End of Month Roundup

[temporus]

This was supposed to have been posted last night.   However, due to a power outage in the middle of attempting to post, I lost the entire post.  To quote a young man whose acquaintance I just recently made:  Blargh!

This month was a slow month writing-wise.  Nothing much to report.   I still have two submissions in a Schroedinger's state.

Four books read:

Worshiping Small Gods, by Richard Parks:  I make no bones about the fact that I was waiting for this book to arrive.  And I was not disappointed.  The stories are excellent, and I'm having a much harder time choosing favorites this time around than in Park's first collection, The Ogre's Wife.  I do feel a bit partial to Fox Tails as I am a fan of the Yamada no Goji character.  And I quite enjoyed Diva the longer piece in his ongoing Eli Mothersbaugh series.  What really struck me about this collection is how each tale felt as if it took a story idea, and followed it from a different skew.  This might be exemplified by A Time for Heroes though I don't think that is the only such tale in the book.  As with the first collection, I can't recommend this one enough.

Writing the Other, A Practical Approach, by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward:  I ran across this title on a blog thread early in the month.  It was brought up in the context that one should not shy away from writing characters of diversity simply because one is not a part of that ethnicity, culture, or gender, for fear that you might get it wrong.  This book is intended to help a writer think about what it means to be Other than yourself.  How can that affect your writing, and what you can do to write responsibly from Other points of view.  It also contains several exercises to help you along that journey.  It made me wish I could have participated in one of the workshops that inspired the book.

Blood Rites, by Jim Butcher: Book six of Harry Dresden.  As far as the plot goes, this one goes along with much the same complications as you expect for one of Harry's more PI inspired adventures.  Yet this book isn't just another story knock off.  There's a lot of character development in this book.  By that, I don't mean that we merely learn more about the character's and who they are.  We begin to learn more about what makes them tick, and I think even more so, they learn it too.  That alone makes it one of the better of the series, and as such it rises above the mere formulaic storyline with many of the traditional plot twists that Butcher throws in.  A good read.

Dead Beat, by Jim Butcher: Book seven of the Dresden files is probably my favorite to date.  Sure, there is the superficial portion of the plot, that aligns it with most of the other books in the series.  But more than anything, this book revels in the repercussions.  Things going on here have all been building up over the previous novels, and this one shows how Harry handles all these little details.  Unlike the earliest books in the series, where the world and circumstance appears to reset between novels, here nearly everything in the preceding four novels comes to play in some way or other.  Then there's Butters--such a fun new character.  (Okay, he's not new, but this is his first real co-starring role.)  I think that it also helps that this is a story that gets further into the shades of grey that Harry's life has become.  We've strayed a long way from the black and white world he lived in at the start of the series.  And of course:  Polka will never die!

Comments

[ogre-san.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the kind words on the collection. Much appreciated.