to say that when ANY WRITER (not just female writers or writers of color) complains about being excluded from a venue and cites issues of platonic principle and idealism, I always first posit underlying jealousy and a desire for status underneath all the lofty hypothetical talk.

(To which I said, "What the hell?")

Then the editor, Mike Ashley, came in to help make things worse.

That probably has something to do with my concept of "mind-blowing". Women are every bit as capable of writing mindblowing sf as men are, but with women the stories concentrate far more on people, life, society and not the hard-scientific concepts I was looking for.

Mike Ashley also notes that he did ask for stories from women, too. Two of them. Even though all we're capable of writing about is people and society, not science.

(Also, as an editor I want to bite him.)

Fires need set. I think The Angry Black Woman just set that fire for me. I like her. :D

Eta: Another bit of WTF has come to my attention: that of a male author with a feminine name, who wrote a story from a male's POV and had it rejected--brutally--because the editor says he, as a woman writer, doesn't know how to write a convincing male character.

I've got this Harlan Ellison quote up in my profile. I found it, I loved it, I snagged it as a mirror of my own dirty optimistic leanings.

My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but debasement, frustration and ignoble deaths; that there is security in personal strength; that you can fight City Hall and win; that any action is better than no action, even if it's the wrong action; that you never reach glory or self-fulfillment unless you're willing to risk everything, dare anything, put yourself dead on the line every time; and that once one becomes strong or rich or potent or powerful it is the responsibility of the strong to help the weak become strong.

Imagine my surprise to find that Harlan Ellison, despite his words' implications, is a bit of an anti-woman racist douchebag. Not only has he apparently started throwing all sorts of strange slurs at a WoC (woman of color) blogger--he sexually assaulted one Connie Wilson, the guest of honor at the '06 Hugo awards, in front of hundreds of people.

I still love the quote; I still love the idea behind it. But to keep it up is to support the man, in all of his frothing, grabbing, overly-entitled insanity. So it's got to go.

(Strangely, the subsequent quote becomes much more appropriate.)

More's a pity, since I've heard so many wonderful things about his writing. (I don't remember if I've read any, but now it's kinda like Orson Scott Card--I'm not sure I'd be able to stomach it based on some of the things he's said/done.)

~~~

I made an awesome barbecue sauce last night with ketchup, creamy Dijon mustard, Old Bay, cranberry chipotle sauce, and a three-finger pinch of ginger. The mustard made it savory, the cranberry part gave it a sweet edge while the chipotle part kicked, and the ginger gave it an awesome smell & aftertaste. I ph34r I'll never be able to replicate it again.

So I went from overly complicated to ridiculously simple. About a cup of ketchup (I bought it by the gallon at Sam's. Don't ask.), about 1/2 to 2/3 a cup of dark brown sugar, and two or three heaping tablespoons of chili powder later (I used almost half of a new container), and I had something sweet & spicy that was very very tasty over chicken on the grill.

~~~

I think I cracked something in my ankle. D: Running circles 'round the bookstore's gonna be interesting . . .

If I do this, I'll have the time to get to everything that needs done. But that silly guaranteed-paycheck day job is in the way . . .

That being said, I've got $7 on Borders going out of business in or by August. (Last week it was $5--then I learned how close we came to going under at the end of last quarter.) We're not getting in a lot of titles again, just like we were when we didn't have credit or funds to buy books from the publishers . . . We've got bargain everywhere, trying to lure in the cheap people with non-returnables and remainders no one wanted to begin with . . . We've got empty shelves left and right, and stores that've been hit by Project Phoenix don't even have the hours to get new releases out of pallets and onto the floor . . . And then the head of Pershing, the company that owns 40% of our stocks and is in charge of our one $42.5 million loan, seems to think that we're really, really aiming towards something we're not.

The business model of book superstores, however, is likely to change over time from primarily bookstores to merchants of a wider variety of products and services which are designed to appeal to the higher-income educated consumer that, on average, spends an hour or more in a book superstore.

