Fey: Only A Little Late

Page 38 is now up, late because I got behind and then went to Victoria to buy art supplies (and, I hoped at the time, a computer, but the usually-helpful staff at CompuSmart all seemed to be either busy or uninterested in making a sale, plus there weren't any Mac mini boxes among the boxes of iMacs and eMacs and Power Books and big ol' G5s so I didn't feel motivated enough to attempt to attract anyone's attention).

So today's page features Robin (slightly pissed, in more ways than one), Jack, and three "snooty bastards" (aka Gannon's lackeys). (I still don't really know quite who Gannon is, except that he is Somebody Important in Faery politics. I also have no idea what he looks like.)

Lackey number three looks like he might be taking on a somewhat larger role, and may at some point cease to be a lackey (none of this is really evident on the page, it's just things I realized as I was drawig yesterday.) He also seems to be Pier's younger brother (Pier's the odd black-coated elf from a few pages back), and is apparently named Sabre. (Their father is a Royal Weaponsmaster or some such grandiose thing, who thought naming his sons after swords was a good idea--Pier is short for Rapier, in case you hadn't guessed. They have a half-sister, I think, also named after a sword. She's called Katana, and her mother is a Japanese kitsune princess, or something.) Of course, these are all random thoughts and could very well change by the time I get to a point in the story where such things could be revealed. One thing is certain, though: Sabre is snooty (but not, technically speaking, a bastard), and he doesn't get along with his big brother very well.

Right, enough of things that may never be.

Friends of Lulu Annual Lulu Awards!

I don't suppose anyone out there who reads Fey is also a member of Friends of Lulu? 'Cause if they were, they could nominate me for the Kim Yale Award for the best new female talent. (Yeah, okay, very unlikely, but you never know.)

Fey Friday, Again

Yup, it's that time of the week. Time for a new page of Fey: page 37. Be warned: I used the word "snooty." Twice.

What!? Mid-Week Fey?

Yeah, well, I finally finished the cover for part two (only . . . about 14 pages late . . .). It's not perfect, but I think it turned out better than part one's cover. Quite a bit better, actually.

Recent Distractions (Reading and Playing)

Non-Fiction:
I think I'm becoming a non-fiction junkie. There are so many interesting things to learn about (my goal since childhood has been to learn everything--unattainable, perhaps, but I'll always have something to strive for).

9. Alpha and Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe by Charles Seife. So continues my quest to better understand the universe I live in. I've read about many of the topics covered in this book before, but reading about them again made them clearer--helped, no doubt, by Seife's clear prose and ability to explain complicated stuff like quantum mechanics. I'm not sure I quite believe that scientists know exactly how the universe will end, but this book did go a long way towards convincing me that they've got a pretty good idea (or maybe, some pretty good ideas).
   
10. Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky. Yup, a book about fish. But, like the best "creative non-fiction" (in quotes because it's one of those things that have to be defined more by what they are not than by what they are--for my attempt, go here). Erm, where was I? Like the best creative non-fiction, this book uses its topic as a centrepoint, a focus, around which to look at other things. Kurlansky covers a lot of history--both European and North American--the politics of environmentalism, biology, and assorted other things, all as they relate to the lowly cod (mmm . . . tasty fried fish). The result is a very readable, interesting book, and it made me . . . there should be a word that means "homesick" but for someplace that isn't technically "home." It made me want to go back to Newfoundland. or the east coast, at least.
    
11. Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. I reviewed this one for work. It's very good. I was expecting something rather wishy-washy and nice, I suppose (I might have had even lower expectations if I'd noticed the publisher before I read it--not that they publish bad books, but they do publish New Age). Anyway, it was beautifully written and actually quite helpful.
    

Now it's on to a huge book on codes, another marionette book (oops, nope, turns out someone else wants it, so I have to take it back to the library today), something on Celtic Archaeology . . .

Fiction:

And now for some more YA fiction, because grown-up books are making me tired.

7. The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman. This books is sooo good. I first saw it at Chapters (aka The Evil Empire) weeks and weeks ago, along with two others in the same series. I finally picked it up at a small discount at my niece's school's book fair. It's one of the few really well-done YA mysteries I've encountered. Usually mystery novels aimed at teens are either too obvious or too simplistic (or, sometimes both). Or too improbable. This one is sophisticated enough that most adults would enjoy it, but not too intricate for younger readers. And it has lots of adventure. Pullman's having fun with the Victorian mystery genre. I will absolutley be getting the rest of this series.
   
8. Grim Tuesday by Garth Nix. Nix is always a good bet. I don't like this series quite as much as the Sabriel books, but they're still good. There's a seriously whimsical, slightly twisted imagination at work in these books, which is just exactly what I needed when I sat down to read.
   

Now I have to get back to that Hindenberg novel. It's quite good, but requires more concentration than I've had lately.

Sequential Art:

As usual, I've read more comics than anything else. No French books this time, though. (I did get another Schuiten/Peeters Cities of the Fantastic volume off eBay, but it's part 2, so I have to get part 1 before I read it.)

20. Girl Genius: Agatha Heterodyne and the Airship City (volume 2) by Phil and Kaja Foglio. This time, Girl Genius is in full colour, which looks nice, but means the book cost something like twice as much as book one. Not that I'm really complaining. This is a fun story (with airships!) done in a cartoony, high-energy art style that I find really appealing. The main character is volatile, but likeable, and won't let anyone push her around. If you have any interest in steampunk, you really oughtta read this book.
    
21. Cardcaptor Sakura: Master of the Clow volume 2 (aka Cardcaptor Sakura volume 8) by CLAMP.
    
22. xxxHolic volume 4 by CLAMP.
    
23. Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle volume 4 by CLAMP.
    

All CLAMP, all the time! OK, not really, but I do seem to read an awful lot of their work. Also, read, but not actually a "book": Swamp Thing #2. This time around, they're trying to bring Swampy back to his horror orgins. It's pretty good so far (but keep in mind I have an awful lot of campy old Swamp Thing comics, and I love them all). Plus, it's got John Constantine in (which reminds me, I need to read more Hellblazer).

Games:

I'm still trying to play through all my pc games before I make The Switch. I've got a disconcertingly large stack to get through still, but I'm making a good effort.

5. The Cameron Files: Secret at Loch Ness (pc). The graphics are pretty dated, but the game came out in 2001, so you can't really hold that against it. I really had a good time playing this. Even the timed sequences (bane of true adventure gamers) were all right, once I realized there were going to be some. I rarely felt at a loss about what I was supposed to be doing, and the puzzles were logical (illogical puzzles are my personal bane). If anything, the puzzles were maybe too easy, and the end was rather anticlimactic. Still, a good game, and well worth the money (especially considering I got both Cameron Files games in one box for $12.99--or maybe it was $19.99).
   
6. The Cameron Files: Pharaoh's Curse (aka The Cameron Files 2) (pc). The graphics were better than the first game, though still not fabulous. There was more humour and slightly harder puzzles. Otherwise, the second Cameron Files was much like the first: a solid game, though not the best game ever. I liked wandering around an empty museum taking stuff and picking locks and looking for clues (it's one of the reasons Shivers appealed to me, too). And a certain Dr. Jones was staying in your (or rather, your character, Alan P.Cameron's) hotel just before you got there, and he seems to have left his hat and whip behind in the museum storeroom.
   
7. Dark Fall: The Journal (pc). Where whole development companies can fail miserably to produce a decent adventure game, one inspired person can create something pretty amazing. The graphics were a bit uneven--on the simplistic side in places, intricate in others--but always gorgeous, and once I got into this game, I hardly noticed the uneveness. You get to explore an abandoned train station and hotel, trying to figure out what happened to the people who disappeared there. There might be something evil lurking nearby, and you're the only one who can stop it. While there's not any danger of you actually dying (except maybe at the end), this is one truly spooky, creepy, eerie game. I loved it. Too bad the sequel isn't likely to be available for Macintosh. I'd pay full price right now.
   

I'm now trying to get Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill working properly. It used to work brilliantly, before I got a new video card and mouse. Now the audio skips and the mouse control is annoyingly jumpy. Argh! Updating DirectX and video drivers didn't help (also didn't help me get Broken Sword: Sleeping Dragon working, which is the game I most want to play next, and I don't know if it's affected the tendency of Jekyll and Hyde to freeze up as soon as the intro sequence is over--we'll see). If I can't get them to work, it'll be back to the pile for something else (LotR, perhaps).

Fey: Now With Fewer Crashes

Page 36, and I finally get to use that headline! I worked out a way to avoid freezing up Photoshop by immediately flattening and saving each new layer. It means I can't keep a bunch of layers open, which means I lose flexibility, and have to make absolutely sure I'm done everything I needed to do with each layer, but it also means (this time, anyway) only having to reboot once. Woo hoo!

Maybe Sooner Than I Thought

I happened to flip through the latest London Drugs "Computer Savings Guide" (aka "flyer"), and whaddayaknow, there's a whole page of Macintoshes, including the Mini. Nothing says they have limited quantities, or that you have to preorder--though nothing says they actually have them in stock, either. But there's hope. Of course, there isn't a London Drugs in Duncan, so it's either Victoria or Nanaimo. Hmmm . . . wonder when I can get there . . .

Edit: Looks like CompuSmart is shipping them within 3 days, while the Apple Canada store still says 3-4 weeks. Interesting.

Fey page 35

Right here.

