Thud: duellist
Jun. 23rd, 2007 01:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Progress Friday 22 June
The duellist of Alusind
Words today: 1,472
Words total: 15,000. Much less anaemic!
Reasons for stopping: I can has sleep now?
Refreshment: Water, prepackaged chicken kiev, three slices of Lindt chocolate.
Exercise: There was gym today. Much gym.
Darling du jour:
"A delicate matter," said the chatelaine consideringly, when, after the appropriate introductions and commonplaces, Jolay broached the subject she had come for. "Particularly given the party concerned."
"Reputations always are."
Typo du jour: at the guard for at the gate
Words Word doesn't know: unspooled, armsmen, stablehand
Mean things: These characters are all so polite today. They drank tea and ask edmannerly questions.
Research (aka the usefulness of Google): 17th century fashions, some generalities about the inter-relationship of the Victorian serving classes.
So I finally committed Map! upon this book. It needed it: the layout of a city gets pretty confusing when you're trying to keep it in your head. I now know the names of various districts and (mostly) how they interconnect.
Pentellion Hill
The Upper Oretain
The Lower Oretain
Shadesborough
Boneyard Hill (not really a district, since no one lives there: it's a graveyard)
Fairmarket
South Ward
Floodsend
Fallonbeck Hill
The Theatre District
North Ward
The Liberties (district outside the city walls, with markets, merchants, and dirt. Lots and lots of dirt.)
Don't tell me if they're terrible names. I don't think I could take thinking up new ones.
Shortly I'll have to start working out how the city's governed in a more-than-general sense, since apparently it's now a Plot Element. Also politics, damn and blast it.
I realised today that I'm writing a story set in a city with Victorian attitudes towards class and nationality, and my protag is a foreigner from the equivalent of 17th century Russia, or maybe the Ottoman empire. Certain things now make much more sense.
Books in progress: Mark van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East
Books read:
Books 93-94, Fiction 88-89: Now with new added spoilers
The sequel to The Society. Saintcrow creates a world where ESP is real, and a secret government agency, Sigma, hunts down all 'psionics' with the intent to make them into tools or weapons. In The Society, Rowan Price discovers that she's one of those 'psionics, sees her father and best friend murdered during Sigma's attempt to recruit her, and becomes the lover of Justin Delgado, a former Sigma operative who now works for an independent organisation of psionics opposed to Sigma's aims and methods, called the Society.
In Hunter Healer Rowan is now one of the Society's operatives, dedicated to the fight against Sigma. Sigma managed to capture Delgado at the end of The Society, and neither Delgado nor Rowan are happy with this state of affairs.
Hunter, Healer attempts to combine a thriller plot with a romance one. And it works, well enough: it's an interesting read, with strong, interesting characters. But the tempo didn't work for me: I was expecting the ratchet of the ticking clock during the moments of romantic tension, and moments of romantic tension when the thriller plot started ratcheting, and a couple of the devices Saintcrow used to wind up to the climactic moments seemed a little facile to me.
But all in all, a decent read.
A very slim volume from Subterranean Press. It's an exquisite piece of writing, set in the universe of Scalzi's Old Man's War, and featuring Jane Sagan. It is, essentially, Sagan's meditations on leaving military service (all she's ever, and those of you who've read Old Man's War know how literal that 'ever' is) in order to spend the rest of her life with John Perry.
It is a truly exquisite little book. Well worth reading.
The duellist of Alusind
Words today: 1,472
Words total: 15,000. Much less anaemic!
Reasons for stopping: I can has sleep now?
Refreshment: Water, prepackaged chicken kiev, three slices of Lindt chocolate.
Exercise: There was gym today. Much gym.
Darling du jour:
"A delicate matter," said the chatelaine consideringly, when, after the appropriate introductions and commonplaces, Jolay broached the subject she had come for. "Particularly given the party concerned."
"Reputations always are."
Typo du jour: at the guard for at the gate
Words Word doesn't know: unspooled, armsmen, stablehand
Mean things: These characters are all so polite today. They drank tea and ask edmannerly questions.
Research (aka the usefulness of Google): 17th century fashions, some generalities about the inter-relationship of the Victorian serving classes.
So I finally committed Map! upon this book. It needed it: the layout of a city gets pretty confusing when you're trying to keep it in your head. I now know the names of various districts and (mostly) how they interconnect.
Pentellion Hill
The Upper Oretain
The Lower Oretain
Shadesborough
Boneyard Hill (not really a district, since no one lives there: it's a graveyard)
Fairmarket
South Ward
Floodsend
Fallonbeck Hill
The Theatre District
North Ward
The Liberties (district outside the city walls, with markets, merchants, and dirt. Lots and lots of dirt.)
Don't tell me if they're terrible names. I don't think I could take thinking up new ones.
Shortly I'll have to start working out how the city's governed in a more-than-general sense, since apparently it's now a Plot Element. Also politics, damn and blast it.
I realised today that I'm writing a story set in a city with Victorian attitudes towards class and nationality, and my protag is a foreigner from the equivalent of 17th century Russia, or maybe the Ottoman empire. Certain things now make much more sense.
Books in progress: Mark van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East
Books read:
Books 93-94, Fiction 88-89: Now with new added spoilers
The sequel to The Society. Saintcrow creates a world where ESP is real, and a secret government agency, Sigma, hunts down all 'psionics' with the intent to make them into tools or weapons. In The Society, Rowan Price discovers that she's one of those 'psionics, sees her father and best friend murdered during Sigma's attempt to recruit her, and becomes the lover of Justin Delgado, a former Sigma operative who now works for an independent organisation of psionics opposed to Sigma's aims and methods, called the Society.
In Hunter Healer Rowan is now one of the Society's operatives, dedicated to the fight against Sigma. Sigma managed to capture Delgado at the end of The Society, and neither Delgado nor Rowan are happy with this state of affairs.
Hunter, Healer attempts to combine a thriller plot with a romance one. And it works, well enough: it's an interesting read, with strong, interesting characters. But the tempo didn't work for me: I was expecting the ratchet of the ticking clock during the moments of romantic tension, and moments of romantic tension when the thriller plot started ratcheting, and a couple of the devices Saintcrow used to wind up to the climactic moments seemed a little facile to me.
But all in all, a decent read.
A very slim volume from Subterranean Press. It's an exquisite piece of writing, set in the universe of Scalzi's Old Man's War, and featuring Jane Sagan. It is, essentially, Sagan's meditations on leaving military service (all she's ever, and those of you who've read Old Man's War know how literal that 'ever' is) in order to spend the rest of her life with John Perry.
It is a truly exquisite little book. Well worth reading.