It’s spring and thoughts do turn to new beginnings. Sometimes those new beginning are new relationships.
Here’s a video that shows that love, ingenuity, and some teamwork can conquer just about anything.
Do you think I should have given a spew warning first?
I was thrilled when Velvet of vvb32 reads told me she was naming A Curious Statistical Anomaly as One Lovely Blog. While I put a lot of thought and effort into this blog, I don’t often get a lot of feedback and it was nice to know someone (other than family) thought is was worth viewing and reading. Thanks Velvet.
The rules for accepting the award are:
As readers of my blog know, I’m pretty eclectic in my taste. Personally I have a lot of interests and often get taken in by the shiny things of life: science, philosophy, computer science, astronomy, reading, writing, reviewing, crafts (knitting, spinning), literature, publishing, and just about anything that catches my fancy and teaches me something or gives me a peak at new ideas, thoughts or way of looking at life and the world around me.
Thus, here are blogs that are rather new, according to my dysfunctional time-sense, in being added to my reading lists — in no particular order as I pull them out of my bookmarks — I think they are all exceptional.):
I was going to say why I chose each of these blogs but I’ll leave it up to you to decide for yourself as you check out the links. Each of the blogs touches my heart/mind in someway: beautiful images, wonderful writing, witty observations on life/books/crafts/politics/society/whatever, and an openness and sharing of themselves with their readers.
I’m only sorry I had to leave so many of my recently found and favorites off the list. I hope you find at least some of these blogs worth adding to your own bookmarks.
And Velvet, thanks again for thinking of my blog as One Lovely Blog.
I got a link to this video today from a friend. It’s on “The Future of Publishing”. If you’ve been seeing the recent bru-ha-ha about ebooks and their various readers and the pricing of ebooks for consumers, it’s possible to get the impression that books and reading are a thing of the past. Roll this belief in with the belief that young people don’t read, have short attention spans and don’t know anything about the world around them . This set of ideas and beliefs are what seem to be driving much of today’s marketing.
I enjoyed the video. Using the same message to express two totally opposite points of view is amazingly well done. It feed into the widely held beliefs and then turns them on their head.
Publishing isn’t dead. I’ve got a Kindle and I love it. I’ve also got tons of traditional books. I say tons because in the last move we had more books in boxes to move than the total of all other items we moved from our apartment to our house. I love reading and can’t imagine a time when I won’t read. If my eyes fail me — I’ll get the Kindle to read to me with its Hawking’s voice (imagine having a great physicist read to you).
What is most likely to kill publishing is the unwillingness of the industry to move forward. The world has changed. They way people live their lives has changed and they need to change with it. I’ll still read books on paper but the Kindle is what I take when I travel. As a computer programmer/software analyst who has helped put together a book or two to be published — I know that an electronic books should not be priced more than a paperback. There’s a big difference between making a paper-book only and then using the same file to create an electronic version and not having storage and distribution issues.
I had several books on my electronic wish list at Amazon until the pricing thing happened. Now those books are too expensive. I’ll buy them at a library sale or in a used books store. Electronic would have been nice but I’m not paying nearly hardcover sale prices for an electronic book. It’s the same reason I don’t buy DVD until they hit the below $10 sales (they should never cost more than $10 anyway). Corporations should make a profit off their work but since the creative artists aren’t the ones reaping the benefits of these too-high prices — it’s the must-make-even-more-profit that’s driving the bus. People will buy your product but only when it’s useful, usable, and priced appropriately. Otherwise most of us can find other ways to spend our money.
Companies should learn to listen to their customers. You know the people who actually buy or are expected to buy the products you produce. Listen and learn.
As readers of this blog may or may not know, we collect bears. We also have a number of Tigers living in our house. If any of you also have stuffed furry friends in their abodes, you may know just how often having a few critters about can be handy when things go wrong or are out of place — after all they’re home all day when you’re not.
So, did you ever wonder what they get up to when you’re not home?
Well, I work at home so I’m here most of the time. But, I’ve noticed that things go missing. Things are often not where I put them. I swear I put things back after I use them but somehow I have to search the whole house to find what should have been on my table/desk or near my reading chair.
So, imagine my surprise last week when I went upstairs to get my phone (I’d left it on the shelf by the bed) to find this little scenario.
