TBR challenge March: Humans

Tor books, 2003

Humans is the middle book in a trilogy by Robert Sawyer, the others being Hominids and Hybrids. It tells the story of a parallel world to Earth, where Homo Sapiens was the human species to die out and the Neanderthals went on to become the dominant, technically advanced, species. In the first book, which I haven't read, an accident with an experimental machine on the Neanderthal world led to a Neanderthal scientist, Ponter Boddit, becoming stranded on our version of Earth.

In Humans, Ponter reopens the portal and revisits the friends he made in the first book. He also rekindles a friendship with Mary Vaughan which becomes a romance.

This is very much a hard sci-fi book. It spends a lot of time exploring the differences between the two worlds, and the Neanderthal world was fascinating. A world where you live apart from the men for most of the month then get together for a few days of  'Two Become One'. Hmm, I could live with it, as long as somebody was around to do the heavy lifting.

I found it a bit sermonising in places, and although I saw it described as a sci-fi romance in one amazon review, I don't think it was. The romance was more of a hook to hang any number of scientific and social observations on than what a romance reader would recognise as a romance.

Not a page-turner, but interesting, and aspects of the Neanderthal society have stayed with me and given me a certain amount of food for thought. Of course, that might just be the prospect of not having a husband under my feet for most of the month then the fun of squashing a month's worth of happies into a few days. On second thoughts, sons live with their fathers. Cancel that plan. I couldn't live without my Boy, even if he does borrow my computer when I want to write.

Hey, I was actually on theme this month. Robert Sawyer was a 'new to me' author. How 'bout that, go me! On to April.

Sexytalk is sexy, right?

In the meeting of the chatroom coven last night, beloved writing buddy Mud mentioned a book that she was enjoying, Pack Challenge by Shelly Laurenston. She liked the banter, and I have to say, any book with a discussion about werebunnies has something going for it. After all, why just have predator weres when you can have werebunnies or werebovines.

MUD: Never walk under a tree containing a werebovine at full moon.
ROSIE: Unless you're wearing a really big hat.

So as well as werebunny discussions, apparently there is also lots of sexytalk in the book, which got us to wondering, do lots of people talk during sex? And is it sexy? We came up with some of our own sexytalk to test the theory. Thank you ladies for letting your creative efforts out to alarm and disturb the real world:

1.  "Did you pick up milk?"

2.  "F*** me hard, big boy"

3.  "Where did you put that saucepan lid the last time you did the dishes?"

4.  "Shut up, you're interrupting my fantasy..."

5.  "Where's the remote? Leno's almost on."

6.  "What the f*** is that?"

7.  "Ow, you're on my hair." (borrowed from a twitter post)

8.  "That reminds me, we need to buy noodles."

9.  "These sheets really need washing."

10.  "I think I hear the dogs outside."

11.  "I think it's time to paint the ceiling. There are 123 cracks."

12.  "When are we getting rid of your mother?"

 
13.  "While you're there, could you take a look at that mole on my neck?"

14.  "Dya think you're gonna be much longer? I had beans for lunch. Fair warning."

15.  "Does this pillow make my butt look fat?"

16.  "That reminds me....I think the car's misfiring again."

17.  "Hey. Make that sound again and watch the look on the dog's face."

18.  "The nose hair trimmers are in the medicine cabinet. Right beside the mouthwash."

19.  "Do you smell something?"

20.  "Sorry, I kinda nodded off there."

21.  "How many gallons would it take to do the ceiling, dya think?"

My conclusion: sexytalk is possibly not sexy the way we do it. C-, could do better, and it's a good job none of us write erotica.

I think my personal favourite is no.17. Congratulations En, your reward is for us all to improve our sexytalk ready to try it out on you when we meet up in June.

En's link of the week

My good buddy En finds the best stuff on the internet. I have no idea how. This week, she found a new way to help me put off revisions, playing

Circle the Cat

Can you catch the cat? He's a crafty beast. It did occur to me that maybe in the next edition the game creator could make it more like real life. In real life if you pin a cat somewhere he can't escape, he comes at you claws first. Maybe the kitty could launch out of the screen, which gets splattered with blood or carved up with claw marks.

Maybe not.

I promise I am thinking up a new blog post which has something to do with, gasp, writing. My take on the werewolf alpha male, coming soon.

When books and families collide

The Boy has de-railed me in his candy sledgehammer Boy way.

