singedsun

 Recently finished the graphic novel, Somna (link to Goodreads).

 

It's a story of witch burnings focused on our main character, Ingrid. She's married to Roland, the town's bailiff and their chief witch hunter. Ingrid is desperate for more out of her husband, wanting a more intimate relationship which he currently seems unwilling or afraid of giving her. In her dreams then, something comes to her, eager to give her what she's craving. 

Ingrid has a friend in town, Maja, who keeps her company in the woods during the burnings. She wants to be far away, despite Roland's invites to accompany him to the witch burnings in town. Maja is married, but is a little wild herself and has some interest in another man who's wife was recently declared a witch and burned. 

Still, at night, this creature comes to her. It tempts her, taunts her, and desperate as she is for touch and intimacy, she refuses to give in to him.

If you've never seen art by Becky Cloonan or Tula Lotay, you are definitely missing out. The beginning of each issue in this graphic novel have several pages of Tula's art which is quite realistic despite it's dream-like quality. Her faces are expressive and gorgeous. Becky's art takes up the majority of the other pages, and everything is just so crisp and emotive and makes it easy to understand what's happening in every panel. 

If Salem style stories are your thing, this one is definitely worth your time. Just beware that the adult nature of this story is going to back it good for high shelves if you buy it physically. 

I did not post about music on Friday, because I haven't listened to much this week aside from a few regular playlists AND the audiobook for John Scalzi's new novel, The Kaiju Preservation Society. If you like Kaiju movies, you'll like this book. If you like Wil Wheaton, you'll like the narration of the audiobook. This book feels like a summer action flick, it's just a good, fun time. (CW: there is a COVID/pandemic backdrop but it's mostly there for setting the events in a certain timeline for a specific reason, the novel itself doesn't have anything to do with it aside that that.)

That said, I highly recommend these two new song releases on Bandcamp:

Atra Aeterna - "1963"
They are a dark pop electronica kind of band from Canada>
&
VUKOVI album/EP - "LASSO"
And this album from VUKOVI. This band is new to me, but theyre in the rock/metal genre and very good.

There's also a new album out from Qveen Herby called Mad Qveen which has BIG Alice in Wonderland vibes and I love it. If you like rap/r&b stylings, check her out.
I hope everyone had a great weekend and if you're listening to something good, let me know in the comments!

We have our house back to ourselves for a little while. My friend, after making sure she's safe, has gone up to stay with her parents until the end of the month. I'll admit it's been so nice having another person around after spending almost all of last year at home where it's just Matt and I. Also, it was so nice having other dogs in the house too so ours had friend to play with. A and her now ex-fiancé were always the ones to watch our dogs when we went out of town so they're all very good friends at this point. I think our two boys were very sad to see her and her dogs go. They spent every night running around like crazy puppies even though only one of them is actually a puppy anymore.

The timing worked out though. Saturday I had my first Futurescapes class. Class is sort of a misnomer, it was really an all day event with three lessons. It was sci-fi day starting with Mary Robinette Kowal, then Dan Wells, and last S.J. Kincaid. Of the three, I think MRK's was probably the most interesting (for me). She talked about sci-fi character and world-building. Dan's lesson was interesting, but more interaction than instruction and tbh it felt a little more like padding/filler than actual class content. His lesson was about SFF character obstacles and flaws and where we see those things cropping up in sci-fi media. The last one with S.J. Kincaid was a two-parter, the first half was about query writing and timing in the market. She let us read over some of her queries both before and after being published and told us how they were received (or not) in the style in which she wrote them. For the second half we talked about action scenes and how to set up and pay off character emotions even in a physical fight.

I had my second class today with Kathryn Purdie & Nephele Tempest, both of which were lessons regarding writing characters and deep character POV. Both of these were really good, I made a ton of notes from both days but I think there were more notes from the two lessons today. We've got homework assignments from both days so far, thought I'm not sure exactly what will be happening with those. I've got another class tomorrow about story structure and then the last one is this weekend on publishing. That'll be the last of them until the workshop in March. There was a class on worldbuilding with Fran Wilde that sold out before I even got in, but if you signed up for all the classes they sent out the link to that. So at some point between now and March I've got that to watch too. We're supposed to bring about three thousand words to work on to the workshop, so aside from any other homework, I need to polish up what I'm working on from my project to have ready.