Hope Otakon goes well enough to cover the expected forthcoming holes in my finances. Stock-wise, I'm almost back up to where I was for ANext. Two more weeks' hard crunchwork should get me up to a decent level. I hope.



I think I shall stab the next person who asks me if this is made of "pop tabs." (Though the last person to ask me seemed borderline-illiterate--I stood an aisle away from her today at work and listened to her painful attempts at pronouncing titles, and I felt sad for her.)





Reading China Mieville's The City & The City, and remembering how much I missed the thinking person's fantasy as opposed to the straightforward popcorn reads. While it's a little dry and the characterization doesn't really stand out in any way, it's very intelligently written and the worldbuilding's fascinating enough to help drive the narrative forward & keep my attention. I'm about a third of the way through and thus far I like it. :)

I have an ARC and might be persuaded to let it go once I'm finished. :)

Is it just me, or do we seem to be revisiting "Copyright: You're Doin' it Wrong" fairly frequently as of late?

The latest chapter: J.D. Salinger doesn't like when people try to make money off of him by professionally publishing fanfic of his work. Who'd have thought?

I still don't get why these little publishers would even want to risk the lawsuit and recall expenses that could come from taking something like this on. It's probably a combination of ignorance and greed that brings out defense statements like this:

Silverman, whose company distributes books by about 150 publishers, called "60 Years Later" a work of "social science fiction," saying that California doesn't plagiarize, but sets a well-known character in an alternate place and time -- as literature has done for centuries.

Fail and epic fail! This person needs to sort out the differences between plagiarism and copyright violation. Technically, only one is illegal--and that one's the one we're looking at.


Methinks this particular author and Lady Potato Moon need to get together and justify themselves to each other, in a vacuum, for the rest of eternity.

I've said before that reading Neil Gaiman is like having a great big bottle of wine and a whole cheesecake, and that finishing one of his books leaves one feeling lazy, sated, and sometimes a little bloated. That being said, reading Gaiman's Anansi Boys was like realizing the wine bottle you'd just finished chugging was really corn syrup, and your cheesecake was really angelfood cake, and you could really use some fucking meat and potatoes.

So I read some Jim Butcher instead. He's still fun and I still like him, though I reached my saturation point mid-book 5. Yes, everyone wants to kill Harry Dresden. Got that. Maybe I'll go back for more later, but it'll take a bit.


So I picked up the upcoming Guillermo del Toro book, The Strain. You guys know my thoughts on & reactions to vampire fiction--they generally involve me screeching and running in the opposite direction--but I figured, "Hey, it's del Toro. I like his movies . . . It'd be hard for this to go wrong. Right?"

. . .

A silly optimist, I am.

Del Toro, his co-author, or someone in there has definitely done their homework, and if you go into the book wanting to know the how & why of every little detail of Hazmat stuff, bio team reactions, solar eclipses, storing dead people, and so on, you'll be set. If you want the story to get on with it, you're screwed. And if keeping track of fifty different POV characters gets on your nerves, you'd better not pick the book up at all. The writing is simply not good enough to hold up to ten solid pages of people looking at the sky, the dialog doesn't like to stay believable, and the POV-hopping every few pages just becomes tedious.

And if you get pissed off when characters pointedly don't see the cliche wagon? Join me as I run screaming in the other direction. Seriously: a plane full of bloodless dead people lands in New York City (again, always NYC), and amongst the cargo there's a giant unclaimed black box half-full of dirt--and no one goes, "Hey, I've seen this movie before!"

(We have seen this movie, actually. Remember how in Blade II [which was directed by del Toro] the new vampire strain features a super-stabby extend-a-tongue? The stabbity comes from under the tongue in this book's case, but still. Same idea.)

I came away from what I finished of this book feeling like it was trying to be Lovecraft and missing. Lovecraft could make scenery be scary. This? Not so much.


