Well Past 50 Books

I have a strange assortment of books from the library right now. Then again, I own a strange assortment of books.

58. Jester Leaps In by Alan Gordon. This is the sequel to Thirteenth Night, which I blogged earlier. Jester Leaps In is the one I was browsing while waiting for Sue, which got me hooked. There are at least two more in this very literate medieval mystery series. I will be reading them.
    
59. Phantom Islands of the Atlantic by Donald S. Johnson. One of my favourite things to do at the library is to wander the stacks randomly, pulling interesting-looking books, or books with curious titles, off the shelf from time to time. This book is the result of one such ramble. It's part folklore, part history of exploration. And it has cool maps. (And it made me decide to change the title of Vinland Stories again, to Frisland Stories--but more on that in a future post.) Rowena would like this book, I think.
    
60. A Glancing Light by Aaron Elkins. This is the author who created Gideon Oliver, the physical anthropologist who kept getting mixed up in murder investigations. Those books were extremely addictive. From the way I devoured Glancing Light, it looks like the books about Chris Norgren, art historian and specialist on Renaissance and Baroque paintings, are also going to be addictive.
    

That's it for fiction. I'm plowing through two very dense but good fantasies right now (details on why two at once when I get to them in the list). Oh, and I also read an edition of In Fairyland--this is a children's book which originally had paintings by Richard "Dicky" Doyle (Sir Arthur Conan's uncle--I've blogged about him before) coupled with dubious poetry by William Allingham (and originally called In Fairy Land, possibly with a hyphen). Anyway, not too long after it was published, Andrew Land decided to write a children's story to go with the pictures (Allingham's poetry didn't; it was just fairy-related), and re-publish it. So he did. Like most Victorian children's literature the story, "Princess Nobody," is condecendingly written and far too precious. At heart, it's a nice literary fairy tale, but Lang felt it necessary to explain what was going on in the pictures (and sometimes the connection between text and art was pretty thin). Good picture books should have the words and pictures work together, both adding to the story without either having to directly reference the other. But I digress. The pictures were lovely, though very, very Victorian. The text was not up to Lang's capabilities.

New Page of Fey

Yup, it's up: page 7. Which means I've really, truly switched to posting new pages on Friday. Now I just have to get a few weeks ahead. I've had it pretty easy with Part 1--essentially, I'm redrawing stuff I'd already done to put in wider gutters, do the lettering on the computer, and fix the worst cringe-inducing panels. With Part 2, I'll be drawing from scratch (I do have thumbnails for most of Part 2, but still . . .). Yikes!

Which Firefly Character are You?

Weird. I'm Jayne (though only 61%). Who are you?

Makes Me Laugh

From Neil Gaiman:

I'm at the age where they start to give you lifetime achievement awards, and you rather wish they wouldn't, because it may be some kind of a hint that it's time for you to sit down and shut up.

More Fey

Slowly, I get the hang of PhotoShop. I'm still not quite satisfied with the text (the look of the words, that is), but it's getting better. And I was more clever when I scanned in the pieces, so you can't even tell where I spliced the page back together. Hah! So here is page 6. And you finally get to meet the other main character. (Is it me, or do I have a lot of female characters whose names begin with "m"?)

Yey, Hey, More of Fey

I just put up the cover for "Drawing Borders" part one. And I just noticed I forgot to make the middle of the "e" transparent. Oops. I'll fix it later. Right now I need to go feed my dog and myself before Cardcaptors comes on, followed by an invasion of small relatives to watch Shrek and Shrek 3-D, which Selena got for her birthday (yesterday).

More of the 50 Sequential Art Books

Yup, more words with pictures (or pictures with words) (or pictures without words).

20. Reinventing Comics by Scott McCloud. This is the book that really got me thinking about how Fey isn't really a webcomic (and doesn't want to be, either). Like Understanding Comics, this one slips in lots of subtle challenges to comics creators to be better than ever, to push the boundaries of the medium, and so on. It didn't get me quite as excited about making comics as McCloud's first book did, but it was excellently done.
    
21. The Four Immigrants Manga by Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama, trans. and ed. by Frederik L. Schodt. This is a really interesting book. It was originally written in both Japanese and English (with the odd bit of Chinese), by a Japanese immigrant to San Francisco in the early 1900s (it mostly takes place in the 1920s). It's laregly biographical and autobiographical, and shows what it was like to be Japanese in America at the time. Interestingly, the art is very much in the style of North American cartoons, rather than like the comics that developed in Japan (manga). The editor points out, though, that like later manga, this book depicts its Japanese characters as looking very European rather than Asian. That was something I'd wondered about, when feeding my manga habit.

Time to get some more comics to read, looks like. I'll probably pick up the next volume or two of InuYasha in the next week or so, plus I think the book that's waiting for me to pick it up at the library is more manga. Now if I could only find some more good North American or European comics at the library. I'm going to have to break down and buy that volume three of Preacher. Plus some Hellblazer. It's just they're so much more expensive than manga. Sigh.

More Than 50 Books

I think I may very soon divide this list into fiction and non. Just not right this minute.

53. The Neptune File by Tom Standage. I think one of the cover blurbs called this "science writing at its best." It is, too. Standage manages to evoke the character of each of the people involved, explain things astronomical in a way that non-astronomers can understand without being overly simplistic, and make science seem really cool, all at the same time. Fascinating book, fascinating historical personages, fascinating science.
    
54. I Was a Rat by Philip Pullman. What if the rat who became Cinderella's page boy got lost in the castle and didn't make it back in time to be turned back into a rat? The wonderful Philip Pullman takes that as the starting point of a story about humanity, love, and silly politics. My favourite of his is still Clockwork, but this one is very good, too. Oh yeah, it's YA/kid's fiction.
    
55. The Mermaid's Three Wisdoms by Jane Yolen. Jane Yolen always writes lovely books. I don't think I've ever read anything of hers that was both beautiful and written in a deceptively simple style. This one isn't one of her best, but it's still better than a whole lot of other fiction, YA or adult (this one's YA).
    
56. Hob and the Goblins by William Mayne. I like books about fairies (you may have noticed). This one was very true to its folkloric origins, written in lovely prose, and full of engaging characters. The final scene where everyone is rescued by an errant double-decker bus (actually a gremlin driving an errant double-decker bus) didn't seem to really fit--perhaps because it was too random, and didn't give the heroes a chance to save themselves. It did make sense given the book's opening, though. (Yes, more YA.)
    
57. Elfsong by Ann Turner. You may have noticed a theme running through these last books. I was browsing the YA/kid's shelves at the library and kept finding intriguing books with fairies in. So I signed a bunch out. They're all wonderful, Elfsong included. The elf society was convincing. Lovely book. (Do I use that word too much?)

Phew. I may need to divide my fiction list (once I separate it from the non-fiction list) into adult and YA/children's lists. I read a lot of kid's books. They're fun, and a lot of them are very well written. For example, while I still adore Anne McCaffrey's books written for a YA audience (I'm think specifically about the Pern Harper Hall trilogy and Black Horses for the King, but there are others), but her books for adults don't seem nearly as good as I thought they were when I first read them (to be fair, though, I haven't finished re-reading them all yet). Her writing is much more focussed and elegant in her kid's books.

More on Fey and Image Quality

So I went back and re-did the other pages and they do look very, very much better. I need to play with the .jpg compression a bit more to see if I can get the file saizes down, but I'm much happier. Yay! I tried one page at the lowest quality, and it still looked pretty good (but that version's not online). I don't notice any difference between the best low-quality image (page one) and the worst medium-quality one (page two)--I'll see where I start to notice the difference, and change them all accordingly. But not right now. Darwin is pacing and just came in to breathe hot dog breath on me to remind me that it's pee time. And I want a bath.

New Fey (not a webcomic)

So here's Fey page 5. And I think I've found the secret to non-jaggedy art (or a secret, anyway): don't use the "save for web" function on PhotoShop, even though other webcomics artisits seem to do it. This time I just saved it regularly, and as a .jpg instead of a .gif. The file's bigger, of course, but it looks sooooo much better (if you can ignore the shadowy bit where I joined the two scans--this one's got greys, so I couldn't rely on a b&w scan to get rid of shadows). Time to find a web provider with much cheap webspace, methinks. Anyway, I'll be fixing the previous pages asap.

So there are two new things about this page, besides the nicer look. One is that it's the first time you meet the main character (one of two, actually). I think I broke some kind of sacred rule of fiction by waiting so long to show a main character. Just think of the first four pages as a prologue, if it bothers you (I don't because generally prologues are a poor attempt to fill the reader in with info that should have been worked into the body of the story). New thing number two is grey tones in the art. And they're not cg.

Which leads me to the bracketed part of the title. I just read Scott MCCloud's Reinventing Comics (which I will blather about more when I post about my latest reading), and it got me thinking about what webcomics are, and how Fey really doesn't exploit the electronic format much at all. And I realized that it's because Fey is only a webcomic in the sense that it's a comic published on the web. What it is is a print comic that I can't afford to self publish and haven't got enough of to submit to publishers, so I'm putting it online.

