Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 86

Viva Mose!

35. Dead Ever After – Charlaine Harris

The end of Sookie, except, I guess until October when there’s something else about this universe coming out. I do think that knowing that there is one more book, whether it’s just supposed to be a coda or not, cheapens things a bit. Especially since I felt like everyone and their dog – hey, Terry’s Catahoula Annie (I believe that’s her name) – showed up in the last one plus a new character or two.

I think that with all those cameos and all those “they seem like they’ll be okay or they’re far away” sort of endings, a coda isn’t really necessary. Every series has its end. Sookie has to be persecuted and kidnapped, Quinn has to show up in an outfit that will haunt me, Eric has to be a dick, the vampires in general mess with everyone’s schedule because they’re so bureaucratically ridiculous about their state-based marriages, and basically all is as it should be in the ending. It’s fine. Not unlike The Office finale, it’s mostly about checking in and tightening up loose ends. But I have to admit, I cried a lot during The Office finale (the Phyllis flamingo killed me, as did Mose gazing over at the scarecrow, and Dwight describing his relationships with his employees and calling Pam his best friend, sniff) and I barely registered the end of the Southern Vampire Mysteries – no tears. Normally, I cry very easily, it’s almost impressive how I can think “this should be an emotional moment” and my eyes are immediately twitching, even if I’m not really personally interested in participating in the emotions that are happening. I guess I thought the Sookie Stackhouse books meant more to me than they do. Just like watching every single season of The Office, I committed to reading all of those books, even when they seemed like placeholders and I was irritated.

That said, it’s impressive to write such a long series with such vibrant characters and so much going on. It spawned a ridiculous and enjoyable television show, the covers are neat-o, and there’s a coda coming out this year so no one ever has to feel any longing to know what happened for the rest of time! It’s a whole. I’ll never know if Mose managed to get that scarecrow to gaze back.

Even Twiglet and Pammy have ends. Fuzzy ones.

Operation Impending Doom II

It has been updated.

Now there’s a squirrel on it! Appropriate rodent!

This is the new cover of Night of the Squirrels: Dawn of the Interns, the first book in my squirrelpocalypse trilogy. I made it myself via my handy printing and drawing abilities. It more appropriately represents the story and the trilogy theme. Here is the previous cover, featuring my beloved Pickles:

Inappropriate but most adorable almost-not rodent!

The Pickles cover is still on Good Reads (I like that color scheme damnit and that’s why I rated it five stars…I also like the other cover so I also rated it five stars, and yes, I am the only one who rated it five stars on goodreads, so maybe that was a silly thing to do…Rachel Shukert, one of my fave authors, did it too so I felt less shame). Anyway, I’m clearly attached to the Pickles cover but the squirrel cover represents the updates that I have made. I haven’t made any gigantic story changes, I did fix quite a few things and now there is more zazz. It’s fitter, happier, and more productive. Or something. It’s also been given a new blurb and appears in many more online purchasing venues, like the Apple store and Barnes and Noble. Humans (non-humans too) who have chosen to not use the Kindle store can now read about the squirrelpocalypse…Finally! I know everyone who reads this blog was worried about that. Very worried.

Also, I don’t want to jinx myself, so I will be as vague as possible… This may also be available so you can hold it in your hands someday, it is closer to being available than it was two weeks ago, anyway. Whee!

Here are links to the various purchase pages (they will also perpetually be available via my About page):

Amazon

Apple Store

And, okay, full disclosure, I did rate it at five stars on itunes too. I got excited that it was on there. Plus I do think it’s good and fun to read, it’s been nearly four years since I wrote it and I technically started the idea in 1998 so I feel like it’s fine to five-star my entrance to the gateway to miscellaneous purchasing known as itunes.

Barnes and Noble

On Good Reads, the B&N link refuses to take anyone to my book. But it’s there, my link is direct. Plus, if you’re into work, title searching will prove Good Reads wrong.

Diesel ebooks

Kobo

Smashwords

Sony ebooks

I couldn’t see the cover yet on the Sony ebook store, but it should be forthcoming. It took B&N forever to put that two color work of majesticness up too.

So ends the shameless self-promotion. Or wait, no it doesn’t. The sequel will be going up (just on Amazon at first) towards the end of this month. It’s called Day of the Robots and it’s like Gremlins II meets Cabin Fever. The first one is like Cabin in the Woods meets Ginger Snaps, if only movie-related comparisons are available. They’re short and effective.