One Box to Rule Them All

Today's mail brought my free (except for the $4 shipping, that is) Lord of the Rings DVD trilogy slipcase. As I'd hoped, the slipcases of the individual sets fit inside the One Slipcase. Hwah ha! Now I rule the world (or at least my DVDs will be protected from dust).

Haunted . . .

Thing which is haunting me #1: robin's eggs. I was at the grocery store yesterday, eyeing the candy in the bulk food section, when I spotted robin's eggs. I couldn't remember what sort of candy they actually are, but they were such gorgeous colours that I couldn't resist buying a few to put with whatever I decide to do for the kids (that is, my sister's kids) for Easter. Of course, when I got home, I had to try one. I had some vague notion that they were maybe candy-covered chocolate. Actually, they are candy-covered-chocolate-covered malt balls (you know, like Whoppers). I bit one in half and looked at the crispy inside. Hmmm, I thought. I can't eat this. (Malt = barley, plus the crunchy bit is probably mostly wheat flour = poison to Celiac sufferers like me.) So what did I do? Did I spit it out? Hell, no. I ate it. And then I ate the half that was still in my hand. Very, very bad. But if I only eat one, ever, I'll be fine. And it was sooo good! Now I am haunted by the malty deliciousness of something I'm not allowed to eat. (Maybe, I thought, if I only ate one a week, it'd be okay. And probably it would, but that's a very, very bad habit to pick up.) Sigh.

Thing which is haunting me #2 (still): marionettes. I was working on my cloth doll marionette yesterday after supper. There I sat, cross-legged on the bed (where I often work, despite the bedroom being the darkest room in my house), stuffing the little black cotton arms and legs that I'd sewed up the day before, and the weirdest thing happened. I was working on the legs--they were done up to the knees and I was putting stuffing in the thighs--when I looked down at what I'd done so far. Imagine two little shapely legs, bent neatly at the knee where they lay across my lower leg (remember, I am cross-legged, so the working surface of my lap is made up of bits of my own bent legs). Two little legs bent at the knee, feet turned slightly inward at the ankle, exactly as if there was a little artificial person sitting in my lap (except, of course, the legs weren't attached to anything yet). Every time I looked at the legs as a whole (rather than just the immediate part I was working on) they looked exactly like they might start to move on their own. It was very peculiar. I've made cloth dolls before, but they never seemed about to move on their own. (I'm not saying I thought they actually would, only that they looked as if they could.) Maybe it's just that I was taken to see Coppelia at a very young age, and that first impression of toys coming to life has stayed with me ever since. Or maybe it's that in every puppet book I read, it's emphasized that marionettes are not dolls. They are actors. I can kind of see where that comes from now. I only hope this little fabric person retains that much character when it's finished. Oh, and it (possibly she, but more likely androgynous) has a name now. Iris. After the Greek goddess of the rainbow. It will make sense, I hope, when it's done.

I was surfing around eBay (bad idea, really, but fun), and decided to look at marionettes. There are some really gorgeous ones, like knights in real metal armour (Italian, I think), and the ones by Czech Marionettes. I really could imagine these as actors rather than dolls or toys. And then there were the ones that looked like cheap toys, and probably wouldn't come to life no matter how carefully you twitched their strings. Or maybe I'm just imagining things. A skilled puppeteer could probably make just about anything seem alive.

And speaking of which, my bedtime reading last night was a short (40-page) biography of Jim Henson written for kids. One of the things that struck me was how the human co-stars of the Muppet Show quickly began to see their Muppet coworkers as individuals, and how they found it disappointing that they couldn't go out for coffee with them after the show. Even the puppeteers who played the Muppets tended to think of them as real characters. Perhaps it's much the same as how writers think of their characters. They're not "real" in the sense that they're a part of the "real world," but they are somehow their own people who have pasts and opinions.

Anyway, time to get back to stuffing and sewing.

Need More French Comics (Recent Reading)

I've only been working my way slowly through some fiction and non-fiction (a novel about the Hindenburg and a science book about the beginning and end of the universe), but I have read lots of words&pictures. And some puppet books (I had to work puppets in there somehow).

Non-Fiction:

8. Marionettes by Edith Flack Ackley. Puppets! This is another book mostly meant for kids and people working with kids, but it also has good basic information, plus patterns for making cloth doll marionettes. I've temporarily set aside my paper mache marionette project and now have a sewn-but-not-yet-stuffed cloth one. It's black cotton and will have hair of this wonderful hand-spun, hand-dyed, multicoloured wool I bought at a craft fair last year. I don't know what the rest of it will look like, but I'm thinking of getting a round compact mirror and using it for a mask.

Sequential Art:

15. Morgana Volume 1: Heaven's Gate by Alberti and Enoch. I kept looking at this book every time I went into the local comic shop. The cover art is truly gorgeous (and so, as it turns out, is the interior art). Finally, I decided to buy it. This is what I was referring to in the title of this blogpost--it's translated from French. Now, I haven't read a lot of French comics, but every one I have read has been pretty amazing. The art is just beautiful and the writing seems to tend to the weird-but-really-good. Morgana is a sort of science-fantasy with occasional Arthurian echoes. It's short, but damn do I want to read more. Alas, I'll have to order it online, probably, as this was the only volume Collector's Choice had, and more than likely the only one they'll ever have. I'm rather suprised they had it at all. They tend to only get in stuff that will sell quickly, which is why it's a good place to find the latest InuYasha but not a good place to look for the latest Girl Genius. So yeah, I'll be looking for more of this, and more French comics in general. In fact, I may attempt to dust off and upgrade my highschool French, and have a go at reading some in its original language.
    
16. Cardcaptor Sakura: Master of the Clow volume 1 (aka Cardcaptor Sakura volume 7) by CLAMP. I've been waiting for the local shop to get this in for months. I actually asked them to order it for me, but I guess they forgot (I don't have a file there, so maybe I'm not a priority). So at last I get to find out what happens next (well, I have seen the entire Card Captors anime series, but it was pretty heavily edited and changed around when it was brought to North American television, so it's almost like getting a new story).
    
17. Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle volume 3 by CLAMP. I am quite enjoying this alternate-universe-Cardcaptors (sort of) story. It's pretty girly at times, but I'm old enough that being girly isn't the horror it used to be (no, I was definitely not a girly girl--"girly-girl" was the highest of insults when I was young thing--I was a tree-climbing, snake-handling tomboy, though I've never wanted to be an actual boy).
    
18. Eerie Queerie! volume 2 by Shuri Shiozu. I had to go to the comic shop in Nanaimo to find this. I suspect Duncan isn't really a gay-friendly town, though they did have copies of Fake (a title I haven't read yet) at the local shop. I still think they should have kept the Japanese title (Ghost!), but for some reason, I really like this series.
    
19. Until the Full Moon by Sanami Matoh. Another one I had to get in Nanaimo (for possibly the same reason). I'd really been looking forward to it (that whole werewolf obsession, maybe), so I was a bit disappointed. It's not bad, and I probably will read volume 2, but it seemed pretty shallow. It was much more like the standard romance novel, plotwise, than I'd thought it would be (you know: main character is madly attracted to love interest, but also detests him, various things happen--possibly including a rescue--and in the end they fall in love and live happily ever after). (Er, yes, I have read a few romance novels, because I don't want to be accused of berating a genre I've never read. It's possible that there are good genre romance novels out there . . . I guess.) Anyway, the "boy who turns into a girl during the full moon" thing doesn't really seem to be used as well as it could have, or hardly at all, really. And the two characters admit right from the beginning that they're mad for each other. There just seems to be a series of trivial things coming between them. I'd rather have seen Marlo's gender confusion explored in greater depth than have him get kidnapped and wait around to be rescued (and that story was resolved way too easily, in my opinion; I mean, why not explore the idea of two non-blood-related people raised as siblings, who fall in love?). I guess the point I'm trying to make (and using too many words to do it) is that this book had a lot of potential that was wasted in favour of fairly trivial episodes. But still, I did like it enough to read the next book. I don't know if I'd bother if it was going to be more than two volumes, though.

Once I actually get my NSCAD application and portfolio done and sent off, I may actually have more time for reading (er . . . maybe when I get as far ahead on Fey as I'd like to be). I really don't enjoy having only minimal reading time. Sometimes I think I could actually live without writing as long as I could still read lots. Of course, if I hadn't bought a Gameboy and got hooked on The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, I'd have a little more time. It's probably a very good thing I'm only a casual gamer, and not a total game geek.

And something totally unrelated to anything: I wish the folks who designed the standard qwerty keyboard hadn't put "o" and "0" so close together. It confuses the spellchecker when I make a typ0. Heh.

Not More Books!

Yes, more books! I found out Thursday that today was the annual Times Colonist (that's the Victoria newspaper) booksale, proceeds going to support literacy programs. So this morning (not very early) Sue, Mum, and I set out for downtown Victoria, and spent a couple of hours looking at books. Alas, no comics, though I almost bought The Encyclopedia of Superheroes (think that's what it was called), becuase it had all kinds of obscure old heroes I'd never heard of. I kind of wish I had bought it. Oh well, I found plenty of other things.

Fiction:

• The Wailing Wind by Tony Hillerman. Hillerman's mysteries are addictive. I saw quite a few of them (mostly copies of The Thief of Time, oddly enough), but this was the only one I was sure I hadn't read. My goal is to get them all, read them in chronological order, then trade them in at the used book store.
  
• The Gray Wolf and Other Fantasy Stories by George Macdonald. Wonderful, magical, fairy-tale-like stories. And it even matches my copy of The Light Princess.
  
