Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 397

When a favorite author doesn’t work for you –

Spotted this review of Rusalka over at bysinginglight this morning.

Yeah, what she said. I read this book, and part of the second, but I just could not engage with the characters. I don’t remember the books in detail, but I remember that sense of helpless passivity. It’s interesting to think about the feeling of detachment and why it works or doesn’t work in a particular book; I hadn’t thought of CJ Cherryh’s style in those terms before.

The other thing about Rusalka that bothered me was the style of magic — if you wish for something, it might happen, so it’s important not to experience even momentary wishes for bad things — it’s a kind of magic that makes the magic user into almost a victim. Cherryh does something like that in other books as well, (The Goblin Mirror) but for whatever reason, that one worked better for me than Rusalka.

Okay, raising a broader question: sometimes you read fifteen books by one author and love all but one, and when that happens to me, sometimes I can tell why and sometimes I can’t. I actually liked Sharon Shinn’s shapeshifter books, but the protagonist of each is so emotionally overwrought that it’s a near thing; that’s one I can put my finger on. In contrast, Martha Wells’ Emilie and the Hollow World just did not sing for me and I really have no idea why not. Even Patricia McKillip has written one or two books I don’t like — Solstice Wood, for example, where I hated the way she changed the world she had previously established in Winter Rose.

How about you all? Can you think of a time when a favorite author fell flat for you, and could you figure out why?

Laura Florand: Chocolate Romances and the Craft of Writing

Okay, so we have in this series:

The Chocolate Thief – light, fun, beautifully written, with a poor-little-rich girl protagonist who is neither clichéd nor annoying, but instead a character you can really root for. Plus an arrogant chocolatier, her perfect foil, who is not really all that arrogant – well, he is, but he is also a wonderfully believable and sympathetic protagonist.

The Chocolate Kiss – not quite as light, because Magalie is vulnerable in a way that is actually kind of heartbreaking. Where Thief is basically a comedy, this one is more serious and genuinely touching – though certainly not without humor. I honestly don’t know which book of this series is my favorite, but Magalie is my favorite of the female protagonists.

The Chocolate Rose – am I slow or what? Because I didn’t catch that this story was going to draw on the Beauty-and-the-Beast fairy tale until about the third time Gabriel Delange thinks of himself as a “beast.” After that the shoe finally dropped: A beast, a beautiful girl, her father who steals the rose from the beast, hello. I don’t want to make too much of this, because the fairy tale just echoes gently through The Chocolate Rose, so don’t pick this story up thinking it’s actually a retelling. It’s not. But the fairy tale does add an extra layer – I’m trying not to say it’s the icing on the cake, but I can’t help it; all the beautiful desserts in the story are getting to me.

Let me just add that The Chocolate Rose also has one of my favorite lines ever, because after Jolie has just peeled and sectioned a zillion grapefruit, we get this: “She was not without kitchen skills, not by any means. But the speed, the intensity, the amount of competing motion she had to dodge, and the sheer repetition of task surpassed anything she had ever done before. Jo hated grapefruit. She hadn’t known that before, but not she hated it with a profound and utter passion. Maybe she should give up cookbook writing, become a microbiologist, and create a fungus that would wipe grapefruit trees of the planet.”

People, I laughed out loud. I honestly did.

I also really enjoyed Jolie – because she’s a writer, see, and also because I personally own like a hundred cookbooks and usually read them straight through, like novels, so I can easily imagine the effort that goes into writing a cookbook with a top chef. I enjoyed watching Gabriel struggle with the concept of “recipes a talented amateur could pull off”. I also definitely appreciated how a chef’s crazy hours would be absolutely perfect for a writer who needs a lot of time to herself. As always with Florand, I loved both Jo and Gabriel.

So each of these three books is a little different from the others, and this is true even though you can very definitely tell they’re all by the same author. They all have beautiful characterization and lovely writing and great description and nice, tight plotting, but to me they also seem to be gaining depth as you move through the series, especially if you add Turning Up The Heat, which incidentally is a perfect little gem of a novella.

So, how about Florand’s most recent story, The Chocolate Touch?

I just finished it. And, seriously, it blew me away. If Magalie is my favorite of Florand’s female protagonists, Dom is definitely my favorite of her male protagonists. And I say that as a reader who really enjoys all of Florand’s protagonists in all her books. I think I love best the most damaged protagonists? And Dom definitely carries the most extreme baggage. He carries it very, very well. He knew the value of strength, that was one thing he knew very well. It was to make himself unassailable. And now he would make her unassailable, too. At last somebody needed his strength.