Undead…undead…undead

35. Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters (2003 version) – John Waters

I love this book for many reasons, however the main thing I love about it is that John Waters included little story lists of things he loves and hates. He hates many little, arbitrary things. Me too. He also has a story about true crime paperbacks, which invaded my consciousness via repeated fixing of the 364.1523 shelves and haven’t left yet. Since I didn’t have to look up that Dewey designation (not initially, although I did double check to make sure I was right), I’m sure they never will.

John Waters is one of my role models, although I haven’t read his book called Role Models to find out what his are (beyond Squeaky, and I just can’t quite get behind that despite the shades of gray surrounding the situation), and I’m sure that watching his films as a young child had a profound effect on how much I enjoy high and low culture simultaneously.  Their influence could also have something to do with my taste for the absurd and morbid, although that’s more likely to have come directly from my borderline lifelong interest in Edward Gorey. If I was writing my own version of this book (which I could, I guess, but no one would care and I would have to do research to make the essays worthwhile…) there would probably be Gorey and Waters chapters interspersed between all the chapters about guinea pigs and other cute little fat things.

Murderface is so cute….

 

It’s such a coup, it’s nothing new, it’s nothing we haven’t seen…

51. Chasing the Moon – A. Lee Martinez

I need to move somewhere that is already inhabited by ancient monstrous entities like the apartment building in this book. The kind of ancient monstrous entities that won’t bother my guinea pigs, which may not exist, however, those are the ones I need right now. Several days ago I printed a shirt with the last two lines of dialogue in one of my books on it and those lines (“Doomed?” and “Doomed.” I did not print them with quotation marks though.) seem to have been my personal mantra for quite some time (I didn’t print the shirt for me, I don’t want to be super obvious). I will admit to being a fatalist and a person who has depression and a smattering of OCD-style tics – sometimes these things are helpful (Or “helpful.”). Lots of people have a combination of these qualities and won’t admit to having any of them, which puts me just a tidbit ahead in the game of honesty. I guess. I shall take my victories where I can even if I have to sort of make them up. I mean, I made the premium collection even if I can’t actually see the results on barnesandnoble.com three days later (this is driving me mad, along with the squirrel book cover that has a wolf’s eye on it – that’s not a rodent face).

Anyway, I have taken some steps to improve some of the conditions of my existence and so far, taking those steps has been like walking in quicksand – non-sustainable, irritating, and potentially ending in yet more doom. I was recently contemplating getting back into the “applying to university library jobs I am more than qualified for” game and I saw that, in order to get around paying for health insurance and benefits for humans that do complicated, detail oriented, time consuming, and often thankless work like supervising circulation, several of the listings asked that the candidate do all the work of your typical 40+ hours per week circulation supervisor, in twenty hours per week! Yes, twenty hours. That’s totally going to work out. I was tempted to apply just so that if I was chosen for an interview I could go in and ask them if they were insane or ask them to take that listing down until they could admit it isn’t humanly possible to do everything a circulation supervisor needs to do in twenty hours a week – especially without benefits as an incentive. Now, I am aware that many people need a job, any job, U.S. jibber-jabber about jobs and bootstraps is insane, but it’s just so disheartening and horrific to me that the already horrible job market is getting even worse; I did not realize how possible that was and I find no hope in it whatsoever. Of course, the job market has been getting relatively hopeless since I got my first MA almost ten years ago. So I need that monster-infested apartment building where the world’s about to end to come find me so I can watch the moon get devoured. At least that seems like something that has possibilities. Maybe the next Ice Age will get here first. I’m certainly crossing my fingers.

He’s watching GIR finish the doom song.

I have noted the unfinished buttonhole in the waistcoat

20. Run for Your Life – Ann Brahms

My copy of Run for Your Life is a first edition (1993) and it came with some loose provenance – a receipt from the Cedar Rapids Econofoods. It caused me to pine for a time when people might buy horror paperbacks at the grocery store, probably with gum and cigarettes. Maybe it was purchased by someone who worked there and was reading it on break instead of playing Dead Celebrities behind the orange juice like in Go. That’s my kind of nostalgia. Anyway, it was part of a cache of horror paperbacks with covers resembling the horror videos of your Blockbuster/Mr. Movies circa-1993 that I found at the Salvation Army. It was a kickass find. I miss those video store racks and I am still pursuing low quality horror movies that I glimpsed when I was too young to rent them. I just want to know what the hell was going on with that hair noose and that Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (that cover was soo misleading). Also, I’d really like a copy of The Nightmare Never Ends with its lack of lead in tape, disco Satan, and general incomprehensibility.