It doesn't bother me at all that my comic's not really a webcomic, but I do want to explore the idea of making webcomics--real webcomics--some more. And I want to learn to draw manga style (partly in the hopes that it'll make my drawing style a little more spare, less hatching-heavy). So I thought, hey, I should try them both at the same time. So what I'm going to do is play around with PhotoShop and make a webcomic that explores whatever I feel like exploring at the time. And I'll put it online whenever I happen to finish a page. It's going to be called Into the Woods. Why? Partly because I really liked Alberto Manguel's book of essays about books called Into to Looking-Glass Wood, and partly because when you say someone is "out of the woods" it means they're out of danger. I figure this'll be new territory, and maybe dangerous in a sense. Plus, I like trees.

Attack of the Cutes

I think I'm having an attack of the cutes. I now have two sickly-cute NeoPets on top of my monitor (both given to my by my niece when I said I thought they were cool). And we were out shopping to spend Selena's (said niece) birthday money and I actually liked the t-shirts with cute things on that she was trying on. I mentioned this to my sister. "It must be all that anime," she said, wisely.

And . . .

I just noticed I neglected to remove a few extra lines around the edges when I re-did those pages of Fey. Urgh. I'll fix them later. Right now I need to take my dog out to pee.

Fey News

Well, I worked on Fey today, and it looks better. Definitely not perfect, but better. The next things will be to do the panel borders in PhotoShop with the line tool, so they look neater. And maybe I'll try adding the text after reducing the size. That might help. But it looks a little better.

Understanding Manga

Or my thoughts about it, anyway. As you may know, if you've been following along, I just read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. And you may remember be blathering about manga and why I didn't read much of it in the past (that post is here if you want it). Well, I was reading McCloud's book, and he was discussing the different kinds of between-panel transitions in comics. The most common transitions in western comics are "action-to-action" (sequences showing the progression of actions), followed by "subject-to-subject" (switching between subjects in a single scene or action), and "scene-to-scene" (shanges in time or place). In eastern comics, though, transitions between subjects in a scene/action are nearly as important as action sequences. What is more interesting, though, and what really caught my attention, is the presence of "moment-to-moment" transitions (those that show small changes in a single subject), and the relatively strong presence of "aspect-to-aspect" transitions (those that show different aspects of a single place, idea or mood, ignoring time alltogether). Yeah, pretty technical, but sometimes technical is good. Anyway, McCloud says of these aspect-to-aspect transitions:

Most often used to establish a mood or a sense of place, time often seems to stand still in these quiet, contemplative combinations . . . . Rather than acting as a bridge between separate moments, the reader here must assemble a single moment using scattered fragments.

Now what was that I said about more (or less) bang for your buck (ick, I really dislike that particular cliché)? McCloud speculates that one reason for this difference is that eastern comics (or Japanese comics, anyway) tend to be first published in huge anthologies, and then collected in multi-volume sets (InuYasha is up to 17 volumes, each nearly 200 pages--at least, the comic shop had 17; there could be more).

As such, dozens of panels can be devoted to portraying slow cinematic movement or to setting a mood.

But, he says, there seems to be something more fundamental than just length. Whereas western culture is very goal-oriented, in our literature as in anything else, in the east there is "a rich tradition of cyclical and labyrinthine works of art," comics included. I like that: cyclical and labyrinthine. Beautiful words for a beautiful idea.

Anyway, I don't know if I like manga more now because I'm older and things don't seem so urgent anymore, or if it's just that I've grown more contemplative (though I've always been rather laid back and contemplative; maybe I should've given manga another chance back then. Or maybe it was the quality or subject matter of the work published at the time?) Anyway, I no longer think of those mood-setting aspect-to-aspect transitions as nothing happening. Instead, they're a chance to deepen the moment. Like anything else, though, deepening the moment should not be overdone. Does this make sense? I am fumbling my way through things I don't understand very well yet. Yet. I plan to dig much, much deeper into this.

More Fey, and Some Difficulties

The newest page of Fey is up: part 1, page 4. Still jaggedy as I haven't had a lot of time to play with PhotoShop lately. I'll be making time tomorrow, I hope, as I'm now having even worse problems with the readability of the text. I expect the words in the word balloons are entirely unreadable. I can only read them because I already know what they say. Time to do some more investigating on the web to see what I'm doing wrong. It may meaning starting all over again with fresh scans (or at least from the part where I stick the two halves of the scan together--as I draw too big to fit the pages on the scanner). I may have to resort to drawing future pages actual size. Eh. Don't want to do that. So for now, apologies for the crappy look of the pages. They will be fixed. And I just noticed they look even worse on my laptop. Bleah.

50 Graphic Novels, er, Seqential Art Books

I'm going to have to change the title of this list, since one of the books I've just added (and another coming up) is non-fiction. Come to think of it, at least one of the books already on this list is non-fiction. So what to call it instead of "Graphic Novels"? "Graphic Books" doesn't sound right. "Sequential Art Books"? Better.

17. InuYasha volume 2 by Rumiko Takahashi. Did I mention that InuYasha reappeared on TeleToon? Yay. And I just discovered that, in a poorly-lit display case at the back of the store, our local comic shop has InuYasha DVDs. They ain't cheap, mind you, but it's nice to know they're there. Anyway, volume two picks up where volume one left off, oddly enough, and continues the rollicking adventures. This series really appeals to me. I think it's the guy trying to be tough who's really a nice guy inside. Which isn't to say he isn't actually tough, too. Er . . . I think maybe I'll just stop now.
    
18. Aria volume 1 by Kozue Amano. I picked this up on a whim because it had a pretty cover. Also because I noticed that the characters visit an Inari shrine part way through, and buy some Inarizushi to eat. Inarizushi is next on my list of types of sushi to learn how to make. The book turned out to be a gentle story, full of introspection and lovely scenery. There isn't a whole lot of tension, so it's not exactly a riveting story, but I really, really enjoyed it. I'll be looking for the next volume.
    
19. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. I've been meaning to read this since it first came out, and now I finally have. The library copy (which I had to request from another branch) is so well-used that the cover is disintegrating. And I can see why; it's a fabulous book. Even if you don't read comics, I highly recommend this book. It's an education, and very, very interesting. I've also got Reinventing Comics by the same author (also requested from another branch of the library)--it'll show up on this list soon. More gushing about how great this book is can be found in my review. And some interesting things I learned while reading it will be the topic of a near-future blog entry.
    

I discovered, while trying to locate volume 3 of Preacher (I have vols 1, 2, 4, and 5), that the library hasn't got quite as good a selection of graphic novels as I originally thought. I was fooled by the complete series of Sandman, Elfquest, InuYasha and Ranma 1/2 (most of which are not at my local branch). Sigh. At least they have some comics.

Still More 50 Books

Oh how I love to read,
I like few things better.
Like a burning, itching need,
Only writing is better.

Well, we all know I'm a lousy poet, no?

49. Dracula by Bram Stoker. Yes, I finally finished Dracula. I love this book. The structure, the way it's made up of excerpts from journals and telegrams and such always made it seem much more contemporary (postmodern, almost?). It's easy to see why it's an enduring classic. Interestingly, I wasn't as impressed by the faithfulness of the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula (the one with Gary Oldman as the main bloodsucker) as I was last time. When I first watched the moive, I thought Keanu Reeves did a really, really bad job of portraying Jonathan Harker. But then I read the book and thought, "Hunh, Jonathan Harker really is a weenie." But I didn't think so this time (in the book, I mean). He seemed much more like the gentle and sensitive, yet strong, soul that Mina described in her parts of the book. I wonder why I didn't see that last time? Anyway, I also noticed quite a few plot differences between book and movie, though most of them make sense (or could be argued to make sense) in terms of translation from one medium to another. Did you know that in the book, Mina and Dracula don't even meet until near the end, after Jonathan has returned? Interesting.
    
50. The Death of an Ardent Bibliophile by Bartholomew Gill. This is one that my sister, Sue, signed out of the library and I decided to read because of the title. I couldn't put the damn thing down. The writing wasn't perfect (but it was good), but the characters were engaging and the setting (Dublin) interesting. And it had rare books in. I read it nearly in one (very long) sitting.
    
51. Thirteenth Night by Alan Gordon. Another one Sue is responsible for. I was waiting for her in the car one day, and picked up a book she was returing to the library and started to read the first paragraph. I was hooked immediately, but it was the second book about the character. So I pried myself away and got Thirteenth Night from the library. The main character is the fool Feste from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (which I had to dig out and read concurrently), who returns to town to solve a murder. Imagine all the fools and jesters of old belonging to a secret society.
    
52. The Gathering Dark by Christopher Golden. Chistopher Golden co-created the Ghosts of Albion videos along with Amber Benson (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer). I really liked Ghosts of Albion, so I picked this up tp see what his writing is like. It's very good, but for some reason it took me a long time to get into this. I think it may have partly been because the structure is pretty much the same as any other third-person-multiple-viewpoint genre novel. Show one character doing something for a while, then skip to another character, and so on. Then show things going wrong in the lives of those characters, then finally bring all the characters together. Anyway, the writing was good enough that it did finally pull me in, and kept pulling me back, so I read this rather thick book quite quickly.
    

So I'm still working through the pile of fiction I got from the library, but I think I may go back to some more cool science once I'm done. For a little while. And then it'll be time to get back to my League of Extraordinay Reading. Either Poe or Verne, probably. Or possibly Wells.

Fey Page 3

Finally, page 3 of Fey is up. Still jaggedy (grrr), but I'm working on it. It looks much better big. Sigh.

