Books, Other People's Books

Opening 2019 book roundup, with bonus extra 2018

It will probably surprise none of you that I didn’t get too far into 2019 without getting more new books. 😀

Ebooks

This is technically a book I bought at Orycon, but I didn’t actually go download it off the publisher site until this month. So I’m counting this as a 2019 acquisition: Soul Born, by Kevin James Breaux. This is a fantasy novel put out by Azure Spider Publications, who had a table at Orycon right near the one I was sharing with fellow NIWA members Madison Keller and Jeffrey Cook. I liked the look of the cover, and had a pleasant chat with the lady at the table. So I bought a download code for the book!

A Princess in Theory

A Princess in Theory

Meanwhile, acquired from Kobo, because both of them were on sale for $1.99 at the time:

A Princess in Theory, by Alyssa Cole. I don’t normally buy contemporary romance. But Alyssa Cole has been on the Smart Bitches podcast a couple of times, and she’s delightful. Plus, a) I liked the previous thing of hers I read, An Extraordinary Union, and b) the cover on this title is beautiful. I really like how it’s dynamic and romantic without having to rely upon either person being scantily clad.

Plus, the color scheme stands out to my eye as well. Cole even talked about that on the podcast, and about how the heroine’s dress and the hero’s tie were both patterns she came up with herself, inspired by traditional African ones.

And since she’s an author of color I am happy to explore more of her work!

And #2: no lie, I will totally be reading this thing and mentally casting Chadwick Boseman as the hero. 😉

A Study in Honor, by Claire O’Dell. This one is SF, and came across my radar last year as a new Sherlock Holmes pastiche. The thing here is, the Sherlock and Watson analogues here are both black, queer women. Which strikes me as rather awesome. I’ll be intrigued to see how the author handles keeping core recognizable “Sherlock” and “Watson” characteristics while diverging so hugely from the original characters, as well as so blatantly different a setting. I.e., a futuristic SF dystopia.

Print Books

This actually was a book I acquired in 2018, but which I never mentioned: Cracking the Coding Interview. I ordered this from Amazon last month because I need it for job hunting purposes. And I’ve started slowly working my way through it. It came highly recommended to me by one of my former Big Fish teammates, and so far, a few exercises in, I’m already finding it valuable.

And, since my household always does a gift exchange when Paul returns from Virginia, this also counts as a 2018 acquisition: the hardback edition of The Fall of Gondolin! Which I’ve already read in ebook form, but which I also wanted in hardback.

This bumps my 2018 total up to 59. And so far for 2019, we’re at 3!

Bilingual Silmarillion Reread

Bilingual Silmarillion Reread, Part 1

Back in the summer of 2017, just before I went to Quebec for Camp Violon Trad, I put up a couple of posts about rereading The Silmarillion: this initial post, and then this one.

Y’all may notice I never finished those posts. You may further notice that I’d said at the time that I wasn’t going to do a full series of reread posts about the book, but that I would reserve the right to change my mind.

That change of mind has now come! And it’s brought about by how the little book club Dara and I are in with a few friends of ours has decided to actually read The Silmarillion.

And, since I’m the only real Tolkien nerd in the group, and have of course read the thing multiple times already, we agreed I’d read it in French while everybody else read it in English.

So here’s an initial post about that. I’m not going to get into as much detail as I have on the posts I’ve done for Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings*, but I will talk some about interesting quirks of the French edition as I find them. And I’ll talk about things I notice this time through in general, as well. But mostly I’ll be keeping it pretty high-level. Since I’m doing this for book club as opposed to just doing it on my own time, I need to move through this pretty quickly! But I’m taking notes as I go, and those notes will form the bones of the posts I’ll put here.

About my editions

Le Silmarillion, the Pocket edition published in 2002, is the French edition I’m using for this. And it is, in fact, a copy I bought on that 2017 trip to Quebec! Fun story about that: I bought it at an Archambault in downtown Montreal. Told the guy at the counter that I liked to practice my French, so I was working on rereading a lot of Tolkien. He gave the book a look and said, “That’s a hard book to practice on!” I told him I knew it was hard in English, never mind French.

For comparison, this is the ebook edition I have, and this edition is my original paperback copy. Which would have been the one I snarfed once I read through the Lord of the Rings, and then got all big-eyed and WAIT THERE’S MORE?

For purposes of this reread, though, I’ll be dealing with the ebook version in English. My paperback is one of the few I have that I have specific sentimental attachment to! So I don’t get it out often.

The front matter

A few other notes about the French edition, meanwhile. It’s notable to me that unlike my English copies, the French edition has only Christopher Tolkien’s original Foreword. It doesn’t have the Preface that appears in the English editions, or the full quote of the letter J.R.R. Tolkien sent to his publisher to describe his intentions for the work.

I’m a little sad that the French edition doesn’t have that letter, in no small part because it does have one of my favorite Tolkien quotes.

I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.