Well, this finally explains the missing knitting needles, yarn, and the occasional pattern book. What I really can’t figure out is why I don’t have extra hand-knit (excuse me tigger-knit) socks in my drawer.
Sometimes I think I live in an alternate dimension — or the Twilight Zone without the weird music.
Finally, and in a blaze of stress and last minute finangling, the online magazine are up.
SFReuv: science fiction and fantasy books review along with a review of Skin Horse Volume 1, and some suggestions for Hugo Nominations for short form.
Gumshoe Review: Has an interview with Rhys Bowen and a review of her new book, The Last Illusion. There’s also an original work of fiction, “Negative Reaction” by Lee Hammerschmidt. Then there’s the usual assortment of reviews.
Check them out and I hope you enjoy them.
Cowboy Trouble by Joanne Kennedy. ISBN: 978-1-4022-3668-6, 416 pages. $6.99 mass market paperback/ $4.79 Kindle edition. On sale March 2, 2010.
Libby Brown always wanted to have a farm. That was definitely impractical while working as a journalist in Atlanta — not much scope in farming on your balcony. However, when her love life goes up in flames, she decides “chickens will never break your heart” and buys a ranch and heads to Wyoming. She barely arrives before her next door (but miles away) neighbor show up to welcome her to the area. Luke Rawlins makes a fine first impression even though he’s decked out like a cliché movie cowboy. But she welcomes the help and the information and who wouldn’t want to spend time with those eyes and the dimples. There’s a lot to learn about running a ranch with a herd of chickens while holding down a job on the local paper.
She begins to meet the people of Lackaduck, Wyoming. There’s the handsome sheriff who seems very committed to his job and is definitely making an effort to get to know Libby. Luke seems to always be around and the tension between the sheriff and Luke is palpable. When Libby hears that there’s next to no crime in Lackaduck but there is an unsolved murder still on the books, her journalistic juices start to flow.
I’d never read anything by Joanne Kennedy before but she sure got my attention with Cowboy Trouble. The story moves at a snappy pace with the point of view shifting smoothly from Libby to Luke to fill in some background information and keep the reader in the information loop. The unsolved mystery drives the story as Libby uses all her skills to identify the killer or at least to turn up some new evidence in the case.
On the level of a mystery, the story is top notch. Kennedy plays fair with the reader and the clues are all there to be collected so that the reader should be able to figure out what’s going on. Of course, the fact that Libby is a bit slower than the reader just adds to the tension. We can guess what’s going to happen but no matter how much you yell at the page, Libby just does her own thing.
The book is billed as a romance and there’s definitely all the expected tropes of a romance. Kennedy has a light touch and even while ratcheting up the tension on the mystery, she keeps the romance boiling and the humor unexpected but appropriate and a welcome tension reliever. Though I must warn you that even though the sex is very low key and more vague innuendo than exactingly detail (vague is good, and Kennedy is great at this) some of those scenes sizzle so much I thought the book was going to spontaneously combust.
All in all this is one heck of a good book when you just want to put your cares on the back-burner and forget about your problems for a few hours. Libby is strong, independent, witty, and definitely not to be trifled with. Kennedy manages to write Libby as a fully developed character who doesn’t do dumb things just to move the plot along. She does occasionally do some real dumb things, but always with solid reasoning behind the acts — you could imagine if you were Libby you’d do something similar.
Reading Cowboy Trouble by Joanne Kennedy is like stepping into another world and being the proverbial fly on the wall. If you enjoy mystery, romance, or a bit of both — you’ll want to add this to your To Be Read stack (and maybe bump it to the top).
My busy day I’ll admit is not the same as most people’s busy days. But for me I did a lot. (Remember I’ve got that whole lack of spoon things still going on.)
Well, I did the wash, dried, folded, and put it away.
I made bread. Okay so we’ve got a bread machine but it’s now old and wonky but I managed to get it to produce a loaf so we could have it with the chili for supper.
I managed to gain on the email. Answered, sorted, handled, responded, entered in forms, whatever. It got done. Managed to weed the backlog down to under 100 — hopefully tomorrow I’ll get the rest of it taken care of.
By then the headache was starting so switched to reading some of the stuff I need to get done for March.