Er . . . A Little Late

So the next page of Fey will be slightly late. It's done in hardcopy, and half of it is scanned. The other half was scanned, but I need to redo it as I managed to cut off one edge (and that after scanning it twice!). I'm just too sleepy to do it again now. Wanna go curl up in bed with my book, I do. But it'll be the first thing I do tomorrow. There isn't much text to add so it shouldn't take too long. I hope.

The Beginning of Three Sisters

Here it is:

"Once there was a king who had three daughters," said Jinty, sitting up very straight and looking at each of her sisters to be sure they were paying attention. They were. They always did, though they had told each other this story countless times.

"This king was very rich, and liked nothing better than to spend the day among the emissaries from foreign countries, gambling. The king believed he was good at gambling, but he lost more than he won, and soon the kingdom's coffers were getting bare. Each time he began to run out of money, he'd sell off another estate, or raise the taxes."

Jinty smoothed the pages of the book in her lap. It was a copy of Grimm's fairy tales that had been her mother's. It was open to a story called "The Three Sisters," but Jinty didn't read the words or even look at the pages as she told the story. She didn't need to. Between them, she, Kyrie and Fern knew the story so well they had made it their own.

Now back to work.

I Am

A cywydd llosgyrnog; I'm one. "A what?" Well, quite. There'd be no fun In being understood; I Thrive upon obliquity. Don't comprehend or follow me, For mystery's my ally. What Poetry Form Are You?

Books, Books, Books

I promise I'll write about something other than books soon. Really I will.

48. Seals and Sea-Lions of the World by Nigel Bonner. This was pretty much your standard "X of the World" sort of book. What I mean is, it had blurbs about all the different kinds of seals and sea-lions, chapters on reproduction and social organization, conficts with fisheries and all suchlike, and it was written in a fairly dry information-imparting style. Which isn't to say it was boring. There was enough fascinating detail that I could ignore the dry writing (actually it wasn't as bad as many of this sort of book I've read). I got it from the library in the hopes that it would inspire me to write the second half of "Daughters of the Sea King" the way that reading about sharks got me eager to write the first half (though that was also helped out by a documentary on Great White Sharks that made me stare at the screen and think such intelligent thoughts as "that's one big fucking fish.") It's helped, but I don't quite have the same excitement. I need a good seal documentary, perhaps. Or maybe I need to re-read The People of the Sea. Hmmm. Yes, that might work. At least I now know that the seal-shape of the Seal Folk is Grey Seal. I was also looking for useful information about Steller's Sea-Lions that I could use for Three Sisters. There was some, though not as much as I'd hoped. The author seemed much more familiar with Antarctic seals and those found near England. Lots of good photos, though.
    

I am drawing ever nearer to 50 books, and the year isn't even quite half over yet. Weird. Dracula is coming along, finally. I'll finish it today, and then start on some of those mysteries from the library. And maybe some YA fiction--I got Garth Nix's Grim Tuesday ages ago and haven't hardly glanced at it yet.

Now I think I'll actually try to get some writing done. I did so much work on work in the past couple of days that I need a bit of a break. I was going to wait to slack off until tomorrow, seeing as it is my birthday, but what the hell.

The Meaning in Names?

N	Neat
I	Innocent
K	Keen
O	Organic

Name / Username:

Name Acronym Generator
From Go-Quiz.com

And here's me in comic creator mode:

N	Naughty
I	Industrious
C	Controversial
O	Organic

Name / Username:

Name Acronym Generator
From Go-Quiz.com
I'm organic, apparently, whatever disguise I'm in. (Link via Pen-Elayne.)

More Fey: Page 2

I just put up Fey, part 1, page 2. Still jaggedy, but I'll fix that if it kills me. I'm aiming to get new pages up every Friday, rather than Monday, as Monday is my big day for CW for Teens. Eventually, I'll get ahead by a few weeks and stop doing this at the last minute. Eventually, I'll have a real web page for Fey. Eventually.

Manga, Anime, and Graphic Novel #16

I was going to blog about the graphic novel in the last post, but I know I'm about to go on and on about manga and anime, so I thought it should get its own post. So first, the graphic novel:

16. Shaman King volume 1 by Hiroyuki Takei. I wasn't at all sure I'd like this book, but I ordered it on a whim from my niece's Scholastic Books order--the school gets something as a result of people ordering though them. Books, I think. Anyway, Shaman King was pretty fun. It does have a lot of action--cool fight scenes take up quite a few of the pages (but it's boy's manga, so what can I expect?). The story is a little on the thin side, compared to something like Sandman, but it did have lots of Japanese myth and folklore, and the plot wasn't as much of a thin frame on which to hang fight sequences as a lot of boy's manga has (judging by the latest issue of Shonen Jump, anyway). It won't be right at the top of my list, but I will be watching for volume 2 in my local comic shop.
    

I also read the aforementioned latest issue of Shonen Jump (shonen = boy's manga). At 360-odd pages, it probably could count as a graphic novel (though technically, it's an anthology, not a novel), but it didn't feel like one. It felt like a big magazine, so I haven't put it on the list.

But I was going to blather on about manga and anime. I think I mentioned something about becoming addicted to anime again (one website I saw says, "Anime: crack is cheaper" and another said, "If you want a cheap addiction, try drugs.") But anyway. Aside from Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, I haven't watched much anime for a while. I used to, though. Once upon a time, my favourite tv show was The Transformers (also indirectly responsible for my comics habit). And before that, I loved Battle of the Planets. Then there was Robotech, all three storylines. But then I didn't watch much for a while. Not until many years later when Tim and I got addicted after watching Space: The Imagination Station's Friday night (or was it Saturday?) anime movies that came on after Lexx. Space doesn't play anime anymore, due to lack of interest, apparently.

More recently, I've been watching Cybersix and Inu-Yasha (it's back on!) on YTV and TeleToon (which our stupid free tv guide doesn't even list). Combined with a returning fascination with manga, it was only a matter of time before addiciton happened.

And as for manga . . . If you're aware at all of the state of the comic book industry (a good place to learn is the archives of Journalista, the no-longer-updated blog of The Comics Journal), then you'll know that kids these days don't care about superheroes; they want manga. And a lot of adults do, too. I can see why. Though there are lots of good independent (and non-superhero) books published in North America, most of the big publishers seem to be recycling the same old superheroes (except they dress them in less clothing and put them in poses straight out of porn--so I am told, and it looks like it), presumably to make them more appealing. Superheroes interest me even less than they ever did. And it seems like a lot of people feel that way.

I've been trying to resist the lure of manga. I've been trying very hard. It wasn't too difficult in the past, when manga (in English) was mostly reprinted in the same format as American comics, and for the same price. Because a lot of manga tends to have less story per page than the stuff I usually like to read (nice, dense, story-heavy stuff) (I suspect the story per page thing may be about the same in superhero comics as in action manga, but I don't know), I always thought manga was too expensive. Not enough bang for the buck as it were (or not enough story, rather). But now that most publishers have switched to the thick graphic novel format--usually around 200 pages a book--for only 2 or 3 times the price of a 24-36 page comic, manga seems to be a much better buy. (I'm speaking metaphorically, of course, and in broad generalizations. I don't actually decide whether or not to buy something based on how much of the story is crammed onto one page.)

I wonder if this is coming out of my brain as logically as it seemed when I was thinking about it.

Anyway, I tried to resist the trend. I hate being trendy. I dislike doing what everyone else is doing. But I try not to avoid something just because everyone else likes it. I could miss out on some really good stuff that way. So the result is that my growing anime addiction is closely accompanied by a new manga addiction. Like I need more comics to spend money on. Luckily, the popularity of manga means that there are quite a few titles at the libary, though volume 1 of just about everything always seems to be checked out. Time to exercise my ability to put holds on books via the library web search page.

I'm sure there was a lot more I was going to say, and probably I was going to say some of those things more elegantly, or more clearly, or in a different order. But I don't wish to bore my gentle readers, so I'll shut up for now.

2 More Books

One more non-fiction and--at last--some more fiction.

46. The Rat: A Perverse Miscellany (compiled) by Barbara Hodgson. I thought this would be really cool: a little bit of literature, a little bit of natural science, some nice pictures and a bit of analysis to tie it all together. It wasn't a bad book; I did enjoy it, but I was disappointed. There was almost no natural science, and no analysis, and the literature was almost entirely anti-rat or rat-as-evil-dirty-creature. The pictures were nice, though. One of the most disappointing things, I think, was that Hodgson repeated the contemporary legend (aka "urban myth") that cities have 1:1 ratios of rats to humans, without speculating at all on why this perception exists. Anyway, rats are interesting, so pretty much any book about them will have something to offer, even if it isn't as much as one expected.
    
47. Child of Faerie, Child of Earth by Josepha Sherman. And after something that disappoints, something that delights. This YA novel is full of the best kind of magic (that the characters have to work for), and yes, fairies. It's also a romance, in the sense that it has a girl and a boy falling in love (not in the sense of "Harlequin romance novel"). True love, too. The best kind. All the way through, I kept thinking, "This would make a fabulous animated movie." Sherman's writing is very visual, which I find appealing, and I found myself picturing the story as a movie while I read it (helped along by the somewhat manga/anime-ish illustrations--of which there could have been many more). (I've got it stuck in my head, too, that Jane Yolen wrote a lovely picture book with this same title.) I notice I've written "the best kind" twice in this blurb. I think that's a good thing (for my opinion of the book, not for my grasp of good writing).
    

I went to the library a couple of days ago and got a whole pile of fiction: some mystery, some sf, some just odd. I'm also about halfway through Dracula (finally), so once I finish the book on seals that I'm currenly reading, it'll be a long stretch of good, pulpy novels.

