January 2014 - One Month Down

The year so far:

- We had my partner's daughter with us over from Perth.
- We had Christmas.
- And New Years.
- And cleared out our garage.
- I discovered the Pandora app on my phone, and that led to all sorts of new music.
- Saw Frozen.
- And Sherlock.
- And The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug, which was basically the same thing. ;)
- Compiled a truly intimidating to-be-read pile that is no longer under any control at all.

As for New Year's Resolutions... I have two. One of those comes in the form the above mountain. If I manage to at least pick up all of these titles to see if I like them by mid-year, I'll be happy. 

Notable mentions of good books read so far:



Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8: Retreat.

I'm not usually a huge graphic novel fan, but as soon as season seven ended, I knew I'd be buying all of season eight in comics. And so I did, and there they've sat for... far too many years. Every so often, I pick one up, wipe off the dust and commit to reading it.

Then, a Willow specific comic was lent to me (pictured in above pic, far right) and I felt I should finish the last three issues of season eight.

Well! I read it overnight. Kept on turning pages, so very, very compelled. The rest of the books have been a bit of a slog, to be honest, but this one made it all worth it!

Who's that on the left hand side of the cover? Why, it's the reason why I found this book so enjoyable. Oz is back! (full review..)

Daughter of Smoke and Bone, by Laini Taylor.


For people who have just picked up this book, please don't be alarmed by the first chapter. You are not about to read a young adult novel with a thin plot and sallow romance front and centre. Though I don't blame you for thinking that with the introduction of Kaz.

Thankfully, the book only grows better than that, and the plot hits such a point that by page 100 you will not be able to put this book down.

I had heard many wonderful reviews about this book, and I am thrilled not to be disappointed by it. This is a young adult novel, with the heroine set in Prague so the schooling system seems a bit skewed from what I recognise; much more adult and seeming like TAFE or college with subjects like life drawing. That only improved my reading experience. Karou is also a kickass heroine who can take care of herself, which is the best pairing in young adult fiction up to date.


I'd also like to keep a record of what I write and where, at least once a month, even if it's fanfiction. (NB: It will be fanfiction at some point. We've just had Season 3 Sherlock. So...)

This month, between 10th - 21st January, I wrote a short six part series posted on Tumblr: Delilah and Sansa.

Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.
Part 4.
Part 5.
Part 6.

Inspired by artwork by Fukari, music by Jasmine Thompson and The Dresden Dolls. Word count: 1,448.

From 17th - 21st of January, I also plotted a new novel, projected approx 70,000 words. The first chapter was something I scribbled down during NaNo. Hoping to start that off properly in February, if not before.

Holly Black's upcoming release: 'The Coldest Girl in Coldtown'.

I had just finished airing excitement for the release of Love in a Time of Global Warming by favourite author Francesca Lia Block, as well as the upcoming new season of Sherlock. There as well is the ever-continuing promise of S.H.I.E.L.D. coming out in September. I had almost thought that all my potential for squee had been all used up for the time being.

Nope. I was wrong.

At the beginning of the month, I promised I'd be writing more on this upcoming title soon, and here it is:

Holly Black! That is a name people have no doubt seen on my blog more than a couple of times. (If you haven't, I have personally devised a clever tagging system at the bottom of each post so that clicking on 'Holly Black' will pull all such posts up. :D)

Holly Black's short story anthology The Poison Eaters got a fair amount of publicity in 2010 when it was released, but by far and away the most noise made of any short story in that anthology had to do with "The Coldest Girl in Coldtown".

Now, more than three years later, it's going to be released as a full length story in its own right. Now, first there was the cover reveal, then there was Entertainment Weekly releasing their exclusive trailer for the book slated to come out on September 3rd, here.