That said, this book had its moments. It was a horror novel with a doberman and a cabin on the cover, so I thought the cabin would show up early on. It did not and I had to spend a lot of time inside the head of a total-creepazoid (one of two in the book) who cannot let blonde ladies with green eyes go (guess what I look like, you have five seconds) and who drinks Southern Comfort while driving! Granted, we’re not supposed to sympathize with either of the creepazoids, but still- more stalking chokey men were not necessarily what I needed to read about or expected and if it didn’t read so damn quickly I might have given up. It would have been sad to give up on the first book of my cache since I am very excited about them. One is even listed as Paranormal/Occult on the side and that genre is totally not one that was available to me to use anymore thank you eighties Satanic Panic for opening the possibilities no matter how briefly. Anyway, there is one other particularly interesting character in the book who has a tweest (must be said in Tailor of Gloucester mouse voice)! An antiques dealer with several cats. He’s after Majolica. I would not be after Majolica. Too flashy. I prefer Halloween plates from Target for my dining needs and Get Along Gang mugs for my collectible pottery. I collect many things, but I did not really follow my family’s passion for collecting pottery or beautiful dishware.

I did not see that coming. – Belvedere, collector of souls

What’s rotting?

16. Emergency Room – Caroline B. Cooney

I have often wondered when exactly ghost writers took over for popular young adult writers in the 1990s. Like Carolyn Keene, R. L. Stine seems to be a possible conglomerate, and sometimes it seems like Caroline B. Cooney might not be a real person either because her subject matter choices and writing quality are so strangely varied. She has some very good, very suspenseful books (like The Fog, and I imagine the rest of that series), some books that made a large impression on me in middle school (like Driver’s Ed and the Janie series),  and then some that are just so trite I can’t quite imagine the same person being responsible for all of them. Perhaps I have not written enough books yet to fall into the feeling-trite-but-getting-published-anyway trap and maybe she was asked to write about hot topics by her publisher. Perhaps Caroline B. Cooney is to Emergency Room as David Cross is to Alvin and the Chipmunks. It’s a mystery. If she did have many of her characters describe bad things as things that “rot,” I would be entirely convinced that Caroline B. Cooney is not an individual human.

Emergency Room is basically a slice of life story from The City. Yes, the City has no name because it is a city. It has a mall and a college where rich people go and in between the mall and the rich people college there are many gun battles over drug related topics and people who have no air conditioning. It also has a hospital where this intern guy is a total asshole and this intern girl worries about whether or not the asshole wants to date her and then she runs into her errant father and I’m not really giving anything away there because nothing ever comes of that or anything else that happens in the whole book. It just ends. In the City.

Pickles will be in this box until the plot of Emergency Room is resolved. Luckily, she’s immortal.

They don’t call me Captain Angst for nothing

31. A Gift of Magic – Lois Duncan

Damn, Nancy’s angry. Can’t let anybody have a good time with their own skills.

Mmhmm, you totally care about your siblings, Nancy, Murderface believes you and everything.

The name’s Pammy!

71. Sisters Red – Jackson Pearce

I was discussing heroines at a writer’s conference recently, both formally and informally, and I found myself agreeing and saying that the world needs more badass bitches. It’s true. There just aren’t enough examples of truly badass bitches in literature. Or at least I can’t name enough main characters I can describe that way right now and that is a problem because I seek them out. There are women you can argue as being cool, or having some skills, and I’ve said before that I think that writing I don’t necessarily like very much can be saved by including a lady with some skills, because then I can at least respect it. My method of designating one of my characters as a badass bitch was to give her an eye patch, which also happens in Sisters Red with Scarlett, lose an eye gain street cred. Regan is my own personal version of Snake Plisskin (and soon the description of my book on the e-reading purchaseable sites will reflect this as well). She’s going to get to the bottom of some shit, she’s not all that nice, and she can see through bullshit (usually). I’m saying all that both as very subtle self-promotion (May! In May it will be improved and sequeled!), because the lead character in Sisters Red is pretty much a badass bitch revised-Little Red Riding Hood style, and because my darling Pammy has turned out to be a badass pig just this very week.