Long Time No See

So I finally found out what my friend Tim's been up to. Cool stuff.

Comics: New Page of Fey

Well, I still haven't figured out what I did wrong, so it's still jagged, and so far unshaded, but page 1 of Fey, "Drawing Borders" part 1 is up for your viewing pleasure.

Edit: Oh yeah, and I'm using the alias "nico" for my comics work. Because I feel like it.

Book 45 (Plus Another)

I read the wonderful Lyra's Oxford the other night. I very much recommend it, if you've read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. In fact, if you've read His Dark Materials, you really need to read Lyra's Oxford. If you haven't read the trilogy, though, you can go ahead and read Lyra, but there are a lot of things that won't make much sense.

And I haven't added Lyra to the 50 Books list, because it was barely over 50 pages, and I'd feel guilty, even though it is a book (and a very nice hardcover at that). But I do have a new one for the list, and I read all 216 pages of it yesterday. Yesterday evening, in fact.

45. Murder One: A Writer's Guide to Homicide by Mauro V. Corvasce and Joseph R. Paglino. No, this doesn't mean I'm still working on the mystery novel (well, I haven't given up on it, but other things--like Vinland Stories and Three Sisters-- are more important). Murder is interesting, if sometimes too gruesome to really want to think about. I reviewed this one for work.

Now I've got to find some more graphic novels to read. I calculated that I'll have to read 5 per month to get to 50 by the end of the year.

Just Thought This Was Funny

From Snopes (on a page about finding money in hotel Bibles):

There are only so many places one can hide valuables in a hotel room, and the Bible is most of them.

I'm Jean-Luc!

Blog Genealogy

I just added a link to my Blog Tree genealogy in the sidebar. It's in celebration of my first blogchild (now I have convince her to add her blog there).

44/50 Books -- 15/50 Graphic Novels

So I finished another of my library books, and 50 grows ever closer. Maybe I will have to make separate lists for fiction and non-fiction. I'll have to get cracking on some fiction, though. Now, where'd I put Dracula? I'm supposed to be reading Dracula.

44. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life by Stephen Jay Gould. More on science and religion. I kind of have mixed feelings about this book. It was well-written and well-argued, as is usual for Gould. And he does have a point--if religion and science each stick to their own domain, there is no conflict. But I still don't think religion is the place to look for moral guidance, primarily because I don't agree with the moral guidelines espoused by most religions (the big ones anyway). And I find that most religions (again the big ones, anyway) have fundamental things encoded in their scripture that I just can't agree with (okay, my main objection is with Christianity's historical position on women--and yes, misogyny is in the Bible, both Old Testament and New--and the "function" of the planet (as a resource for "man" to exploit). I know, of course, that not all members of all religions suscribe to all their religion's historic hoo-ha, but I can't help but think that with some of those elements being so pervasive in the background that . . . Oh, crap, I can't make this sound like it does in my head. And anyway, none of that's in this book. To be fair, Gould says that religion is one place to look for moral guidance, and not the only one. I just don't think he made that point strongly enough. But then, that wasn't the point of the book. So I should just shut up.
    

Well, I didn't mean to go off on such a weird tangent (and I especially didn't mean to be unable to put my thoughts into words). There was one quote in the book that really struck me:

We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes--one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximal freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.

And I have two graphic novels to add, because I missed one in my last list.

14. Sei: Death & Legend by Sho Murase. I picked this up because of the gorgeous art. And it really is gorgeous. Not perfect, mind you, but how often do you get perfect art, anyway? The story is lovely, too: a fable of love and death and gods, based on Japanese folklore/mythology. But the writing, alas, was really disappointing. Especially the inane dialogue poor Inari was given. Inari's one of my favourite deities (how can you not like a god/dess who's associated with foxes?). And there were some really cringe-inducing spelling and grammar errors--ones that would have been easy to fix and would have been caught be any halfway competent copyeditor. I wonder if maybe the folks at Image could've given it a read before they published it. I know it's an independent book, which means the creator's supposed to do all that, but it doesn't reflect well on the publisher. But I could even have overlooked that, if it weren't for the criminal font abuse. I could deal with the different fonts for different characters (though it could have been handled a little better; but I don't have the energy to go into detail), but the constant switching in font size was too much. Perhaps the creator meant to indicate different volumes of speech, but in that case there should be one default size, one smaller for (very occasional) whispering, and one bigger for (very occasional) shouting. And maybe that's the case here; I didn't count. But anyway, the creator may have heard the voices at different volumes, but I just found the font size shifts annoying (and it happened way too often). Phew. That said, I did like the book overall, and I will look for more work by Murase. I just wish people would realize that when you're doing words and pictures the words are just as important. Actually, sometimes they're more important. But anyway . . .
    
15. Mobile Suit Gundam: Blue Destiny by Mizuho Takayama (created by Yoshiyuki Tomino and Hajime Yadate). Yup, more manga. I haven't read any other Gundam books, or seen any of the anime, but the library had this one and I thought it looked like fun. And it was. Big robot (er . . . mobile suit) fighting action fun. Lots of shooting and giant swords. I think I finally figured out what was going on, and it was a neat idea, though I could be wrong about the whole thing. But anyway, fun giant robots and stuff.
    

Comics: Fey

I spent a big chunk of the day working on page one of Fey so I can get it online. My aim is to do a page a week. But I haven't quite got the hang of PhotoShop yet. I ended up with either a really nice page that was way too big, or a page the right size that was all jaggedy. Obviously I went wrong somewhere. I have a few ideas about where I messed up, so tomorrow (or soon, anyway), I'll get back at it and see if I can figure it out. I might put page one up jaggedy anyway, just to have something there.

Plus, I'm working on a new webpage for Fey. If it turns out half as good as I imagine, it'll be very, very cool. Or pretty cool, at least. But first I'll need a host that gives me lots of webspace. And bandwidth. Someday my comic may be the next big thing, though I'd settle for well-thought-of.

More 50 Graphic Novels

4. Age of Bronze: A Thousand Ships by Eric Shanower. I don't know why I didn't buy this series when it first came out (in individual issues). It's exactly the sort of thing I like: gorgeous art, retelling of old tales (Homer's Illiad in this case), great writing and characterization. I'm very glad the library had it, and I hope they get the next volume.
   
5. Courtney Crumrin and the Coven of Mystics by Ted Naifeh. Courtney Crumin is cool. I read the first volume (Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things) and loved it, so when I saw this one, I had to have it. Fairies (alias Night Things), a creepy but lovable sorcerer uncle, a big old house, scary and wonderful forest--everything I like best in my fiction (er . . . and non-fiction, for that matter). Plus the art is lovely, even though this volume is reprinted at a smaller size than the original comics (and the copy of Night Things I have).
   
6. Nightmares & Fairytales: Once Upon a Time by Serena Valentino. Illos by FSc. Once upon a time. I came across a single issue of this comic, and was so excited I blogged about it. So more recently I found this collection of the first bunch of issues. I like some stories better than others, but it's scary fairytales, right? My favourite (I think it's starting to sound like everything I read is my favourite).
   
7. Meridian: Flying Solo (CrossGen Comics). I like most of the CrossGen comics I've read, though I really tried not to (blogged here and here). Meridian is a nice fantasy with a young girl protagonist (who doesn't have huge boobs!). The overall "CrossGen" story bits that are supposed to connect all the publisher's titles were a bit annoying and unnecessary, but otherwise it's a nicely plotted book. It's just too bad CrossGen's been so crappy to their freelancers and has gone down the toilet (scroll to "CrossGen Chronicles" midway down).
   
8. Black Jack volume 1 by Osamu Tezuka. This is a really odd book about an unlicensed surgeon who performs miraculous operations. The creator was also responsible for the much more famous Astroboy.
   
9. 2001 Nights: Journey Beyond Tomorrow by Yukinobu Hoshino. My manga infatuation has returned, I think. I picked this one up because I felt like a good space adventure. I was expecting something along the lines of Starblazers or Robotech, but the book turned out to be a really nice collection of short stories. Some of them were horrific while others were much more dreamy, but they all sort of added up to something bigger. Unfortunately, this was volume two of a trilogy, and though it was easy enough to jump in (given that they're short stories and not one narrative), I would've liked to read the first one, too.
   
10. 2001 Nights: Children of Earth by Yukinobu Hoshino. This is book 3 of the trilogy, and really made me wish I could've read book 1. It continued the short stories, but by the end you realize that there was an overall narrative, too, a story about one possible future for humankind. I've added this series to my "books to look for" list, but comics of any kind, let alone manga, don't turn up in used bookstores very often, alas. Though once the Value Village in Nanaimo had a huge pile of manga, but all in Japanese, so I wouldn't have been able to actually read it. Sigh.
    
11. Sleepwalk and Other Stories by Adrian Tomine. Classic independent black and white stuff. This book is short stories and, though a few of them are a bit . . . inscrutable? . . . they're mostly very effectively written and beautifully drawn. Makes me wonder why I never got to reading Tomine's stuff before now. Probably because they're not fantasy and I used to have a bigtime fantasy-only thing. Yes, I am a geek.
    
