About Me, Music

Imminent Anna sightings!

For Seattle-area locals, hey, I’m going to be at Norwescon! Not in a professional writer-type capacity, but I WILL be there, and I’ll be easily found providing assistance to Dara during the music concerts! And just in case anybody wants one, I will also be bringing my few remaining print copies of Faerie Blood. And I’ll have some special CDs as well with ebook copies on ’em, offered at a special price for con attendees! Look for me if you want either of these things, or both!

And NEXT week, of course, I will be happily boinging up to Vancouver to see Le Vent du Nord perform with the Vancouver Metropolitan Orchestra! This time, I am taking the TRAIN. Because I am NOT trusting our car to be driven any farther than the distance necessary to get to and from work. And if the train should encounter any difficulties, you may rest assured that I am FULLY PREPARED to fight my way through any zombie apocalypses that may overwhelm the tracks. Because nothing, I repeat, NOTHING is going to stand between me and seeing a show which is going to look and sound a LOT like this:

You may also rest assured, O Internets, that I am sternly reminding myself that no, it is NOT socially acceptable for me to shove the VMO’s piccolo player into a closet so I can steal their seat. No matter HOW much I want to see whatever sheet music they’ll be using for the evening! Likewise I will be sternly reminding myself that as this is a symphony venue, it will NOT be really acceptable to jump out of my seat and start dancing or singing the response lines at the top of my lungs, no matter HOW great the urge.

(Though I’m tellin’ ya, Internets, with inspiration like this, this is going to be a hard, hard test of my fangirly willpower!)

And at this show I’ll be seeing Susan, who, as I have expressed on previous posts, IS made entirely of awesomeness. And I’ll be staying with Geri, who is ALSO made of awesomeness. And I’ll be seeing fellow GBS fangirls Kate and Angela, with whom I have every hope of carrying out shenanigans the day after the show. Possibly also hijinx, and maybe even mischief!

Any of the rest of you who are also in Vancouver, if you want to meet up, let me know! I’ll be in Vancouver from the afternoon of April 4th through the evening of the 6th. I still have time free on Saturday for possible brunch or lunch!

March 25, 2013 by
Books

50th anniversary Doctor Who book roundup

Picked up in print from Barnes and Noble, because I DO buy Kit in both formats:

  • Mountain Echoes, by C.E. Murphy. Book Eight of the Walker Papers.

Picked up from Kobo:

  • Avis de tempête and Sturmnacht, by Jim Butcher. These are the French and German translations of Storm Front, which is of course Book 1 of the Dresden Files.
  • Dhampir, Thief of Lives, and Sister of the Dead, by Barb and J.C. Hendee. These are the first three books of the Hendees’ Noble Dead series, one of the few fantasy series doing a treatment of vampires that I’d ever read anything of. I liked the first couple of them. This is me re-buying them in ebook form.

Also picked up from Kobo, but calling these out in a separate list as they’re all the ebook releases of the special 50th Anniversary editions of selected Doctor Who novels, one for each Doctor!

  • Ten Little Aliens, by Stephen Cole
  • Dreams of Empire, by Justin Richards
  • Last of the Gaderene, by Mark Gatiss
  • Festival of Death, by Jonathan Morris
  • Fear of the Dark, by Trevor Baxendale
  • Players, by Terrance Dicks
  • Remembrance of the Daleks, by Ben Aaronovitch
  • Earthworld, by Jacqueline Rayner
  • Only Human, by Gareth Roberts
  • Beautiful Chaos, by Gary Russell
  • The Silent Stars Go By, by Dan Abnett

52 for the year.

March 24, 2013 by
About Me, Photos

Internets, I give you my new author pic

At the day job this afternoon, my team’s having a little party for our lead dev’s birthday! The theme is mustaches, so there are cookies and cupcakes with mustaches decorating them. And they brought in fake mustaches (the box for which was helpfully labelled EMERGENCY MUSTACHES, y’know, for all your whisker-impairment needs) for all of us to wear.

However, nobody said how we were supposed to wear them. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a QA engineer demonstrating ‘boundary testing’!

Mustache Hat

Mustache Hat

March 22, 2013 by
Trilingual Hobbit Reread

Tri-lingual Hobbit re-read: Chapter 10 (German notes)

And now, last but not least, the notes for Chapter 10 of the German edition of The Hobbit!

