Recently Read: Uglies trilogy and Soulless

Posted by Liza at 9:44 pm Tagged with:
Jun 192010

Once again, I’ve been remiss about posting what I’ve read lately, so here’s a start.  In no particular order…

Uglies, Pretties, and Specials, a trilogy by Scott Westerfield.  I devoured these.  Well, I devoured each one individually, though I gave myself at least a week between each one and insisted that I read something else.  You know, to let myself savor them for longer.  :)   They are YA, a dystopic future earth where everyone undergoes surgery on their 16th birthday to become Pretty–that is, to be surgically reformed to be a more attractive and more resilient version of themselves–and then they party and have fun for years.  At some age later in life (not specified), all people undergo another surgery to become “Middle Pretty”, which means they are made to be wiser looking, distinctively older, and at that point they get jobs.  When they are older still, they have a third surgery to become “Old Pretty”, or “Crumbly”.  The main character is Tally, who in the first book is still “ugly” and wants nothing more than to become pretty.  But when her friend runs away from The City to avoid the surgery, secret government officials force Tally to follow her, or else she’ll never become pretty.  And what happens when she realizes she doesn’t want to betray the run-aways?  You should read these.  They’re fun, and I love the questions they ask.  (Incidentally, there is another book in the series that I haven’t read yet, called Extras, which seems to have a different MC.)

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Soulless, by Gail Carriger.  What happens if you take horror, romance, steampunk, Jane Austen’s manners, Oscar Wilde’s satire, threw in urban fantasy, and set it in Victorian London?  You’d get a fun story about a woman (who doesn’t have a soul) who inadvertently kills a vampire in the first chapter, causes trouble for a werewolf in the second chapter, and gets mixed up with a scientist in some later chapter.  In short, you’d get Soulless, which I thought was great fun, easy to read (once I got used to the semi-Victorian language), and promises an exciting sequel.  (Changeless, which is already out, and Blameless will be coming in September.)

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Ok, there are still a whole bunch more.  I’m sure I’ll remember to post about them soon…

Mood: (cheerful) cheerful
Music: Ben playing his drum-thing
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More Vampires!

Posted by Liza at 9:54 pm Tagged with: , ,
May 092010

I’ve continued writing the vampire story I started last month.  I’ve figured out how to make it a short story, I think, though of course I’ve also concluded there’s a much bigger story it fits into.  :-/  But since I never finish anything, I figure I’ll write the short story, make it the best I can, and then move on.  Either to something else, or to the next part of this story.  Whichever.

I’ve been really bad at sitting my Butt In the Chair.  I find good excuses—other things to do in the evening, too tired, home too late—but in aggregate they’re just excuses.  Today I decided I was going to sit down and finish this dranglefarbing story, so I sat down and spent several hours on it.  I decided to step back and look at the big picture.  Who are the characters, what’s important about them, how does it fit together.  Mostly these were things I knew, but I found a few important nuggets, without which I wasn’t going to have a coherent story*.  Of course, I didn’t finish it, but I deleted a scene, wrote a different one, and figured out what comes after that.  Unfortunately, now I don’t know how to get from that scene to the last scene.  :-/  I don’t expect there to be any other scenes in between so… I really need to get that figured out.

And once I’ve finished it, I have to go back and fix the beginning, which is a mishmash of PoVs and ideas because I didn’t know where the story was going yet.

And I want to get all this done by next Sunday.

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* Of course, I still might not have a coherent story. ;)

Mood: (accomplished) accomplished
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Weekend in Tiburon

Posted by Liza at 6:17 pm Tagged with: , ,
May 022010

Ben and I just got back from Tiburon.  It was lovely weather, and though we didn’t plan our activities, everything just fell together nicely.

We were inspired to go up because our neighbor said he was throwing his wife a surprise birthday party at this particular hotel, and if we wanted we could stay one or both nights at a discounted rate. Ben and I looked at each other and said, “hell yeah!”  What a nice excuse to go on a little vacation.

We decided not to push ourselves too hard, so we went up late Friday, missed all the traffic, and took it easy.   Continue reading »

Mood: (happy) happy
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Recently Read (at any point this year): Flesh and Fire, Quatrain, and a manuscript

Posted by Liza at 10:11 pm Tagged with:
Apr 182010

Ok, so I really liked keeping track of the books I was reading last year.  I didn’t read much for the first couple of months of this year, and then even when I did I didn’t get around to mentioning them.  So, here they are.