• The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson. Shapechangers. Fox shapechangers. I've been wanting to read this for ages.
  
• Inez by Carlos Fuentes. I'm not sure why I got this one. It has a nice cover and it sounded good. Do I need any more reason?

Non-Fiction:

• The Amateur Magician's Handbook by Henry Hay. I don't know if I'll ever actually learn to do any of these tricks (I still haven't managed to juggle, after all), but it'll be useful if (no, not if, when) I get around to writing my Victorian magic ghost-busting psychic-debunking novel Bunk. I'll need to at least know the theory for that. Plus, I think I'll need to go to Vegas and watch a bunch of magic shows. Anyone wanna go? It's for research, of course.
  
• A Guide to the Prehistoric and Roman Monuments in England and Wales by Jacqetta Hawkes. I seem to be getting quite a collection of books like this--guides to the prehistory of England. I'm really going to have to actually go there one day. (Hey, I need to do some research in Aberfoyle and Skye . . .)
  
• The Science of Jurassic Park and The Lost World, or, How to Build a Dinosaur by Rob DeSalle and David Lindley. Caitlín Kiernan mentioned this one in her blog, saying it was a good one to consult "for more on Crichton's bad science." Heh. So of course I had to buy it.
  
• A Rum Affair: The True Story of a Botanical Fraud by Karl Sabbagh. Here's another one with a nice cover that sounded good. Scientific hoaxes are always fun.
  
• Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky. This one was recommended as a good example of creative non-fiction in a workshop I took in my last year of the most recent degree (the BFA). It's been on my to-read list for quite a while. Ugly fish, but quite yummy. If you're ever in Newfoundland, see if you can't find someplace to eat cod cheeks (you could have cod tongues--not actually the tongue, but the meat from under the chin--which is more popular with locals, but I liked cheeks better). Mmmm. Now I'm hungry.
  
• Dinosaur Plots and Other Intrigues in Natural History by Leonard Krishtalka. Dinosaurs, palaeontology, conflicts and hoaxes in science. Looks very good.
  
• Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science by Martin Gardner. I suspect there's a new(er) edition of this out, but it was only $2, so I can't complain. I have something else of Gardner's (can't remember what, and I too lazy to go look at the shelf). It was good, I do remember that, and this one's also a favourite topic of mine.
  
• Sir Henry Morgan: Pirate and Pioneer by Rosita Forbes. I like reading about pirates. This book's pretty old and so could be rather outdated, but it's got endpaper maps. Endpaper maps are cool.
  
• The Pirates by Douglas Botting and the editors of Time-Life Books. Yeah, it's a Time-Life book, part of the "Seafarers" series, But it has pictures of the different kinds of ships pirates used (showing rigging and sails and how many masts) and pictures of piratey weapons, and portraits of different pirates. Time-Life books can be surprisingly useful, sometimes.
  
• The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing by David Kahn. I think this may be the fattest book I own that isn't a dictionary. It's 1164 pages (including the notes and index). That's not why I bought it, though. I'm not that sort of a freak. I got it because secret codes are cool. I have a secret decoder wheel on my keychain (it's the simplest code of all, but it's still cool). Hee hee.

I think I am giddy from the smell of books. Now I just have to find the time to read them all, plus all the other ones I already own. It is time for a book purge, though, as painful as it will be. I have a lot of fiction I'll be weeding out. The non-fiction will be harder, because how can I know for sure I won't need it again? I have a lot of somewhat obscure books. Not obscure enough that I can sell them on eBay for pots of money, but enough that finding them again could be awkward, especially if I need them in a hurry. So I shall have to be careful. And just to show that I am actually reading, and not just acquiring volumes in a bibliophiliac frenzy, my very next post will be about my recent reading. Or puppets, but probably reading.

Alas, I found not a single puppet book at the sale.

Fey page 34

Done, done, done. And with somewhat less hassle than usual.

You may have noticed the overall greyer look of the last couple of pages. That's due to the new scanner, which is much better than the old one (even though I'm still scanning at the same resolution)--it picks up the translucency of the drafting vellum I've been drawing on, so the pages look grey (even though I put a blank white sheet behind them). One more good reason to switch to bristol (which I should have been using all along) once this batch of paper runs out (don't want to waste it, and it comes already in the right size).

This is Cool (and Something Not So)

I was reading through my regular blogs this afternoon, and to my surprise found Anagram for Ink (which, in case you haven't a clue, you are reading right now) linked on The Johnny Bacardi Show sidebar. That's pretty cool. (It's in the "full-and-semi Comics Bloggers" section, waaay down near the bottom.) And, while there, I discovered the link to this story. A Firefly comic could be good, or it could be not good. I'll have to wait and see. And the movie's out in September! Yay. (Now if only I could get Fey linked in the Johnny Bacardi "Creators/Webcomics" section . . . ) (After it's moved to the new server and domain, preferably, as Geocities won't take much traffic.)

In not-so-cool news, I went to work on the annotated bibliography of fairy books I've been doing to lead up to a book proposal (ie. I'm gonna write one), and discovered I deleted it last week when I was madly deleting things to make enough room on the hard drive for Photoshop to consent to open. Crap! Fortunately, it won't be too hard to reconstruct, as I copied and pasted some of it from my thesis bibliography and from The Faery Bibliography, but I had added some recent books and written at least something for each book (much in need of editing, but still something). I was going to start typing/revising the summaries of the different book ideas I have, but when I discovered I'd deleted the bibliography, I suddenly felt very, very tired. Maybe I'll have a nap first. Bleah.

Puppets, Again

Here's a great quote I found:

Part of the fascination of puppetry lies in its betrayal of reason: lifeless objects are made to act in a lifelike way.

It's from "Last Supper: The Lively Art of Puppetry" by Jill Boettger (Geist 53 (Summer 2004): 54-61).

Back in Business

As much as I can be, anyway. I went along when Sue took Ryan home, and we made a stop at EB Games and Futureshop in Langford. I am now the proud owner of this monitor. It's the cheapest model they had, but it's nicer than my old one, plus they had one in an opened box (probably either a display model or a customer return) that was $20 cheaper. Yay! I can play games again. And do work. Of course. Lots of serious work. And, it's not that horrible putty colour computers always used to be. It's black and silver, and so won't look out of place when I get the Mac. Not that matching colours is a big consideration when buying computer equipment, but it is nice to have something that isn't "computer colour." So I've started playing The Cameron Files: Secret at Loch Ness, which is pretty good so far (all 1/2 hour I've played). But I just remembered I told Selena I'd play Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill first, so I can pass it on to her, so I'd better start that one next time I play.

Also, I decided a while ago to buy a Gameboy Advance SP. I had been thinking about it for a while. I tend to think about things like that for a while, considering carefully, but when I make a decision, I want to act on it right away. Anyway, I decided that there were enough action/adventure and adventure/rpg (and even a few straight adventure) games available for it that I would actually play it, so it wouldn't be a waste of money. Plus, they have a long-lasting rechargeable battery, so when the power goes out (which it does fairly often up here), I won't have to wander around wondering what I should do. With three hours of laptop battery and ten + hours of Gameboy battery, I won't have to strain my eyes trying to read by candlelight, which is what I usually do when the power goes out. Anyway, I've been looking on eBay for a week or two, and discovered that used Gameboys sell for nearly as much as new ones, even with the Nintendo DS being out now (that's the next generation handheld) (it's really expensive) (so is Sony's very cool PSP handheld--it's like a mini PS2, almost). Used Gameboys at EB Games aren't all that cheap, either, but they are guaranteed, so I saved about $20, and didn't have to pay eBay shipping. I also picked up a couple of games: Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars (adventure) and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (rpg). I've played the second Broken Sword on PC, and it was very good. I've got the third one now, but I think I need to install a different version of DirectX to get it to work. Either that, or I'll be sneaking downstairs to play it on Sue's machine. Anyway, Shadow of the Templars was the first one, so I'm really looking forward to it. And the Zelda games have always looked like lots of fun, though I've never felt quite like buying a GameCube in order to play them. So there you go. I am big-time game-girl now, but I must not get too distracted by Gameboy (or the PS2 game I just got on eBay) until all my PC games are finished.

Blah, blah, blah, games, games, games. I'm sure you're all very bored now. Next time I will endeavour to write about something halfway interesting.

Recent Games

I've been (or was, until my monitor went snap crackle pop) playing through all these adventure games I'd amassed. I want to finish them all (or as many of them as I can get to work) before I switch over to a Mac. Just for fun, here are the games I've played most recently:

1. The Longest Journey (pc). I'd been wanting to play this for ages and ages. It's one of those adventure games that gamers who usually don't bother with adventure games were playing and raving about. And it was good. There was a little too much walking across essentially empty screens, and a few times I couldn't figure out where to get the tools to solve a problem I could see how to solve (if that makes any sense), but basically this was a very good game. A little old now, maybe, but still good. I think there's supposed to be a sequel in the works, but with my luck it'll never make it to Mac.
   