After supper we watched a movie and knitted on my sock — the plain vanilla one not the sock club one. I’m doing the cuff now and should finish it tomorrow. Then I get to start the next one of this pair.
See. Not much. But I feel right now like I ran a marathon. Sigh but still that’s improvement.
A Contest: The Sourcebooks, the publisher of Mr. Darcy’s Great Escape, is willing to support a giveaway for the US and Canadian readers of this interview. Leave a comment on the post and I will chose a random comment author on Sunday February 7th. I’ll contact the winner to get their snail mail address. Winner will receive one set of three books in the Darcys and Bingleys series).
Marsha Altman continues the story of The Darcys and the Bingleys in Mr. Darcy’s Great Escape, bringing us to 1812. This is book three of the series following The Darcys and the Bingleys and The Plight of the Darcy Brothers. The books are a delight, continuing the lives of some of literature favorite characters Elizabeth Bennet Darcy and Fitzwilliam Darcy. One reviewer said that “that [these books] would please even Jane Austen.” The more I read about Austen’s wit and humor, the more I do believe that she would appreciate Marsha Altman’s continuation of the story.
It may be Mr. Darcy’s Great Escape but you gave the women a very big role this time. Just how much fun was it to pair up the unlikely duo of Elizabeth and Caroline?
Marsha: A lot of fun, but also a little tricky. Even though nine years have passed since the events of Pride and Prejudice, these women still haven’t completely warmed to each other. Elizabeth is still witty and stubborn, and Caroline has to retain a certain edge to her for her to remain Caroline Bingley, even if she’s now Caroline Maddox. It’s not my attempt to make these characters unrecognizable, even if they do evolve significantly as they go through milestones in their lives, particularly marriage and children. Nor was it appropriate to have them constantly sniping at each other, because their journey was very serious. So I had to find a kind of balance there. Darcy and Dr. Maddox actually have more time to bicker, because they have few ways to pass the time while they’re waiting to be rescued.
So much of this resonated with Bram Stoker’s Dracula only without the vampires but with all the Gothic scariness. There’s even a ninja. Did you intend such a homage? Or am I just seeing a connection you didn’t intend?
Marsha: Just a straight-out correction here: There are two vampires in this story. The book just never says it outright, but the hints are hidden in the details. They reappear in other literature I’ve written that’s not Pride and Prejudice related and is either going to be published soon or I’m hoping will sell later this year. And there are no ninjas, only samurai (book 8 has ninjas).
The homage is entirely intentional, but more for the reader than the characters. To them, Transylvania is a place they’ve never heard of and can’t locate on a map before this story begins, except within the context of Brian Maddox having mentioned it was in Austria somewhere in the previous book. Let’s remember that Dracula by Bram Stoker wasn’t published until 1897, and that book was the formation of the modern vampire legend and its association with Transylvania, whereas previously the legends about vampires were less centralized to a place and more nebulous. Vlad the Impaler, on whom Dracula the character is supposedly based, was actually from Wallachia, not Transylvania, and his legend wasn’t widespread until the book was published. So the name “Transylvania” wouldn’t strike instant fear into the hearts of people in 1812. It would be intimidating for being so far east, beyond the known and safe world of the European Continent even if it was technically part of the Austrian Empire at the time, because of its remoteness. The fear comes from leaving familiar Regency England and traveling into a dangerous backwater area, where the “other” is the real scare, not the supernatural.
Nonetheless I chose Transylvania because it has an instant connotation for my audience, and it does have a wealthy historical tradition of folklore to draw from in the scenes that use it. When you’re in a mysterious place, it’s an easy step to be drawn into the foreboding local tales that might surround it, so it’s a simple jump from “scary count who kills people” to “vampires, witches, and warlocks.”
I should remark that this isn’t totally fair to Romanian history. Transylvania had plenty of European, cosmopolitan nobles who had encountered the Enlightenment and were beyond this nonsense (there’s one in the book), but the villains are particularly backwards to heighten the experience.
It seems with each book that Mr. Darcy has to face some of his inner devils or at least learn to broaden his view of the world and the people in it. Do you enjoy tormenting him? Have you got much more torment in store for him?