The Boy: Mummy, are you going to write another book when you finish this one?
Rosie: That's the plan. Daddy is even going to build me a little office in the loft.
The Boy, in wobbly voice: I like it better when we do stuff together.
Rosie: *feels like the worst mother in the world*

I confess I don't know what to do next. Do I stop writing until he's a vile teenager who will be happy not to spend time with his mother? What if he stays this sweet forever?

TBR Challenge February: Kraken

Paperback, Pan, 2010

Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears?

For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature he's been preserving is more than a biological rarity: there are those who are sure it's a god.

A god that someone is hoping will end the world

I'm cheating a little. This book hasn't been languishing in my TBR pile because I forgot about it, or wasn't in the mood for it. It was sitting there as my reward for finishing a draft, because I knew that if I read it, I wouldn't be doing anything else until it was done.

I really don't know how Mieville comes up with his ideas. Billy disappears into another London populated by strange religions and mysterious characters. This London has talking tattoos and guardian angels, and horrors hiding below a paper-thin surface. Although Billy is the protagonist, for me, London is the hero of the book. Despite the craziness of what's going on, it doesn't feel like some alien city; it feels like London. Magic is called 'knack', and if Londoners had magic, that's exactly what they'd call it.

I found it easy to immerse myself in, but I struggled to understand the final twist of the plot. That meant that I felt a tiny bit unsatisfied at the end. If I read it again with the benefit of a little bit of foreknowledge, I think it would be easier, and I probably will read it again because the imagination of it just takes my breath away.

3.5/5 

Brains it is?

I'm writing a story for an anthology at the moment, and thought I would use a random word picker to mess about with the themes. I would roll the die a few times and see what combination of the themes I should use. It came out:

First roll - undead
Second roll - punk
Third roll - undead

Looks like the gods of randomness want a zombie story really badly. I have to decide now whether ignoring them would mean I wake up tomorrow as a zombie and have to propitiate them with an offering of brains. If my butcher can't get them I would have to give them the Old Git's, and nobody gets his brain until he's finished repairing the central heating. After that, we can talk.

How kickass are you?

There is a subject close to my heart, that I rant about often in real life, but which I have never blogged about. Don’t know why, but here it is.

It’s a question for the girls: How kickass are you? Really?

I mean really really. Physically.

I’m not talking about how you don’t take crap from anyone in your personal life or how gutsy you are in business, or how you manage your life. I’m talking serious, physical fighting. How strong are you?

Have you uncovered fightin’ skills you never knew you had, donned leather pants and gone out to take the world on?

How many times have you even been put in a situation where you had to discover how kickass you really are?

I have.

And that’s why I love urban fantasy, heck I write it, but I'm tired of reading about kickass women, and I doubt I will ever write one into a story.

Once upon a time, I was an environmental health officer. Probably not the best one out there by a very long way, but I cared a whole lot about the people whose problems the council employed me to solve. Neighbour making your life a misery with noise? I was your woman (if I had some evidence to prove it, which is a *whole* other story).

So, when I went out a-gathering evidence for noise nuisance and sat in someone’s flat listening to thumping bass downstairs, and read his diary of recent noise events and saw the exhaustion on his face and the anti-depressants on his table to match it, I was on the job. Go downstairs, talk to the budding home DJ, warn him that the music level had to come down or he’d be getting a piece of paper from me that said in flowery legal words, shut up or we’ll see you in court.

Rosie saves the day, right?

Except my budding DJ, who was oh so friendly at the door, had a little anger management problem as well as some other psychiatric issues. My budding DJ lost the plot when our friendly conversation didn’t lead to permission to play his music as loud as he wanted because his decks ‘are really important to him’.

And my budding DJ, who was about a head shorter than me and weighed a damn sight less, managed to overpower me, stop me leaving even though I was right next to the door, and lock me in while he threw his decks out of the window in a rage.

I, the council enforcer who was paid to take no crap and had received two days of self defence training from my employer a few years before, could do nothing but stand at the doorway and say, “Please let me out, you’re frightening me,” until he calmed down and opened the door.

Bad, bad day at work. He was prosecuted for false imprisonment. I quit the profession and went on to do something that doesn’t make me nauseous with stress in the mornings. All over. Happy ending.

But I occasionally get comments, friendly ones, about my female characters being weak. They hide instead of fight. They don’t come out slugging. That’s because I *know* that a lot of ordinary women just won’t have the strength, pound for pound, to physically take on an angry man, and won’t discover some secret reservoir of physical kick-assity to make up for it.

Discovering the reality led to a change in the way I look at life and people. To me, kickassity (if it isn't a word, it should be) is another impossible standard, like beauty, that makes me feel diminished in comparison.