2. The New Adventures of the Time Machine (pc). Now this game, on the other hand, was not so good. It was a good idea, and some of design was nice, but the gameplay was mostly pretty awful. There were some good puzzles, but way too much walking through some really ugly environments (poor graphics partly due to the age of the game, to be fair). The designers tried to make this an action-adventure, but the controls were too sluggish and the camera too bad to make any of the action elements anything but an annoying (and sometimes maddening) task to get through. Imagine walking into a room where you're immediately shot at (and you can't not go into the room, or else you won't get any farther along in the game), but you can't actually see the guy shooting at you, and if you walk to where you can see him, you'll soon be dead, because you can't move and shoot at the same time. That actually happened. More than once. This could have been a much better game if they'd either left out the action elements, or else made the controls better--either an auto lock-on or else the ability to move and shoot at the same time would have helped immensely. I'm a stubborn old lady, though, and I kept at it until I was done (consulting a walkthrough for hints on how to actually fight the bad guys when I couldn't see them). Why? you may ask (especially if you heard me exclaim "I HATE this game" many times over during an evening's play session). Like I said, I'm stubborn. And there were some good puzzles. Plus, it was oddly satisfying to finish the game. I may not have liked it much while I was playing it, but I liked having played it. Once it was over.
   
3. Shivers (pc). This is a really old game. It won't run under WinXP, I don't think, since it's DOS-based. But damn, is it good. It's like a lot of older adventure games, in that the graphics are what's sometimes referred to as a "slide show"--there's no 3D movement, just zooming along from one view to the next (there is animation joining the screens, like you see the hallway zooming by as you click your way down it). The museum setting was the perfect excuse for lots of bizarre puzzles, and it meant there was mostly not too far to go from room to room, so it wasn't a big deal that you'd have to keep going back to places you'd already been. The only quibbles I had is that the animation of the evil spirits you have to trap was really cartoony and stood out (in a bad way) from the lovely museum rooms and artifacts and live-action ghost sequences (not very many of those), and that a few of the puzzles were really hard. There were only two I finally gave up on and went looking for the solution online--one was a move-coloured-pieces-back-to-where-they-should-be puzzle that I probably could have solved if I'd had more patience, and the other was that solitare game you play on a Chinese chequers board (or on a fox & geese board, should you have one of those). That one where you have to clear the board of pieces by jumping them and end up with the last piece in the centre. I've played that for hours offline and never been able to get closer than two pieces left on opposite sides of the centre position. I gave it a good shot, but after an hour or so, I decided I'd better just look up the solution so I could continue hunting down evil spirits. I just discovered that there was a Shivers 2--probably only for pc, but I may grab it on eBay anyway, since I probably won't have a Mac for a while yet.
   
4. Atlantis: The Lost Tales (pc). I thought I was going to have to sell this game without playing it, because when I first tried it a year or two ago, it wouldn't work on my machine (or on my old machine, which I still had kicking around). I guess the video card I installed since then was compatible, because it worked when I decided to give it one more try. The game itself has some lovely graphics and decent puzzles, though sometimes the puzzles seemed rather tacked on. The story was pretty good--the Queen of Atlantis is missing and her consort seems to be trying to take over and turn it into a Kingdom, and you have to escape the city (or navigate secretly through it) to find the Queen and stop her consort from taking over. There were a few sort-of action elements that really didn't work that well. Trying to flee the bad guys with an interface made for peacefully clicking through slideshow-style screens doesn't work very well. Nor does shooting a boar with a arrow that points diagonally across your bow and can only be aimed in a very general way. The character graphics were pretty basic, and everybody had some irritating repetitive mannerism that made them look like they all had some kind of degenerative muscle disease. Anyway, it wasn't as good as The Longest Journey, but it was way, way better than The New Adventures of the Time Machine. Even though the ending was rather disappointing (**spoilers** you rescue the Queen, but she later gets killed; you stop the consort and his evil weapon, but then Atlantis is destroyed by a volcanic eruption and sinking into the sea--you know the story; you do get to escape with the fisherman's cute red-headed daughter, though).
   

I still have a fair pile to get through, and that's not counting the Playstation games (but I'll leave those until the pc games are done, since I'll still have a PS2 after I get my Mac).

Recent Reading (and some not so)

I kept meaning to get around to writing about what I'm reading for weeks, and kept not doing it, too. So finally I am, as I procrastinate away my Saturday (I should be drawing, or writing).

Non-Fiction:

3. A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel. The may have taken the place previously occupied by Into the Looking Glass Wood (same author) on my desert island reading list. Depending on the size of the bookshelves on my hypothetical desert island, I might take them both. There is simply so much to think about in this book, that I'm going to have to read it over and over. It's comfort reading for a reader, a nice thick book that says "You are not alone" and then shows you hundreds and hundreds of years of readers, and the way readers use reading, and the way reading is done. I'd read anything Manguel wrote or edited, but currently this is my favourite (mind you, I haven't read a lot of his stuff yet).
   
4. Taking Wing: Archaeopteryx and the Evolution of Bird Flight by Pat Shipman. This is another example of my favourite kind of science book. Or one of my favourite kinds. It explores the development of the various ideas about the evolution of bird flight, carefully describing the possibilities in a way that is not too technical for the non-palaeontologist, but has enough meat and details that the reader can begin to evaluate the evidence for themselves. Shipman presents both (or more) sides of each issue fairly. I'd often find myself agreeing with the first idea presented, and then having to re-evaluate when the next one was described. And the writing is well done, pleasant to read, and only technical where it needs to be (but not overly simplistic anywhere). If you're into birds or dinosuars or the history of life, read this. It's not cutting edge, being a few years old (late 90s, if I remember right), but it's still good science. Plus archaeopteryx fossils are probably the most beautiful fossils ever found (though I'm also partial to ichthyosaur fossils).
   
5. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 edited by Steven Pinker. This was one of my purchases from Bolen Books, made with my assorted Christmas gift certificates. I chose it because I thought it would have a nice range of different kinds of science writing, and it certainly had. Not only that, but the writing in all of the essays was absolutely top-notch. I found myself thoroughly enjoying essays on topics I wouldn't normally seek out. There was one essay I had already read--the one on multiple universes that was published in Scientific American (I think; maybe it was Discover). It was interesting to see it without all the sidebars and visual aids the magazine adds in, and I had forgotten a lot of the details, anyway. This was definitely a good choice, and I'll probably be looking for previous editions.
   
6. Explore Fairy Traditions by Jeremy Harte. I'm supposed to review this book. The author sent it to me, all the way from England, and it's taken me unforgivably long to get to reading it, even though it's on one of my favourite topics. It's a well written, intelligent exploration of different aspects of fairy traditions in the British Isles, and the meaning of the stories for the people who tell them. I kept thinking how useful it would have been when writing my Master's thesis. If you want a good general book on fairy lore to start with, this would be a good choice. You'd probably have to order it from the publisher though (their website is here: http://www.hoap.co.uk/), or maybe from a UK bookseller.
   
7. Making and Playing Marionettes by James McMahon. Puppets! Not long after I first mentioned my growing puppet obsession, I logged on to the library website and requested a few books. This is one of them. It's really meant for teachers wanting to get their students into puppetry, but it assumes the students are capable and relatively mature--that they could do basic carpentry and sewing and work togther in a team in a professional manner--so it's a decent book for interested adults, too. Most importantly, it has diagrams and plans for the basic form and stringing of marionettes, which is exactly what I was looking for. There will be notes and sketches made from this one.
   

Fiction:

2. A Scientific Romance by Ronald Wright. This is one of the books I got at the recent books sale at the Duncan Mall (which has approximately five stores, plus WalMart at one end and Staples at the other). I thought it sounded kind of neat. It ended up to be one of the best novels I've read in a while. It's not easy to write long stretches of a novel with only a single character, and no one for them to interact with, without losing the reader's interest. Wright pulls it off though--at least half of the book has only the main character all by himself, and much of the rest is so closely focussed on his viewpoint (being in first person), that we only see interactions through him. But it works. It's a beautiful book, and I am going to be searching out more by this author. Plus, everyone I know should read it. I think you'd all get something out of it. (Well, maybe not everyone I know, but most of you.)
   
3. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I found this thing at Superstore of all places. Mostly they have overpriced cookbooks and overpriced books about God. And an odd selection of other stuff. This is one of those books that feels magical without having anything particularly fantastic actually happen. It's a story about books and love and writing and families, and I thoroughly adored it. It has a Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Probably almost everyone I know should read this one, too.
   
4. Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. This is so short, it maybe shouldn't count, but it is over 100 pages. So there. I hadn't read Pinocchio since I was a kid (thanks to my parents, or some gift-giving relative, I had a copy of the originial--though translated, of course--and not one of those "retold for children" horrors). This isn't the copy I had back then, but I think it might be the same translation, and it has lovely, super-detailed illustrations by Roberto Innocenti. I love his cityscape panoramas, especially. I decided to read this because of my recent puppet obsession. I'd forgotten how moralistic the story is, but it has enough beautiful writing and clever comments to make it a good read nonetheless.
   
5. The Mammoth Book of Werewolves edited by Stephen Jones. If you've read this blog much, you'll know I have a weakness for werewolves and other shapechangers. I thought, for some reason, that the Mammoth Books of . . . were best-of volumes, rather than ordinary themed anthologies. Turns out they're a mix of reprinted and new material, and pretty much as mediocre overall as other themed anthos. Which isn't to say it was a waste of time. Most of the stories were all right, and a few were very good. Plus there was a long Manly Wade Wellman story that I hadn't read, so it was worth reading for that alone.
   
6. Awful End by Philip Ardagh. I'm not sure when this was published (don't have it to hand), so I don't know if it belongs in the "jumping on the Lemony Snicket bandwagon" category, but it looks like it from the cover, and it feels like it when reading. It's not a bad read. The writing is good, and some of the characters are pretty fun, but overall, I think it just tries too hard. Mind you, I'm not remotely the intended audience, but for me, a lot of the wordplay (things along the lines of "He took the seat across from her. 'Don't steal that!' she shrieked, so he put it back and sat down." That's not the actual words, but you get the idea) was so over-the-top that it detracted from the actual story, which was otherwise fun. Basically, I got jarred out of the story so much I ended up not being particularly interested in what happened to any of the characters. Perhaps young boys would like it for the sillyness alone, but I can't imagine more sophisticated kids getting into it. But what do I know?
   