12. Faeries' Landing, vol. 1 by You Hyun. Yes, more manga. Yes, it's got fairies in. How could I pass it up. It's kind of a silly urban fantasy, but the art is nice and it's lots of fun. I'll be looking for vol. 2 next time I'm in the comic store. (Collector's Choice in Duncan turns out to have a not too bad selection of manga--for what is essentially a small-town shop. Their selection of independent and small press book stinks, though, but that's not unusual for even a big-city store.)
    
13. InuYasha vol. 1 by Rumiko Takahashi. So pretty much as soon as I start watching the anime version of this on YTV, they stop showing it. How annoying. Lucky for me, I found vol. 1 in the comic store so now I am happy. It's got beautiful demons, time travel, magic and of course a school girl in a short skirt. I am going to turn into a manga junkie at this rate.
    

Looks like it might take me a little longer to reach 50 graphic novels.

Surely Not More 50 Books?

29. The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. This is another one of my heavy science readings. Except it really wasn't all that heavy. And it has a lot to do with science and religion, or at least with science as an antidote to superstition. Good reading, and food for much thought.
    
30. Lucinda's Secret by Holly Black. (Spiderwick Chronicles Book 3) Illos by Tony diTerlizzi. I love Spiderwick! This is a really fun series of kids' novels (really one novel in 5 parts, and probably too short to include on the list, but like I said before, it's my list). There are fairies, of course, and intrepid siblings (twin brothers and an older sister), and really pretty pictures.
    
31. Shades of Dracula by Bram Stoker (ed. Peter Haining). This is kind of an odd collection, beginning with the subtitle: "The uncollected stories of Bram Stoker." I suspect that should be "previously uncollected." Anyway, there are, of course, several Bram Stoker stories in it (enough commas there for you?), which range from kinda flaky to really good. There is also a newspaper article (not by Stoker) that Stoker cut out of a paper in the US, and which was probably a major influence for Dracula. And there is a story called "Another Dracula?" (also not by Stoker) which was written by an American writer "based on an idea by Bram Stoker." As I said, odd, but worth the reading. This should also count under my "League of Extraordinary Books" reading. And it made me decide to read Dracula again. Except then I got distracted, as you'll see below.
    
32. How to Write a Mystery by Larry Beinhart. I picked this up hoping it'd help me get into writing Reading the Bones (a book which looks less and less likely to happen any time soon). It didn't. You can read my review for CW for Teens to see what I thought.
    
33. The Criminal Mind by Katherine Ramsland. Another book I got from the library to help me get into mystery-writing mode. This one was really good, though not all that helpful for the plot I have planned. I also reviewed it for work.
    
34. The Dark Place by Aaron Elkins. Now this is what distracted me from Dracula. I went to the used book store looking for . . . actually I can't remember what I was looking for, but I ended up in the "e"s in the mystery section, thought the title looked interesting, discovered the protagonist was a physical anthropologist and ended up buying two of the books. And so I got hooked. Except I figured out the whole "supernatural force" necessary to create the mortal wound by the time I got to the end of the back cover copy. The characters didn't figure it out until several chapters in, which was very frustrating. But I used to live with a guy who made replicas of "stone age" tools. He made one of the things used in the murder (which I won't spoil by telling what it was). I used one myself. Fun with archaeologists.
    
35. Old Bones by Aaron Elkins. This is the second Gideon Oliver mystery I got at that used book store (actually, I think it was the title of this one that first caught my eye). This one's set in France where a skeleton is discovered buries in the basement of an old manor house by the workmen who are there to fix the drains.
    
36. Skeleton Dance by Aaron Elkins. This one I had to get from the library. I think I read it in one day. Maybe two. Hooked I say. Except I never did figure out what the title had to do with anything (except the obvious skeleton bit).
    
37. Murder in the Queen's Armes by Aaron Elkins. After searching two used book stores, I found two more Gideon Oliver book in the same store where I'd found the first two. In this one, Gideon's in England, and there's academic intrigue and thefts of artifacts and a really, really big dog.
    
38. Briar Rose by Robert Coover. This is a lush and beautiful book (and it doesn't even have pictures!). Coover manages to fits just about every conceivable retelling of Sleeping Beauty into this novella, all within the context of a single retelling. That makes sense if you've read the book. This is a fantastic example of revisionary/retold fairytale, and I've added it to my "must own" list (alas, the copy I read belongs to the library, and they're going to want it back soon). (I might read it again before then.)
    
39. The Rumpelstiltskin Problem by Vivian Vande Velde. More retold fairy tales! This time one of my favourite YA authors tries to answer questions like "Why did a creature that cold spin gold from straw want the girl's gold ring and necklace?" and "What would such a creature do with a baby?" in six very different versions of one old story. Besides being a wonderful read, this book is a good example of how one plot can reseult in many different stories.
    
40. How to Create Action, Fantasy and Adventure Comics by Tom Alvarez. There wasn't much in here that I didn't know, and the writing ranged from mediocre to cringe-inducing, but I actually did pick up a few tips and ideas from this book, so it wasn't a waste of time to read. Heh. How's that for a glowing review. Partly, I was disappointed because the focus was more on superheroes than anything else. Don't wanna make superhero comics.
    
41. Icy Clutches by Aaron Elkins. Another Gideon Oliver mystery, this time to do with the bones of lost hikers melting out of a glacier. These things are addictive. I was going to read Dracula, wasn't I? But I can't stop reading this series. They're like candy. But good candy that doesn't get too sweet after you've had a few.
    
42. Animal Bone Archaeology by Brian Hesse and Paula Wapnish. My attempts to write a mystery novel with a zooarchaeologist main character (plus my love affair with Gideon Oliver mysteries) got me to pull out this old textbook. It was really fun to read it again. MNI. TNF. Oh yeah, we zooarchaeologists speak a secret language. I am reminded, though, that I probably should forget my thoughts about maybe doing a master's in zooarch. I'd have to re-learn an awful lot of technical stuff. But bones are cool.
    
43. Science Fiction Comics: The Illustrated History by Mike Benton. This was a lot of fun, though perhaps a little light on text. Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, plus all kinds of obscure sf comics. One of the really interesting things covered was the relationship between the sf pulp magazines (that is, the ones with short fiction in) and the sf comics. I hadn't realized so many early sf writers wrote comics scripts as well as stories.
    

Look, ma, I'm caught up. Yep. That's all the books I've read so far this year (besides graphic novels, of course). Think I'll make it to 50?

Penn and Teller Strike Again

Anyone who's read much of this blog will probably know that my subconscious mind's messengers of choice are Penn and Teller. Well, the other night, my psyche decided to send them into my dreams again. This time they and I were conducting fake funerals as a form of entertainment. It was very bizarre, but also amusing. Except the part where I was trapped in a bikini and couldn't find anything else to put on. And I was chubbier than I actually am. There's nothing like parading around in a bikini while Penn and Teller preside over a fake funeral (complete with "deceased" jumping out of the coffin at the end).

I wonder if I could translate any of these famous magician dreams into webcomics . . .

50 Graphic Novels

Now here's the new second list: graphic novels and comic collections I've read so far this year.

1. After the Rain by Andre Juillard
   
2. My New York Diary By Julie Doucet
   
3. Hellboy by Mike Mignola

And now I see how far behind I am in this blogging about books thing, as all those many graphic novels I've been going on about having read aren't actually on the list yet.

New 50 Books

So here's the new "books read so far list" (without the annotations, so you don't have to read them all over again).

1. Skeptics and True Believers by Chet Raymo
   
2. Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer
   
3. Eccentric Lives, Peculiar Notions by John Michel
   
4. The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague deCamp
   
5. The New Aquarium Handbook by Ines Scheurmann
   
6. Bettas by Robert J. Goldstein
   
7. Galileo's Finger by Peter Atkins
   
8. Under the Black Flag by David Cordingly
   
9. Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries? by Martin Gardner
   
10. Generation S.L.U.T. by Marty Beckerman
    
11. The Queen's Conjurer by Benjamin Wolley
    
12. Voodoo Science by Robert Park
    
13. The Search for the Giant Squid by Richard Ellis
    
14. On Writing by Stephen King
    
15. The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume 2 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
    
16. Timeline by Michael Crichton
    
17. The Stone Circle by Gary Goshgarian
    
18. Shadows in the Sea by Thomas B. Allen
    
19. A History of Pirates by Nigel Cawthorne
    
20. How We Believe by Michael Shermer
    
21. How to Write a Book Proposal by Michael Larsen
    
22. Monsters by John Michael Greer
    
23. West Coast Fossils by R. Ludvigsen and G. Beard
    
24. Dinosaurs, Spitfires and Sea Dragons by Christopher McGowan
    
25. Contact by Carl Sagan
    
26. The Flamingo's Smile by Stephen Jay Gould
    
27. Second Act by Barbara Barrie
    
28. The Guizer by Alan Garner

As I was cutting and pasting that, I started to think, "Hmm. Maybe I should do separate fiction and non-fiction lists." I think I am insane. Since I've been reading so much non-fiction lately, I'd be hard pressed to read 50 books of fiction. Maybe. Besides, I wouldn't know whether to put The Guizer under fiction or non.

50 Books and Graphic Novels

This whole read 50 books things is occupying way too much of my thoughts. Anyway, I've decided that since I've been reading a lot of graphic novels/comic collections lately, I'm going to divide my book reading into two lists and try to read 50 books and 50 graphic novels/collections this year. Which means I have to re-do my lists and I haven't even caught up yet. Eek.

Archaeology: Library of Alexandria

Even if it isn't the Library of Alexandria that's been discovered, it's still a very cool find. (Link via Scott McCloud.)