Pammy, badass pig, just went through her second surgery to remove a tumor from her beautiful face. If you viewed her today from above, you’d think half her face was missing, the tumor was the size of a walnut and much cheek fluffiness had to be shaved off to sort it out. Pammy was the teenage mother of a clearly incest-based child, her daughter passed away of pneumonia, Pammy had onsetting symptoms but survived, then she demonstrated every symptom of having ovarian cysts (including hitting on every single other pig in the herd, even Murderface, her sworn enemy/fellow teen mother) and had surgery to remove all her ovaries (two cysts per) three months after the end of her pneumonia medication, moved with me to Iowa and moved in with Thaddeus, and now she had a walnut sized tumor removed from her face and she is peppier than I expected. She’s the She Ra of guinea pigs and I am so proud of her. She’s a badass. She deserves an action figure. And she will turn four in June. Bow to the Pammy.

Vintage Pammy. Teeny feets and fluffy cheeks.

A murderer and a terrible speller.

15. Ripper – Stefan Petrucha

Ripper started slowly for me. Historical fiction can be a little much because there’s a lot of world building that needs to be accurate and sometimes, when people do the research necessary to build an accurate world, they want to tell you about ALL the details they found. All of them. Pneumatics? Hey! Orphanage? Hey, they don’t really have those anymore in New York City! (Do they? Is there an orphanage on a lost corner somewhere?) Another important aspect of world building is including actual people from the time period and accurately representing their jobs – like Theodore Roosevelt! He’s in there! Jack the Ripper! He’s in there too! And he’s not an artist (Damn it.) I kind of liked that idea from Patricia Cornwell even though some people were all “Boooo” (or was it “Booo-urns?”) about it. I mean, he mentions his “work” in his letters and his work is generally unappreciated, to say the least, doesn’t that seem like something characteristic of an artist who painted as muddily as Sickert did? Anyway, I’m going to stop using exclamation points and speculating about the true identity of Jack the Ripper now. Reading that should be enough of an example of how I felt while reading the first few chapters of this book. Exposition, man, exposition. Not to say that it’s not well done exposition.

The book picked up for me in the middle. Once the chase was really on, it was on. The action sequences were glorious. I did see the twist coming though. There were two sentences using the same word in two important scenes that told me exactly what was going to happen – although it was definitely well played out.

Thaddeus is trying to tell you that Pickles is the real Jack the Ripper. In my nineteenth century print series, she’s Professor Pickles, nemesis of Danger Crumples’ investigator pig. It’s a slightly different scale of evil.

Digression Post

So, the last post I made mere seconds ago made me super sad. And then, I noticed that someone found my blog by searching for “adjectives for guinea pigs” and my mood changed slightly – cute didn’t instantaneously come to mind, searcher?

Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty cute. Belvedere knows how to sit.

 

The other adjective that comes to mind (beyond like fifty synonyms for “cute”) when I think of guinea pigs is: Demanding.

Yes, demanding is so much more than an adjective. I think it’s obvious that Mortemer wants something here.

Also, I wanted to mention that this week I screenprinted the new cover for Dawn of the Interns and I am super happy with it. I am quite fond of my Pickles model guinea pig cover , but it seems relevant to make a slightly more appropriate cover, since I have the skills. I would say I have the technology, but I’m a hand done art kind of person. My silkscreens are hand drawn, hand stenciled (no photo emulsion, it goes bad and might get on the carpet), and hand pulled – which often leads to tragedy. Twiglet, subject of the sadness inducing post and anchor pig forever in my heart, will of course be on the guinea pig version cover of the last book in the Night of the Squirrels trilogy. I haven’t written that one yet, but the new cover and the second volume in the trilogy, also with a guinea pig cover (featuring the beautiful Duncan) will be out in May.

“Snazzy” also comes to mind. Check out the Abyssinian moustache on Thaddeus. One could also use the adjectives: smart, fluffy, fuzzy, portly, or perfect to describe any number of guinea pigs.