Wow. I fell so hard for Dom, I can’t even tell you.

Anyway, I bookmarked dozens of pages of The Chocolate Touch because I also thought it would be a good book to take apart a little, if you’re in an analytical mood.

Here’s the beginning:

—–

“She’s back.”

Dom straightened from the enormous block of chocolate he was creating, gave his maitresse de salle, Guillemette, a disgruntled look for having realized he would want to know that, and slipped around to the spot in the glass walls where he could get the best view of the salle below.

—–

What I like about this beginning is the disgruntled look for having realized he would want to know that. That’s a really nice phrase. Just right there, it establishes so much about Dom’s character, plus it instantly sketches the minor secondary character, Guillemette.

Now, Dom. He is pretty fabulous. He tries so hard. His background is so awful, and he is so determined to overcome it. I love, love, love his relationship with his employees. You know, they call him “Dom” and address him as “tu”? His interactions with his employees not only drive the plot but serve perfectly to develop Dom’s character: Someone catcalled. Amand gave a long wolf-whistle. “Oh, shut the hell up,” Dom said. He couldn’t entirely suppress a grin, even though he was flushing.

One disappointment for me in this story – I found Dom’s employees so engaging, and their relationship with Dom so charming, that I would have really enjoyed seeing them actually get the news about Jaime asking Dom to marry her. They must have gone nuts and I didn’t get to watch. Well, the author can’t put in everything, I know. But if I wrote fan fiction, I would totally write that scene. And I want to point out that this means that even very minor secondary characters like Guillemette and Célie and Amand felt like real people to me even though we barely glimpse them on stage, which is quite an accomplishment.

Now, Jaime. Jaime is also a great protagonist, and I say this even though I have a low low low tolerance for the sort of person who devotes herself to Saving The World. That’s because it’s pretty plain that actually that sort of thing is often all about First World posturing: Look at me, I’m a Good Person, I Care, never mind that my Cause is poorly thought out and not actually helping anybody – maybe even hurting people. Yeah, excuse me while I roll my eyes, but I’m the sort of person who cares strictly about results and not about how bright and shiny anybody’s intentions might be.

But! In this book, Florand has given Jaime a backstory that involves truly helping real people deal with real abusive practices. She shows the problem, and (extremely important for me) she also shows the results that Jaime was achieving. And Florand does this without preaching and without spending a lot of time developing the issue. And then Jaime’s backstory makes her perfectly suited for Dom. Really nice, and we’re back to a study of characterization and the importance of backstory for motivation.

You can also reach for The Chocolate Touch to look at description and detail and drawing the scene. Like Dom’s rosebud wall, and La Victoire. And like the Eiffel Tower: “He liked the impossible, fantastical strength of [the Eiffel Tower], the way the metal seemed so massive up close. He liked the fact that it had risen above all the complaints and criticism that surrounded its birth and stamped its power not only over the city but the world. He pulled out the little moleskin journal he always carried with him and stood for a long time sketching the curves and angles of the bolts and metal plates, thinking of designs for the surfaces of his chocolates.”

And I want to point out how description also deepens characterization, because nothing is described in isolation – everything is described in terms of the protagonist’s reaction to it – this Eiffel Tower scene is a perfect example. It’s so important to embed your character in the scene that way. Problems with setting the scene have been so noticeable in the workshop entries I’ve seen at conventions.

Florand also has some stylistic tricks that are worth noticing. Like her use of italics to emphasize a particular phrase when we’re seeing a character’s thoughts. I read something somewhere (sorry, no idea where) where an author said something like: emphasis is so personal to the reader, he had all but quit using italics. Well, Florand wouldn’t agree, and I’m glad, because I get a real kick out of her use of italics. Like here:

“How are you?” Dom asked the brunette crisply, trying to make himself seem unavailable without making anyone watching think he was a rude, crude, and socially unacceptable human being who had sex with women whose names he couldn’t remember later and then treated them badly. Everything else might be true, but he did not treat them badly. . . . brushing her off wasn’t going to be that easy to do. Certainly not without giving the definite impression to people who happened to watching that he used women and was heartless to them afterward.