Must Have

Ooh, I really need this ALA Lemony Snicket poster. (Link via Bookslut.)

Yet More 50 Books

There are going to be a lot of graphic novels in the next few installments. I considered not including graphic novels, since they tend to be on the short side, and usually have more words than pictures. But, since reading a graphic novel properly takes more time than just reading the words, and considering the number of very long and/or very dense non-fiction books I've read recently, I decided to include them. It's my list.

26. The Flamingo's Smile by Stephen Jay Gould. I think I'll add Gould to my list of the-closest-things-I-have-to-heros. He writes science in a way that's understandable to a curious non-scientist, but still has lots of meat for those familiar with the concepts. Science is cool, and Gould makes that obvious in his essays.
    
27. Second Act by Barbara Barrie. This is a somewhat mediocre book in terms of writing, but it was part of my "read about cancer" thing when Mum was diagnosed. So I read it. I learned a few things, but not really much more than I already knew.
    
28. The Guizer by Alan Garner. I love Garner's fiction, so when I saw this on the shelf at the library, I grabbed it. It's a nice colection of trickster tales, though I'm not sure I really agree that they are all trickster tales. Not the sort of book for the indifferent reader, though; like many folklore collections, it's as close as possible to the original oral tales, which makes for less-than-easy reading. But if you like that sort of thing as I do (in moderation, though), then this is a good choice.
    
29. After the Rain by Andre Juillard. This one I very nearly did leave off since it's really short. But, like I said, it's my list, and this is a book by the usual definition. And anyway, it was really good. Beautiful illustration, neat story (if a little improbable--but then, so is most mystery fiction). I think the author/artist is French, and in France they take graphic fiction much more seriously than North Americans do.
    
30. My New York Diary By Julie Doucet. One of the classic independent books. I'm surprised I hadn't read any Doucet before now, but then my graphic novel/comics education has been a bit spotty (I blame the aversion of most comic shops to independent books). I don't really like Doucet's drawing style, though I'll admit it does fit the book.
    
31. Hellboy by Mike Mignola. Yeah, okay, I read this because the movie was coming out, and it looked like a good movie so I thought I should read the comic. I still haven't seen the movie, but this first volume of the series was lots of fun. Things paranormal, Nazis, paranormal Nazis, eldritch god-monsters, and a big red demon who fights for good and hasn't got a name--what more can one ask?

Even More 50 Books

Last time I posted about this, I think I only had 9 or 10 more books to go to get to the end of my list-so-far. I've read a few since then. But I'll try to get close to being caught up.

21. How to Write a Book Proposal by Michael Larsen. I read this one when working on a thing to send to Girlamatic. It's much like other books of its type, though maybe better than most. Not exactly a fun read, but I learned a few things. Oh, and I reviewed it for CW for Teens.
    
22. Monsters by John Michael Greer. I probably wouldn't have ordered this one if I'd noticed it was published by Llewellyn. Still, it turned out to be rather fun to read. Kind of a peculiar mix of competent folklore research, and an oddly skeptical crackpotism (you'll have to read it to see what I mean; I don't think I could explain without using way too many words).
    
23. West Coast Fossils by R. Ludvigsen and G. Beard. I haven't much to say about this one. It's a guide to fossils, and part of my recent science reading binge. It's got lots of neat stuff in, but isn't the sort of book you go around thrusting into people's hands with the words, "You've got to read this." (Not that I do that anyway. Very often. Library stunt from previous post excepted, of course.)
    
24. Dinosaurs, Spitfires and Sea Dragons by Christopher McGowan. I don't know what the opinion of the scholoary palaeontological community is on this one, but I really liked it. McGowan talked about reconstructing dinosaurs--posture, habits, etc--from the structures of the bones. Kind of like engineering applied to long-dead but once-living creatures. Er. Anyway, it's just the sort of meaty scientific read I like, with clear explanations but lots of unknowns to ponder. Plus it's about dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are cool.
    
25. Contact by Carl Sagan. At last, some fiction. Oddly, I actually like the movie version of Contact better than the book. Not that I didn't like the book. I liked it a great deal, it's just that the movie--I thought--was much more successful in getting the point across. By making the setting now instead of a slightly-in-the-future now (which, in the case of the book is now a futuristic near past, though it was slightly-in-the-future at the time) and dispensing with the distracting futuristic sfnal bits and pieces, the movie made everything much more immediate. Instead of a nice speculation on a possibility, it was more like something that really, really might happen. Somehow the movie seemed to have more force because it was smaller. If that makes any sense. I don't think I'm using quite the right words.

Okay, I'm not so close to being caught up, but I'm closer. More soon.

More League of Extraordinary Books

One of the books I've been busily reading in the last little while is a volume of Bram Stoker's short stories (which I'll talk about more when I get to it in my "50 Books" posts). After reading that, re-reading Dracula seemed like a good way to continue my exploration of all books mentioned or alluded to in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. So that's what I'm doing. Except then I got distracted by a newly-discovered mystery author, so I haven't got very far into Dracula yet, though it's a book I like very much. Also, I made Sue read League (by getting it off the shelf at the library and handing it to her and saying, "You need to sign this one out.") She was very annoyed at me on account of she had to stay up very late at night reading it. (I also got her to read Good Omens the same way, with much the same result. Hee hee.)

Hmmm . . .

I'm pretty much a crappy poet, but I think I might submit something (the only poem I wrote that I currently like) to this: Red Giant: A One-Shot of Speculative Poetry.

Writing Odds and Ends

I'm beginning to think this mystery novel is going to get the better of me. I have a plot idea (to do with historic archaeology), I have a setting (southern Alberta, present day), I have a main character (Grace Cowell, called Gray), and I have a title (Reading the Bones). I even have niggling thoughts about recurring images and subplots. And a short, dark and handsome stranger (a cop, actually) who could be a possible love interest. But there are too many things I don't know. I don't know enough of the plot structure. I don't know much about how the RCMP work, especially in cases where old bones get dug up. And it's taken me so long to just get started (one page so far), that I'm not likely to even have a zero draft by the time the contest deadline arrives. How is it possible that so many people think writing is easy?

I seem to be pretty much stuck everywhere. "Daughters of the Sea King" made it to the one-third point or so, but I haven't got back to it. I think I need to read about seals first, before I can write the confrontation with the seal-folk. Just like I had to read about sharks before writing the Daughters themselves. Possibly I need to read more about fishermen, too.

The rest of Cobblehsore/Vinland stories await revision. Well, "Hollow Bones" is done. I don't think I'll touch it again. "Sealskin" just needs some tweaking and smoothing, I think. "Cobbleshore Knit" needs some serious rewrites, but only because the main character turned out to be Torin, and not Tryv. Kinda messes one up when one writes a whole story thinking the character is one person, then someone who knows one's work points out that really, it has to be someone else. And then one realizes that that someone is absolutely right.

Right, enough of that. Back to Reading the Bones. And later today, drawing Sorcha from Fey from different angles to make a reference sheet, so the she'll be consistent when I do the final pages of the comic. (Did this ages ago for Megan, becuase I thought she had a difficult face to get right. It's helped enormously, and Sorcha's turned out to be the face I can never get to look the same twice.)

Fantastic Fiction

Need a bibliography for your favourite author? Try Fantastic Fiction. It worked for me. (End sincere, earnest, selling something on tv voice.) (But it is a good place to find books.)

Io is Bright Yellow!

See Io in true colour. It really is bright yellow. And some of the lava glows in the dark. I am filled with feelings of geeky coolness.

New Dunning!

Holy crap! Look what I just found by accident on the Munro's site. Gotta get me to a bookstore.

More 50 Books

Phew! I've read rather a lot so far this year. And I thought my reading rate had slowed down.

11. The Queen's Conjurer by Benjamin Wolley. I knew who John Dee was before I read this book, but I didn't realize he was a legitimate scientist as well as a particularly crackpot astrologer. This biography of Queen Elizabeth's favourite astronomer/angel contactee was a little dry at times, but was mostly just really, really interesting. (And, by the way, I adore the remainder/bargain tables at Munro's Books.)
    
12. Voodoo Science by Robert Park. This was a fabulous look at things pretty much on the border between science and pseudoscience. Some of the stuff Park covered was obviously crackpot, but some of it was less obvious. I found the part on homeopathy especially enlightening.
    
13. The Search for the Giant Squid by Richard Ellis. I've been wanting to read Ellis's seamonster book for ages, so when I saw this one at Munro's (on the aforementioned remainder table), I had to have it. I'm not sure I buy all of Ellis's explanations for sea-serpent sightings (some of them look/sound more like whales or really big sharks than squid, but then I'm not a marine biologist). This is a great book, though, with my favourite ingredients for a volume of its sort: sections on biology and sections on folklore and sections on literature and sections on . . .
    
14. On Writing by Stephen King. I reviewed this one for my work site. I'm not a fan of King, largely because I've not read more than a short story or two. This is a really good read, though, even if you're not a writer. There's lots of insight into how writers (or one writer, anyway) work. It's made me take a second look at some of those huge novels I keep seeing in the stores. Now if I could just find one really cheap.
    
15. The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume 2 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. At last, I get to some fiction! 8 or 9 hundred pages of Sherlockian goodness, this is. I was constantly surprised by how well these stories stand up so many years later, especially compared to some much more recent books.
    