Sequential Art:

11. Rurouni Kenshin volume 1 by Nabuhiro Watsuki. I really liked the anime made from this series, so I thought I'd try the manga, and it's just as good (maybe better in some ways). The series in general (manga and anime) is a fun mix of serious more-or-less historical (early Meiji) action and rather slapstick humour, and mixes more and less realistic art styles.
    
12. Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle volume 2 by CLAMP.
    
13. Wish volume 2 by CLAMP.
    
14. Ranma 1/2 volume 5 by Rumiko Takahashi.
    

Looks like it's all manga this time, and only one new series. I haven't been comsuming comics at quite the insane rate I was, but I've been trying to finish off some of the stuff I've already got on the shelves before buying more. Actually, I've been trying to do that for books in general, though I've been less sucessful with fiction and non-fiction thanks to Value Village, thrift shops, book sales, and the remainder section of Chapters (good thing the nearest Chapters stores are in Nanaimo and Victoria). I have to say, though, I've picked up some really cool books.

I've also been having one of my periodic magazine cravings, and have been continuing to work my way through back issues of Geist (only one left, and then I have to decide whether or not to subscribe again). I've also been reading Scientific American and Discover, as well as the usual anime and gaming magazines (I've not been picking up any PC gaming mags, though, since I don't intend to have a PC for very much longer, and there are no Mac gaming mags).

More Thought

After more consideration, I think I'm going to stick with my original MacMini plan, and just go buy a monitor at Staples. They have a decent 17" for around $150. And that way, I can keep playing my games (I hadn't even had a chance to install some of them) until the Mac is shipping more quickly than "3-4 weeks." Still, if anyone knows of a used Mac with decent specs, let me know.

Fey page 33: About Bloody Time

Right, so here it is. This morning, after blazing through scanning, reassembling and cleaning up the edges of today's page, I was thinking of calling this blog entry "Fey, Now With Fewer Crashes." Aside from the laptop shutting itself off in protest in the middle of scanning the second section (it does that some times, when it thinks whatever I've asked it to is using too much memory, or something), everything behanved perfectly, though it did get slower the farther I went. Oh, I thought, I should have switched to this machine ages ago (remember, my desktop machine is currently without a functioning monitor). That was before Photoshop kept shutting down for no particular reason (the usual "illegal action" error that never seems to bear any connection to what you've been trying to do). I finally managed to finish the last thrid of the text by typing the text for a single bubble, flattening the layer and saving before going on to the next bubble.

I'm looking at used iMacs on eBay. I figure if I'm going to need a new monitor (not yet determined, but I haven't found a place in town that actually fixes monitors; plenty fix computers, just not the part you see what you're doing with), I might as well get a machine with a monitor already attached. Plus I love the look of the old G4 iMacs (they're the ones with the half-spherical base and the monitor on a steel arm coming out the top). Not that I would turn down a G5 of any description, if I could get one. Or a G4 PowerMac with a separate monitor, as long as it had one. Even used Macs aren't cheap. At least ones with sufficient power. On the off chance someone I know happens across a used Mac, I'd like the following:

• at least a G4 processor
  
• at least a 1 GHz processor (though I'd go for 800 MHz is it was cheap enough)
  
• at least 512 MB of RAM (again, 256 would be okay if cheap)
  
• at least a 40 GB hard drive (more is better)
  
• a 3D video card with at least 32 MB (64 is better)

Pop! Goes the Monitor (and Crackle, Too)

So I was playing Tomb Raider III, finally, and just getting back into it, when I hear this sort of "pop"--kind of like a lightbulb makes when it goes, only quieter. Then my monitor starts making these funny crackly sort of noises, then it powers down like it does when I've left it on too long, or turned off the computer without turning off the monitor. Oh, greeat.

Pluging the monitor into the original monitor port (instead of the one on the 3D card) makes no difference. Same crackle, same powering down. So it's not that the somewhat aged second-hand 3D card went wonky, it's the monitor itself. (To make sure, I'll see if Sue will let me plug her machine into it tomorrow). Crap. Crap. Crap. Now I need a new monitor.

Well, okay, maybe I can get this one fixed. But that "pop" was kind of ominous (though I know pretty much nothing about monitors, so maybe it's only a minor thing). Oh how I'd love to buy an Apple flat screen to go with the new Mac (whenever it is I get that), but they start at approximately twice the price of the Mac Mini (it is a 20" flat panel, but still . . .). Crap. I wonder if Sneakers fixes monitors, or if I need to take it to a special monitor place.

Lucky for me, I have my important work stuff on my laptop (thought it's not exactly a reliable machine, either). Crap, again.

Fey page 32

Here is is: page 32. Bad day for computers, today. First my laptop decided to shut itself off while I was trying to answer an eBay question, then there was the usual struggle to keep the desktop from freezing up while Photoshopping today's page of Fey. Sigh.

You Know You're From British Columbia When...

You Know You're From British Columbia When...

You know the provincial flower You consider that if it has no snow, it is not a real mountain. You can taste the difference between Starbucks, Blendz, and Tim Horton's. You know how to pronounce Squamish, Osoyoos & Nanaimo. You can tell the difference between Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and Thai food. In winter, you go to work in the dark and come home in the dark - while only working eight-hour days. You have no concept of humidity without precipitation. You know that Dawson Creek is a town, not a TV show. You can point to at least two ski mountains, even if you cannot see through the cloud cover. You notice "the mountain is out" when it is a pretty day and you can actually see it. You put on your shorts when the temperature gets above 5, but still wear your hiking boots and parka. You switch to your sandals when it gets about 10, but keep the socks on. You recognize the background shots in your favourite movies & TV shows. You buy new sunglasses every year, because you can't find the old ones after such a long time. You use a down comforter in the summer. The local hero is a pot-smoking snowboarder The local wine doesn't taste like malt vinegar Your $400,000 Vancouver home is 5 hours from downtown You can throw a rock and hit three Starbucks locations You've been to a deforestation protest If a cop pulls you over, just offer them some of your hash It's November, it's raining, but you're still wearing birkenstocks You go broke just paying rent. You don't own a heavy winter coat You can't figure out why Manitoba is considered part of Western Canada. You wouldn't be caught dead on Vancouver Island or Vancouver without your umbrella and plastic shoes. You actually get these jokes and pass them on to other friends from British Columbia.

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I Am Not Scary

You Are Not Scary

Everyone loves you. Isn't that sweet?

How scary are you?

No Longer Late

With page 31 now posted, I'm no longer behind on pages-to-post (well, except for the cover to part 2, maybe). I am, however, still behind and falling farther on pages-to-draw. Oh well. I'll catch up eventually.

Fey: Better Late?

I finally got the machine to work long enough to finish page 30. With luck, I'll be able to finish page 31, too, and post it on time (which is to say, tomorrow).

Beta Reading

So I finished my NSCAD admissions essay. I'm pretty happy with it. I went for a somewhat more creative angle rather than a strict "here's why I want to go to your school and why I think you should let me in approach." I hope that doesn't count against me. So anyone want to beta read it for me?

Crust

The day we broke
up I couldn't get out
of my mind the food
stuck in the corners
of your mouth.
All I could see
was that bit of orange.
And, Christ, I thought
as you tried to convince
me to go back,
Couldn't he at least wipe
his face?

Word Obsession

And speaking of words that catch my imagination, sometimes I get obsessed with a particular word. For some reason it sticks in my brain and won't go away. It fascinates me, and soon I have to do something about it--make a story or a poem, read a book about it, say it so many times I get sick of it. Right now the word is "puppet." Why? I have no idea. I think it may have started with an episode of InuYasha that involved demon puppetry, and the phrase stuck. Or maybe it wasn't that at all. I've always been fascinated by puppets. My grandfather used to have an old suitcase full of hand puppets, and a rack of marionettes hanging in the basement, many of which he'd made himself. I was especially enamoured of the skeleton marionette. I still am. That's one cool puppet. And kind of creepy, too, which is even better. I think Granddad might still have a few of those puppets, but I don't know if the skeleton is among them. Perhaps I should ask.

The weird thing about word obsession is that, if it's a good word, I don't even want to make it go away. "Puppet," I think to myself. "How cool. Puppetry. Puppets." Just say it out loud. That repetition of "p" sounds is fascinating, isn't it? Or maybe I'm just weird. I wonder if there's a good online tutorial on puppet-making. I could make a marionette to photograph for my NSCAD portfolio (I'm supposed to be devoting this week to getting that done). That way I could exorcise the puppet obsession and not feel like I was wasting time. Then again, "puppet" is such a fun word to have stuck in your head. Or in mine, anyway.

Fun With Words

I was flipping through my mostly-neglected journal, looking for the notes I made for my NSCAD admissions essay, when I found some lists of words I'd made. They almost sound like poetry.

eldritch dirigibles, poulpe-shaped
sundry savants dancing
tenebrous tentacular antennae
cetaceans
bioluminescent sleepy steam calliope
aerodynamic piezoelectric
antediluvian aeronaut

Invisible Library

The Invisible Library is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library's catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound.