Which are rather shorter than the French notes, but then, my grasp of German is still rather shorter than my grasp of French is these days, and I’m still not having those a-ha moments where I get chunks of German starting to make sense. But I HAVE started studying German in SuperMemo, so we’ll see what happens after I’ve done that for a while!

Continue Reading

March 21, 2013 by
About Me

This is what the inside of my head looks like

There are days where I wish I could draw, sometimes. Because I have a picture in my head I’d TOTALLY draw if I had the time, and I’d be calling it ‘The Many Fandoms of Anna the Piper’.

There’d be a version of me right in the front with a Great Big Sea shirt, bouncing a baby version of me on her knee, only the baby’s babbling in French. And another me would have a Doctor Who scarf, and another a Battlestar Galactica flight jacket, and a third would be wearing lip gloss and wielding a stake.

A me in a Dewshine costume would be dancing her way around the circle, hand in hand with another pointy-eared version of me cosplaying Galadriel. There’d be a me with a Telgar Weyr shoulderknot on and her Threadfighting jacket slung over the back of her chair. There’d TOTALLY be a me cosplaying femme!Han Solo, knocking back a shot of the best Ardbeg she can get her hands on. And a me looking suspiciously like the one cosplaying femme!Han, only she’s got on suspenders and a long brown coat. ;D

There are laptops scattered all over the scene, as well as smaller computing devices. And every cat I’ve ever shared a house with. There are posters of the Seaview and the Jupiter II and the original Galactica on the walls. And there’s a me in the corner wielding a Swiss army knife and looking like she’s busy reassembling a functioning computer out of chicken wire, broken hard drives, and several empty cider bottles. Another me on the side would be dressed like an FBI agent, with Scully’s haircut.

And on the other side, oldest of all, would be a me with a bit of gray in her hair and an Elvis shirt, beaming kindly at everybody else.

Several of them have flutes of various shapes and sizes. One’s got the General and another got’s Ragamuffin, and another’s got my bouzouki, and anybody without an instrument has her hands up about to clap. Several pairs of feet are about to do some serious stomping. Everyone is singing. Because there is indeed a HELL of a kitchen party going on.

Welcome to the inside of my brain. <3

March 21, 2013 by
Trilingual Hobbit Reread

Tri-lingual Hobbit re-read: Chapter 10 (General notes)

Been a bit, but now, getting back to it, let’s do Chapter 10 of The Hobbit!

Objectively speaking, not terribly much actually happens in this chapter. We’re basically talking the following chain of events:

Bilbo and dwarves: *float downriver to Laketown*
Bilbo: *gets dwarves out of barrels*
Thorin: “I am Thorin Oakenshield! KNEEL BEFORE ZOD–” (Wait, wrong movie.)
Lake-town Men and Elves: “Wut just happened? WOO HOO PARTY WITH THE DWARVES!”
Thorin: “We’re all going to go beat up on the dragon now!”
Lake-town Men: “Yeah okay, you have fun with that.”
Bilbo: *spends entire chapter with a cold*

Raise your hand if you’re imagining Martin Freeman looking miserable throughout this chapter. It does rather add an extra element of “aww your poor thing!”

General notes:

It’s going to be amusing to see the shots in the next movie of Thorin and Fili and Kili coming out of those barrels. Somehow, I suspect they’re still going to manage to look dreamy even when bedraggled. And I can see Martin Freeman looking sneezy and unimpressed during their entire visit to Lake-town, too.

The narrator tells us that “I have never heard what happened to the chief of the guards and the butler.” Which, even though I understand that this is being said for effect here, still translates to me as “I didn’t feel like bothering to fill that in”. It’s yet another little thing I’m pretty sure a modern writer would never get away with!

Noticed this actually when going through the French, but since Tolkien phrased it this way in English too, it goes up here: Thorin telling the party that “we must thank our stars and Mr. Baggins”. I note the lack of “lucky” in this phrase, but that would seem to be the intent here.

I have to wonder how trusting the folk of Lake-town are! The town Master clearly isn’t buying Thorin’s arrival for an instant, but the town at large goes pretty much batshit with Happy–and all it takes is this band of ragged-looking dwarves walking up, and the one in front going, “I’m King under the Mountain!” And *bam*, they all start singing. Either they’re very trusting, or else they’re looking for an excuse to party.

French notes in the next post!

March 21, 2013 by