16. Timeline by Michael Crichton. I think this is the first Crichton book I've ever read. And after reading Peter Atkin's chapters on quantum mechanics and spacetime in Gallileo's Finger, I thought the time-travel mechanism really didn't work very well. It would probably have read better if Crichton had been more vague and trusted that his readers didn't need to have a full explanation. Also, the plot seemed to be pretty much a rack on which to hang all those ideas and carefully researched details about medieval France. That said, it was a pretty good, if pulpy read. And I kind of needed something pulpy after all that cerebral Holmes stuff.
    
17. The Stone Circle by Gary Goshgarian. I picked this one up--at Value Village, I think--because the cover blurb reminded me very, very much of Grahame Joyce's Dark Sister (a lovely book that I very much recommend). I was curious to see how much alike they were. Plus the protagonist was an archaeologist. Anyway, there was some pretty crackpotty stuff--Mystery Hill and all--and it was not a fabulous book, but an okay escape for a few hours.
    
18. Shadows in the Sea by Thomas B. Allen. A Times Colonist book sale find, this one's all about sharks (and skates and rays). The first few sections were a little too focussed on shark attacks, but there was lots of great folklore and biology here, too. And recipes. Plus, it was the perfect thing to read while "Daughters of the Sea King" (about halfway done now) was still an idea rattling around in my brain.
    
19. A History of Pirates by Nigel Cawthorne. I kept thinking this guy's name was Nathaniel Hawthorne. Wouldn't that be confusing? Anyway, this is another post-Pirates of the Caribbean, gotta-read-about-pirates book. It's not as good as David Cordingly's book (but then, this guy isn't the world's foremost expert on pirates), but still worth reading.
    
20. How We Believe by Michael Shermer. Another skepticism book, this time about belief--how and why people believe stuff and how that relates to why people believe pseudoscience instead of science. Also, it's very well written.
    

Anyway, that's the next ten. There are still more before I get to the end (looks like exactly ten more, unless I finish something else before I get back to this list).

Self Torture

Here's why I want the see the movie version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, even though I know it will be awful:

I had a sort of strange anticipation, a quivering of foreboding, that had to be satisfied. I didn't just want to see LXG to see what new stupidities could be put on screen. No, I was entranced by the prospect. LXG was a pile-up on the highway, beckoning to the passing drivers to take a look.

(It's from Chris Lawson's Frankenstein Journal.)

50 Books

Somebody, somewhere, on some blog or livejournal or other (it wasn't one I regularly read, and I don't even remember where I found it from), issued a challenge to read 50 books in 2004 and then blog about them. Then later on I came across someone who was going to read 52 books in 52 weeks (that one I found via Bookslut, I think. This sounds like fun, I thought. This sounds like something I can do. I changed the idea, a little, and I'm just going to see how many books I can read this year (though I'll keep 50 as a general goal, just to have something to aim for). I don't know whether I'll blog much about them, but I will list them here. So, the books I've read so far this year (not counting ones I started in 2003 and finished in 2004) are:

1. Skeptics and True Believers by Chet Raymo. This is very readable and interesting book about science and religion and the differences between them. Though Raymo is a little more hopeful, this is the book that really helped me figure out that religion and science are in many ways antithetical. This is a good one for those interested in why we believe (or not).
   
2. Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer. Notice the beginnings of a trend here? Not only am I trying to figure out how things work, but I want to know why we sometimes have clashes in ideas about how things work.
   
3. Eccentric Lives, Peculiar Notions by John Michel. This one is more about strange individuals and their strage convictions than about why people in general believe things in general. The writing was a little uneven, and generally mediocre, but the people Michel wrote about were quite fascinating.
   
4. The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague deCamp. This is a book that combines my interest in crackpotism with my passion for archaeology. DeCamp looks at the history of technology and does a little debunking along the way. It's a little out of date, but still holds up surprisingly well.
   
5. The New Aquarium Handbook by Ines Scheurmann. Yeah, so I want to get some fish. And I always have to read up on things before I do them. It's kind of a short book, and I considered leaving it off the list, but then again, some of the others are very long.
   
6. Bettas by Robert J. Goldstein. Another fish book (this time specifically on Siamese fighting fish), also pretty short. I still do not have any fish.
   
7. Galileo's Finger by Peter Atkins. The subtitle is something about 10 great ideas in science, and Atkins gives a chapter to each, starting with evolution, then moving on through DNA, atoms, mathematics, entropy, and some others I've forgotten for the moment, to spacetime. There were some pretty brain-busting things in this book, but I made myself read very carefully. Atkins does a pretty good job of simplifying concepts so they're understandable to the layperson without rendering them completely meaningless.
   
8. Under the Black Flag by David Cordingly. How can you not like a book by "the world's foremost expert on pirates"? Yes, this was brought on by viewing Pirates of the Caribbean. But I have always liked pirates. Who hasn't? Anyway, if you only read one book about pirates (as they say), make it this one.
   
9. Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries? by Martin Gardner. This is a collection of essays. I found some very thought-provoking, and others not so much. But it was mostly well-written (a few mediocre parts, but they weren't too distracting). Okay, there was some math stuff I just didn't get . . .
   
10. Generation S.L.U.T. by Marty Beckerman. I read this one to review for my Teenwriting site, because Marty wrote it when he was 19, and I interviewed him about it. It's pretty disturbing. I don't remember being that fucked up when I was a teenager.
    

Well, that's the first ten. I haven't got to the end of the books I read so far in 2004 yet, but I'm getting a little weary of sitting at the computer. More later.

League of Extraordinary Books

My attempt to read all books referenced or alluded to in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the comic, not the movie) is proceeding. Slowly, but it goes. I got all the way through the entire Sherlock Holmes canon (very delightful books, now go read them). Then I got sidetracked by other books, but only temporarily. If I can find a copy of Doyle's The Lost World, that'll be next. If not, then I'll move on to Poe, probably. Or else Jules Verne.

One of the things that has distracted me is science. I'm not exactly sure why, but I developed an urge--a quite strong one--to understand more about the universe. Now, I've always been interested in science--at times in the past I was going to be a geologist, a marine biologist, a botanist, and a wolf biologist; when I studied archaeology, I focused on zooarchaeology and when I studied folklore, one of my main interests was pseudoscience--but I've never felt quite so compelled to wrap my brain around things scientific. So I've been reading lots of science books, as well as history and archaeology and other disciplines that seek to understand the whys of the universe and civilization.

Comic Surprise

I hate when things go awry. I just wrote a long and witty post (of which the following post will be a bland paraphrase), then I went to a different webpage to collect another URL, and when I went back to BlogThis, all my text was gone (but the original link), as if it had reset to when I first opened it. Aargh!

Anyway, I was writing about how I was just searching the Vancouver Island Regional Library (VIRL) catalogue, and couldn't figure out why most of the graphic novels had no call numbers. Turns out, they have no call numbers because they are shelved in with the fiction. This is logical; graphic novels are usually fictional, and therefore should be in with the rest of the fiction. The reason I was surprised, I think, is because at the Greater Victoria Public Library (GVPL), all the graphic novels are in the non-fiction, which sometimes makes sense (as where Maus is shelved with the books on the Holocaust), but which means that someone just browsing the shelves for a good read is less likely to find graphic fiction.

Then I went on to say something about how I'd always percieved the VIRL as rather backward--I remember when signing out a book meant writing the title and your name on a sheet of paper at the check-out desk--and how the GVPL seemed much more sophisticated. Maybe because our municipality was a member of the VIRL and not the GVPL. The GVPL was unattainable until a few years ago, when Colwood/Langford joined up, and the VIRL left town.

Anyway, this is the second time I've been pleasantly surprised by the Cowichan branch of the VIRL. The first time was when I went in expecting to sign out one book (which I hadn't expected to find there), and came away with six as a result of browsing down a single aisle (the one with science and folklore) while waiting for my mother. And I could eaily have taken more. I put several back.

It's good to have your perceptions changed once in a while.

What Colour is Your Dragon?

A SILVER Dragon Lies Beneath!

My inner dragon is to dragons what the Ranger is to humans. I possess considerable intelligence and self-confidence. I live by my own code of ethics and I stick to it at all times. Click the image to try the Inner Dragon Online Quiz for yourself.

Writing: Deadly Webs

So there's this contest where you send in your mystery novel manuscript (by July 1) and you can win a publication contract and a nice fat advance (not so different from trying to get published in the regular way, really, except the contest is limited to first novels).

I figure, I can write a novel by July 1. Or a draft of one, at least. With sufficient motivation (and if a chance at $10,000 isn't sufficient motivation . . . ). The problem is, can I write a mystery novel? I can read them, but that's rather different. But I've come up with a character--a zooarchaeologist. I'm thinking maybe she solves some mystery from the past (maybe recent past, to give it more immediacy). Something that someone else doesn't want solved. Murder, probably. Or else she debunks some pseudoscience that is somehow tangled up with a murder.

Or I could have a folklorist who solves crimes that copycat contemporary legends (that's urban myths for any non-folklorists out there). Now I just need a plot . . .

I Am . . .

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!


If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!


How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
(Link via Language Log and Languagehat.)

Comics

So I was getting all ready to submit a proposal and samples to Girlamatic. And then I checked today, and they've already found 11 new creators, so the open submissions are now closed. Sigh. I really wanted to see Fey there. But the news isn't all bad--it's still okay to send submissions, it's just that there won't be any openings until fall. Which is probably good, really. It means more time to get my stuff looking better (I didn't do very well in my first attempts to use Illustrator, and my results with Photoshop were less that ideal), and my proposal sounding better. And I'll probably (finally) invest in my own domain and more webspace/bandwidth than my current Geocities site can provide, and get some of my stuff up for people to read.