I'm not ashamed to say that I am excited. In fact, I'm already re-reading The Poison Eaters just to tide me through! And, as of today, the First 8 Chapters of The Coldest Girl in Coldtown are available for FREE, you saw correctly, FREE on Amazon now: http://www.amazon.com/Coldest-Girl-Coldtown-Chapters-ebook/dp/B00DB7R7E6/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_kin?ie=UTF8&qid=1375816503&sr=8-1&keywords=coldtown

Only until the date of the release. (September 3rd. Eeeeeee!!) So get in quick!

Sherlock: Season 3, Episode 3.

Remember when I came to you with a very disappointing update on Sherlock season three tacked onto the end of a post?

"(Unlike True Blood, BBC's Sherlock is something I'm looking forward to with baited breath. Come on season three!)"

Well, now this has happened.




This may just be the most exciting thing that has happened to me all morning.

(Of course, considering I've only been up for an hour and it's almost midday, that might be the most exciting thing that has happened to me all morning.)

Episode 3! They are up to filming episode 3 at the end of this month!

Charlaine Harris, Southern Vampire Mysteries and 'Dead Ever After'.

Okay, so, my love affair with Patricia Briggs clearly goes above and beyond any feelings I may have for Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire Mysteries, or it's associated HBO television show True Blood. Time and again, I mention again how amazing I think Patricia's writing is. I don't think this blog yet has had a thing to say about the certainly more public series written by Charlaine.

At the risk of being just another commentator on the big issue that has come out of the latest--indeed, last--book of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, they are in a similar enough genre to the Mercy Thompson books and I think a person must almost have been hiding under a rock to have missed the outcry that has come along with Dead Ever After.


At the core, Charlaine completed her series of books in a way that many of her fans did not like. As with many fellow authors, she had a vision for the trajectory of the series and, even with the popularity of certain characters over other certain characters, Charlaine made the decision not to waver from her original view on how the books would end.

Now, in the wake of many impassioned and angry fans, Charlaine has had to cancel public appearances and otherwise hide under her own rock until the sensation passes, instead of celebrating the end of a particularly popular series of books.

At the end of season three, I put True Blood aside when they went off and seemed to kill everyone but Sookie at the end of season three, leaving me feeling like I would have sacrificed the main character rather than lose all the rest. I ranted about it a little to my friends that year. I even started voicing it again when time came around for season four to be premiering. I certainly did not write hate mail to the author and producer of the series, or even post my opinion publicly.

As far as the books, I've been trying to figure out how far I'd gotten. Dead and Gone is the last one I read, I think. As much as I loved the 'mysteries' element of these stories, I thought that the character interaction was, on occasion, a little thin. There were a lot of questions about Sookie and Eric getting together that I thought went overlooked in favour of other things.

I've got a Goodreads.com account, and I do post reviews of all the books I read up there. All the books I finish. There have been many I haven't, and to those I simply put a 'Did Not Finish' marker on my blog here and move on.

For any books I've finished and not liked? There is always something constructive one can say about a book. I've also read my fair share of writing in various creative writing courses over the years. It is common courtesy, even when you do not like what you've just read, to say something positive before you give the criticism. I take that route whenever writing a review to a book I didn't feel was all that strong. There's got to be some reason you kept on reading it, even if you didn't like some parts of it, so why not mention those, too? (To be truthful, I also list the one or two things I thought weren't strong in books I absolutely loved.)

The issue has brought up questions of whether authors, as both artists and producers of a service, do or don't have an obligation to give their readers what they want. It's a really interesting debate, but also really scary if authors are put in a position where they have to give in to their readers if they don't want to face all this.

Of course, this is hardly the first time anything of this nature has occurred. In what's probably the most famous previous occasion of public outcry against an author's decision, and probably something that's coming to a lot of peoples' minds right now, Arthur Conan Doyle made the decision to wrap up his Sherlock Holmes series by killing him. In this case, of course, the author did give in to public outcry and brought him back.

(Unlike True Blood, BBC's Sherlock is something I'm looking forward to with baited breath. Come on season three!)

I'll tell you what, though. The public outcry over the end of the Southern Vampire Mysteries series of books has made this little read want to sit up and finish reading these books on my shelf, just to see how she did decide to finish them. :D