Flesh and Fire by Laura Anne Gilman ([info]suricattus), Book One of the Vineart War.  I ordered a copy from Amazon as soon as it came out, because I’ve liked her books before and this one sounded different-and-interesting.  And then before it arrived, I went to World Fantasy Con and got a free copy in my book bag.  Which I then had to keep, so I could get her to sign it, because I didn’t have my copy yet. *facepalm*  I started reading it immediately, and enjoyed it immensely, but then got distracted (as I do) and didn’t finish it until this year.  And now I’m sad that I did, because the next book isn’t out yet, and I want to know what happens next.

Continue reading »

Mood: (accomplished) accomplished
Music: Peter Gabriel
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Glorious day by the coast

Posted by Liza at 5:31 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Apr 182010

I mean, uh, it’s horrible and cold and you wouldn’t like it.  Yeah.

Well, none of the tourists believe me, either, and all the attractions (Barbara’s Fish Trap, for example) are very crowded.

The sky is blue, the air is warm, I’m wearing a tank-top.  Ben and I went for a walk at the Point, and I took my fleecy off.  I *never* take my fleecy off while walking up there, it’s too cold.  So this, today, is one of the five beautiful days we get per year.  In a month it’ll be foggy and cold, but for now the flowers are amazing (we counted 30 different types of flower blooming in our backyard), the sun is warm, and it’s just like summer.

We had Ben’s family over for brunch today, and we had all different yummy food.  We decided to make all the food ourselves, not do a potluck, so we picked yummy simple things.  Homefries, a frittata* (gruyere, mushroom, and scallions), braised greens (chard** and kale), a fruit salad (strawberries, mango, orange, and grapefruit), a bean salad, and something Sunset Magazine calls an “apple oven cake”, which I’ve made several times now and is super yummy (butter and brown sugar, apples and a little cinnamon, with an egg/flour/milk mixture to hold it together).  It was all a big hit, but the apple stuff was the biggest hit, and was definitely the easiest to make.  :)   Oh yeah, and mimosas.  Except a bunch of us had orange juice-free mimosas, aka champagne.  Mmm, it was good.

We managed to prepare a lot of stuff last night, and get everything chopped and ready this morning, so we could just compile everything and cook it at the last minute when they were here.  The homefries took longer than we expected, and we were waiting for them to finish before starting everything else, but everything came together perfectly for us to sit down with all of the food ready (except the frittata, which was a little slow, so I guess it was only nearly-perfect).  It was so yummy.  And even though it seemed like a lot of food, everything was finished off except the homefries and bean salad. And the ingredients for a second apple oven cake.  So we’ll have those for breakfast tomorrow!

None of Ben’s family have been over since Ben finished my office, so I straightened it all up (no extra papers or boxes anywhere in sight!) and we showed it off.  It’s so nice and comfortable in there.  Everyone was very impressed with Ben’s handiwork.

Last night Ben and I thought to pull out the two of my mom’s paintings*** that I have, and we discovered that one of them looks wonderful in the room, so we’re going to hang it up.  The other is too dark (lots of black), so I think maybe I’ll trade it in for a different one, because there’s plenty of space for two on my wall.  And it’ll be nice to have Mommy art hanging in my office.  :)

Other than that… I started writing a vampire story the other day.  I don’t do vampires, but I had a title that included vampires, so it had to be about vampires.

Recently I’ve noticed that I have trouble distinguishing between “I must continue working on story x so that I’ll finish it some day” and “I must only work on story x, to the exclusion of all other stories or writing”–the latter of which is incredibly stifling to me.  And then I wonder why I don’t want to write.  So, I’m trying to ease up on myself and write whatever I want… while keeping in mind that I have Story X which I’d like to be working on if I’m so inspired.  In other words, I must write in order to write.  BIC.

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* How do you spell that? Firefox doesn’t like fritata, frittata, or fritatta.  How about frittatta? No, that can’t be it.  Google + wikipedia tell me it’s frittata.

** I’ve discovered I really like braised chard, whereas kale tends to be more tough even when braised.

*** You can see her art at her website, but neither of the two I have are up there so I can’t show them to you specifically.  My mom is so prolific that the website doesn’t even contain a tenth of all of her art. If we included all of her drawings, it might not even be one percent.  So, the likelihood of me having one of those is pretty small.  :-/

† And with a new update, WordPress + LivePress will properly cross-post daggers (†) to LiveJournal, so my footnotes should go more smoothly.  Yay!

Mood: (cheerful) cheerful
Music: chirping birds
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Oooh, it's storming.

Posted by Liza at 12:19 pm
Apr 112010

And the masses of torrential rain have arrived!  wooo!

I was trying to paste in a radar picture from weather underground, but I seem to be having issues with firefox recently. :(   Is it just me, or is the latest firefox update crummy?