And, in case you're wondering, I'm having a strange and hectic and not really very nice week (er, couple of weeks), and I'm still sleepy, so I'm probably not terribly coherent. Or at all focussed. Or, probably, capable of spelling.

Crackpot

Here's a useful thing: the Crackpot Index:

10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is 'only a theory', as if this were somehow a point against it.

(Link via The Panda's Thumb.)

The Cat With Hands

Here's a very creepy, and very very good short movie: The Cat With Hands. (Link via Jenn Manley Lee.)

Writing: Sea Things

I haven't written it down yet, but a new Vinland story is knocking about in my head. I meant to start working on it yesterday, and then today. Tomorrow will be so full of review-writing that I'll probably be sick of words by the end of it. Which means "Daughters of the Sea King" might not get written until Tuesday. But we shall see.

Misc

I'm feeling "stiff as an old boot," as my mother would say, after spending all weekend working out in the yard. But things are coming together out there and, despite the stiffness, I feel better for the exercise.

And I was flipping around channels while trying to decide what to do with the evening, and discovered that Penn and Teller are going to be on While You Were Out next week. Mostly, I watch While You Were Out for this, though sometimes the actual decorating is good, too. But I might even tape an ep with Penn and Teller. And of course this means I need to renew my efforts to learn to juggle. (Almost there . . . )

Disrobing Aragorn

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting on my bed carefully disrobing my new twelve inch Aragorn action figure, when I started to wonder why I was doing it. I'm sure some of you (assuming there is more more than one person reading this) have nasty thoughts just from the title of this post. But, while I am weird and I did once write an editorial about 1/6 scale action figures called "Twelve Inches of Fun," there's nothing lewd about naked plastic Aragorn. Not for me, anyway.

Even if it is the closest I'll ever get to seeing Viggo Mortensen naked.

(Though if recent theories about the universe being infinite and therefore everything that is possible being actual somewhere are true, then there are all kinds of almost-mes answering the door at this very moment to find all kinds of almost-Viggo-Mortensens on the doorstep, eager to disrobe with a sexy little dance. I'm not sure if that is a comforting thought or a depressing one. Or just another example of how I'm a freak.)

So. Taking the clothes off little Aragorn is not a naughty sexual peculiarity. It's something I've done with every action figure, doll or other toy I've ever owned that had removeable clothes. Ever since I was old enough to take the clothes off things, if the clothes came off, I removed them. It does have practical applications. For instance, removing the clothes from an action figure allows one to determine exactly how the figure is articulated, so one does not accidently rip an arm off trying to bend it in a way it wasn't meant to bend. Taking twelve-inch Eowyn's dress off meant I discovered that her arm had been bent backwards in the process (I assume) of putting her dress on in the first place. If I hadn't known that, I might have broken her trying to put her in a suitable pose for display.

Disrobing figures also means one can get the clothes to go on better. At least for the less expensive range of twelve inch figures, the people who put the clothes on in the first place probably don't get paid a whole lot, and probably don't much care how the figure will look once you take it out of the box and put it on the shelf. And hey, I'd never have discovered that Ringwraiths wear shoulder pads if I hadn't unclothed (as far as possible) my Witch-King of Angmar.

But I'm not sure that those practical considerations are the real reason for pulling the clothes off my toys, or at least they're not the main reason. I think it's partly human curiosity--the need to see how things go together, to see how the clothes go on, and if they can come off. It's a deep seated instinct. I won't go so far as to say that every little girl has it, but every little girl I've ever known has (and a lot of little boys, too; I once found a G.I. Joe of my nephew's stripped naked except for a pair of pants around his ankles. He had rubbery legs and I suspect Ryan couldn't get Joe's trousers back on once he'd got them off). The little girl I was had the instinct, and so does the little girl not so deeply hidden inside the woman that I now am. 1/6 scale Blackbeard is next.

(And yes, that was the naked Aragorn post I kept mentioning. Anticlimactic, isn't it?)

Writing: Skerries, Again

I just finished draft two of "Great Skerry," and it's just over 7200 words, which is a nice fat story, I think. It could well end up shorter once I edit. There are some bits that really, really need reworking. It was fun though, because I discovered some interesting things about two of my favourite male characters.

A Bit of "Great Skerry"

Just for funsies:

"You all know, I'm sure, of the rocks up Blackstrand way that we call the Skerries? Only one of them boat-hazards can make any claim to be called an island, and that only just. That's Great Skerry, though it's great only in comparison to its brothers. It's there the seals live and, some say, the seal folk, the Selkies who can take the shape of man or seal depending on whether they're walking the land or swimming the sea."

Lir smiled. He had named his boat for that legend.

"Well now, these past months—nobody's sure how long, really, as we don't often sail near there—these past months smoke's been seen rising from Great Skerry. My fisher friend—" The man indicated his silent companion. "—decided to see what's what. Maybe somebody shipwrecked, he thought. But what should he find but a little stone house with an upturned boat for a roof. And a man with a long scroggly beard who wanted to talk of nothing but seals.

"Tried to bring the man back did good master Sigrson, but the hermit would not hear of it. 'Leave me be,' he said. 'Leave me with my seals.' He'd not even say who he was or where he'd come from. Trey Sigrson here thinks the hermit's sweater was Cobbleshore knit, but the wool was so felted it was hard to say for certain."

Archaeological Bits and Pieces

Here are few things I bookmarked along the way to blog, and somehow never got to (so I no longer have any idea where I nicked the links from).

This story is about some very cool, very old artifacts found in the Yukon. The organic artifacts are especially important, as that kind of stuff just doesn't preserve well (especially in that environment).

It kind of bugs me how "they" always talk of people worshipping things, just because those things were important in a sacred context. I mean like the idea that the Celts worshipped trees. Do you suppose they really worshipped the trees? Do you think maybe the trees (or rather, groves) were actually symbols of the gods and spirits? Do Christians worship crucifixes and churches? (Well, maybe some of them do, but I don't think it's a good general statement.) Anyway, despite the "lion-worship" angle, this is a pretty cool story about Egyptian archaeology.

And here's a long article about crackpot archaeology in Australia, which I haven't had a chance to read all the way through yet, so I won't comment.

Writing

The first draft of "Great Skerry" is finally done. Actually, it was done on the 17th of February, but I've been lazy about blogging lately (good thing I didn't make that New Year's resolution to blog every day). Today I'm working busily at draft two (which mostly means transcribing it from longhand in my notebook to a word processor on my computer, editing as I go). The real edits will happen once I print out a copy and go at it with a red pen.

And, even better, last night I stayed up too late finishing the first draft of "Raven's Wing" or "Ravenswing Woman" (which will probably be called neither when it's done). But is it really staying up too late when you get a story done? Maybe it's just late enough. I'm not entirely certain the draft really is done, because I wrote the beginning a long time ago, and it's not in my most recent writing notebook. So I have to find it and see how much is missing between what I wrote before and the many pages I wrote last night (cramping hand and sweat-slippery pen and all. I need to get a better writing pen).

Stay tuned for naked Aragorn. Gotta get him out of my brain soon.

Disappearance

I didn't really. Disappear, that is. I just seem to have spent too much time staring at computer screens lately. So I haven't blogged in a while. I've got some good topics brewing in my half-mad brain, though. Like naked Aragorn (sort of), and . . . I forgot what else. Oh well. Time for tea. Blogging later.

Religion and Literature?

Now this is truly frightening. (Link via Bookslut.) I think I'd rather be left behind. (And my contrary side wonders: What if the Rapture already happened, but we just haven't noticed because so few were taken up?) Here's a nice quote:

"We believe that God has raised up America to be a tool in these last days, to get the Gospel to the innermost parts of the earth."

Yikes. How about this one:

"I realize that our message is inherently offensive and divisive . . ."

The really scary thing is how many people truly believe this stuff.

Bad Science

Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, shows how that organization has manipulated science to discredit boitechnology and genetic modification of food plants (and has, in the process, hindered people trying to help impoverished farmers and the environment) in Battle for Biotech Progress. (Phew, long sentence.)

The programs of genetic research and development now under way in labs and field stations around the world are entirely about benefiting society and the environment. Their purpose is to improve nutrition, to reduce the use of synthetic chemicals, to increase the productivity of our farmlands and forests, and to improve human health. Those who have adopted a zero tolerance attitude towards genetic modification threaten to deny these many benefits by playing on fear of the unknown and fear of change.

It's a very eye-opening essay. (Link via Frankenstein Journal.)

Crackpot: Vikings Again

I just sent a letter to the editor of the News Leader regarding the "Vikings in the Valley" article, basically saying the things I said in my blog entry, only worded more professionally. Actually, I just cut and pasted and edited. I also offered to write an article critiquing the full "The Last Viking" essay. We'll see if they take me up on it, or if my letter even gets into the paper.

Archaeology: Neanderthals

I really didn't think this was all that new, but I guess someone's done a definitive study:

The study found differences measured between humans and Neanderthals were significantly greater than those between subspecies of any single group, indicating Neanderthals were not a subspecies of humans.

Of course, what constitutes a "subspecies" is still very much debated. (Link via Pen-Elayne.)