We see both the standard use of italics for emphasis here (not) and the really clever use of italics to add humor to Dom’s self-derisive commentary on the situation. It seems to me Florand mostly uses this technique with her male leads, and I think this might be because they are all extremely arrogant and this self-derisive tone is a way of showing their vulnerability. (I could be totally wrong. It’s not like I’m taking notes every minute, right? I get lost in the story, too, you know. But it does seem to me this is mostly something Florand uses for her male protagonists.) Oh, and let me draw your attention to that crisply and just reiterate that adverbs are not bad, not even in dialogue tags, if you use them well. I know I have said that before.

This scene also shows a really close third-person voice, which is worth noticing because Florand uses this kind of voice to great effect and it is by no means the only choice when using third person. If you use phrases like “It would be difficult, he thought, to get rid of this brunette without appearing rude,” then you are using a much more distant third-person voice. In other words, you can either report on your character’s thoughts and feelings: he thought, he felt, he imagined. Or you can bring the reader directly into your character’s head, in which case you would not use that kind of report, right? You will find that a skilled author moves back and forth in distance as she moves through the narrative, because a really close third-person stance is too exhausting for the reader to keep up for a whole book. Florand uses a lot of close third-person, but even she doesn’t stick to it all the time. I don’t expect she analyzes this (I don’t imagine anybody actually writes so analytically.) It’s something you do by feel. But if you wanted to really study close third person and see how it’s done, these books would be excellent.

So, characterization, scene, style. Dialogue, too. My favorite scene in the whole book may be the one where Dom meets Jaime’s family. I love Dom’s aggression, wow. And I love how he forces himself to acknowledge Sylvain’s kindness to Jaime before he met her, and honestly I just love the way the whole family interacts. Writing a scene with that many characters in it is not easy – in this one, we have Dom, Jaime, Sylvain, Cade, James, and Mack, and they all have to be there through essentially the whole scene. If you have anybody fall silent for three or four paragraphs, the reader can lose track of him and that’s a problem. This is a nice crowd scene, if you would like to take it apart and see how it works. My favorite line in it may be: “I’m begging you, James, stop with the spinach.”

Is this book totally perfect? Well, just about, yes. On the other hand, I’m not going to buy a copy for my mother. She wouldn’t be able to tolerate the occasional English cusswords – I am going to have to look up putain some time – and she, like me, really prefers a discreet veil to be drawn across the bedroom door. For anybody where those aspects aren’t dealbreakers, though – yes, it comes pretty close to perfect.

Laura Florand is definitely on my autobuy list after this year – not just for the Chocolate romances, but for whatever she writes. I’m only sorry I’ve now run out of her entire list, but at least it’s not too long a wait till her next title comes out — she has a novella, “Snow-Kissed” due out in September, and two more Chocolate titles are scheduled for this coming November and January release dates.

Update: I need one more uninterrupted week

Stuff to do: the rest of the big battle, the disaster — actually we’ve already had that, so I mean the worse disaster — various people heroically saving the day, and (naturally) ultimate victory. Plus the dénouement, which is often my favorite part and I expect that to be the case for PURE MAGIC, too. A lot of that is already written in detail, in my head.

I’m thinking this will all take another fifty-sixty pages. Not sure if I’ve ever learned to judge that kind of thing accurately, though, so it could be a little more (very unlikely to be less). I could easily bring this one in with five or six uninterrupted days, which alas I do not have, so it will take longer and writing it will be both less intense and less fun. : ( But the chance I will get this one in on my personal deadline, just about 100%, yay!

I’m guessing the rough draft will come in at about 110,000 – 115,000 words, which for me is excellent — I may even be able to cut it back to no more than 100,000 words, which would be fabulous. You know, I actually had to ask for the maximum length specified in the contract for BLACK DOG to be extended, because there was no possible way I could have got it under 120,000 words. That may not be such an issue for the sequel!

And if you’re wondering whether I know what I’ll be working on next: Yes. I have a short story to write that takes place before BLACK DOG and another one that takes place after PURE MAGIC — I have no idea why it is that this universe seems to lend itself to short stories, which as you all know I basically never write.

And after that — not sure! But I will have to decide because I read a ton of books while writing PURE MAGIC, way more than usual, so I don’t feel like I need a break and will probably pick up a new project to work on before the end of September, with plans to finish another rough draft by the end of January.

