Sunday pre-editing stuff

[annathepiper]

+0: Greetings to xelona and irysangel, who are now reading my journal! Glad to see you stopping by.

+1: I have now finished Kim Harrison's Dead Witch Walking. Not bad at all, though it's very strange to be reading a bunch of urban fantasies back to back and seeing all the small variations on how authors do things: vampires, werewolves, witches, etc. Ms. Harrison does a couple of things I disagree with, but on the whole her book was fun and I'll go buy the next one. She has a very Jim-Butcher-esque flavor to her, and that's a good thing. I'm also amused that her heroine seems to be bi and hasn't admitted it yet, but we'll have to see where that goes. I have, however, also resolved that I will not be having vampires anywhere in the Faerie Blood books. Everybody does vampires.

+2: Friday night, solarbird, spazzkat, llachglin, kathrynt and I all went to see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Picoreview: fun and fluffy, not much substance. It's been long enough since I've read the books that I have no real clear memory of most of Adams' humor, but I did catch at least one spot where they tried to condense down some of his Funny--quite unsuccessfully. You just can't do the Reader's Digest Condensed Version of Douglas Adams. That said, I did enjoy the movie overall.

-3: Yesterday afternoon, my stupid cat decided to use my backpack as her stand-in litter box. This may be a symptom of, again, my not having changed the stupid litter box fast enough (I did, of course, immediately change it after cleaning up after the cat). But it may also be a sign of something else, and fortunately I'd just made an appointment for her to have her annual vet exam. Hopefully the vet will be able to tell me if she's got something going on that might be causing her to urinate inappropriately; she may just be getting extremely old. Sigh.

+4: Last night Dara and I went out to dinner with elflad and his new sweetie Jeff, who are in town on a visit. We had pleasant conversation and tasty sushi at our favorite sushi place, and then we went to the Dilettante on Capitol Hill and had more pleasant conversation and tasty desserts. We walked up and down Broadway afterwards, and stopped at Twice Sold Tales--where I finally scored copies of a couple of Dorothy Sayers books I'd been looking for, In the Teeth of the Evidence and Lord Peter Views the Body. They appear to be short story collections. But now at least I'll have 'em. I also need to pick up a copy of Murder Must Advertise, even enough I've already read it, just to keep rounding out my Sayers collection.

Thursday miles: 1.0
Friday miles: 0.5
Saturday miles: 2.0
Miles out of Hobbiton: 102.66
Miles to Rivendell: 355.34

You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational. </td> Cultural Creative 69% Modernist 63% Materialist 63% Existentialist 56% Postmodernist 56% Idealist 50% Romanticist 38% Fundamentalist 25% What is Your World View? created with QuizFarm.com

Comments

[irysangel.livejournal.com]

I poke in every once in a while, so I figured I'd add you to my list. Hope you don't mind!

I'm an ex-Two-Moons-MUSHer as well. I played Shenshen and a few other characters (Kahvi? And someone else) for a while about 5 years back or so. Mebbe six.

At any rate, hi!

[irysangel.livejournal.com]

Oh, and may I be on the writing filter? I love reading other people's writing progress and habits, mostly because I'm obsessive about my own. :)

[annathepiper]

Done!

[annathepiper]

Ah, okay! I noticed you had mizkit and shadowhwk both on your Friends list, so I half-suspected you were connected to them via MUSHing somehow, but I didn't know for sure. Glad to have you aboard. :)

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

Everybody does vampires.

Not me!

At least, not in the Walker Papers. :)

[annathepiper]

*high-fives her fellow author of a vampire-free series* YAY!

[kieri.livejournal.com]

Actually, if I ask nicely, may I be added to the writing filter as well?

I do actually write, albeit in fits and starts depending on my own bizarre whims, but I definitely enjoy listening to others talk about writing and discussing it. Plus I'm utterly shameless about offering advice on prose. (Whether the advice is worth anything, I have no idea.) :)

[kieri.livejournal.com]

I also do not do vampires.

