Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 336

A quick note about the next couple of weeks

I just wanted to let you all know that I may be out of touch with the internet for a week or two, starting sometime next week. I will no doubt go not only into internet-withdrawal, but into blog-withdrawal! But on the other hand, I will probably be getting an awful lot of writing done, which would be a good thing.

I bet there’s a way to set up WordPress to post stuff on a pre-set schedule, but I don’t know how, I don’t write posts that far ahead of time anyway, and I can’t access comments from home regardless.

So if I seem to vanish, sorry, but it’s not unexpected, it won’t mean anything too dramatic is going on, and I’ll be back in ten days or two weeks or something on that general scale.

Recent Reading: BEAUTY QUEENS by Libba Bray

So, I’ve had more time to read recently than I expected, so I finally had a chance to try a book I’ve been dying to pick up since reading its opening prologue: BEAUTY QUEENS by Libba Bray.

Here’s the opening paragraph from the prologue:

A Word From Your Sponsor

This book begins with a plane crash. We do not want you to worry about this. According to the US Department of Unnecessary Statistics, your chances of dying in a plane crash are one in half a million. Whereas your chances of losing your bathing suit bottoms in a strong tide are two to one. So, all in all, it’s safer to fly than to go to the beach. As we said, this book begins with a plane crash. But there are survivors. You see? Already it’s a happy tale. They are all beauty queen contestants. You do not need to know their names here. But you will get to know them. They are all such nice girls. Yes, they are nice, happy, shining, patriotic girls who happen to have interest in baton twirling, sign language, AIDS prevention in the animal population, the ancient preparation of poppadum, feminine firearms, interpretive dance, and sequins. Such a happy story. And shiny, too.

You see? Who could resist a beginning like that?

Okay, I liked BEAUTY QUEENS a lot. But despite that beginning, which implies certain things about the story, it was not quite what I was expecting. See, I was expecting a story. BEAUTY QUEENS is so very much a satire that the “story” aspects kind of get reduced to serve the ends of the satire. Which is fine, but as I say, it took me a bit by surprise.

Part of the appeal of this book is its sheer ridiculousness. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book which was so deliberately preposterous on the surface and so serious about acerbic social commentary underneath.

In BEAUTY QUEENS, we have not only the beauty queen contestants, but pirates – oh, I mean actors from a TV reality show dressed up as pirates. And secret installations built by evil corporations, manned by secret agents right out of a James Bond movie (except more ridiculous). Tanks full of piranhas to lower people into! Crazy dictators! Totem poles! Exploding skin cream! Giant snakes! Mystical powers! A girl who walks around for the whole book with half a serving tray stuck out of her skull because of the plane crash. But don’t worry, she’s fine!

And all of this is thrown madly together with writing that is good, but also deliberately silly.

Here, for example, is a passage that made me laugh:

The agent crept back to the catamaran stashed behind the rocks and paddled through the rough surf to the far side of the island. As he walked onto the beach, a sudden hiss-growl came from the right. A nearly extinct bred of giant snake particular to the island leapt onto the sand, blocking his path. It puffed out its Elizabethan ruff of colorful neck webbing in warning, and with a terrifying hiss-screech, it lunged.

.

In this book, we not infrequently have immense snakes lunge, leap, roar, bite people in two, swallow girls whole in an instant, etc. I’m sure many, many other details were equally ridiculous, but for me, the giant snakes were practically the apex of ridiculousness. It is, of course, not possible that Libba Bray actually thinks giant snakes could act like this. The silliness has a certain charm, and it allows the reader to enjoy the pointedly comedic qualities of the satire, but it is not a quality which lends itself to getting lost in a story. You can’t believe in it for a minute.

I want to emphasize that the writing *is* good. Listen to this – this is right after the snake swallowed the girl:

“Oh my God. I thought you were a total goner, man. But you were all, ‘Feel my fists of fury, Amphibian Bitch,’ and I was all, ‘Let’s settle this, X-Men-style,’ and you were all, ‘Kayaaaaa spear time!’ and oh my God, that was flippin’ amazing. Wasn’t that amazing? I haven’t felt so good since I punched Dennis Anastasias during sixth grade recess when he called me thunder thighs ‘cause, I’m sorry, that little punk had it coming.” Laughing maniacally, Jennifer combed her hands through her snake-slimed, muddy hair and looked up at the doily of sky far above, and even though she had just nearly met her demise with a gigantic snake on a deserted island far from home, somehow this moment was glorious.