I swear, it’s like he was hoping for fanfic. 😉 (And at any rate, that quote right there is part of why I’m a lot more patient with Jackson’s Hobbit movies, as I’ve said before.)

Plus, it’s just nice to see Tolkien’s own thoughts included in the English edition. So, yeah, a bit sad those thoughts aren’t in the French. I must presume that the French translation was done off the first English edition and that they didn’t bother to swing back and translate the additional front matter, for whatever reason.

There’s not much more than that I can say about the front matter here. It’s maybe valuable to read through once for Christopher Tolkien’s commentary. But when I’m trying to work my way through the French, it’s less interesting.

So let’s proceed on into the Ainulindalë, shall we? I’ll talk about that and the Valaquenta in the next post.

—–
*And in case any of you are going, “hey Anna, what about your Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter rereads? We notice you haven’t finished those, either!”, stand by on that. I haven’t forgotten them. And one silver lining in the whole cloud of being between jobs is that at the moment, I’ve got more time to blog! I will be re-awakening those rereads, too.

Books, Other People's Books

End of year ebook roundup

I was going to post this sooner, but I got smacked upside the head by an end-of-year cold. So let’s open 2019 by talking about the last few ebooks I grabbed during 2018, shall we?

Acquired from Kobo:

Blood Orbit, by K.R. Richardson. K.R. Richardson is a.k.a. Kat Richardson, and as y’all know, I loves me some Greywalker books. So this, her first outing into SF, was something I’d had my eye on to get for a while. Finally picked it up during Orycon, when I chatted with Kat there.

Head On, by John Scalzi. This is book 2 of his series that began with Lock In, and which I quite enjoyed. Finally snagged this when it went briefly on sale in ebook form.

Solomon’s Seal, by Skyla Dawn Cameron. Saw this one talked up on the Smart Bitches site in a roundup of ebook sales. And it sounds like potential Big Silly Fun, for which I’m willing to plunk down 99 cents. The sample I read on Kobo’s site seemed promising, too!

That puts me at 57 for the year.

Site Updates

And this is me testing the WordPress block editor

I am pretty sure I’m not a fan of the block style editor that WordPress 5.0 has now by default. But I’ve also discovered that the WordPress team has released a “Classic Editor” plugin to bring back the previous UI if you need it for whatever reason. Or if you just like it better.

This plugin also includes the ability to switch back and forth between the editor styles. So right now I’ve got annathepiper.org set to dealing with the classic UI, because apparently the new one is cranky at the photo gallery plugin I’m using. But I’m playing now with using the block style editor on angelahighland.com, just to give it a fair shake and see if it shows its worth to me.

I will say that I like that this UI looks more like a word processor. But I don’t think I like the “block” concept much yet. It feels clunky to me and I’m not sure why yet. Perhaps specifically because it makes WordPress look more like a word processor–but no word processor I’ve ever used does this block-level formatting thing. I don’t like the formatting bar following me around from paragraph to paragraph.

But of course, yeah, this might also just me being older and set in my ways now, computing-wise. 😉 So yeah, I’ll play with this a bit more and see what I think.

About Me

The ongoing quest to get my avians aligned

It’s been a while again since I’ve posted on angelahighland.com. For those of you who haven’t seen my recent annathepiper.org posts (or my posts to social media), here’s a quick overview of what’s been going on in my life lately.

Day Job: I got laid off from the day job at the end of September. I’m still sad about that, as I really loved that job! Since then, I’ve been working on a short-term testing contract while I search for other full time employment leads. This contract job is still in downtown Seattle, but it’s a bit farther south in downtown than I’ve worked before.

It’s also meant that my hours have been somewhat wacky, and I’ve been pretty fried by the time I make it home in the evenings. So I’ve barely had any time to keep up with regular adulting-type things like paying bills. Never mind actually writing anything. That said…

Writing: I’m still working on the next print edition of Faerie Blood. This is something that HAS to happen, given that the espresso book machine I’d been previously using at Third Place to do my print editions is no longer available. Once the day job situation stabilizes, I’m hoping I’ll actually be able to resume work on this. Right now, working on an edit pass seems like it’s more without my power than writing anything new.

(I know I haven’t written anything new in a while, and that DOES stress me out, you guys. But I gotta get my writing mojo back with baby steps, apparently.)

General Site Housekeeping: I had previously tried to spin up sub-sites of my annathepiper.org network, a dev site and a photo site, only to discover that trying to maintain two many different WordPress sites is annoying. So the dev and photo functionality I wanted to do is getting rolled into the general annathepiper.org site.

Angelahighland.com will retain its focus on my books.

For the time being, the bulk of my blog writing will remain on angelahighland.com. Annathepiper.org will get posts specifically related to that site. (This is only relevant to y’all if you’re following my sites directly. If you’re following me on Dreamwidth, you’re going to get both sites’ posts regardless!)

Any questions? How are y’all anyway?