Marsha: This is as bad as it ever gets for Darcy. Seriously, I let him off easy from here on. He’s better equipped to deal with strife that involves his family lineage in future books after his experiences in this book. This book was my attempt to stretch as far as I could my interpretation of Darcy. In many circles, there are two schools of thought to explain Darcy’s actions in Pride and Prejudice – either he made his mistakes because he was “proud” and then genuinely learned from his actions and changed his characters, or he was “shy” and misinterpreted, causing multiple misinterpretations on both ends that needed to get cleared up before the right people could get married. Austen provides fodder for both explanations: Mrs. Reynolds, on Elizabeth’s visit to Pemberley, goes out of her way to proclaim that her master has always been good and kind to everyone, and Darcy admits at Rosings that he’s not good in making easy conversation with strangers, leading to the “shy” interpretation. Then you have Darcy at the end saying that he was spoiled as a child and expected only the best, leading to the “proud” interpretation. I’ve always sided with “shy” because it makes Darcy a better man – he’s not a jerk who reformed so much as someone who made bad decisions and then corrected them.
Today we have a larger understanding of people who are uncomfortable around other people, myself being one of them, and don’t have an easy time making new friendships or retaining old ones. For people like this, parties full of strangers can feel like living hell. In extreme examples, you have Social Anxiety Disorder, where people can actually develop shortness of breath in the presence of too many people, and you have medication for it. I don’t believe that these problems didn’t exist in the past, they just weren’t acknowledged or understood. I am not, for the record, diagnosing Darcy with SAD (his symptoms don’t match), but pushed to the edge as he is in this book, the darker side of whatever makes him an unsocial person comes out in full force, and coupled with a genetic predisposition you have a serious problem on your hands that tests not just him but everyone around him. It’s a pretty radical interpretation of Darcy, but I like doing new things.
It appears that Gregoire may be learning to relax a bit. You’ve taken all the characters in new directions that wouldn’t have been expected just one book ago. But, it all feels so consistent with their growth. Can you tell us in some very general terms what we might have to look forward to in future volumes?
Marsha: G-d willing, this series will keep being published by my benevolent publisher Sourcebooks, and the next book will be mostly concerned with Grégoire, and his spiritual evolution after some events force him to return to England. Grégoire is like his half-sister Georgiana in that he believes in the good in everyone, but he’s a Darcy, so that makes him stubborn as hell about the way he wants to live his life, even if it seems in direct conflict with the way a modern person (in Regency terms) should live their life. In the fourth book you also have the emerging characters of the children. George Wickham (the third), Darcy’s half-nephew, is old enough to be in University, and Geoffrey Darcy is about to leave for Eton, and Georgiana Bingley is getting ready to enter society, so the shape of their characters as adults is starting to emerge, and the parents have to take a greater hand in trying to guide them into adulthood, where potential fortune or disaster awaits depending on their behavior. When they’re little kids, you can kind of let them run around and occasionally give them instruction, but the stakes become much higher much faster in their teenage years.
The fifth book, which a lot of my readers on the internet feel is the best book so far (nobody’s had a chance to weigh in on the last book and the Velociraptor-related ending), is the one where most of the children have entered society or are about to do so, and they become instrumental to the conflict and resolution in the story. There are still a lot of young kids running around, but the main cast of the next generation has emerged as players, sometimes to their parents’ disapproval. I didn’t want to write a series where BOOM! the kids are all adults trying to get married and the adults haven’t changed except that they have more gray hair and wear glasses. Books skip ahead a few years to key events, but the evolution is steady and somewhat mapped. Nobody ever stops evolving, because people are always growing, even in their later years.
What’s been the biggest surprise about response to your series?
Marsha: That people who have not read Pride and Prejudice have read it and enjoyed it. My parents re-watched the movie and that helped them out. I really should have included a summary of Pride and Prejudice in an introduction to the first book.
Mr. Darcy’s Great Escape—in stores February 2010
Much to his dismay, Charles Bingley is left to hold the fort at Pemberley while his sister Caroline, Elizabeth, and Col. Fitzwilliam traverse Europe on a daring rescue. Meanwhile, Lady Catherine de Bourgh kicks up a truly shocking scandal. One never knows what might happen next between the estates of Rosings and Pemberley.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: