my heart is a glorious machine;

Heavens, it's been nearly a week since last I posted! For shame! But really, I've been rather shockingly busy, in, yes, the offline world, what with writing a Hire Me letter and composing my first proper resume ever (it's very short and not terribly impressive, but the fonts are lovely!) for the job at the local paper, and then accidentally spending the night at the Meholicks', which has become such a tradition -- with the Nielsons, too, when they still lived here -- that I really ought to put together an emergency survival kit consisting largely of pyjamas and spare underthings and leave it in a convenient corner. You see, burningstarsxe was coming home from three months in Maine, and when she arrived at last, there was such a riot of conversation and general jubileeing that I kept not leaving, and then it was eleven thirty at night... The next day was Friday, which was also Season Premiere of Dollhouse Day, so Sarah and Hannah came back in the evening, and we had a drawer of inappropriate starches (a real drawer, too), only someone neglected to tell me that none of the normal channels work anymore. We have bloomin' satellite, so this really oughtn't be a problem, but apparently it is. So here we are, panicking, staring at the grey screen, frantically eating cookies and squeaking... oh, it was dreadful. Eventually we gave up, took the drawer upstairs, and cosied up on my bed to show Hannah the Supernatural pilot, while I refreshed downloady sites to no avail. (A link finally surfaced about ten minutes after their father collected them, of course.)

Saturday was spent at Hershey Park, to which we acquired free passes from buying certain products at Martin's. Dad took Heidi and Timmy and I in the shiny new car, while Mum stayed home with Leandra (who would be no fun at an amusement park, as she would climb everything and be impossible to keep track of and she'd probably try to jump into a roller coaster or kidnap a duck or something). Ah, new car, how marvellously you glide along! And how exquisite it is finally to listen to CDs in the car again, instead of ancient tapes! (Okay, that often meant that we listened to a lot of Steeleye Span, but after two years it begins to be tiring when road trip music always consists solely of the surviving remnants of what Dad listened to twenty-five years ago. A lot of it is modern jazz, which I'm not especially keen on, and even Dad isn't that interested in anymore, and some of the singer-songwriter stuff is too eightiesified, and there isn't any of Dad's awesome psych folk stuff from the seventies besides Steeleye Span.)

Anyway, I'm not the largest fan of amusement parks in general, especially when I think about them too much ("this would be a really rubbish way to die, in the service of something so frivolous", I occasionally think on roller coasters or even swing rides, where a line might suddenly break; and then I think about how ridiculously much money goes into building these town-sized clusters of sheer entertainment, when people are, well, yes, starving in India and being murdered in the Sudan, and I am well aware that this sort of thing makes me the epicest of wet blankets), but I enjoyed myself rather -- they had an excellent carousel that actually went around quite fast, and tearing down an old wooden roller coaster is fantastic, and those spinning swing rides I adore because they're exhilarating and relaxing at the same time. Also there's something peculiarly sordid and fascinating about amusement parks and fairgrounds and circuses, something I can't quite put my finger on -- something about the colours and the sticky-sweet smell and the odd music and the mechanisms and the peculiar names of things and the way so many things seem strangely frozen in time. I do so want to put Mr Caruthers and Evy onto a carousel or something. (I have also always wanted an old carousel horse, a real one, on a golden pole, to keep in my bedroom and try to know the stories of it.)

And then it began to rain. Bah. It was cold and wet and we braved it for several hours, but then they started closing the roller coasters because they weren't safe anymore, and the rain wasn't letting up at all, and we were soaked and shivering and finally toured the Hershey not-factory -- mostly it was an array of Yay Capitalism Buy Our Overpriced Stuff, but it was very interesting to learn all of the different processes involved in making a simple chocolate bar, and when we finally wrenched the siblings away from the piles and piles of obscenely expensive mass-produced chocolates we decided to just go home. Ah, warm car warm car warm car.