I love this. It makes me want to go through all my books and find more things for them to add. I know there are some in Charles deLint that they don't have listed.

Cool Stuff

I'm sitting at the dining room table, wasting time because I really don't feel much up to working (Darwin's going to be fine, but I'm still pretty frazzled). Blog reading leads me to this site: I Want One Of Those (via Diane Duane's Out of Ambit). Some of the truly cool stuff you can buy there: the Binary Watch, the Write Light, the USB Swiss Army Knife, Emergency Cufflinks, the Death Clock, the Pet Doorbell, and many other strange and wonderful things. I can't take it all in.

Of Hellhounds and Fey

I suppose it was inevitable. One of our neighbours' dogs, Daisy the evil bitch dog, charged Darwin on our way back from the mailbox and took a chunk out of his left hip. So Darwin's at the vet getting stitches (for which the neighbours will be paying), and I'm completely frazzled. I'm not even going to try to get the new page of Fey up (I'm having enough trouble with basic spelling; don't want to fight with Photoshop and cranky computers). I'll try to get it up tomorrow. In the meantime, I'll be having a long, hot bath and a cup of tea before I have to go pick up Mr Tall, Dark and Handsome dog.

Big Book Score

Well, I'm back from the book sale, have had some food and tea, hauled broken branches out of the garden, looked at stuff on eBay and am now ready to bask in the cool books I brought home. I didn't get to Staples (opting, instead, to buy groceries), but I'll go tomorrow when Sue and Selena go to take back their videos. Which is better, because now I can balance my chequebook and see how much (or rather, how little) I can actually spend on a scanner.

But anyway, the books. Here's what I got for donating to help fund diabetes research. First, the fiction:

• A Scientific Romance by Ronald Wright. I've no idea if this author is any good, but the cover blurb mentioned H.G. Wells' time machine, Egyptology, Victorian machinery, time travel, and jazz, and made it sound really cool. I'll probably read this one very soon. I might even start it this evening.
  
• The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King. A retired Sherlock Holmes meets his match in a modern young woman? Or something. I think I saw a mention of this somewhere recently, and thought it sounded interesting.
  
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson. Here's something for the League of Extraordinary Reading. It's a Reader's Digest book (shudder) but the copyright page says it has the complete text of all the stories. Also, it's actually rather a handsome book, with pictures, and looks nothing like the usual RD edition. It just better have all the words.
  
• The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde. I've been meaning to read more Wilde for ages. I've been meaning to read this particular book for ages. Now I can. I think it qualifies for the League of Extraordinary Reading (at least via the horrible LXG movie, if nothing else).
  
• The Lady in the Loch by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. Kinda funny I found this, considering the poetry I got (below). I've never read this author, but she uses Sir Walter Scott as a character, so it should be interesting, at least.
  
• He Shall Thunder in the Sky by Elizabeth Peters. This is one of her "Amelia Peabody" mysteries. They're set in Victorian times and have lots of archeaology (Peters, aka Barbara Michaels, is an Egyptologist, or at least has a PhD in the field). I've only read one or two of them, and I really want to start at the beginning and read them in order. Now I have to find the earlier ones (back to the library, I suppose).
  
• Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within by Jane Jensen. This is maybe kind of a silly one. It's based on a series of acclaimed adventure games (computer games, that is), created by Jensen. I wasn't going to get it, but I've had adventure games on the brain lately (trying to play all the ones I have before I get my new Mac). I thought it would be silly fun, and might even surprise me by being good. Plus, it has werewolves in. You may have realized by now that shapechangers are one of my minor obsessions. They keep showing up in my fiction.

Next, the poetry:

• The Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott. I should probably read more poetry. Actually, I should read more contemporary poetry, but old stuff is good, too. Plus, it's got fairies. Or a fairy. Maybe.

And finally, the non-fiction:

• Eight Modern Essayists edited by William Smart. Short pieces by the likes of George Orwell, E.B. White, Virginia Woolf, and others. It includes Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," which I've been wanting to read again lately.
  
• The Periodic Kingdom by P.W. Atkins. It's good to understand the periodic table of the elements, right? Actually, I was thinking of picking up one of those nice laminated tables they make for highschool and college kids, to put on my wall. (I really was, that's not a joke. I'm a geek, remember? A nerd.)
  
• Armor by Sean Morrison. If you know me at all, you probably know that another of my minor obsessions is swords (and if you somehow managed to visit my house and not realize this, I seriously question your powers of observation). Swords and armour (or "armor" if you're American) go together.
  
• In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall. Here's another of those "been meaning to read for ages books," along with Dian Fossey's Gorillas in the Mist and Birute Galdikas' orangutan book(s).
  
• Science Under Siege by Michael Fumento. I'm a little dubious about this one--it's one of those "environmentalists are hugely overracting (or else part of a conspiracy)" books (or it sounds like it, anyway), plus the guy's other book is called The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS. But, I'll give it a fair read (carefully balanced by checking reviews and such in the science press). It should be thought-provoking at least (or maybe just provoking).

And, just so you don't wonder that I'm being buried in my wealth of books, but not actually reading them, I'll have a "recent reading" post soon. Just not yet. I need to bask some more.

The Obscure Cities

Connections and coincidences. I was reading some stuff on the Just Adventure+ website (a good place for adventure game geeks), and discovered that François Schuiten, who co-created The Great Walls of Samaris is going to be working with Benoit Sokal, of White Bird Productions. This is one of those odd, but cool, coincidences that pop up now and then: I read and blogged The Great Walls of Samaris some while ago, and vaguely remember commenting that I'd like to read more French comics, if that was a good sample. It turns out that Samaris is only one volume in a series called Les Cités Obscures (aka The Obscure Cities). Alas, only three of them have been translated into English (though the website provides text translations for some of the others). Guess I'll have to look for the other two. The other part of the coincidental connection is Sokal, who created two of my favourite adventure games: Amerzone and Syberia (and also Syberia 2 which I haven't played. Whatever those two come up with, I'll have to get my hands on, whether it's a game or a comic, or something else entirely.

Fey Page 29, and Other Things

Today, my computer behaved relatively well running PhotoShop (only restarted four times, I think). So here's page 29, featuring Maeve (deceptively pretty winged pond faery) and Pier (dark, broody, kind of weird elf in a long black coat).

And in computer-related news, I got a nice email from the Apple Store with a coupon for $40 off $399 or more, if I use it in the next two weeks. So I hope Mac Minis start shipping in a reasonable time within the next two weeks--that way I can get $40 off my order (which amounts to a free keyboard and a little extra) AND get the $100 rebate for buying a printer at the same time. I've already splurged on a couple of adventure games for Macs on eBay (well, "splurged" is relative--they were really cheap).

In only-somewhat-computer-related news, tomorrow there's a used book sale at the mall, to which I and Sue and Mum will be going. How many books I come home with will depend partly on the selection (naturally) and partly on how much they're charging. Funds benefit the Diabetes Association (or Society, or whatever they're called), so that's good. Always nice to have an excuse to spend more on books. The computer-related part is that afterwards, I'm going to go to Staples to see if I can find a decent USB Mac-compatible scanner on which to use my $20 off $100 or more coupon before it expires at the end of the month (I am rich in coupons today). There was a perfect one on the website, but who knows what they'll actually have in stock. So if anyone needs/wants a rather aged but still functional Mustek 600 III EP Plus scanner that plugs into a printer port (you can then plug your printer into the scanner and run it through) and only works with Windows, let me know.

Mail From the ESA (or, I Am Such a Geek)

So I got a big envelope from the European Space Agency today (I got mail from the European Space Agency!). Inside was my copy of Tales of Innovation and Imagination: Selected Stories from the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury International Science Fiction Competition (which, if you want to read it, is available here in pdf format, or you can go here to try to find the appropriate link for ordering it [it's SP-546, September 2004]). Of course, I found a typo. And the formatting is the same as the pdf version, which I hoped it wouldn't be. There are no indents at the beginnings of paragraphs, so the only way to tell it's a new paragraph is if there's a lot of space at the end of the previous paragraph. I dunno what style format they were following . . . Anyway.

I'm published in a thingy put out by the European Space Agency (have I squeezed "European Space Agency" in there often enough? No? Here it is again: European Space Agency). I read my story through again (it's not very long) and it definitely has flaws, but I still kind of like it. Not in a "this is a masterpiece" kind of way, but in a fond sort of "here's a fun little trifle I wrote" way. But I realized, with slight embarassment, that I sent a story about winning an arts contest to an arts contest. But I wrote the story way before I knew about the contest. I wrote it for an Arts and Technology class I did when finishing my writing degree. I originally did it as an illustrated book (kind of a Griffin and Sabine sort of thing, in the form of the narrator's journal), then rewrote it for the contest (the orignal didn't have much middle).

I think this is my first print publication of fiction. Weird. It's not a professional publication, since I didn't get paid for it and it was for a contest, but still. It's from the European Space Agency.

Funny Webcomic

Go read this: girls with slingshots. (Link via The Johnny Bacardi Show.)

I See Snowdrops . . . and Red

Yesterday on my way back from the mailbox I spotted a cheerful-looking bunch of the year's first flowers--snowdrops! I haven't seen any anywhere but there, yet, but it suddenly got warm after the snow, so I expect there will be flowers popping up everywhere soon. Or else it'll suddenly get cold again and all the snowdrops will die.