And then there was Harris's latest, Dead and Gone. It's a staggeringly fast read and I'm about 98% certain she's taking stabs at SMeyer left and right, but I could've done without those if she'd . . . well, written a cleaner, better-structured and consistently characterized story. Hell, Viking Eric even stops being fun, and the sex scenes--now with more unnecessary dialog!--have become outright mockable.

Overall, this makes me sadface. :( I'm wondering how it'll affect the rest of the series if I pretend this book doesn't exist.



I get the feeling I'm gonna end up headed into the Literature section really damn soon.

Tried reading K. J. Parker's Devices and Desires. It was interesting how the fantastic element in this supposed fantasy novel wasn't magic but machinery, but while the characterization is fabulous the book itself is so staggeringly overwritten I had to put it down.

If anyone wants the ARC, let me know--I'll mail it to you.


I started reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys and, for the first few pages, didn't like it. And by "few" I mean "forty." I went in expecting a narrative like American Gods and found . . . yeah, something else entirely. Not only did I have problems liking the character, a gigantic dork who seems to only excel at feeling sorry for himself--the writing style was completely different from American Gods. Dog help me, some of the sentences actually clunked.

But at about forty pages in, I realized what'd happened. Gaiman had tweaked his narrative voice so hard that it no longer sounded like him. It sounded more like hearing a fable as narrated by an old Southern black woman.

Then--seriously, within pages of my little epiphany--the dorky main character's crazy half-god brother turned up, the proverbial shoe dropped, and the story finally took off. I don't think I'll put it down now.




(No, is mine. In the words of kitteh!Gandalf, You can not has!)

"It's one massive circlejerk. You ever see video from Anthrocon? It's like that. It's like watching this giant pile of people in fursuits, doggies and bears and cats and maybe a lion, all rolling around humping each other. It's kinda disgusting."

Dragging this out again because it's suddenly become more pertinent . . . ( Hideously unoriginal YA authors are sandbagging each other! I mean, sticking together! )


The question remains, though: Is this flood of irony uproariously hilarious, or stupendously depressing? I'm leaning towards the latter.

Jodi Picoult's latest, Handle With Care, is astoundingly, amazingly, mind-bendingly depressing. If Christopher Moore's Fool was like watching someone you didn't know get kicked in the nads over and over, Picoult's Handle With Care was like watching someone you recognize get their fingernails ripped out. And we're not gonna touch the ending.

~~

I decided to make a maille fringe belt because I didn't want to sew and my results were . . . different. I feel sorta like I need to make the mobius ball sections on the sides more dramatic, or add dangly coins, or maybe some beads onto the yarn so it can hit people properly.

Maybe with the next prototype. Hmm.

Less than two weeks until Tekko and it looks like I'm gonna have to work primarily with the shinies I already have. Egads! Nightmares! :P

~~

Ebay! My sin, my soul! My pr0nish addiction! Give me t3h pretty pictures, I shall throw my money at you as I whine in a vaguely literary fashion. This is obviously the way things must be. I just wish I could quit you you'd let me get other things done.

