le weekend

[freckles_and_doubt]

Things achieved this weekend:

• marking of the last few vampire essays (v. bad);
• one SCA event including singing (nice event, got bitten on the thumb by a candlestick, making it difficult to hold a pen; singing OK except for me, as this cold has given me a frog in my tonsils and then chased it backwards down my throat like a small dog down a rabbit hole);
• survival of one day of the random post-glandular exhaustion (yesterday);
• possibly not unrelated to said exhaustion, the reading of three Stephanie Plum novels (much fun of a guilty nature) and Scott Westerfield's Uglies (good, review to follow).

Things not achieved this weekend:

• the marking of the medieval romance essays, which I'd planned to have finished by tonight (not even started, although I note with pleasure that the top essay in the pile has chosen to compare Sir Launfal with Han Solo, there's hope for undergrads yet);
• anything more than a few guilty thoughts towards book updates;
• any more watching of Heroes, which is annoying as I'm a few episodes from the end and the suspense is killing me;
• anything much.

Obligatory Random Linkery: "The Life and Work of Godfrey Winton: A Panel Discussion on One of Science Fiction’s Lost Masters." A lovely exercise in deadpan, very similar in tone to my favourite piece of Lovecraftian nonsense, which I blogged about ages ago (and which, I now realise, I should have recalled when posting randomly about squirrels).

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

If you like Stephanie Plum, you might like the Spellman Files even more. Or maybe not. They're really very, very different... but I like Izzy Spellman much better. She's more screwed up, in more interesting ways. Anyway, give it a go, it's a first novel and that shows, but terribly funny.

scroob

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I really enjoy Stephanie Plum because she has an extremely and often comically disastrous life without actually being a total ditz - she's a wonderful antidote to Bridget Jones, whose hopeless inutility I utterly abhor. Also, the supporting characters are wonderful - the family vignettes, local eccentrics and Ranger, who won my heart utterly by communicating mostly through the word "Babe!" given different meanings in context. The Spellman Files mad family stuff sounds similar, and great fun - I'll definitely look out for it.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, Izzy Spellman is pretty much the anti-Bridget. Have problem? Solve problem. Solve it in creatively disastrous and dysfunctional ways, yes, creating even more problems; but at least don't just sit there counting calories. Plus, the opening pages are sheer genius.

I picked that book up at random from the pile of free proof copies lying around at work; there are always bunches of debuts and fantasy novels (mostly young adult) that nobody else wants. If I didn't restrain myself I would quickly have a house overflowing with books I don't have time to read. But I'm glad I picked that one.

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

The persistent motif of Winton’s autobiographical discourse is self-inflation.
Heh. Loved every word.
I rarely follow your links as they eat up too much of my time. I'm glad I followed that one :)

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Glad you enjoyed it. I came to it expecting an actual discussion of an actual sf author I hadn't happened to hear of before, and the mad lateral invention dawned on me only slowly. There's quite a fun comments thread (http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/005129.html) on Scalzi's blog, Whatever, in which his more or less insane readers add to the myth.

I'm only giving you more time-wasting links because you absolutely need to be distracted from worrying about your thesis. Honestly!