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.

Paw down time

A couple of weeks ago our dog numbers doubled overnight to four as we looked after some of our friend's dogs while they went to the States for a funeral. They were beautifully behaved, but I had forgotten the wading motion you use in the kitchen when you have four dogs milling around your feet. Not going back to four dogs again, no sirree.

What tickled me was the way that our two boys sat back and let the girl visitors take over their beds and special spots, such as next to my bed while I use my laptop. Youngest girl visitor welded herself to my side and my dog, Buzzy, just let her get on with it.

For a while.

After the first week, the boys decided that clearly the girls were permanent additions to the household, and things had to change. Suddenly, Buzzy was in the spot next to my bed even if he had to sit on youngest girl visitor to get there, and he reclaimed his bed. Youngest girl visitor whinged all night, but had to find somewhere else to sleep. The Old Git's dog, Buddy, decided he had to sleep in the bedroom when he's normally happy downstairs. The paw was put down. Hard.

The girls just went home. The boys are celebrating.

TBR Challenge 2011 - January

Paperback, Arrow Books, 2007

Dr Temperance Brennan is on an archeological dig on Dewees Island when her students find a set of remains a lot fresher than the rest. She finds herself the de facto coroner for the investigation as she covers for her friend, Emma, who is fighting a life-threatening illness. Just to complicate matters, her ex-husband and her current lover turn up to share the house she is staying at in an uncomfortable triangle. One body becomes two, then three, and her suspicions turn to the local free health clinic and the doctor there. When her ex-husband is shot, the threats come close to home.

I like the older and wiser Tempe much more than her youthful TV counterpart, Bones. She is engaged with the world, with her grown up daughter and her endearing but unfaithful ex-husband, and with her tentative new relationship with a Montreal detective. Kathy Reichs kept the mystery cracking along while still giving plenty of time to Tempe's personal life and her struggle to put aside the affection she still feels for her husband despite the end of their marriage. The characters were interesting, although Boyd the dog stole every scene he was in, and I remained interested to the end.

I have read one other book by Reichs, Fatal Voyage, and I had a slight problem with the book in that I had a nagging suspicion through the first third that I might already have read it, when in fact it was Fatal Voyage I had read. I don't think I would want to read the whole series, because forensics only hold a certain amount of interest for me. I hope that Tempe and Ryan can make their relationship work, but I don't plan to buy more books to find out.

I give it a 3.5/5.

First one down. For February, release the Kraken.