I picked up Anne Bishop's latest book, The Shadow Queen, and found it vastly superior to her last few works. ( But . . . )


~~~

I also picked up Ariana Franklin's Grave Goods, which is quite possibly the best book she's written yet. ( Ramblings! )

I'd definitely recommend this one.

Okay, so I'm starting to really hate Borders Group. ( Cut for the long and long of it. )

I picked up Christopher Moore's Fool and surprisingly ended up disliking it. A lot. Sure, it wasn't an easy task he took on, turning Shakespeare's King Lear into comedy--but the end result lost all semblance of joy. (Not that it could have much, being as the ending was very much "Rocks fall, everyone dies.") With this, though, Moore basically took the character blueprint of Biff from Lamb and made him a douchebag. Biff was trouble tempered by good intentions and his love for his best friend, Jesus. The titular Fool of this book, Pocket, is trouble with a perpetual hardon who does and says all manner of awful things because he feels the (still fairly awful) recipients deserve it.

You know how the basic idea behind King Lear was that Lear was a generally okay old guy who made a really dumb call and got kicked across his country for it? Moore's taken a different spin on things: Lear was a positively awful old bastard who was just getting what he deserved. Constantly. In spades. We shouldn't feel bad for him! He killed his father! And his brother! And his wives! And he raised his daughters to become the awful people they are! And he made someone rape someone!

To which I said, Wait wait wait hold on--the guy he was egging on chose to rape someone and it's Lear's fault. Hm.

Which makes one wonder about the moral accountability of Pocket tricking both the wicked sisters into nailing a drooling "I'm tired of hearing about how gigantic his bits are" nitwit.


But if the overarching moral of the story is that karma's fuckin' coming for you, the entire narrative thus becomes equivalent to watching a guy get kicked in the nuts by the universe a few dozen times. It's tiresome. And by the time the editor went to sleep at around page 200, I was barely engaged enough to roll my eyes at the Luke I am your Father Uncle trope.


Dare I say it? I liked Diane Paxton's version, The Serpent's Tooth better.



. . . I should write a little about the latest Anne Bishop but I have to pack my wheelie-thing for tomorrow. I'm supposed to meet with the one lady who wants me to do commission/custom work and I need to be able to show off my stuff. :P

Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind owns a piece of my soul now. Rothfuss doesn't pull punches with his characters, his narrative voice makes me a happy little monkey, and there's enough going on in the storyline that I'm nomming at the shelves waiting for his second book.

Basically, a guy who used to be a legendary hero gets dragged out of hiding/retirement and is coaxed into telling his life story. From there we get a very knotted story about him getting pwnd over and over by the universe and emerging more awesome because of it, about the strange ways legends change with time, and eventually about him versus a dragon on psuedo-heroin.

A dragon on heroin is very much like a dancing bookbag, I believe--you can't quite argue with it.

What else can I say? This guy is good and worth trying out.

(Also, the main character? A redhead.)



Also coming in line with my grabby little paws are Christopher Moore's Fool, Anne Bishop's Shadow Queen, and the upcoming books from Ariana Franklin & Charlaine Harris. (I'm scared but hopeful.) *waves Sookie/Eric flag like the goofy little fangirl she is*

I had a lady come into work today looking for a state quarter book. No big deal--I showed her the section with all the coin-collecting stuff and put some of the quarter books in her hands.

Well, that wasn't it. She wanted a quarter book with a picture of the states.

I'm industrious. I dug one up and handed it to her as well.

Well, that wasn't it either. She wanted one with all the states, and spots for all the quarters. Like the ones from Washington DC, and Guam, and the Virgin Islands.

When I kindly pointed out that no, none of those are states and won't be getting quarters, she refused to believe me.


I managed to leave without insulting her to her face. If Borders was giving raises this year, I'd say I deserve a big one.

~~

Boredom at work and restricted access to Jim Butcher (We couldn't get or keep any of his earlier works in for any given time) meant I turned to Jeff Lindsey's Dexter series. I liked the first book, though the ending seemed rushed. The second book, Dearly Devoted Dexter, started with a clunk and meandered for a bit before picking up any sort of pace, and Lindsey picked up a particular predilection for perpetually shrieking IN ALL CAPS. ALL THE TIME. I'm not allowed to take a pen to the books I haven't bought and was thus saddened to the point that I had to come home and huggle my CMS.