Sunday I woke to rain, and when one is under the covers and indoors, grey rainy wet days are cosy and wonderful. Alack, I had to get up for church, and was rather cross, but at least it was chilly enough that I could wear my little black and grey double-buttoned schoolmistress dress, and people left quickly, and at home again there was magnificent chili for dinner, the first of the season, and then I ran off to finally watch Dollhouse with Sarah and Hannah at their house, and there was much conversation, merry and thinky and both, and I do so like people (and having Sarah back). Also Mr Joss Whedon is rather a meany-pants, but I expect you knew that. (Also JAMIE BAMBER IN HIS REAL ACCENT IS SO GORGEOUS AND WIBBLE-INDUCING AND ALSO CONFUSING. WHY DID YOU HIDE THIS BEAUTIFUL ACCENT FROM ME FOR SO MANY SEASONS OF BSG, MR BAMBER? WHY? THIS IS CRIMINAL. And, oh yes, there was also Alexis Denisof with his real accent, which is, alas, American, but his voice is still quite splendid and I am afraid that Sarah and Hannah and I could not possibly be prevailed upon to tell you a word of what he said in his little speech, as we simpered like very silly girls all the way through it.) 

Today, there was leftover chili and rain and coffee and a little autumn-coloured cat in the morning, and a library run in my new favourite purple sweater and my elegant pashmina scarf flowing around me in the brisk belligerent wind, and I am really quite enjoying it all. Except for these silly advertisements all over my LJ and being reduced to fifteen usericons. Pah!

Reading Robert K. Massie's 900+ page Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War (which totally has an Oxford comma: win!), which is omghuge and terrifying and daunting, and this is me we're talking about. I eat giant books for afternoon tea. BUT ARGH SO HUGE and so very full of exactly the information I need. And it's really interesting and everything, and I love Massie -- he wrote Nicholas and Alexandra, which I have read three times. But it is MADE OF HUGENESS and so much politics and argh. I am quite busy just trying to keep everything straight. However, I am incredibly thrilled to have found exactly the sort of book I needed, although I am a little bitter at the library, and publishing in general, because while the World War II section takes up an entire bookcase, World War I gets a little less than two shelves. And far too much of the WWI literature is centred on America's role in the war, which... come on, we were in it for eleven months. The rest of the world fought for four years.

Also, Germany and Britain were on pretty tense terms for decades before the war. And Austria-Hungary was allied with Germany. And everybody was preparing for war, for when it inevitably broke out. So. Having some thinky thoughts, storywise; namely that Germany or Austria-Hungary or both are looking into how they could use vampires; maybe they get an ambitious vampire who wants them to do something for him, and they bargain with him for, like, vampire soldiers or something, I don't know. (That sounds incredibly lame now that I've typed it out.) Or they're trying to work out how to control the vampires. Plus, Austria-Hungary was in control of Transylvania until the end of the war, and I have to wonder -- sure, vampires are real in my storyworld, but Transylvania and Romania in general are so tied into the vampire mythos that maybe in this world there's something to it -- larger population, concentration of magic, something? 

And all of this is causing unrest in the vampire community, blah blah we've heard all of this already, so this is in part what Evangeline is supposed to prevent? How does that tie into the vampires trying to Tam-Linify Mr Caruthers at the end? And while she has to succeed at some level for the story not to be completely depressing and pointless, seeing as I can't escape the sequel that takes place during the war, there still needs to be tension and... stuff. I become increasingly eloquent as the night wears on, as you see.

Asdojhghg. That's enough of that. I need to actually write a few paragraphs before bed.

Of all the things I thought research might accomplish, forcing me to write a sequel to the ever-present Novel that isn't even half-finished yet was not really something that crossed my mind.

Ah well, I'm a young writer yet. Eventually I'll learn there are Things To Watch Out For.