So, since my last post (which was what, 2 months ago? ack.), I’ve concluded several things.  First, there’s nothing wrong with my story, as such.  I simply had an important piece of information be revealed too early (on page 2) instead of later (oh, a few chapters later at least).  Changing that simplifies things a lot.  Second, the theme I was using doesn’t work anymore if I move that piece of information.  This is just as well, because the story wasn’t going to work as it was (I was going to beat myself up, not helpful).  Which leads to the third thing, which is that I need a new theme.  I haven’t figured out what it is, and I don’t think I need to have it figured out yet, but without a theme I’m having trouble figuring out which details need to happen and which are extraneous.

Just write.  Make these decisions later.

Yeah, that’s not working so well for me.  :-/  But it’s the weekend, so maybe I can make time for writing actual story, not just writing about the story.

ETA: ha, I got it to upload! I win!

Mood: (cheerful) cheerful
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Things I want or need to do today

Posted by Liza at 1:57 pm Tagged with: , ,
Feb 212010

- Have my Muse show up with characters and a plot
- Sew Ben’s pj pants shut (long story…)
- add feedback comments to a friend’s manuscript
- blog about watching Star Wars
- go for a walk

Mood: unmotivated
Music: Seal
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Going to the Ballet - Coppelia

Posted by Liza at 9:59 am Tagged with: , ,
Feb 142010

My mom and I went to the ballet Friday night.  We saw the Moscow Festival Ballet performing Coppelia.  I haven’t seen many ballets (Nutcracker and Swan Lake, mostly, in various incarnations), and I don’t think I’ve attended any before.

It was great fun.  The main female character got to dance and look pretty, of course, but she also got to be seriously annoyed at the male lead, and stomp around being angry.  Because they don’t talk, everything has to be explained through body language, very exaggerated so that the people in the back can see it, too.  I was impressed by the way that most of them kept smiling throughout the whole performance.  Don’t their faces start hurting?  Do you think they smile like that in their sleep, because their faces have frozen that way?

We were sitting in the third row, which meant that we could see them all very clearly, so it was easy to get lost in the details.  Like, noticing the lines drawn under their eyes so they would be visible from far away.  Or the braces on one woman’s teeth.  And the earring in one guy’s ear.  And dude, those men wear *tight* pants.  So I spent quite a bit more time than was really necessary wondering about underwear.  The women’s costumes were far less distracting.  We were also close enough to readily identify each of the ballerinas and danseurs, and notice when they switched places or did different things.  Like one of Swanhilde’s friends (that was her official description) also played the Doll, and we thought she was very good.

If we’d been sitting further back, it would’ve been easier to watch the ensemble instead of the individual dancers.

The music was canned, which probably shouldn’t be surprising.  But, if the audience clapped for too long, sometimes the next piece of music would start while we were still clapping.  And the ballerinas would have to start dancing, even though we were still clapping.  And then there’s a thing where the lead ballerina spins around in circles on one leg without putting the other down and without stopping, called fouetté en tournant.  It’s a show of skill, the more times you can spin the better you are.  With an orchestra, the orchestra will just keep playing that bit until she is finishes, but with canned music she can only spin as many times as the music allows.  (My mom counted: she spun 30 times.  Apparently to snobs 60 is note-worthy, and some ballerinas have spun as many as 130 times [wow!], though Wikipedia doesn’t say anything about more than 32.)

The story was really thin.  There was a two-page description of the story in the program which almost-kinda made sense, but the ballet itself only followed the description in the vaguest of ways.  My mom liked the third act best, which was the wedding scene, which was all dancing without really trying to tell a story.  I liked the second act, because some of the ballerinas and danseurs were meant to be automata, life-sized wind-up dolls that do a particular thing.  One was a Spanish fan dancer, who was very pretty, another was a medieval soldier with a pike, and there were a few more.  It was fun.

Mood: artistic
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Random thought of the morning...

Posted by Liza at 12:18 pm Tagged with:
Jan 152010

It’s not green to use disposable things.  For example, the paper cup and the plastic spoon I use for my coffee every morning.  Sure.  But plastic stirrers are *also* plastic and disposable and not very green.  I suppose they’re better than a whole plastic spoon, but it’s still bad for the planet.

It doesn’t make me a better person to use a plastic stirrer than a plastic spoon, because I’m still throwing away non-biodegradable trash, even if it is less.

Just sayin’.

Mood: argumentative
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Meh

Posted by Liza at 3:55 pm Tagged with:
Jan 142010

I had something profound to say this morning.  Then I had a meeting to go to before I could even make a note of the thought… and pfft, it’s gone.  *sigh*

What could it have been?  :-/

Mood: (aggravated) aggravated
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