But I will take a little break to read some longer books / series and some titles I have particularly been waiting to get to: Kate Elliot’s Spiritwalker trilogy, UNDER THE LIGHT by Laura Whitcomb, SARAPHINA by Rachel Hartman, CROWN DUEL / COURT DUEL by Sherwood Smith. Really looking forward to it!

An eclectic beginner’s guide to SFF

With thanks for the pointer to Elaine T.

I always do enjoy these kinds of lists. This one has a little attitude to go with its suggestions:

“People say it all the time: they’d love to get into science fiction or fantasy, but they’ve no idea where to start. If this is you, listen up.”

This list follows a handful of sensible rules — only one work by any particular author, no short stories, like that.

I’ve read 35 of the 50 suggested works and agree that this list comprises an excellent snapshot of the SFF genres.

My favorite of the 50: For SF, probably ENDER’S GAME. For F, naturally it’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

Works they included I most disliked: THE HANDMAID’S TALE. Too heavy-handed for me.

The one I hadn’t ever even heard of: UBIK by Philip K Dick. I guess I just never read much by Dick.

The one I don’t think belongs: ALICE IN WONDERLAND. To me that is really a child’s book and out of place on ths list.

One author who should most have been included but wasn’t: Patricia McKillip. I would have put THE BOOK OF ATRIX WOLFE on here no matter what had to come off.

If you enjoy this kind of list, or for that matter enjoy a look at vintage covers, then click through and see what you think.

Recent reading: Magic Rises by Ilona Andrews

Wow, opinions are all over the place on this one! I usually avoid reviews till I read the book, but I hadn’t really expected such a spread. Keertana at Ivy Book Bindings found it disappointing, but Chachic at Chachic’s Book Nook really enjoyed it and Adina at Adina’s Book Blog thought it was great — gave it a 9.5 out of 10.

Though I don’t think Magic Rises was flawless, I definitely come down on the loved-it end of the spectrum. The snappy dialogue makes this series for me, it really does. “I wondered what he’d do if I asked him about second breakfast.” “Oops, sorry, we broke your rock.” I don’t have the book in front of me right now, so those probably aren’t exact quotes, but they’re close and they made me laugh out loud. Honestly, you all need to read this series just to get to the “Sorry we broke your rock” scene, which is totally classic Kate / Curren.

I don’t think I’m just automatically rating Ilona Andrews’ books up there out of habit. For me, Steel’s Edge was the one that was disappointing, and up till then I really liked all the Edge books. For me, the plot of Magic Rises was just okay, but it was okay, and the interaction of the characters and priceless dialogue continues to keep the Kate Daniels series right up there at the top of the UF / Paranormal list.

I’m definitely looking forward to the next book in this series. I believe the publisher’s initial plan was to go to seven books, but I hear rumors that now they may just continue the series until Ilona Andrews wants to bring it to a close, and no wonder, given its popularity.

If you’ve read this one already, what did you think?

Reading now: Magic Rises by Ilona Andrews. Because what deadline?

My favorite line so far is the bit about the Carpathian hobbit and second breakfast. Hah!

I was initially really disappointed in what seemed to be a quest story thrown in as filler — the sort of thing that could be called Further Adventures of Kate and Curren but doesn’t serve to advance the overarching plot that threads through the whole series.

But no! This story ties right back into that overall plot. Really enjoying it so far! Now must go read the rest of the book now before I can get back to work on my own current WIP. It’s all good, though: My deadline is actually very generous, so I am reading (almost) without guilt.

Recent Reading: Cover (Story) Girl by Chris Mariano

So I picked up this novella because the background of the story was interesting and because the setting — the island of Boracay, which sounded like it would be interesting and different and definitely well-suited to a romance. And because, as you will see if you follow the link, it’s only .99c on Kindle, so why not, right?

Wikipedia informs me that Boracay is “… a small island in the Philippines located approximately 315 km (196 mi) south of Manila and 2 km off the northwest tip of Panay Island in the Western Visayas region of the Philippines.” The protagonist, Gio, works there and lives nearby, and though he’s proud of the island and enjoys showing it off to tourists, it is his home, a place he also takes for granted.

I really liked Gio as the protagonist, and let me just add here that it was nice to read a romance where the protagonist was the guy rather than the girl. This one had to be written that way, though, because the girl, Min Hee, tells Gio all kinds of whoppers about why she’s on the island — she’s on the run from her family, she has amnesia, she had a brain tumor and is enjoying her last days in this world — so of course the story can’t be told from her point of view or it’d give everything away.

