Y’all can find the master post for this month’s Drollerie Press blog tour over here. Check it out for all the other posts besides the ones I’m hosting, on the theme of fathers! And when you go check out the posts, tell ’em I sent you.
All Posts By
Angela Korra'ti
Shana Abe’s second Drakon book, The Dream Thief, didn’t seize me quite as nicely as The Smoke Thief did. This one picks up some years after the first one left off, with Lia, one of the children of the first book’s protagonists, impulsively joining Zane, the human thief who’d adored her mother when he was a boy working with her in thievery, on a quest to recover a fabled diamond said to possess the power to control her people. Lia is, of course, quite in love with Zane–and against his better judgement, for her people will doubtless never accept him as a mate for one of the Alpha’s daughters–he reciprocates her feelings.
All a fine core concept for the story. But in its execution, it fell down a little bit for me. There’s much made of Lia’s ability to foretell the future, and she has quite a few rather dark-themed visions about her future with Zane that ultimately and unsurprisingly do not bear fruit. Accordingly, they lose quite a bit of their impact and don’t really add much to the story for me as a reader.
Still, though, this was enjoyable enough, and the stage is clearly set for Book Three, Queen of Dragons. For this one, three stars.
Apparently I need to wander off to Canada more often, if it means I can actually finish up a chapter. Did a little bit of poking at Chapter 20 of Lament on Thursday night, more yesterday morning in Vancouver, and a bit more tonight–and realized that yeah, I was ready to go on ahead to the end of the file.
So this means the fourth draft of Chapter 20 is finally done. The biggest change to this turned out to be pulling a bit of interaction between Kirinil and Faanshi out of a previous version of Chapter 17, since I wanted that here for Kirinil generally magically checking Faanshi out.
And this means that at last, I can move on to Chapter 21. And hopefully pick up some serious speed with the editing. Chapter 21 is a Kestar chapter and I don’t plan any major edits here, so it should all be word count reduction.
Let’s see if I can get that chapter finished off by the end of the week. It’d be nice, too, if I can finish the edit pass by the time I’m ready to go to Disneyland.
Edited since Thursday: -69
Chapter 20 revised total: 4,733
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 122,128
Oops, I think we got some signals crossed this time around–because I’ve received not one but TWO blog posts from fellow Drollerie authors to share with y’all this time around. So what the hey, I’ll post this one too. Everybody say hey to Sarah Avery, author of Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply and Closing Arguments, and who is on Livejournal! Here’s what Sarah’s got to say about her father.
It’s time for this month’s round of the Drollerie Blog Tour! Jessica Howe has visited me before, in the very first month of this year; give her a warm welcome for her return, y’all!
So yeah, Saturday in Vancouver has failed to suck. Made it safely up here to Chez , with hardly any wait time at all at the border. And today, we went out on various and sundry shopping sorts of excursions.
took and and me over to the nearby HMV–which proved to be a way more fruitful visit this time around than on the two previous visits, because this time I actually scored an album by La Bottine Souriante! Also picked up one by the Punters, who I’ve been meaning to listen to anyway by way of introducing myself to more Newfoundland music; plus, this album has the magic words “Produced by Alan Doyle” on the back, so I’m figuring that’s a strong recommendation right there. Lastly, got one by the Rankins, since I like their track on Fire in the Kitchen.
Relatedly, also gave Dara and me a copy of ‘s very first filk CD, Steel Cage Match. Looking forward to listening to this, in no small part because “I Fell Asleep (Reading the Silmarillion)” made me LOL, and also, I want to hear “Livejournal Shanty” too.
And, snagged me a couple of loaner copies of La Bottine Souriante albums from the Vancouver Public Library as well. These shall have to stand me until I can acquire actual copies of these albums–which I have now ordered from Amazon, since apparently Amazon’s actually stocked up on La Bottine Souriante a lot since the last time I looked. To wit, bitchin’. Or should that be bitchin-ez moi?
Anyway, aside from all this musical love, we stopped in at Little Sister’s, which is Vancouver’s oldest queer bookstore. Which was kind of neat. I walked out with a novel called Salt Fish Girl which sounded interesting to me and SFnal (it mentions shapechanging and biotechnology), even though it doesn’t call itself a science fiction novel. I told the dude at the counter that I was a bit surprised that they didn’t have Tanya Huff in their (teeny) fantasy section, given that she’s a queer Canadian author and that she has a whole trilogy of books starring a queer boy, set in Vancouver even! He thought that was cool, so who knows, maybe they’ll stock ’em. Also, they had a big black Labrador-lookin’ doggie who reminded me a lot of Sheriff, the doggie who lives along the goat trail.
OH OH OH, also, they had a magazine on the rack there with a cover blurb about an interview with the actress Alex Hedison. Wait a minute, I thought, Hedison? She did look suspiciously familiar, so I thumbed into the zine to check the interview–and yep, that there was the daughter of David Hedison, my very own Captain Crane from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. And she’s not only queer, she’s the former partner of Ellen DeGeneres! That’s some pretty high-profile queer there.
And after that, went back to his place while Dara and Paul and I proceeded to hop on the bus and head down to the Asian-heavy community in Richmond, where they have a couple of largish Japanese/Chinese/Asian-friendly shopping mails. That was neat. Quite a bit of flashbacks to Japan there what with the layout of the stores and the sorts of stuff they sold. We snagged a couple of gifts for folks, had tasty lunch and later on tasty yogurt, and eventually staggered back to Chez for zzz’s.
We’ll be heading to Steamworks for tasty food in a little bit, and to meet up with and possibly also . Which should be a fine closer to a pretty fine day indeed.
A couple more pages of Chapter 20 tonight, even though it felt like pulling teeth to do it. I’ve finally reached the part of the chapter where a bit I’d previously excised from Chapter 17 needs to come back in–so I’ve had a sudden jump in word count, to the tune of a few hundred words. This is, as I’ve said before, the wrong direction.
But I’m hoping I’ll be able to make up for it once I finish slogging through this chapter and get into Chapter 21, where I can hopefully do some serious verbiage reduction.
But I think a few pages tonight is all I’m up for. More tomorrow. She hopes.
Edited tonight: +256
Chapter 20 revised total: 4,802
Lament of the Dove revised total: 122,197