So: I've been reading as much about the Edwardians and the Great War as I can manage to find in the house -- I'll start to go spare if I can't pay off my library fines before much longer -- and the deeper I go, the more the blasted sequel talks to me. Okay, so "in the house" means "my siblings' history books" and "the internet", because for some reason I don't seem to have anything much on the First World War myself. Or the Edwardian era. A brief glance through the Book Closet brings me... uh... well, Barbara Hambly's duo of awesome and political-situation-foreshadowing Edwardian vampire novels (starring James Asher, motorbiking philologist ex-spy professor! and Lydia, his doctor wife of much win), and... Nicholas and Alexandra, okay, and the Emily of New Moon trilogy (Emily's diary entries are always dated 19--, which leads me to a bit of private fanon in which Emily's Quest ends just before the war begins, and there's all this stuff about Dean Priest in, like, Cairo or Japan or somewhere doing espionage, I don't know), and Peter Pan, a couple of my Ibbotsons -- A Countess Below Stairs is, rather plot-pointedly, right after both the Great War and the Russian Revolution, and A Company of Swans is London and the Amazon in, oh hey, 1912! -- um, is that it? Seriously? Argh.

Novels are excellent for research, too, especially novels written either during the era, or afterwards by people who were alive then -- one reason I love Eva Ibbotson's historicals so much: she has this really fresh perspective on the World Wars and writes about them so naturally, because she was there, and she sees them from both an English and an Austrian perspective, which is also neat -- because that gives you a better idea of how and what people were thinking and reacting to everything around them, instead of being told by a history book what was on everyone's minds. History books are well-meaning, and immensely live-in-able and helpful in most areas, but understanding how people thought and felt and reacted... you need to be in there. I'd like to write a historical novel that feels more like Eva Ibbotson's, in which she's just writing about what happened in her childhood, knowledge that comes naturally to her, so she's not shoehorning in Historical Perspectives or This Event or painstakingly describing everything you might not be quite familiar with (hint: people pick up on stuff fast, writers). I want to understand what it was like to wear those clothes and eat that food and read those newspapers. And then I can put in the vampires...

Anyway, I'm just reading a pretty basic World Wars history book -- I don't want to say textbook, cos the curriculumn my mother used for me and is now teaching my siblings with doesn't tend to hurl textbooks at you unless it's maths and there's nothing else for it. It's a book about history, and it's got a lot of pictures and things, but it's really well-done and readable and interesting. I mean, readable until something hits you straight in the stomach and you kind of have to put the book down for a while. Today I read about the Christmas Truce of 1914, and I kept thinking, blimey, these men didn't even want to be killing each other. Ugh. Screw this war.

Which is probably what Mr Caruthers would be saying, honestly, only with some rather choicer words learnt on the streets of London... Which brings me back to the bleeding sequel for a novel that's only three-quarters plotted and doesn't even have a real name yet, but here I am, thinking about Briony growing up in the war and bobbing her hair, and Camilla as a battlefield nurse, and how Mr Caruthers would be a staunch conscientious objector, but as the war got more and more desperate and the government got more and more pushy, he'd get dragged into espionage or something, given his Special Areas of Knowledge, and some other Exciting Novelly Stuff I should talk about soon. (I bet if I were a professional novelist I'd have a Do Not Talk About Your Blasted Novel So Much On Your LiveJournal Clause, because there are noooo secrets here, are there? Only I need someone to bounce all of this off. Actually, there is one secret. Just a little one. And I don't want to tell you about it because it's just a little weird brainquirk that is much, much more powerful in inference and in context.) And how Evangeline's Special Skills might get her pulled into the War, and how much things would be different with the addition of vampires and magic...

I was just trying to understand the political situation before the war, you know? Curses.