I think the basic truth about who Min Hee really is is pretty clear to the reader, though Gio misses the clues. But the exact reason Min Hee came to Boracay is harder to guess — I didn’t — and Gio’s reaction to finding out is both understandable and, um, perhaps not well considered. Of course things work out in the end, though!

This novella was actually written for a class run by Mina Esguerra. It’s charming and fun and nicely written. Here’s my favorite passage:

“The watercolor she was doing captured the beach as if seen through a dream, all soft sea-foam and powder, the colors disappearing into the white edges of the paper. The sea itself danced with different shades — white near the shore moving to pale green, then growing bolder into the deep blue of the horizon. Boracay was usually seen in the loud and bright colors of summer. But under Min Hee’s brush, it looked like a filtered paradise, something old and fragile and familiar.”

Beautiful, eh? Art is an important thread right through the story.

This novella also made me with a deep desire for calamansi muffins. Which I can actually make, because I have a calamansi plant in a pot on my deck. All I need is a recipe, which I bet I can find through the magic of google. Calamansi — calamondins — are the easiest citrus to grow in a pot, so if you happen to want to try them, no reason you can’t.

The assembly of a molecule

Can be fun to read about. I kid you not. It may be a science post, but DEREK LOWE wrote it, so it is a vivid and fun-to-read science post, even though it is about chemistry.

. . . and that’s just what high-level total synthesis is like: you have to be prepared to spend months and months beating on reactions in every tiny, picky variation that you can imagine might help.

Let me speak metaphorically, for those outside the field or who have never had the experience. Total synthesis of a complex natural product is like. . .it’s like assembling a huge balloon sculpture, all twists and turns, knots and bulges, only half of the balloons are rubber and half of them are made of blown glass. And you can’t just reach in and grab the thing, either, and they don’t give you any pliers or glue. What you get is a huge pile of miscellaneous stuff – bamboo poles, cricket bats, spiral-wound copper tubing, balsa-wood dowels, and several barrels of even more mixed-up junk: croquet balls, doughnuts, wadded-up aluminum foil, wobbly Frisbees, and so on.

The balloon sculpture is your molecule. The piles of junk are the available chemical methods you use to assemble it. . .

If you find this kind of thing interesting, then by all means read the whole thing, right?

Recent Listening: HERO by Perry Moore

Good heavens, why didn’t anybody warn me that this is an Issue story?

Actually, I’m sure everyone did; that’s what I get for not reading reviews carefully before buying a book, but I was avoiding spoilers. Wow, did I get caught. In its way, HERO is just as preachy as one of those awful seventeenth-century stories for children — you know, like

“James Janeway’s A token for children: Being an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives and joyful deaths of several young children. Published in 1671, Janeway’s morbidly titled work, which underwent several editions and remains available today, enjoyed vast nineteenth-century popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. As the title suggests, all the children invariably die at tender ages after converting heathen Turks or rebuking wayward parents and frivolous siblings.”

Which I didn’t know about that particular example specifically; I got that here. But we’ve all heard of the exemplary-life morally-uplifting stories for children, right?

And you thought those were confined to the seventeenth century? Hah.

I know that HERO has gotten lots of rave reviews, but you know why that is? Because (I surmise) the Gay Pride message is one that reviewers like and want to support, and therefore they want to like and support HERO and convince themselves it’s a great book. But for me, this story is way too heavy-handed on the preaching. Just in case the reader is in any danger of missing the point, not that that is even vaguely possible, the preface by Stan Lee points it out explicitly for you. I should have known right then that the Message was going to rule the story. Does it ever.

Even if I didn’t mind the preachiness — and if the writing was good enough, I could forget the Message and enjoy the story — but the eye-rolling levels of self-absorbed stupidity displayed by the protagonist (Tom), well, it’s just painful. You know, when a guy gets himself into a horribly embarrassing situation, to me that is not funny, it is just embarrassing. And when a guy gets himself into horribly embarrassing situations over and over because he is a self-absorbed idiot, that’s worse. I am sure some reviewers also have a much, much higher tolerance for this kind of protagonist than I do, which would be another reason they might rate this one so much more highly than I do. I never used to watch sitcoms, either, because I just detest the embarrassing type of humor.

