Words, words, words

[hawkwing_lb]

Wordcount!

Progress:

"Dreamdark, or, the Confused-Title Story"

New words: c. 1000
Previous words: c. 800
Total relevent words: c. 1800
Old-and-now-irrelevant-but-I'm-still-counting-them words: c. 20,000
Total words: 22,000
Estimated words required: 120,000
Unpleasant things that characters were subjected to: rain, mud, fear, close encounters of the sharp and pointy kind, deaths.

21,800 / 120,000 (17.0%)

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My current reading is eclectic again. Sigh. Started a new book on the First Crusade - the first book about the crusades I've ever read, so should be interesting. I'm reading for college, of course: art and architecture books this week, because Thursday = test. And I'm halfway through CJ Cherryh's Downbelow Station.

I'm feeling somewhat ambivalent about Downbelow Station. The prose is solid, the characters are solid and interesting - even if they do all seem to sound alike, and come from the anti-hero end of the scale - but... I dunno. I'm not being gripped, but yet I feel that I should be.

Partly it's the humanocentric view of the future. Partly it's because I can almost see real-world politics informing the text (uh-oh, literary phrase. help, please), but mostly, I think, it's because I could care less if all these characters went to hell in the same handbasket.

I can almost identify with Signy Mallory. But not really. They're just a little bit too far around that corner of unlikeableness (or non-entity-ness) for me to form any kind of connection.

::sigh::

I'll finish the book - I'm interested enough to want to find out how it ends - but I don't think (unless something major changes in the next few hundred pages) that I'll be getting any more of Cherryh's SF. Although, interestingly enough, I've read other books by the same author and found them much easier to connect to.

Question, if anyone's out there who's read Downbelow Station and feels like answering: am I the only one who feels this way about it? Interested to know.
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I'm off to type up my wordcount now, and to try to get it to make sense. *g*

Comments

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Hm. So close, and yet so far...I was on Grafton Street (much nicer now than it was in 1981), and I was at Trinity. I should say, _we_ were at Trinity, to peruse the Library Store and attempt to see the display of...whatever it was that day. Probably the Book Of Kells, but it might have been something else.

Yes, you could study french. I'm sure there's plenty of good reason to do immersion in Canada. I leave that as an exercise for the student.

Now I shall counter with Tanya Huff. If you haven't read any of her stuff, get thee to a bookshop. Beg, borrow, or steal anything with her name on it. Here: http://www.sfsite.com/lists/thuff.htm

I have word from Amazon that my order is shipping. You will have much to be sorry for. :-D

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Book of Kells - you know, as a TCD student, I have free entry to that? But I was dragged to see it on a school trip in primary school, so. In no hurry to see it again.

Let's see: most of my Tanya Huff stuff is in boxes. I thought the Four Quarters series was very good, the Vicki Nelson likewise, and the Keeper books (I've read the first two) reasonable. Oh, and her two SF 'Valor' books, pretty good. There are actually some Tanya Huff books in Hodges Figgis - the Vicki Nelson series, AFAIK, was also published by a UK publisher.

(Yes, I am a book addict. Once I was able to recall all the books I owned and/or had read: no longer.)

You'll have to do better than that. :-) *shoves inappropriately competitive spirit back in the box where it belongs and sits on it*

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Oo. Oooh. :: rolls up sleeves, buckles down :: All righty then!

Have you tried Lee Killough? Blood Walk? Another take on the vampire myth, in a Huff-ish vein (ok, ok, pun intended) only before Huff. Reprinted by Meisha Merlin a few years ago. You might have heard of her other books as well...

::note to self: ransack library at home for more titles to throw at young whippersnapper ::

::tries to stifle competitive beast within::

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I've never heard of Lee Killough. I take it this is a state of existence that I should attempt to rectify at the soonest possible moment?

Mercy, mercy! You denizen of the Evil Emp - ahem, sorry, you inhabitents of the marvellous USA - have a leg up on the rest of us when it comes to books; they usually come out much later in the UK and Ireland, if they come at all. *sends jealousy to the same box as the well-and-truly-crushed competitive spirit*

Recommendations welcome, oh older, infinitely more experienced one. :-)
(Even though I already have a list as long as a giant's arm.)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Phew.

Ah, Lee Killough hasn't written much in recent years, but she had a bunch of books out in the 80s. A Voice Out of Ramah was her first "big one"; it was ok. Then she had a series of books about law enforcement officers (Leos) in the future, which was nicely done; a combination of SF and mystery. IIRC, Doppelganger Gambit was the first in this series, then there's Spider's Play and Dragon's Teeth. She also had a bunch of single titles like The Deadly Silents and Aventine. Later she wrote her police officer-turned vampire (Gareth Mikaelian) series, Blood Hunt and Blood Links, which were reprinted as Blood Walk. I think she's recently published another Gareth Mikaelian book, but I haven't read anything of hers in years now.