My oh my, the hour is fast approaching! Today has mostly been a whirlwind of packing and cleaning and music organising, with breaks in between to re-dye the fading purple streaks in my hair (and add some pink highlights), fetch nibbles for the road, read Howl's Moving Castle, and snuggle the cats I won't see for two weeks. (Two weeks with no cats? What kind of a holiday is this?) Suitcases have left my bedroom, I managed to find places for everything at last, and can now actually think because there isn't a great awful mound of stuff everywhere. Bookbag weighs rather a lot and looks like this. Er... yes. There are three more books in my computer bag, and one more -- the one I'm reading now -- in my satchel. And then there was this. ^-^

Two spots of good news -- firstly, apparently there was some nasty faux pas with the rental car we're driving from Philadelphia to Cape Breton in (we don't trust our rickety old van for that long, so we'll pick up my aunt in the Philly area and then go get the rental), and they were giving us a smaller one than we'd requested and paid for, but after my parents complained, they relented and gave us a larger vehicle than we'd requested, with no extra cost. So, uh, we're driving to Canada in a twelve-passenger van. There will be seven of us and quite a lot of gear and luggage, and I am highly relieved, because Dad was starting to tell me highly ridiculous things such as "pack your books in your suitcase". (I was prepared to sit on my bookbag rather than go on holiday without them.)

Secondly, about a week ago I won an auction for (or rather, was the only bidder on) a lovely Patty Griffin poster, which arrived today. It's small, but not too small (eighteen inches tall), and so pretty, and was only seven dollars, including shipping. It certainly lends an air to my bedroom; how very marvellous! In that musical vein, used grandmother's birthday money to buy myself Linford Detweiler's other two solo piano albums for the trip, as I have wanted them for two years now. His song titles are so gorgeous and evocative. "We Dream an Ocean in Ohio", "Emma Grace Takes Off Her Glasses", "New Thrift Store Dress". ♥

Well, ought to be loading things, making certain my books are with me, and plugging the laptop into the converter for the cigarette lighter. Eep! There's a lovely cool misty rain outside, making everything alive and verdant, and a black cat curled up at the foot of my bed, and oh dear my bags are all so heavy...

Today acquired the first bathing suit that I have owned and not disliked in many a year, just in time for July's holiday in Nova Scotia. (Good heavens, that's... really coming up now, isn't it? Need to collect a few more books. Mum got me a copy of Thomas Wharton's Salamander from PaperBackSwap, and it's coming soon; I am so happy. Salamander is one of those books that changed me, and the way I look at books and story, and when I consciously realised how much I love books as objects. It is also one of the strangest books I have ever read, and I wasn't even certain if I liked it at first, only I kept re-reading it and realising I was in love.) Anyway, it is polka-dotted and old-fashioned and not in the least dowdy or overly trendy. Also, new Converse high tops at long last! For fifteen dollars! And, er, undergarmenty things. Very pleasant to have. Also, chocolate. Must go back to it and my book immediately.

But actually, this is mostly to subtlely and casually say, oh look, there is stuff and you should look at it. Because firstly, I posted an Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet discography (complete with fabulous new live EP) over at musicyardsale, and secondly, wrote deeply strange and probably vastly pretentious Dean Priest-centric Emily of New Moon fic which plays with time and alternate universes. A sort of riff on/deconstruction of the Five Things meme of fic writing, I suppose, especially as it originally started out as one and then turned into a different scenario altogether. (Potential subtitle: A Thousand Things That Never Happened To Dean Priest, Or, A Thousand Things That Did?) There's also a broody-piano-and-cello-music mix in there, which happened entirely by accident. In fact, I am still trying to remember how it happened. Er...

Mmmm, cosy bedspread is cosy. And Impressive. Also, as bedspreads go, it is extremely friendly towards computer mice. This is an important criterion for me, you know.

