Timewaster's Guide Archive

Ooooo, I can endorse Tamora Pierce's books, or at least the Tortall ones. (The Circle of Magic ones I'm less enthusiastic about.)  I first read 'em when I was a wee tyke myself. While I think fondly of the Alanna series, as it was the first set I read, I think it's the roughest of the batch. I really enjoyed the Protector of the Small, as well as the latest, Trickster's Choice and Trickster's Queen, which follow Alanna's youngest child. She does a good job of making her heroines distinct characters despite shared attitudes.

At this last Comic-con, I got my paws on a partial manuscript of Terrier, the latest Tortall book. It's not even got an ending, and it's pretty rough in some ways, being only a partial, but eet was equally intriguing. The Del Rey people let me have it. Two years before they'd given me a ARC of Trickster's Queen and I'd blogged about that. I stayed up one night reading it, and was disappointed come morning that I didn't have the whole thing.

Lessee, an introduction:

Name: Lis
Handle: PixelFish (because I push zee pixels, and because I love zee feesh)

I grew up in the wilds of Utah County. I went to Ricks College back when it was still called Ricks College, and I'm very adamant that I graduated from Ricks College, and not from BYU-Idaho.

I'm a graphic designer, an artist, and an as-yet-unpublished writer.

As an adult, I have lived in Calgary, AB; San Diego, CA; Durham, NC; and San Francisco, CA, which is where I currently dwell. I have yet to leave North America, unless you're of the school fo thought that regards Mexico as Central America, in which case, I once spent a pleasant afternoon in Tijuana.

I read obsessively. I read shampoo bottles even. The movers HATE me, because I have about six bookcases worth of books, and despite trying to pack these in the smallest boxes I can find, to save their back muscles, it all adds up.

I play video games. I started with NetHack and Rogue and Pac Man, moved merrily on to Civilization in it's earliest incarnations, Doom, Castle Wolfenstein, Quake, Gauntlet, Diablo, Zelda, World of Warcraft, etc. I have an Atari 2600--I traded my sister to my brother-in-law for it. I said, "Hey, neat, you have an Atari 2600." He said, "I can get you one." I said, "Cool, you can marry my sister if you want."

How I ended up here: I read a review on OSC's site about Elantris. Then I saw the cover of Elantris in Spectrum. Then I found Elantris in the bookstore one day and thought, "Hey, that book with that cover that OSC likes." Then I read Elantris. Then I googled the EUOL. Then I came here. A very simple chain of causality.

If interested, you can view some of my art at my DevArt site:

http://pixelfish.deviantart.com/

I'm reading the fourth Snicket book...but I just get so bored.  I own 1-9, so I feel like I should read them, but they are just so simplistic and predictable.  I can be entertained by the narrator's wit for about 15 minutes, and then I have to put the book down.

I had the same issue, alas. A friend lent me the first nine too. I kept wanting to like the books, but about the only thing I was reading them for was Lemony Snicket's sentence-per-book about his lost love.

The adults-as-stupid schtick gets old for me too. When I got to the fourth or so book and yet another adult doesn't believe that Count Wossname is involved, despite the track record, I just kinda groaned and closed the book.

....


Am now re-reading:

+ All the City Watch books out loud with my boyfriend.

+ Komarr by Lois Bujold (again out loud with my boyfriend--whichever we read depends on our tastes for the evening)


New Reads:

+ Kate Elliot's Crown of Stars (very quietly reading, based on an OSC article recommending it)

+ David Sedaris's Holidays on Ice

+ Pippi Langstrumpf (in German, because I am trying to learn German. This means I read...oh, a page a day. Maybe I'll get done with this by the end of the year?)

Just finished:

+ Elantris and Mistborn by EUOL

+ Thud! by Terry Pratchett

Oh, yeah, here in the Sandman annotations:

ftp://theory.lcs.mit.edu/pub/people/wald/sandman/sandman.01

Page 18 panel 3:  Unity's child will become important later.
     Panel 4-6:  Wesley Dodds was the Golden Age Sandman.  The dreams are a
retcon.  The costume is correct; it is Dodds' first costume.  Later he will don
a purple and gold outfit and acquire a sidekick, Sandy.  Dodds will be referred
to again.

I'm gonna play My Anal Nerd Card, and say that he re-created Sandman. From what I hear, he went to Karen Berger, asked if he could co-opt a defunct DC character, and got full creative reign.

But other than that....yeah, you are right, the entire modern run of Sandman, as we know it, is his. I didn't mean to make it seem otherwise.

Scalzi's blog is one of my regular reads actually. He's had some bang up articles on life as a newbie writer. (Alas, I did not know you were up against him, although to be fair, I only just found Elantris a few weeks ago.)