And in other news . . . my desktop computer just froze twice in a row while I was trying to PhotoShop this week's page of Fey. Usually, it waits until I have all the pieces together and am trying to flatten the image (or sometimes while I'm copying and pasting the pieces). This time, it happened when I was trying to rotate the first piece. That's the very first thing I do after creating the new document. Argh! Right after it crashed I went to the Apple Store to see when the Mac Minis are shipping. Still 3-4 weeks. Damn! As soon as the ship time is around a week, I'm ordering one. (Waiting because of "buy a printer at the same time get a fat rebate" dealies that require postmarks and invoice dates to be within 30 days of one another.) Argh! again. I'm going to leave it for a while. If I get desperate, I'll try to PhotoShop on my laptop, but it'll mean having to re-scan (I think the tiff files are too big to email, but I might try anyway).

Right. End of rant. Think of pretty white flowers nodding on their fresh green stems in the warm breeze (well, warm-ish).

50 Books Begins

Oops! I haven't made a single "latest reading" post since the year began, have I? At least, not one for this year's books. Fortunately, I've been reading a lot of magazines lately, so I haven't gone through as many books as I might have. Here's what I've read so far:

Non-Fiction:

1. One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty. I read this one to review for work. It's quite short, but really beautifully written. (You can read more of me blathering about how wonderful it is in my review.)
   
2. No Place for a Lady by Barbara Hodgson. Sue checked this one out from the library, and I thought it looked interesting--it's about women travellers in . . . the 18th century, I think? I can't remember. Anyway, it was interesting, but rather shallow. By which I mean that Hodgson would introduce an interesting character, breeze quickly through her travels in a particular place (each chapter was on a different part of the world), and then move on to the next character. I get that she was trying to cover as many different women as possible, but I'd rather have had fewer women and more details. As it was, the stories felt very superficial, and it's a topic that, I think, would have benefitted from more in-depth coverage. But maybe it's just me. The writing was good, at least, I just still felt hungry after.

I also finished one book I'd started in 2004--Womansword: What Japanese Words Say About Women, which was just as interesting for showing how Japanese words are formed out of other words, as for its depiction of how women are viewed. Now I'm reading three non-fiction books at the same time, which isn't really conducive to me actually finishing any of them soon.

Fiction:

1. Medicine Road by Charles deLint. I always like deLint's books. I'm not nearly the fanatic I once was, though. I'm enjoying this "series" (not really a series, but a bunch of related books--the first one was Seven Wild Sisters) more than I have his Newford cycle. I think they have more of what made me love his work in the first place. Which isn't to say I don't like the Newford books. I do, very much. Geh. I don't know what I'm trying to say. Maybe I should go back to bed.

And that's all the fiction I've read. Kind of sad. I started a big anthology of short stories, but I don't seem to be getting through it very quickly.

Sequential Art:

1. Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle by CLAMP. It's CLAMP, do I need to say more? This is an odd story of alternate-world characters from the Cardcaptor Sakura storyline, but so far I'm really enjoying it.
   
2. Viz Sneak Peek by various. This was a freebie when I bought the Inu-Yasha movie DVDs. It's the usual mix of story excerpts from Viz books. There are a couple I'll at least browse through in the store, one I'll probably buy, and several I have absolutely no interest in (just in case you were beginning to think I'd read anything manga).
   
3. Seraphic Feather: Crimson Angel (volume one) by Hiroyuki Utatane and Yo Morimoto. Hmmm. This wasn't a bad book, it just didn't really grab me. Plus there were way too many gratuitous panty shots. I can handle a few. Heck, I can even enjoy the odd one. But this book just overdid it for me. If the story was more gripping or the art more gorgeous, I could ignore it. It definitely has appealing elements, just not enough of them for me to keep reading.
   
4. Usagi Yojimbo volume 5 by Stan Sakai. So I had to skip to volume 5 from volume 2, owing to the fact that our library system doesn't have volumes 3 or 4. Sigh. Still, Sakai's stories are self-contained, so it didn't matter too much (unless there turns out to be a subtle overall storyline, which there could well be). There was a lovely story about kites, plus the usual samurai rabbit action. Oh, and a very amusing Lone Wolf and Cub tribute called "Lone Goat and Kid."
   
5. The Return of Lum * Urusei Yatsura: For Better or Curse by Rumiko Takahashi. I go this in a lot of Takahashi books off eBay. It's got the usual cute art and slapstick comedy (largely centred around botched romance--also a Takahashi staple). I'd have enjoyed it much more, I suspect, if I had read the earlier books. As it was, I sometimes felt a little lost about what was going on and who everyone was. Still, there was enough fun stuff that I didn't feel like I was wasting my time, and I'll probably get around to those earlier books eventually.
   
6. Artbabe: Mirror Window by Jessica Abel. Short stories about art and realtionships and life in general. Nice art. Good writing. This was a nice change from weird manga, and I'll definitely be looking for more Artbabe.
   
7. Rave Master volume 1 by Hiro Mashima. I got this from Selena's school Scholastic book order. I like to support the school library and encourage Scholastic to offer more comics. That said, Rave Master didn't blow me away. It was okay, and I think it might develop into a more involving story, but I really don't feel like I must eagerly await the next book.
   
8. Queen and Country: Operation Stormfront by Greg Rucka and Carla Speed McNeil. You could file this under "comics for people who think they won't like comics." Then again, I'm sure lots of people who do like comics love this series. What I'm trying to say is that it's great spy fiction in graphic form, and anyone who likes spy fiction (or mysteries or suspense; or any of those things in movies or tv or whatever medium) would be missing out if they skipped this because it's comics. Anyway, I liked it.
   
9. Chobits volume 5 by CLAMP. Finally, I got back to this series. I broke down and just bought volume 5 at the comic shop, instead of looking for it cheap on eBay. I really wanted to know what happened. So now I need volume 6.
   
10. Inu-Yasha volume 20 by Rumiko Takahashi.

It feels weird sometimes, to go into a comic shop and buy nothing but manga. I have this peculiar notion that I shouldn't let everyone think I'm one of those women who just discovered comics during the big manga explosion (which, incidentally, is still going on and shows no signs of slowing down) and has never read, and probably never will read, any other kinds of comics. I fell like I should buy something not manga. My local comic shop never seems to have the titles I want, though. And anyway, most of them I'd rather have in trade format rather than pamphlets (ie. individual comics, also called "floppies"). And western tpbs cost more than manga. It's stupid to feel that way, I know. But I've been reading comics since before variant covers killed the industry. I was reading comics when manga in English was nearly impossible to find. Since . . . Oh, never mind. It just makes me feel old. (No, I'm not saying it's bad to be one of those women who just discovered comics during the big manga explosion, just that I'm not one.)

So. Like I said, I've been reading a lot of magazines instead of books lately. It seems to go in cycles. I've read various issues of Newtype USA, Anime Insider (the writing is pretty awful, but it's much less juvenile than sister publications Wizard and Toy Fare, and the stories are sometimes actually informative, plus Selena likes to cut out the pictures when I'm done), Skeptic, Skeptical Inquirer, and a few computer and gaming-related things. Oh yeah, and I'm trying to catch up on a year's worth of Geist (only 4 issues, fortunately).

I'm really starting to want to read science books again, too. Or maybe science magazines . . .

Hee hee

Neil Gaiman's blog makes me laugh again, especially this bit:

. . . as you go to bed, having found yet another cat-murdered roll of toilet paper in the middle of the office floor, you realise that you don't actually know where the cats are getting the nightly fresh toilet paper rolls from.

My cat murders t.p., too, though usually while it's still on the wall.

Fey Today

Here's page 28. Today I decided to work on the long-delayed cover for Part 2 instead of a new page (I'll probably try to do two next week). It's almost all coloured now, I just have some background colour to do. Then I have to try to get PhotoShop and my decrepit old machine to let me add the text. It'll be the same as the Part 1 cover, only with a different picture (duh). Eh. I need to eat.

I'm a What?

What weird misc. thing are you? Wallama You're a little backwards and a little annoying, but deep down, we all love you.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

Spacey

Wow. So we've ("we" = humans) put landers on Mars and sent an orbiter to Saturn. I watched the Discovery Channel special on Titan last night. It was very, very cool. And I was happy that they showed a bunch of Cassini photos of other moons, as well as the Huygens probe photos of Titan. Did I mention it was very cool? I was going to write something intelligent about all this, but it's one of those times when I need to let it seep in for a while before trying to put things into words.

And here's something truly bizarre. Sometime in 2003 I entered my story "Seeing Stars" in The Clarke-Bradbury Science Fiction Competition. I didn't win (I hadn't really expected to, but entered just for fun). This morning I got an email from someone at the European Space Agency (who sponored the contest) asking for my new address because they'd sent me a copy of the anthology and it had been returned. It seems that, although I didn't win, my story was selected as one of those "selected for their interest, content, novelty and structure" to appear in the anthology. You can read it in pdf format here.

Fey page 27

I got so busy working on today's page-to-draw, I almost forgot about today's page-to-post.

VanderWorld

Jeff Vandermeer's guest blogger Iain Rowan (what a great name) blogs about automata:

If you were rich, and inclined to be somewhat unhinged in a rather scary way, you would surely have a house full of automata.

What does it say about me that I think it would be cool to live in a big old house full of books and automata?

Ouch

There's some great stuff on writing and getting published--from Neil Gaiman and Teresa Nielsen Hayden--over on Neil Gaiman's blog, including this:

writing about writing, or writing about publishing, is what wanna-be authors do when they've given up on writing, but don't yet want to admit it.

Ouch. But for the record, I haven't given up and don't intend to.