Isn’t that delightful? The whole thing is so silly it didn’t even bother me to have a character call a snake an amphibian. I also never worried for a second about the girl who got swallowed by the snake. Partly this is because comic book rules pretty much apply. Or you could say, Roger Rabbit rules apply. There’s likely to be a giant snake or quicksand or a tankful of piranhas wherever you turn, but it’s not like anybody’s actually going to get swallowed whole or drown or get nibbled to death.

Beyond that, worrying about the characters? Not even relevant, because they are not actually characters so much as Satiric Poses. We have The Token Black Girl and The Other Brown Girl, The Wild Girl and The Freethinker, The Lesbian and The Transsexual and so on and so forth. Everyone is there to play a role, not to be taken seriously as a person, which is kind of ironic in a way since their character arcs all start with Being Victimized By A Society That Expects Girls To Be Pretty And Vacuous and move through gaining confidence and deciding that they’re allowed to be real people, even if their personal goals don’t involve Normal Girl Roles. It’s not that Bray isn’t skewering real aspects of modern society. It’s that, when you make your satire THIS pointed, you’re not really telling a story anymore.

So . . . I liked this book a lot. I liked the writing and the jokes and the pointed commentary and perhaps most of all the Charles Dickens puns, which I didn’t see coming at all – that was really funny. I liked the characters, such as they were, and the ludicrous plot, and the preposterous snakes. But it wasn’t, after all, the kind of book I’d assign to read next to LORD OF THE FLIES. It might be one to assign in a unit on satire. I might well read it again eventually, and sure, I’d recommend it to readers – in fact, I do, if it sounds like something you’d enjoy – but it will never be a book I think of when I’m looking for a great *story.*

If you’ve read this one, I’m really curious: what did you think?

When less plot = more play

This is a very long but very readable post by Ada Palmer at tor.com, comparing “Loves Labor Lost” with “Pericles, Prince of Tyre.”

Today I will take on the unsurprising thesis that Love’s Labour’s Lost is a better play than Pericles Prince of Tyre. The very fact that thesis does not surprise us is itself important, since it means we all agree a play about royal heroes, alluring princesses, evil kings, loyal nobles, dastardly assassins, incest, famine, shipwreck, infanticide, pirates, slavery, prostitution, and divine intervention is less exciting than one about some people flirting for two hours to no particular end.

The simple conclusion that it’s a bad idea to pack too much plot into a 20,000 word story (on the short end for a modern novella), but by digging deeper I hope we can look, both at plot, and at the many things which aren’t plot that make up the length of a play or story, and how those other components can make a giant epic spanning five kingdoms and two decades less gripping than Love’s Labour’s Lost, which I choose for comparison because it is not merely a story about nothing, but, in many ways, a story about less than nothing.

And then that is exactly what Palmer does, with a side note that she actually likes “Pericles,” so don’t think this is a post where she slams one play and raves about another, because that’s not what she’s doing.

As it happens, I’ve never seen either play. Now . . . now I kind of want to see “Loves Labor Lost.” Listen to this:

I cannot supply a plot summary [Of LLL] here. There is no plot. In the first loooooong scene, packed with bad Latin, grammar jokes and insult games, the only “plot” is that the “fantastical Spaniard” asks the priest and schoolmaster to help him improvise some kind of show to entertain the princess. That isn’t a plot, it’s killing time by having actors discuss how they’re going to come up with a way to kill more time! There’s even a character who watches silently through the whole thing, serving only as someone others make incomprehensible puns at, so at the end when they comment “Thou hast spoken no word all this while,” he can reply deadpan, “Nor understood none neither, sir.” It’s a hilarious moment (and a great example of how silent observer characters can be hilarious on stage but invisible in text), but, still, nothing happened in that scene! Nothing! In the next scene the four gentlemen come to woo the ladies while dressed up as Russians for no reason! We don’t even get a scene of them coming up with this idea and explaining why, Shakespeare just plunges in knowing we will be absolutely delighted to see the king and lords being teased mercilessly while they fail utterly at passing for ridiculous Russians! (The girls disguise themselves too, just for giggles).