Books, Other People's Books

Another quick clearing of the inbox ebook roundup

There’s some new Julia Czerneda in my near future, but until THAT happens, behold! A few more books I’ve picked up lately, all from Kobo:

Within the Sanctuary of Wings, by Marie Brennan. The final book in the Lady Trent series, which I’ve finally been able to pick up as the price came down some more. VERY much looking forward to savoring this.

Chapel of Ease, by Alex Bledsoe. This is I believe the fourth book in his Tufa series, which started with the wonderful The Hum and the Shiver.

To Guard Against the Dark, by the aforementioned Julie E. Czerneda. This is the third book of her Reunification trilogy, and I’m looking forward to savoring this too!

The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin. The second and third books of her Broken Earth trilogy. VERY much enjoying this. Plowing through Book 2 right now and should be charging into Book 3 in the next week or so.

This brings me to 54 for the year.

About Me

New front in the battle of me vs. entropy

Y’all have doubtless noticed I haven’t released anything in a while. There are reasons for that. A lot of them are political. I, like a lot of other creatives, have been having a bitch of a time trying to muster the will to work on anything since the 2016 election.

But honesty dictates that I note for the record that that isn’t all of it. I have come to realize over the past few years that one of my character flaws is that I get paralyzed if I have too many things I have to organize at once. I wind up looking at all the things I keep meaning to do, and keep never frigging doing them. That, coupled with the world being generally on fire (politically, but if you happen to live on the West Coast, in a lot of cases also literally), has dropped me into a many-months-long bout of “fuck it, I have just enough brain to handle dealing with my day job so I can keep the bills paid and the food bought, and I’ll spend the rest of my waking hours playing Dungeon Boss and Gummy Drop”.

At the end of the day, though, this doesn’t get books written. Or released. And Orycon is coming up. I’ve promised to work a table again with Madison Keller, since they and I make good table partners. But I’ve also run flat out of print copies of Faerie Blood. And Third Place Press is no longer going to have the espresso book machine available–which means I need a new way to produce print copies of Faerie Blood, Bone Walker, and anything else I decide to release.

I’ve also been (grumpily) thinking for some time that it’s stupid that the print copies of my books aren’t available on Amazon. So I’ve been intending for a while to get my print editions up on Amazon for purchase that way. It should help with my discoverability, as well as just making it easier for people to buy books from me without having to track me down in person, or even contact me online.

All of which are good intentions. But y’all know what the road to hell is paved with. See previous commentary re: being paralyzed by too many things I haven’t finished yet. Here is a list of some of those things:

  • New print edition of Faerie Blood
  • Finish Walk the Wards
  • Restart work on Warder Soul
  • Finish the edit pass on Queen of Ghosts (the book formerly known as Queen of Souls)
  • Restart the Bilingual Lord of the Rings Reread
  • Restart the Trilingual Harry Potter Reread
  • Finish the posts I never finished about the trip to Quebec last summer and Camp Violon Trad 2017
  • Finish reviewing all my old Livejournal posts so I can finally delete my Livejournal
  • Pull a lot of my old mail off my Gmail account and onto the murkworks.net mail server
  • Finish porting a lot of old content onto my personal/fannish site, annathepiper.org

And that’s just a partial list of all the projects. There are more. And I got tired of never actually making any progress on them due to my tendency to paralysis.

So I thought about this a bit and realized that at the day job, we tackle big projects via a very loose Agile-ish methodology. Roughly speaking, this means we split big projects down into component tasks, ballpark how long it’ll take to do those tasks, and then plan to do tasks X, Y, Z, etc., in however many two-week sprints it takes to get the project done.

And I thought, “well hell, wouldn’t it be nice if I had some sort of way to do this with personal projects too?”

I’ve never been content with Apple’s Reminders app in macOS and iOS. It’s not really conducive to planning out larger projects. So I researched around to see what other options were out there, and I finally came across a program called Things. It’s available on both macOS AND iOS. And what made me decide to throw money at it was its ability to organize tasks by not only giving each task a date, but also by assigning them to larger projects.

So here’s what the “Third Edition of Faerie Blood” project currently looks like:

Third Edition of Faerie Blood in Things

Third Edition of Faerie Blood in Things

And here’s what I’ve done already:

More Faerie Blood in Things

More Faerie Blood in Things

I’m not going to say this thing has changed my life yet. But I will say that I really like the design of it, and it’s very galvanizing to have a nice list of tasks to check off every day. The Faerie Blood project isn’t the only one I’m working on, either. I’ve got active work going on the deletion of old Livejournal posts, as well as the review and archiving of old email.

Here’s what today’s task list looks like so far:

Things Logbook

Things Logbook

Just being able to have a visual thing to point at, as evidence that I have in fact accomplished things today, makes me feel like I might actually manage to chip away at the mountain of entropy that’s been slamming me down for some time now.

And in summary, if you’re a macOS/iOS person? Things. I recommend it.