Who should read this book: if you want an inclusive title for your school library, then sure, why not, I guess. But the painfully ineffectual protagonist is surely going to be a turn-off for anyone who prefers main characters who are competent and intelligent.

Quality of the writing: just fair. In my opinion, and here I am perhaps biased because I was so disgusted by the protagonist’s inability to cope, but to me the writing itself is pretty boring and flat. Though I rather liked Ruth. Until she was given her own Message to deliver, and then I was pretty much like: Oh you have to be kidding me, enough with the Messages already!

Plausibility of various plot elements: poor. Talk about eye rolling. I don’t know how many times I said “OH COME ON YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS” out loud while driving. It would be much easier to provide examples if I’d been reading a paper copy, but it’s hard to make notes while driving. But for example the incredibly pat mis-identification of Snake as the big bad guy was hard to swallow, and then the overwhelming stupidity of Tom’s big reveal he-was-with-me-that-night, I could hardly bear it; how could Tom possibly not just say, “No, sorry, you’ve got the wrong guy, he and I went out for coffee that night,” and shrug like it was no big deal?

The Message: Laid on with a trowel, I can’t even tell you.

Who does it better: I’m stepping out of YA here, but the SHADOW UNIT series by Emma Bull et al? I have been working my way through those for a while, so they leap immediately to mind because they are way, way better. On a scale of one to ten for effective message delivery, I’d give HERO a two and SHADOW UNIT a ten. The latter has much snappier dialogue, far more compelling edge-of-the seat plotting, vastly better characterization, and gay characters who are competent, interesting, complex, and well-rounded. Also, societal attitudes toward homosexuality are both more believable and presented more sympathetically in the SHADOW UNIT series than in HERO.

But, though I immediately thought of an adult series, there have just got to be YA stories that do it better than HERO. Brian Katcher’s contemporary YA ALMOST PERFECT comes immediately to mind. Anybody else got an example?

Recent listening: To Say Nothing of the Dog

I finished listening to Connie Willis’ TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG on the way to Indy. Wow, that was one long book. I wouldn’t say it seemed unnecessarily long or anything, but yeah, definitely a doorstopper.

Did anybody read BLACKOUT / ALL CLEAR? Because it’s really startling how different that story is from TO SAY NOTHING. The latter is very definitely a comedy; of course the former is not a comedy at all, but a suspense / war novel. With time travel, of course. Plus, TO SAY NOTHING actually worked well as an audiobook because there is only one real plotline and only one protagonist, so it’s easy to keep track of even if you take long breaks between listening sessions. That would definitely not have been the case for B / AC, which had an awful lot going on.

If you’ve read B / AC, then you’re aware that it just doesn’t matter how screwed up everything seems to be, everything will actually unfold exactly as it should and the historical continuum will be fine. But I think that’s supposed to be quite clear to the reader in TO SAY NOTHING, much more so than in B / AC, where I think the reader is supposed to be worried — though in fact I assumed things would work out in both books. As of course they do, hope you don’t mind the spoiler.

Okay, if you love Wodehouse, you will almost certainly enjoy TO SAY NOTHING. It’s really well put together, complete with couples that get engaged when they clearly shouldn’t, and couples that are rather slow off the mark when they are plainly meant for each other, and crazy family members, and Highly Competent Butlers holding everything together.

There are indeed a lot of explicit references to THREE MEN IN A BOAT by Jerome, also to murder mysteries — especially Agatha Christie (I missed those) and Dorothy Sayers (those I got). So you might indeed want to do some preliminary reading. Especially because the Lord Peter Whimsy books are really good — at least the ones after Lord Peter meets Harriet Vane.

Okay, and if you have read To SAY NOTHING,I would like to know when you figured out who Mr C is? I figured it out about halfway through, but then I’m dead sure the reader is supposed to find it obvious about three-quarters of the way through. I also saw the thing with the kittens coming a mile away, but I admit I did not figure out where the Bishop’s Birdstump was until the big reveal.

The descriptions of the Bishop’s Birdstump are priceless, btw. We never step back and have it actually described, that wouldn’t work nearly as well. It’s just revealed in dialogue, as in: “Are those . . . camels?” “Seahorses, I think, with Neptune. The camels are over on this side, next to Aphrodite rising from the sea on a clamshell.”

I made that up, I don’t remember what all is on the Bishop’s Birdstump.

So, yeah, read this one for the Bishop’s Birdstump. And yes, I did like the dog.