What this reminds me of is Georgette Heyer, because when I was listening to FALSE COLORS, the entire — the entire — first 80 minute cd was taken up by the mother explaining to one of her sons how deeply, deeply in debt she is. And yet this not only made both mother and son into sympathetic characters, it made for riveting listening — and for me, audio is an unforgiving format. If the book is at all boring to read, then if I try to listen to it, it’ll be excruciatingly boring. Any clunky prose or misused words? Glaringly obvious in audio. But Heyer totally pulls off this scene where nothing is really happening.

Anyway, it really is a thoroughly readable and interesting post. You should click through if you have time.

Killing characters

I happened to see a comment, in a review of PURE MAGIC, about how the reader didn’t have to worry about anybody important dying in this book, but probably someone would die in Book III.

Hmm, I said to myself. Actually, it’s true, isn’t it, that the body count was a lot higher in BLACK DOG than in PURE MAGIC. I’m not sure whether it’s really *so* plain that no one is at risk in PURE MAGIC . . . I would hope that the reader entertains some doubts about that from time to time, in fact. But the truth is, I’m not sure whether or not I’m going to kill anybody important in Book III, either.

Of course, I’m not envisioning this as a trilogy, but as a five-book series with short stories in between each pair of novels. So to me, Book III has never felt like the ending. I am practically certain one important character is going to die in the 4th or 5th book. I really don’t know myself whether some of the other characters will die. Maybe, maybe not. That’s the kind of thing that I only know for sure when I get there.

At the moment, I must say, I really don’t *want* to kill anybody. I really like the whole cast! If, as the plot unscrolls, it becomes reasonable not to kill anybody, then I won’t force it.

To me, sometimes it looks an awful lot like an important character dies because the author is determined to kill them, not because the plot leads to or through a necessary death.

I’m not talking here about the GAME OF THRONES kind of thing, where the body count is so very very very high and practically no one is safe. I’m talking about the author deliberately reaching into the plot and stabbing an important secondary protagonist in the back, so to speak, in order to manipulate the reader’s experience. IMO, if you can spot the author’s hand holding the knife, it’s a serious failing.

I stopped reading Stephen King novels because at some point in his career, it became clear that King was deliberately inserting The Nice Character in order to kill her. I say her because The Nice Character seems to be, usually (always?) female and usually (always?) she is someone the other characters particularly want to protect. We saw that in CELL, if I remember correctly, and even more blatantly in DUMA KEY. Once you see the author doing this, you can’t unsee it. Then the death of the character becomes so obviously manipulative it’s almost offensive.

For me . . . and by now everyone’s read THE HUNGER GAMES, right? Because here comes a spoiler:

. . . the death of Prim at the end of MOCKINGJAY also feels blatantly manipulative and seems to oppose the natural shape of the plot. I realize other readers may not feel that way. Opinions about this series are highly variable. But some deaths grow naturally out of the plot and this one did not feel that way to me. It felt like the author reaching in and using Prim to stab Katniss in the back.

To take one obvious counterexample, this is not the case at all with Aral Vorkosigan’s death, which was actually necessary to the shape of the Vorkosigan series. That is what I mean by the death of an important character arising from the plot. It would have felt quite different if Bujold had let, say, Bel Thorne die.

In contrast, it was awfully convenient that Ekaterin’s first husband died. I really didn’t think he was going to; I thought Bujold would do something else, something less obvious, to get him out of the way. Of course that’s not a death to manipulate the reader; it’s a death to clear the way for your protagonists. That doesn’t feel offensive to me, just a bit pat.

Anyway. As I said, I’m almost certain that at least one important character in the Black Dog series is going to die, though probably not for a while. I really don’t know about some of the others. It’s a dangerous universe and the challenges everyone’s going to face in Book III are pretty serious. But I hope that whoever dies, their death will feel like a natural part of the plot rather than something imposed from the outside, as it were.

Can Buzzfeed guess where you live based on your taste in books?

I got this entertaining link via Book Riot.

“Can we guess where you live based on your taste in books?”

Answer, for me: Not even close.

This quiz consists of only a handful of questions: Which of these classics is your favorite, where’s your favorite place to read, which of these contemporary authors do you like best, what type of protagonist do you prefer reading about, what’s your favorite indie bookstore, which of these quotes most speaks to you?

I actually had read almost all of those classics. The question did ask: which is your favorite? Not: Which do you think is the best? Or: Which do you think is the most important literary work? Since I didn’t actually like most of them, Huck Finn was an easy choice for me.

I had not read most of the contemporary titles they picked, and of the ones I had read, I had to go with Ender’s Game. It’s the only SFF title you can select.

There aren’t any Indie bookstores within eighty miles of me, so it would be hard to say I have a “favorite.”

Anyway, I got the Pacific Northwest. This is dead wrong (as you may know, I live in southern Missouri). My take: it is, of course, utterly ludicrous to think you’d be able to set up a six-question quiz on reading tastes that could peg readers to their geographical region. People are just too variable in their reading tastes.

If you’re curious, well, it’s only six questions. Click through and find out whether the quiz works better for you than it did for me!

Textiles, language, and technology

I happened across this interesting post this morning:

…. textiles are technology, more ancient than bronze and as contemporary as nanowires. We hairless apes co-evolved with our apparel. But, to reverse Arthur C Clarke’s adage, any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature. It seems intuitive, obvious – so woven into the fabric of our lives that we take it for granted.

This is a post by Virginia Postrel, who, it says, is “an author, columnist and speaker whose work focuses on the intersection of culture and commerce.” She clearly also thinks about language:

We drag out heirloom metaphors – ‘on tenterhooks’, ‘tow-headed’, ‘frazzled’ – with no idea that we’re talking about fabric and fibres. We repeat threadbare clichés: ‘whole cloth’, ‘hanging by a thread’, ‘dyed in the wool’. We catch airline shuttles, weave through traffic, follow comment threads. We talk of lifespans and spin‑offs and never wonder why drawing out fibres and twirling them into thread looms so large in our language. The story of technology is in fact the story of textiles. From the most ancient times to the present, so too is the story of economic development and global trade. The origins of chemistry lie in the colouring and finishing of cloth. The textile business funded the Italian Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; it left us double-entry bookkeeping and letters of credit, Michelangelo’s David and the Taj Mahal. As much as spices or gold, the quest for fabrics and dyestuffs drew sailors across strange seas. In ways both subtle and obvious, textiles made our world.

All very interesting! Doesn’t that make you think of the Niccolo series by Dorothy Dunnett? I didn’t like that one as much as I liked the Lymond series. Or at least, I liked the high points of the Lymond series much more than the Niccolo series as a whole. But the issues with dyes and alum and so on were worked out in such detail and so believably in the Niccolo series, not to mention, well, the intersection of culture and commerce, I guess.

Whether they were captives in ancient Crete, orphans in the Florentine Ospedale degli Innocenti, widows in South India or country wives in Georgian England, women through the centuries spent their lives spinning, especially after water wheels freed up time previously devoted to grinding grain. Turning fibre into thread was a time-consuming, highly skilled craft, requiring dexterity and care. Even after the spread of the spinning wheel in the Middle Ages, the finest, most consistent yarn, as well as strong warp threads in general, still came from the most ancient of techniques: drop spinning, using a hooked or notched stick with a weight as a flywheel.

The whole article is worth reading if you happen to have time. If you’re a writer, this is also the sort of thing that, if it’s in the back of your mind, is liable to make your worldbuilding feel just that little bit deeper, even if you don’t specifically set out to make spinning or weaving or other textile-related crafts into an important thread in your novel.

Updates —

PURE MAGIC

I think all the issues with doing CreateSpace for PURE MAGIC have been resolved at last. Yesterday I simply could not figure out how to get the minimum price to be something reasonable. It was saying $42, which was plainly insane, but no changes I put in ever made a difference. Finally I emailed the CreateSpace people and found out I had accidentally selected “full color” for the book interior, I guess like it was an art book or something. Switching to black-and-white fixed the issue. Finally!

Now the book has to once again go through their review process. However, that shouldn’t take more than 24 hours. I bet they’re going to offer me another proof copy and I do wonder if the reason the price of the first proof copy was so high because of the full color thing? Because I have heard it shouldn’t be so high. However, I don’t believe I need a second proof copy. I know what needed to be fixed, it’s fixed, it looks like all the pages are in the right place in the online review copy, I’m honestly pretty sure it’s fine the way it is.

So, provided nothing else comes up, I believe I will be able to hit Go and release the paper edition into the wild some time this week, hopefully tomorrow.