Life has been going in fits and starts, but today was a good day. Still working on Doing More Things, and college and jobs and things, which is just barely short of overwhelming and terrifying, of course, but today I started on Battlestar Galactica, and it is wonderful (also younger Paul Ballard with a slightly odd haircut and being all happy and... why did he have a lollipop during the card game? is that, like, reverse hardcore? "I AM A SOLDIER I AM SO HARDCORE I PREFER LOLLIPOPS TO VODKA TOP THAT") and I am really looking forward to watching more. Naturally I only watch shows after they are finished, but at least this one finished on its own terms, apparently, rather than being cancelled. I love that this future still looks like a real world; you have dirt and grime and everyone isn't wearing, like, sparkly jumpsuits or whatever, and the cities look like real lived-in cities (mannnn, I loved that one view of the marketplace, and Six had this made of win purple coat and then she CASUALLY KILLED A BABY AUGH NIGHTMARE FUEL) and I discovered anew what a hold science fiction has got on my psyche when I realised suddenly during a battle scene that I had forgotten our military does not have battles in space. With space ships. It looked so real and natural! The camera work is also really pleasing; Dad loathes and despises hand-held cameras with all of his being, but I really love them when their format has something to add in terms of viewpoint and atmosphere, which they did here; and the minimal use of music was also excellently done.

This evening there was a street fair down the block from our house -- one of the advantages of living downtown. Frequently local events are mostly dull, but not long after I arrived, a local swing quartet came up to play. (And by "quartet", I mean "trio" -- "the double bass is the fourth member!"; I suppose because quartet sounds much more awesome?) Two acoustic guitars and a double bass, which is one of my favourite instruments in the world, and I danced, and it was marvellous. I am always so very happy when I am dancing; and it was a lovely afternoon, warm and sunny and full of little breezes, and there were birds flying overhead and trees and pavement and oh yes swing music, which is incredibly fun to dance to, although I have absolutely no formal training and especially not in swing (though I would very much like to take lessons). I so need more swing music in my life. The bloke on lead guitar had on pinstriped trousers and a nice pinstriped shirt and a fedora; this pleased me immensely.

And now to wrench my sleeping schedule back towards something a little more comfortable; I have been sleeping very badly lately and it is making all sorts of things difficult. And there's work tomorrow, hurrah -- and, I think, a paycheck, which is Good In My Sight.

Oh! And before I forget, Cabinet of Wonders has been updated, with a review of Eva Ibbotson's novel A Countess Below Stairs, and the book art of Su Blackwell. Check it out! Because you love me! :/

Assorted excerpts from my week-and-a-half with lady_moriel.


- At her friend Calli's house, we watched and sporked Twilight, then cleansed our palates with Iron Man (if Tony Stark, the Doctor, and Topher from Dollhouse were ever in the same room, things would blow up -- a lot), and watching Calli play Portal, which is made of win, and then we watched the first episode of Chuck, and by the time Kyra and I got home it was one in the morning. Heh. Luckily, Calli lent us the first season of Chuck on DVD, and we ended up watching through the entire season in a week, much to Kyra's delight as she has been trying to get me to watch it for an age. Nearly every night we'd sit about watching Chuck and doing other things like organising stuff or computering or I don't even remember, but it was fantastic, and Chuck is made of win.

- There was one day when we discovered that we had somehow accidentally colour-coordinated our clothing. I had a ruffled ribbony teal apron-blouse and black skinny jeans tucked into Chinese silk-print boots and a choker with a lock; she had a teal-and-dark-blue puff-sleeved flowered blouse and an ankle-length blue tie-dyed skirt from England and Converses and a teal ribbon round her neck with a key on it. It was kind of fabulous. Also, yes, we are marvellous dressers, indeed we are.

- I've mentioned that we did a lot of shopping, but on the way back from a shopping trip at the big Anchorage mall we wandered around the city a bit and went down dripping alleyways and I wrote T.S. Eliot graffiti on the walls with a sharpie. And we drove around blaring Metric. It was brilliant.

- We discussed at length the uses and conveniences of a sword cane (Kyra has one) and if Mr Caruthers possesses one what it might look like. I was practicing with her sword cane, which has a twist-off top, trying to see how quickly I could get the sword bit out and stab someone with it, and finding it a little over-complicated to have to twist the top off because that would signal to my opponent and distract me for a valuable couple of seconds; with a lot of whirling and stabbing I managed to reduce movement to two twists, but it was still too cumbersome. Then Kyra's mother walked in (Kyra was... somewhere else. bathroom? shower? food?), asked bemusedly about the thumping noises, and I told her that I was practicing with the sword cane but it still took too long to get the sword out and I'd probably get killed in the time that lost. "Um... it's research. Yes." She shook her head and laughed at me. "You are exactly like Kyra." 

I have: downloaded Firefox, iTunes, Picasa, Music Rescue, Last.fm, Gtalk, WinRAR, and a something-or-other that I needed to play .avi files; installed Roller Coaster Tycoon, ArcSoft PhotoStudio, Microsoft Works, and Flash; recovered all of my files from the half-dead computer; extracted everything from my iPod; and changed numerous settings so that I don't have to work around Vista quite so much. (Vista is really pretty, though, whatever else it may be. I find myself very much enjoying the appearances of windows, and oh my goodness, my screen is glossy and everything looks so gorgeous on it!)

I have also, after transferring the entire contents of the iPod to this hard drive through Music Rescue (which is fabulous; it saved all of my playcounts and imported my playlists and everything) -- anyway, after that, I went through the library album by album and changed, replaced, or acquired covers for about ninety-seven percent of the files. (Okay, iTunes found about two thirds automatically, but there were quite a lot that it didn't, so I had to Google those. And half the time when it hadn't found art it was because the song had no album tags, so I had to find all of the albums...) Nearly all of the yet-coverless songs are live bootlegs and rarities, which don't have official covers, although I plan to make some. Later. In the process I deleted at least a hundred songs; I wasn't counting and didn't think to look in the Recycle Bin till after I'd emptied it. So many duplicates from mixes and things! So much nonsense I can't remember getting and don't know why I've kept! So much nonsense I've loathed for ages but have never gotten round to deleting somehow!

I was so wrapped up in this -- it was sort of tedious, but also sort of... entertaining? in a strange way? -- that I forgot to eat lunch, although mostly that was because time kept going away when I wasn't paying attention. "What do you mean, it's four already? Oh... dear..." I also completely neglected to read more than the first three chapters of the brand new Dresden Files novel which came out yesterday and which I snatched up the moment I got into work yesterday evening. (Working at a bookstore is so useful!) I'm beginning to rectify that. My neck and lower back are ridiculously sore. I should shut the lid of sweet Yvaine and perhaps shut her down so that I may not be tempted by any more projects (I have my photo programmes back! I can make album covers! OH LOOK WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ON A RAINY DAY NOW?).

My computer ought to be here tomorrow afternoon! Oh dear, I'm beginning to get giddy. (Beginning? All right, I'm beginning to get excessively giddy. There is definitely literal, physical flailing going on.) I am daydreaming about it entirely too much -- when I am trying to sleep, I usually run over bits of stories in my head, and the same scenes often loop like films until I find I'm getting them right, or I find I'm wearing them a little too thin, but the last several nights, Evy's philosophical conversations with her vampire and Briony confronting Mr Caruthers in a very Briony-like manner and the bit with the motorbike and the ceilidh at the pub: these have given way to endless panoramas of typing, and sorting my music library, and playing Roller Coaster Tycoon, and just generally setting the computer to rights and making my mark on it. I run over what I need to download, and install, and wonder what my first desktop picture ought to be, and whether I should run out to the library and borrow a film I've been wanting to see for a while, or if I should be sensible and watch The Namesake or Pan's Labyrinth instead, two very favourite films which I recieved for Christmas and haven't watched yet.

I have also, with the help of UPS's package tracking system, visualised the journey my computer is travelling to me with MapQuest, which also told me approximately how many miles and hours away it was (only four, in the beginning!). Seeing the path, which is nearly straight, as highways go, was very reassuring. And then I've been shopping around for a laptop bag (more on that later; not having the best of luck thus far), and deciding about criteria for external speakers, and wondering if there's anything else I've absolutely got to purchase (good heavens, I hope not!), and my desk is cleared off and made ready... (And I've missed typing by candleabra-light!) 

Things I want to do when the new computer arrives:

• Completely overhaul my music library, which is a shambles, really. Songbird scrambled all of my album art, which is vexing, to be sure, but there are more complicated things to fix -- songs that need to be retagged, genres to go through and decide upon, duplicates to be deleted, live tracks and rarities that need to be consolidated somehow to calm the disorder, various songs I don't even like that ought to be deleted... When one's music library is spread over three separate computers, there tends to be a lot of muddle.
• And then, there will be mixes. I have so many just a few songs and re-orderings away from being ready!
• Completely renovate my LJ tags and retag old entries and... Wow. Yes. This will be an epic task.
• Thrash out my not-Nano-anymore again. I haven't talked about it much, but I think about it constantly, and play with it, and look in its corners for things I might have missed. (The Ian and Tuesday story, which sometimes goes by Tuesday Skyline, is also frequently present in my mind, though I haven't mentioned it in an age -- just to reassure those of you who were fond of it.) 
• Catch up on some television. And I want to watch Battlestar Galactica.
• Write more essay-like somethings-or-other, to do battle with some of the thoughts and concepts that have been trapped inside of my head of late.
• Write more book reviews. I have been reading so many good books lately, it is positively uncanny! 
• WRITE. WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE. I could do this with a notebook and pen, it is true (I have a lovely new composition book with polka dots and owls!), but for anything long, anything that's a story, I write better on a computer, because it's so much more orderly, and I become less confused. And I type faster than I write, and I compose faster than I do either of those things, and occasionally I lose sight of what I meant to say in the middle of trying to say it, which is very displeasing.
• Comment on people's LJs more often! 
• Play a lot of Roller Coaster Tycoon. Possibly acquire The Sims.

I mean, clearly, few of these are projects that are likely to be finished in the near future, and some of them are more disciplines than anything else, but... I'm really looking forward to having things more orderly, more consolidated. 

ALSO MY LAPTOP IS SUPPOSED TO BE HERE TOMORROW.  (Other thing on the list of things to do: post about important things I have neglected to post about, such as Dollhouse, where I am going this summer, my general emotional state, my job, and the many fantastic books I have recently read. You may hold me to these things -- with violence, if need be.)

You guys, I have been reading frenetically over the last several weeks. It is delicious, although occasionally disconcerting -- there were a couple of days when I was so locked into a pair of books that I could not drag myself away from them, and so did hardly anything but read. The catalyst, I think, is suddenly (and at last) having so many new books to read. Library trips have mostly been bringing back old favourites of late, or books I've read once or twice in the years since we've moved here, and the book-lover's soul does get a little lonely after a long time of this. But now I've a job in a bookstore, and I can borrow whatever I please! It is delicious. Also I have been buying far more books than usual. Eep. (But my bookshelf needs Eva Ibbotson on it! And Un Lun Dun! And...) Not only because of work, but because of serendipitous recent happenings that seem to be shoving books into my lap. There was the unintended trip to Rosie's Book Shoppe, the only used bookstore in town, during which I found Those Who Hunt the Night, one of the few vampire novels I have read and loved, and discovered that it has a sequel! which was also on the shelf! and together they were only five dollars. La la la... And then Ollie's, after getting my photo ID, and its stacks of discounted books, half of which are silly Christian-fiction nonsense (nearly every book I've ever read that dealt with Christianity in a meaningful way has never seen the light of a Christian bookstore), but I found and bought three wonderful books, though I've read them all before and haven't needed to re-read them yet.

