For those of you who are opening Dreamwidth accounts

Thanks to a kindly offered invite code (thank you, kind person! You know who you are), I'm now over there with the usual ID, annathepiper. Y'all feel free to link up with me there, and/or drop a comment here to let me know who you are so's I can make with the subscribing and granting access and stuff.

Right now my plans for Dreamwidth mostly involve "playing with their code" to see if the changes they've made are interesting enough to warrant extended attention. But I'll also likely be mirroring posts over there as well.

For those of you who don't intend on joining Dreamwidth, no worries, I'm not jumping ship here. Dreamwidth may have some potentially shiny new toys to play with, but LJ's got the established userbase and name recognition, and it'll be too useful for me to give it up completely!

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about at all, short form: Dreamwidth is the latest Livejournal clone to come into existence. Like Inksome, it's come out of the big spate of scandals going around here when Six Apart was still in charge--and a lot of folks asking the question, "Well, so if we wanted to go found our own site, what features would we like?" There's at least one ex-LJ-staffer on its founding team.

In particular I'm interested in what Dreamwidth is doing with the whole concept of Friending. They're dropping the term 'Friending' entirely, and have set up a more complex system that separates "whose journals you want to read" from "who you'd like to grant access to your own locked stuff".

So anyway, if you're over there, say hi. Or not. :)

ETA: Can any kind souls hook up kathrynt with an invite code? Thanks in advance! She has one now!
ETA #2: And also, alinsa?

Testing testing testing one one one me me me

So yeah, this is me with a Dreamwidth account, making the obligatory test post to announce my presence. Say hi if you find me here!

Book Log #29: Blue Diablo, by Ann Aguirre

Ann Aguirre takes her first jaunt into urban fantasy with Blue Diablo, the opening book of the Corine Solomon series. Our heroine Corine is a "handler", able to sense the history surrounding objects she holds--but not without a price, as her gift came to her from the sacrifice of her mother when she was a child. She cannot use it without the object damaging her hands, and invariably reminding her of the fire that killed her mother.

More recently, Corine has fled her past history with Chance, another gifted individual whose talent lies in the manipulating of luck. She's living in Mexico now, thinking that she's re-established some sanity in her life--so of course, Chance finds her. And of course, he's brought her dire news: his mother, of whom Corine was always very fond, has gone missing. And Corine is the only one who can help him find her.

This is definitely a paranormal romance that falls more into the "romance" category than it does the "paranormal" one; it borrows a lot more tropes from the romance genre than it does from the fantasy one, although the paranormal is of course in hefty play here as well. Its primary strength for me was less the fantasy elements--especially given that Anton Strout's also playing with a character who can read history off of objects--and more the relationship between not only Corine and Chance, but also between Corine and Jesse, the other male lead, an empathic cop. Since the book starts off with Chance and Corine in the decidedly ex-lovers stage, there's a lot of intriguing uncertainty as to how exactly their relationship will evolve, or whether she will actually choose to establish a relationship with Jesse instead.

But be braced for a cliffhanger ending, folks--at least, from the emotional standpoint.

Overall a decent read, although so far I like Aguirre's SF better. Three stars.