THE WHITE ROAD

Moving forward, but it’s a little slower than I would like. It turns out that I have some distracting stuff going on right now that is preventing me from working on it as much as I would like, and also preventing me from falling into it and getting absorbed in working on it. You remember that post about working in the flow that Naomi Novik wrote a little while ago? Yeah, not there at the moment. In a few weeks, life should get less distracting, though. Probably.

I’m departing somewhat from the synopsis I sent my editor, and I can see that in a little while I will probably be departing a LOT from the synopsis, but I’m pretty sure she will not be surprised.

More annoyingly, I feel like I’m overwriting and will need to cut a good bit of the last 100 pages. That could happen, it’s happened before, and it’s such a pain. On the other hand, I’ve been wrong about that feeling before, too, so maybe I’ll wind up deciding the recent work mostly stays in the book.

THE KEEPER OF THE MIST

So, I got the ARCs before I got the galley proofs. I can’t remember if that usually happens, but it seems odd. Anyway, the proofs arrived, and as my editor warned me, the proofreader is the most diligent in the entire world. She marked up all but half a dozen pages. Then my editor went through and did stuff, and so did someone else, so I had three sets of marks to evaluate. This took time, but on the other hand, flow has nothing to do with working on page proofs. I can do that even if I’m distracted and somewhat stressed by other things, and I did, so off the proofs went yesterday.

In general I am inclined to accept the proofreader’s changes, incidentally. Not all the time, but in general. Often I decide that even though I put that dash or semicolon in for a reason, FINE, it can change. Other times I’m like, no, sorry, I know the rule and this is me breaking it on purpose. Stet.

More important are those moments when the proofreader catches a character opening her eyes when she hadn’t closed them in the first place, or pointing out that it’s strange that it’s afternoon when just two pages back it was evening, or whatever. Thank heaven for proofreaders.

I am relieved to note that I quite like MIST. Always a nice feeling.

LIFE

Good heavens, enough with the sauna. Can we please have the humidity drop about thirty percent? And preferably the temperature drop a bit, too? This is awful. And the mosquitoes! Aargh! I’m sure the flycatchers and bats are happy, but the rest of us, not so much.

Rhythm: poetry that sticks with you

So,this is Maureen’s fault, because on Twitter yesterday she tweeted lines from “Sea Fever” by John Masefield. You know the poem even if, like me, you have forgotten the title. It’s this one:

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

I bet if someone feeds you the first line, you would be able to get the second, even without this refresher. The poem is just unforgettable. Maybe you can recite the whole first stanza. Some poems are like that: they stick. The rhythm just carries you along. And you know what I thought was: This ought to be set to music. Then I thought: Shoot, I’m positive someone already HAS set this to music. And I was right! So, as a public service, let me direct you to a couple of YouTube clips you might like.

John Ireland’s version

And here’s a less professional guitar arrangement that I actually prefer. I like the lighter tenor of this voice for this particular poem.

While on the subject, you all are familiar with Loreena McKennitt’s version of “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes, right? Here is a YouTube version of that which is well worth your time. Uh, just in case you are not in fact familiar with this poem, let me just mention that it is a tragedy.

One poem I memorized all the way through when I was in high school was “The Bells” by Edgar Allen Poe. I just loved the sound of it, especially the stanza dealing with the iron bells. I couldn’t recite it now, of course, except for a couple lines here and there. But naturally I’m not alone in loving that one, either. Here’s a YouTube version of it. I imagine this one must have been a bit more difficult to set to music than some.

And Joan Baez’ version of “All in Green Went My Love Riding” by ee cummings, which is probably my favorite ever as far as poems set to music.

Any poems that immediately spring to your mind that would be especially fabulous set to music? Or that particularly stuck in your head from your school days?

Recent Reading: UPROOTED by Naomi Novik

So, UPROOTED.

What this book is: really, really good. Outstanding. Is it being presented as YA? It could be read as YA or adult. Nieshka’s arc is a YA character arc, but this is a complex story with plenty of depth. It’s definitely going to appeal to readers of all ages.

What this book is not: a Beauty and the Beast retelling. Oh, it has echoes of Beauty and the Beast, especially at first. Also, there is a rose. But UPROOTED departs significantly from the fairy tale. It really cannot be called a retelling. Let’s say it’s in the same family as Beauty and the Beast.

What this book is: by Naomi Novik.

What this book is not: even faintly reminiscent of the Temeraire series. You know, when I read TEMERAIRE, I said to myself, “Just look at all these semicolons! Novik’s overdone it. She’s really captured Jane Austen-style language generally, but Austen definitely did not use a zillion semicolons per paragraph like this.” Then I went and opened up some book or other by Austen and you know what? Yes, she did.

What I mean to say is, Naomi Novik honestly did capture Austen-style language in the Temeraire series. And since before UPROOTED, she’d written nothing but that series, it was impossible to tell what her natural writing style might be like. Well, I guess she might switch and switch again, who knows, but UPROOTED is written in a style that reminds me a lot of Robin McKinley. If it had McKinley’s name on the cover, I’d have believed it was hers. It’s a smooth, straightforward writing style that doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s the kind of writing that gets out of the way and lets you fall right into the story. It starts like this:

Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.

What this book is: a dark fairy tale.

What this book is not: a pastoral fantasy, in the sense that Sherwood Smith used the term in her recent post at Book View Café. Oh, there is an enchanted wood. There sure is. And it is certainly very powerful. But it is the most malevolent enchanted wood you can possibly imagine. It is so malignant that anybody who sets foot in its shade and takes a breath of its air is likely to be inextricably corrupted and try to kill everyone. That scene where the village cows get corrupted and turn evil? Yeah, sounds funny, but actually no, it is seriously horrific. I definitely see why some reviewers are setting UPROOTED in the horror category. I wouldn’t go that far, quite, but as far as I’m concerned, despite the otherwise bucolic village setting and the ordinary forest through which it’s safe to ramble, this story is shoved firmly out of the Pastoral Fantasy category by its horror aspects.

What this book is: compulsively readable, with wonderful characterization and wonderful writing.

What this book is not: flawless. I truly appreciate a story with a theme of redemption. There’s almost no other theme that appeals to me more. But the Wood was SO malevolent in this story that I had trouble believing in the ending. I’m curious: if you’ve read this book, what did you think of the ending? In very general terms, please: no actual spoilers.

What I liked best about this book: practically everything. Specifically: the relationship between Nieshka and Kasia. The relationship between Nieshka and The Dragon. The way the relationship between Nieshka and her mother was handled, and the way the relationship between Kasia and her mother was handled. How Kasia grew and, uh, changed through the story. That bit where Nieshka first called down lightning, that was totally awesome.

What I did not think quuuiiite worked: this setting was supposed to be Eastern European-ish, but in fact it was a thoroughly generic fantasy setting (*extremely* well done, but generic). I guess the names were sort of Eastern European-ish, but they did not really strike me that way. Every time Nieshka cooked buckwheat or ate a blini or whatever, I was just a little bit startled. Maybe this was just me, but one writer who I think manages to pull off this kind of setting just a little better is Merrie Haskell. To me, her settings feel just a little more grounded in historical settings.

Also, the Dragon can clearly read minds. Why did nobody ever seem to notice this? Maybe they all just took it for granted that naturally the Dragon could read minds and so nobody ever saw any need to comment?

Rating: Five out of five. Nine and a half out of ten.

Probability that I’ll re-read this: 100%, probably as soon as next year.

Chance that I’ll send a copy to someone just cause I must share the love: I already have. I did that before I had quite finished the book myself.

Chance that I’ll nominate this for awards next year: Very, very likely, and it’s got enough buzz that I think it has a good chance of picking up a lot of nominations.

Chance that I’ll keep an eye out for Naomi Novik’s next book: Are you kidding? Absolutely.

What I want Novik to write next: something SF. I think it would be fun to see what she’d do with a space opera type of story. Or something with a hard-boiled noir tone. It’s fascinating to me to see her write in such madly disparate styles, so it would be neat if she’d try that again.

Mist in the banner

Well, I like that a lot better. A LOT BETTER. I looked at lots of mist, I must say. Like this:

I really liked this, but it turns out that it’s hard to read print against this kind of dramatic background. Too bad!

And this:

More landscape-y. I like the open gate type of image, but I really wanted a more abstract kind of mist.

So, I hope you like the one up there at the top of the post. I do. Maybe eventually I’ll find one (or buy one) with rainbow-colored mist and a dragon, like so:

Except a prettier dragon, and sort of transparent. With feathers . . . wait, am I getting too picky?