In Which Our Heroine's Amiability Resumes With Book Two

12 August 2005

I'm revising away on Sampo, revise revise revise. Except that my red pen ran out and my other red pen was too pale and I'm in the middle of a different cartridge in my fountain pen. So I'm using a shocking-pink pen for revisions (it came in a package, all right?), and the metaphors are just not nearly as vivid. "I'm...well, not bleeding all over the page, exactly, unless I was a Barbie doll, which I'm not...." I'm sure you see the problem.

The first twelve pages lulled me into a false sense of well-being on this book. The ones that follow them are wrong in baffling ways: What? No, that's not what they did next! I can fix it, so the baffling ways are not upsetting ways. Still. What did you do that for, self? Lots o' rewrite, is what I'm saying, and that's no surprise.

I'm reading Karen Traviss's Crossing the Line and enjoying it a lot. Lately I've been enjoying the second book in new SF trilogies more than the first, and I can't tell if they're genuinely better or if my expectations are more in line with the actual book. I'm looking for something to revolutionize at least a small corner of SF right now in a way I find appealing. I'm restless about the genre, is what it is. When I read a new volume of SF, some squidgy back part of my brain wonders if this will be It; when I read the second volume in a series, it's allowed to be itself more instead. I'm more at ease with letting the author do what they intended instead of something I can't even articulate but wished they'd intended.

I'm generally a fairly amiable reader, willing to deal with things on the author's terms unless the author screws up enough that I can't, so I feel a little guilty when I slip up in that. On the other hand, I also think I'm allowed to want what I want in a book. So not too guilty.

Ista has discovered a weed in the back woods that produces stickery little pods. They aren't painful -- not like cockleburs -- but they've got fine little hairs all over them, and they stick in her curly fur with great plantish enthusiasm. After she goes running around outside, we sit down and one of her monkeys picks the seed pods out of her fur. Sometimes she gets to them and eats them, thereby extracting her vengeance upon them, or displaying her love for them, or something like that. Sometimes puply emotions are not the clearest thing in the world, but she generally seems to have the concept that pack members groom each other down fairly well, so that's something, at least.

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