Great Big Sea

And speaking of Great Big Sea

T minus 7 days and counting until the B’ys are HERE for the Zoo show next week!

userinfosolarbird, userinfospazzkat, and I will be gathering Team Cascadia for a mighty gathering! userinfomamishka and userinfojennygriffee and userinfotechnoshaman and userinfoladyallyn and userinfojessicac and userinfokathrynt and userinfollachglin and Clint (whose LJ I forget DOH) and userinfosksouth are all joining us!

The Cascadian Vertical Movement team (which y’all may recall totally took the Gold medal this past February) will also have the Junior Auxiliary of Lillian and Moira! I am looking forward to this with great, great glee. These are the children who beg me to play “Donkey Riding” on the Great Big DVD whenever they come over to my house, so I am VERY much anticipating the looks on their little faces when they realize holy crap Great Big Sea is real!

This is going to be huge, huge fun. And I’m taking that day off from work, too, so will be looking into a pre-show lunch and zoo thing of some sort! If you’re not directly involved with the herd I’m organizing but you are planning to be at the show, keep an eye out for me! Better yet, drop me a comment and let me know when and where you’ll be so I can keep an eye out for you, too!

*runs around in anticipatory circles* *practices her Vertical Movement* *puts SRS BZNZ consideration into what new swag to buy now that she’s dropped 25 pounds and TOTALLY needs a new, smaller GBS shirt*

I am ready, B’ys! BRING IT!

July 22, 2010 by
Great Big Sea

Great Big Sea Karaoke contest!

Check this out, you guys: my beloved B’ys have announced a video karaoke contest! They are handing out instrumental tracks for three of the songs off the new album and telling people to get creative with video responses!

Anybody local want in on this with me? 😀

(I wonder if it’d still count as karaoke if you actually learned the chords to the songs… *eyes guitar meaningfully*)

H/t to userinfojesshartley who spotted this even before I did!

ETA: My favorite part of the whole contest description: Do you ever sing along with GBS when no one is looking? Yes. YES I DO. Also when random passersby are looking, when an entire crowd of my fellow GBS fans are looking, when userinfosolarbird and I are busking, when I’m boinging down the street with my iPhone’s earbuds on, when I’m going past the fruit stand at Pike Place Market with the cute market men, when I’m browsing the shelves at bookstores, when I’m noodling around on the guitar, when I’m on the treadmill, and when I’m feeding the cats!

July 22, 2010 by
Books

Official new book hiatus

I am as of this post on official No Buying New Books hiatus through the end of August. This includes buying replacement electronic copies of stuff I have previously owned in print.

Basically, there are two reasons for this. One is that my beloved userinfosolarbird and I will be a bit short on rent in the month of August, as we’re doing a shuffle of student tenants prior to the new school year. The other is that I do have nearly 600 things on the To Read shelf (both the physical one and the virtual one), so it ain’t like I’m lacking for things to read!

So from now until the tail end of August I will be trying to get caught up on many of these tasty, tasty things I’m behind on reading. This includes the new userinfonaominovik, userinfokatatomic‘s last before her next one drops, some userinfoblackaire, the two books of userinfomizkit‘s I’m behind on, reading the three books I’ve got by my fellow Telgar Weyr alum Deby Fredericks, and a jaunt through my accumulated works by userinfodesperance. Time permitting, I will also be eying userinforachelcaine and userinfojpsorrow!

Please however do feel free to use this post as a means to recommend to me forthcoming new books I should be getting as soon as the hiatus lifts! (And yes, I’m already intending to buy Kit’s Truthseeker as soon as I can! 😀 )

July 20, 2010 by
Bone Walker, Mirror's Gate

Ooh hey, progress

Looks like I’m back to trying to lure words out of my brain a small dribble and drabble at a time.

Tonight, at least, I managed to throw words at both Mirror’s Gate and Bone Walker, though, so I’m calling that a win! Still in Chapter 2 on the one and Chapter 11 on the other, but between ’em I got roughly 500 words tonight. So I call that a win!

Mirror’s Gate:
Written tonight: 267
Chapter 2 total: 2,231
Mirror’s Gate total (first draft): 6,014

Bone Walker:
Written tonight: 293
Chapter 11 total: 682
Bone Walker total (first draft): 30,683

July 19, 2010 by
Book Log

Book Log #45: Goblin Hero, by Jim C. Hines

The second Jig the Goblin book by userinfojimhines does what any good second book of a fantasy trilogy ought to do: it shows you what’s happened to your protagonist as a result of Book 1’s events, and upped the stakes this time around to get him in even more trouble. In this particular installment’s case, it does an excellent job as well of taking traditional fantasy tropes and subverting them.

Now that Jig’s become “Jig Dragonslayer”, if anything, he’s almost more miserable than he was before. It is nifty that he’s gotten the ability to heal his fellow goblins of their injuries, but oi, the singing they’re doing about him! Not to mention how he’s coming perilously close to being chosen as chief. One goblin, though, is convinced that Jig’s not all he’s cracked up to be: Veka, who’s adamant that SHE is far better hero material, and who is bound and determined to win the acclaim that ought to be hers. Jig would quite cheerfully let her do her thing–only their lair is threatened by a pixie invasion, and it becomes the job of Jig Dragonslayer to go do something about it. Even if he’d much rather run the other way.

All in all this was a lovely followup to Book 1. I very much liked the character of Veka, her almost-a-romance with the hobgoblin nicknamed “Slash”, her struggle to master magic–and ultimately, even though she’s not about to admit it, to live up to Jig’s example and become a true hero. She gets significant point-of-view time, making her plotline as important as Jig’s all throughout the book, and her character arc does not disappoint.

Other high points of the book are Jig’s developing relationship with his god Tymalous Shadowstar, and the “duh OF COURSE” giggle-worthy way Jig finally wins the day. Four stars.

July 17, 2010 by
Books

Yeah yeah yeah raise your hand if you’re surprised

I got more ebooks. 😉 Though in this particular case, aside from the previously promised new Temeraire novel, all of these are actually replacing print books I’d previously owned. So there’s not much actual gain on the To Read shelves–and the hiatus of buying brand new books is still kind of on. Anyhow, here’s the rundown:

  • In the Bleak Midwinter and A Fountain Filled With Blood, by Julia Spencer-Fleming. Mystery. Y’all may recall that I had previously acquired these as free PDFs, and I liked them well enough that I wanted to actually buy copies. So this is me officially adding them to my purchased library. I’ll swing back in a bit and get more of this series, since I want to know where it goes.
  • The Smoke Thief and The Dream Thief, by Shana Abe. Historical/paranormal romance.
  • Death is Forever, by Elizabeth Lowell. Romantic Suspense. One of the Lowells I like better than most.
  • And last and very, very definitely not least, Tongues of Serpents, by Naomi Novik! Fantasy, sixth in the Temeraire series, and I’m thinking this is what I’m going to read next now that I’m done with Jim Hines!

Thus the year’s total comes up to 195.

July 17, 2010 by
The Internet

PSA: About that I Write Like meme going around

Y’all might want to check here and here for what seems to be going on with that. This is what you get for when bored geeks are on the case.

(I myself have been told I’m reminiscent of Esther Friesner and Barbara Michaels/Elizabeth Peters in some ways, which means quite a bit more to me than some random meme, so hey!

But what I’d really like is to be told ‘you write like somebody we’d like to publish, here, have a contract to get you into print!’)

July 16, 2010 by