...well, okay, -once-, but that story died a sharp death the minute I came down off the antihistamine and M&Ms.

(Do I get bonus points for mentioning an Alf blanket in said story? And having the narrator be a shiny-thing addicted Vietnam vet named Fingers?)

[annathepiper]

You certainly may. :) And shamelessly offered advice is always welcome!

Bookage,movies,too.

[(Anonymous)]

I've read "Dead Witch Walking" as well as "The Good, The Bad,and the Undead"..both are fun to read,and,as you said, very Jim Butcher-esque. On minor glitch I caught was she claims they're in Cincinnati, but from the location she described,the characters are in northern Kentucky,on the outskirts of Covington-Newport...at one point she mentions to a new house "across the river",which puts them in Kentucky.
I'm not a big fan of vampire stories,but I think she did a good job with them overall.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was less..modified than I thought it would be-close to the book in some ways,off course in others. To me, they turned Zaphod into an annoying jerk-I liked the TV series Zaphod better,and the TV Marvin,but the movie did a great job with the Vogons-bureaucracy visualized and brought to life..Scott

[annathepiper]

solarbird has advised me that the only good stories involving vampires involve their immediate, gruesome deaths. I have promised her that when Kendis has a conversation with Christopher about what else besides the Sidhe are real, he will roll his eyes and say, "Vampires are just stupid." ^_^

Did you burn the Alf blanket in the story? ;)

Re: Bookage,movies,too.

[annathepiper]

Yeah, I think that glitch you mention chimed in the back of my brain somewhere, though I didn't really home in on it--possibly just because I haven't been in Kentucky long enough to have remembered that clearly.

I'm not sure if I'd call this a vampire story per se; yes, a vampire is a significant character in the story, but she isn't really the point. It's more like a story that happens to have a vampire in it.

I'm also not at all sure what I think about this whole idea of 'living vampires'. It rather seems like a way to get the 'sexy' aspects of being a vampire without the character actually being, like, y'know, DEAD. :)

I'll be very intrigued to see the followup stuff on Trent, and to find out if he is in fact what I think he is.

As for the movie... yeah, Zaphod didn't do much for me. But I liked the movie rendition of Marvin; Alan Rickman was PERFECT for the voice. Unlike spazzkat, I wasn't constantly hearing Snape in my brain every time he spoke. It's been a very long time since I read the books, though, so I had no fresh memories against which the movie might have jarred. And you're right, the Vogons were quite cool. :)

Re: Bookage,movies,too.

[(Anonymous)]

You may be right about Kim Harrison's vampires..I had thought she'd made them a separate, but living, species to make them fit in,at least in a small way,better with the known laws of physics..IIRC,there was a vampire virus that could convert a human into a type of vampire.
She did a good job,IMHO, of blending fantasy elements with recognizable"everyday" things,and her bit of history altering worked well.(early-on genetics,but the space program is way behind ours in her universe) I thought she did a good job of creating a society where genetic engineering had gone haywire,and how society would look at such after a global epidemic caused by that technology,as well as the different "fantasy" creatures making themselves known to the human race.
I thought the cameo appearance of the original Marvin in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was a nice touch. I wonder if the original series is out of DVD? Something to do a search on..Scott

Re: Bookage,movies,too.

[annathepiper]

Just based on what she's got in the first book, she's got a "vamp virus" that can infect living persons and give them certain vampiric traits. It's also possible for living persons with this virus to breed and have children that are genetically born vamps. Now, if these people die, they become 'true' vamps. There's a good bit of description of Ivy's mother who has become a true vampire, and is a shadow of her former self--and how Ivy's father has been pretty much obsessed with keeping her mother sustained by his own blood, which has wrecked his life.

Re: Bookage,movies,too.

[poetry-lady.livejournal.com]

HHGG, the series, is indeed out on DVD. :)