I See a Light

Okay, it's nowhere near a G5, but this may be--at least for now--an answer to my problems. And it's so cute! Mac Mini. Hee hee.

Readerware

I'm not certain yet, but I think I may have finally found the perfect book cataloguing software. I've tried a lot of these over the years, and they range from truly crappy to almost, but not quite, what I want. Usually, I find two or three that would be perfect if their features were combined, but no single one that has everything I want. Readerware looks like it might--and I can add up to 9 fields if it doesn't. The trial version comes with CD and movie versions, too. It costs more to buy, but the package deal for all three seems reasonable. Even better, if you buy the software, then switch to a different platform (like I plan to switch back to a Mac asap), you don't have to buy the program again. If you get the disc, all the versions are on there, and if you get the download, you can use your same key for any version. So now I just have to take one of each kind of book I own, and see how it does. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, because I've wanted a good book cataloguing program for ages.

50 Books Challenge

The 50 Books reading challenge has rules. I think I'll do it this year pretty much the same as I did last, keeping separate lists for fiction, non-fiction, and sequential art. I already have a bunch of comics TPBs to blog, thanks to many of them having large enough text to see in candlelight.

A Day Late, and a Lot of Snow

Courtesy of BC Hydro and Mother Nature, this week's Fey (page 26) is somewhat late. We had a mountain of snow fall on us all at once, and large parts of the Cowichan valley (actually much of the south island, I think) were without power for over 24 hours. Not such a big deal, really, except it's hard to keep a greyhound warm without power when he decides he doesn't like all the blankets piled on top of him. Plus, I was ready to kill for a cup of tea. Anyway, the power is back on (for now, anyway), and the latest page is up. Phew. Plus, I'm almost caught up on the pages-in-progress, despite running out of daylight last night, and it being too dim in the only warmish room for drawing today. If I don't finish those pages tomorrow, they'll be done by Tuesday for sure (even without electricity). Yay!

Another Hero Gone

I've sort of been avoiding blogging about this, because I really don't know what to say. Will Eisner died January 3. Now I'll never get to meet one of the biggest, most influential people ever in comics. And how selfish a thought is that?

It's hard to believe that a man could die at age 87 and still seem to have been cut down in full stride, and yet that's who and what Will Eisner was.

(That's from THE BEAT, where there's a nice survey of many of the tributes to Eisner popping up on the web.)

Red Sonja Is What?

Here's something cool that I didn't know, from postmodernbarney:

. . . Red Sonja is coming back to comics. Again. And it's going to be a barbarian fantasy series. Again. So, basically, Roy Thomas and Frank Thorne killed any chance of me ever seeing a faithful adaptation of Howard's one Sonya story, in which she is a 16th century Russian gunfighter fighting the Ottoman Turks . . .

I think I had better move Robert E. Howard farther up the list of things to read (I've read some of the early Conan stories, but that's it). I wonder which book had the Sonja story. A 16th century gunfighter. How cool.

Ringing in the New Year

So, how did I spend my first day of 2005? Why, watching the extended editions of all three Lord of the Rings movies in the company of dear friends, of course. What better way could there possibly be to kill a day than twelve straight hours of LotR? Rowena brought delicious chicken and rice dishes, the names of which I can't remember, but boy were they good. Sue made some kind of veggie and chicken soup (to die for, as usual), and I provided cheese and crackers and chips and dip and pop and tea and coffee and chocolate. Oh, and I also provided the venue (include warm blankies), though Sue lugged her much larger tv upstairs so we could actually see Aragorn. And all those other pretty men, approximately half of whom I have had crushes on (their fictional, novelistic counterparts, that is) since I was about 9 years old (or whenever it was I first read tLotR).

I thought it was going to be a feat of endurace along the lines of the old Red Dwarf marathons, which I think were actually shorter in duration, but I was--again--too entranced by the movies to really notice their length. Most of the new and extended scenes added a lot to the whole, I think. The flood of skulls was a little cheesy, but also amusing, so I didn't mind. And I didn't exactly object to having to look at Viggo Mortensen for longer. That man has some nice cheekbones.

I did forget, though, that although wine makes me sleepy, it also makes me wakeful, so I didn't sleep nearly as much as I'd have liked last night. And when I did sleep I had weird dreams in which--I think--I and some friends were attempting to make a movie.

It was back to work today, alas, though a large part of today's work consisted of reading the book I'm going to write the review of tomorrow. Sometimes, I like my job. (And sometimes I use the phrase "I think" too often.)

Well, Maybe a Few Little Ones

Okay, I won't be so ambitious this time. For 2005, I resolve to:

• continue a page a week of Fey, unless I have a damn good reason not to
  
• revise all the Friesland Stories to date, and keep submitting them
  
• pick up writing White Foxes, Full Moon where I left off, and try to finish the damn thing
  
• continue writing more Friesland Stories
  
• write at least a little more of Three Sisters
  
• get back in touch with friends I lost track of, and stay in touch with them
  
• keep exercising and lose a few more pounds

I think that'll do. Notice all the qualifiers. I can't fail this time! Heh.

No Resolution

So last year I made a few New Year's resolutions, and cheekily said to check back at the end of the year to see how I did. Well, last night I was eating roast goose, so I didn't get to writing about that. So I'll go though 2004's resolutions one by one and make up excuses for why I didn't meet them. Good excuses, really.

Last year, I resolved to:

• revise The Secret Common-Wealth
  I didn't finish it. I started second-guessing myself. I was going to collapse some characters together, but then decided maybe I shouldn't. Plus, I really need to either go to Scotland, or find some super-detailed reference material to get the location details right. Or at least close.
  
• finish writing White Foxes, Full Moon
  I didn't. I decided that White Foxes was really meant to be a series of short stories and form the second part of Friesland Stories (formerly Vinland Stories). Then, I when I went to separate it into its component stories, I discovered they were more closely intertwined that I'd thought. So I left it alone a while. Then I decided it probably should be a novel after all. Now I'm getting antsy about working on it again, which is good, even though I failed to keep both resolutions so far.
  
• finish writing Vinland Stories (now called Friesland Stories)
  This one isn't a total failure, though the goal of finishing became much less likely when I decided that White Foxes wasn't going to be part of it after all. I did get a few more stories written, just not all of them. They tend to only come out good when I let them come out one their own. The one I wrote just to get another one done isn't very good. Geh.
  
• complete at least three more issues of Fey
  I didn't realize how unrealistic this was until I started working on it. I can finish a page in a day, but it takes the entire day. And I can only really spare one whole day--occasionally two-- out of a week, which means I can only effectively do a page a week. And since I decided to re-do the first part to make the gutters the right size and correct the worst of my anatomical blunders, there was no way I'd get three more parts done. I finished the re-do of part 1 and am almost halfway through part 2. I didn't meet the letter of this resolution, but I'm satisfied that I did it in spirit.
  
• send out more stories
  I did this, though I didn't really send out as many as I probably intended.
  
• revise Fox Point Dragon and send it to publishers
  I didn't touch this at all. It's never felt like a very high priority, partly because I'm not sure it's any good. Perhaps now that I'm more distanced from it, I can work on it.
  
• revise Jenny's Troll and send it to publishers
  I didn't do this, either. The revisions needed are really only the rewriting of one scene, but it's going to be difficult to do. Plus, I can't decide if I should illustrate it myself, of just submit the text.
  
• work very hard on Three Sisters
  Didn't do this. I worked on it a bit. I thought about it very hard. But that's all I managed.
  
• look for an agent
  I know the agent I want, I'm just too chicken to send her an email to see if she's even taking new writers. I really need to do this soon, though.
  
• occasionally go outside to remind myself that there is a world
  I think I did okay on this one, though I didn't get out hiking and such as much I wanted to.

Looks prety disnal, hey? But I did also write the first draft of an entirely new novel (well, one that's not on the list--I had the basic idea for it ages ago). You can even read the draft online. I also got back into exercising fairly regularly, and lost ten pounds (then gained 5 back, but still . . .). I wrote a lot of stuff for About, I got my first professional non-fiction print publication, I read a whole lot of books, and . . . I can't think of anything else, but I did a few other good things. So all-in-all, I'm a bit embarassed that I made so many resolutions I didn't quite keep, but not unhappy with the progress I made this year.

Last Reading of Last Year

A few more last minute manga readings:

172. Maison Ikkoku: Game, Set, Match (volume 13) by Rumiko Takahashi. I was hoping this was the final volume of the series, as it's the last one the library has. Alas, there is one more. Argh! Guess I'll have to look for it on eBay.
     
173. Lone Wolf and Cub: Chains of Death (volume 8) by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima.
     
174. Ranma 1/2 volume 4 by Rumiko Takahashi.
     
175. Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle volume 1 by CLAMP. The first volume of this book and the first volume of xxxHolic cross over, so I've been wanting to read it for a while (plus, it's CLAMP!). It's kind of a weird alternate universe(s) of many different CLAMP characters, but lots of fun and beautifully drawn. Selena's hooked on it, too.

So that's the last of the things I read in 2004. My totals?

• fiction: 51
  
• non-fiction: 55
  
• sequential art: 175

That's a total of 181 books! 106 of the take-a-long-time-to-read variety, and 175 quicker reads (graphic novels usually take me an hour and up, depending on how long and/or dense they are). Phew!

Edit: Sue noted in the comments that I can't add (the ability to do sums seems to be following my ability to spell--out of my brain and into nothingness). That should be 281 books, not 181. Sigh.

That's a lot of books, even not counting the ones with pictures.