My manager finds my frantic reading habits amusing, I think; he still seems surprised when I come back with my loans a few days after checking them out, and swap them for new ones. Of course I've been roaring through my loans especially quickly the last month, because I finally started reading Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series, and when I get on a series, I really get on it. And I was actually surprised at how much I've been loving this one. The characters are fantastic and I adore them all, and while Mr Butcher's prose isn't always the most well-crafted, it fits Harry Dresden's voice in a way a more talented wordsmith might not be able to match. And the ideas and imagination and the plots are wonderful, which makes up for mechanical shortfalls. Have I mentioned that I LOVE EVERYONE IN IT? LIKE CRAZY? And aslksdghg, the Carpenters are pretty much my favourite people EVER. And THOMAS. And Murphy, and HARRY HIMSELF who is so adorable and ridiculous and has the worst life ever. (If you are named Harry and a wizard, your life will be awful. Trufax. Also if you are a private investigator specialising in supernatural shenanigans, and you wear a leather duster, your life will be awful and your love-life will be complicated beyond belief. Here an imaginary Ender Wiggin interjects, "Wait until you wipe out an entire race." And my Ten action figure scowls at him and says darkly, "Wait until you destroy YOUR OWN PLANET and EVERY OTHER MEMBER OF YOUR SPECIES WITH I IT." And then he sits back on the windowsill and looks smug, as though he's pleased about winning this argument, until it dawns on him, and he goes to emo on the candelabra, while miniature Martha facepalms from the lamp.) 

And I just finished the last book this afternoon and feel kind of adrift. There are more coming out, but they're not out yet, and I miss everyone already! 

The other books that I found particularly difficult to come out of were, as previously mentioned, Those Who Hunt the Night and then its sequel, by Barbara Hambly: Those Who Hunt the Night is a vampire novel set in England, circa 1907, and the protagonist, James Asher, is a philologist and folklore expert and professor who also used to be a spy (and he has a motorbike), and his philological observations of vampires make my linguophile self twirl in sheer delight, because that is exactly how I would react. I love the book because it's excellently written, and a compelling story -- someone is murdering vampires, why?, and Asher is pretty much blackmailed (via threats to his wife, Lydia, who is also one of the best characters in the novel) into investigating by vampire Don Simon Ysidro -- and it also examines the nature of vampires and vampirism. Hambly's vampires are neither demonised nor apologised for, which gives both the characters and the reader a lot to think about. They're both sympathetic and not sympathetic at all at the same time -- and fascinating.

The sequel is Traveling With the Dead, in which Hambly nearly but not quite steals my idea (except it was really Kyra's, I think), about vampires and foreign governments and the years leading to the Great War. While the first book is mostly James', the second primarily belongs to Lydia (though it centres on James and what he is doing, the journey is Lydia's), and we discover that she is even more made of awesome than previously suspected. I love that she's a strong, opinionated woman, a female doctor and theoretical scientist in an era in which this was rare and controversial, but she's allowed to love pretty clothes, and be vain about her spectacles, which she will not wear if anyone is likely to see her. And she's brave and funny and clever and I love her a lot. I think I love the second book even more than the first, because it takes everything we learnt the first time and deepens it, examines it, develops it a little further.

I must warn you, however, that if you pick these books up, especially at a used bookstore, do not be deterred by the horrible pulpy covers and the deeply misleading sensationalistic back-cover blurbs. (Huh. For some reason the blurb for Traveling With the Dead makes a big deal about James going on the Orient Express, which, sure, he did, for a tiny part of a chapter, and that was in flashback, and the Orient-Express-ness was not even remotely important or much emphasised. Also it makes Ysidro out to be the villain of the piece, which... he really, really isn't.) 
Today it was so warm that I spent half the day outside -- I spread a quilt on the lawn and made a picnic of my lunch (roast chicken), and stayed for several hours more finishing Small Favor, the last Dresden Files book, and sometimes just lying on my back or on my stomach, marvelling in how the sunlight and warmth felt almost tangible. Later, I went to the playground with Mum and the siblings, and pushed Leandra on the swings and tried to spin on the merry-go-round with Heidi, which didn't work out so well. Mostly I read Neil Gaiman short stories and watched people in between. And I am revelling in dresses! Oh summer dresses, I missed you most of all! 

In the evening, I shut myself in the book closet with an old candle and an old mix I made for Kyra last year, and wrote poetry and made hand-shadows against the weird flickering light.