I probably would've stopped the series there if we'd gotten Butcher's Fool Moon in, or another of Friedman's Feast of Souls . . . but alas, Borders Group seems to have problems with keeping the authors I like in stock. So instead I picked up the third, Dexter in the Dark . . . aaaaand I got cranky. ( Spoilers, again! )

Lindesy supposedly has a fourth book coming out in August. I don't think I'll look into it unless I get phenomenally bored--and even then, it's not likely.


(But I still own the first, and those first few pages still make me happy.)

One of the things on the new releases cart, to be put out tomorrow, was a new Dean Koontz hardcover--a graphic novel version of his wanna-be-trilogy-stuck-at-pair Frankenstein novels. If you remember, I once picked one of the novels up out of curiosity and have yet to unsee the official God-Awful Worst Sentence Ever . . . So like anyone else who suffers from acute trainwreck syndrome, I grabbed one of the graphic novels and started flipping through.

Then I paused: I knew this art style. The hair was out to eat someone's head, the musculature was worse, characters' torsos were extremely stretched, all the faces looked the same, there were about a billion perfect profiles and Stop-watching-Labyrinth you're-gettin'-a-yeast-infection-thar-sonny crotch-bulges . . .

I flipped a little further and found 'em--BOOM! Gigantic thighs! Smugglin' turkeys thighs! THIGHS of CAPS-LOCKED DOOM!

It seems I wasn't mistaken: The artist is Brett Booth, a twenty-some year comic field veteran who used to draw for the Anita Blake comic (see: The Annotated Anita Blake, 3 4 5 6 7-3 . . . oh fuck, there's no method to this madness.). I'm told the wide and wild mockery of his particular art style is the reason the Anita Blake creators & writers--a batshit insane woman not exactly known for her quality control and the editorially-challenged sycophants surrounding/enabling her--traded him in for a less OH HOLY WTF model. sorta kinda

But Koontz & co. still picked him up/got saddled with him for this adventure.



I wonder if anyone's informed Chris of Chris's Invincible Super Blog.

You'd think someone would've learned after the dismal failure exemplified at NYAF--where Random House's imprint Del Rey tried to give away copies of Koontz-as-manga and failed. (If they couldn't give the shit away, imagine how well it sold. Then again, the market for novels-to-manga seems to be pretty evenly awful. It might be in part because most of the novels being turned are . . . awful. Hmm.) It's still kinda sad, in a way: It looks like this guy's trying to get his art style under control a little, but really--it still all looks the same.

Lookie! I found my birthday present to myself. :D



Also: Once again, Neil Gaiman has proven himself deserving of freshly-baked cookies. I read this and guffawed so much the better half put down his video game to find out what I was up to. From his blog this morning:

It was 5:45 in the morning. No-one had died, though, I was fairly certain of that. My cell-phone rang.

"Hello. This is Rose Trevino. I'm chair of the ALA Newbery Committee..." Oh. Newbery. Right. Cool. I may be an honors book or something. That would be nice, "and I have the voting members of the Newbery Committee here, and we want to tell you that your book..."

"THE GRAVEYARD BOOK," said fourteen loud voices, and I thought, I may be still asleep right now, but they probably don't do this, probably don't call people and sound so amazingly excited, for Honors books....

"...just won..."

"THE NEWBERY MEDAL" they chorused. They sounded really happy. I checked the hotel room because it seemed very likely that I was still fast asleep. It all looked reassuringly solid.

You are on a speakerphone with at least 14 teachers and librarians and suchlike great, wise and good people, I thought. Do not start swearing like you did when you got the Hugo.

I wonder if I'll find the time to sit down and finish The Graveyard Book--it seemed like much fun, so I hope so. I also wonder if this means we'll get more than a couple copies of The Graveyard Book into our store. But Borders Group is still flailing in altogether disturbing ways, so I doubt it. Instead I still have the awful feeling that we're gonna see the axe falling on a few local places before this mess is all over.

Cnn.com tells me the economic turnaround is predicted at around the end of the second quarter, though. So what's that--six months to limp along? And if we make it that far, we'll be good? We'll see.

But I won't stop applying around. A full forty hours at minimum wage would net me more than "full time" at Borders. And with BGInc nixing any bonuses or raises this year (but giving ex-CEO George Jones $2.1 million to go away), I'd be stupid to not just take a rinky-dink job that's closer to home and make do with it.