I will say it's nice to be able not to take days off work to attend this, since they're able to stagger all the classes out and send us the recordings if we can't make it. As long as I don't have meetings, I can listen in and take notes and still work during the week when these are happening. So it's worked out really well.

Since everything else since Christmas has been a pile of trash, I've decided I'm only going to be picking up books that I've left "currently reading" in Goodreads for the last... idk YEARS? I picked up a book about Sylvia Plath that I started three years ago when I was in the hospital after having gallbladder out. I never picked it back up when I got home, so I was only like three chapters into it. The book Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 by Elizabeth Winder is about the summer internship at Mademoiselle magazine in 1953. It's not my usual reading style, but it was really interesting. There were twenty women in that summer internship and many of them are still alive to be interviewed and of course, remembered Sylvia and the whole experience well enough.

I've also picked up Buddy Walker's Stunt Water book of poetry which someone gave me four years ago and I apparently just forgot about it? When we put up the bookshelves again last fall, I found it in a bag of books that I'd all just stopped reading a chapter or two in.

I'm also reading Silk and Silver by Andrew Shields, which is a Blades in the Dark book. It's also written by the husband of a friend of mine, who has written a number of things for the Blades in the Dark TTRPG now and I have been sitting on all three of his books in the series for far too long now.

There are like another 12 books on my "currently reading" stash and I think only one of them is not something I have a copy of myself. So at least for the next month or two I've got plenty of things to put my hands on when I want to read, or have time to read, or am sitting around in places with nothing else to do but wait and stare at my phone. I'm tired of doomscrolling, so ebooks it is. Of course, I did just pre-order three new books coming out between May and June, so this is a good incentive to make sure I get things crossed off before then.

A while back I posted about using Notion. I've been poking at it more and I downloaded my entire Goodreads archive and uploaded it there so I could play a bit more. It's been very useful to be able to make multiple lists out of the same data and in a more interactive way than just building an excel spreadsheet. I do love a good spreadsheet, but this just does more for me. Also, little fiddly things like this tend to be real good on my brain when I'm stressed out. Just the right kind of hyperfocus activity that lets me relax after dealing with friends, family and work stresses right now.

Oh and while I was going through photos of my grandpa, I managed to find the Glamour Shots I had done when I was fifteen going on fifty. I loaded a couple up to twitter because they are just the most 90's things I've ever seen from the hair to the clothes to the hat. Clearly I was channeling some latent goth fashion I wouldn't discover until I was in my twenties.
( pictures )

Matt finished securing the last of the book cases to the wall, and unloading all the books from boxes onto the shelves. Then this weekend I went down and rearranged a whole bunch, trying to arrange things by category because there's so many of them, I didn't know any other real good way to do it, other than to do my best to genre categorize and then to try and keep authors together. We culled another full box of books while we were doing all this too. Some were old ARCs from my actual review days and some were ones that have sense been tainted by the author, or by time and changing impressions. Then there was a host of my old coding books that are so out of fashion there's no point in keeping them around.

I tried my best to take a panoramic shot to include all the book cases.



I'm pretty happy with the way it all looks now, even if we do have a couple of random sections of "it takes too much effort to fit these elsewhere" shelves. That and I did discover that there are several of my books missing - specifically my Kate Forsyth series. I have books two and three of one series and no books from another series and I cannot for the life of me think what I must've done with them. Normally if I loan out a book I know who exactly took it but these, I can't remember and I don't feel like I would've culled them to be sold or donated. So I'm at a loss. We did unearth several books from another room and I think there's still some closet shelf books hidden somewhere. So I might reach out to a few people to see if they have them, but spend an evening digging through the two spare closets too just in case.

I also spent my extended weekend with a migraine, a pretty bad one after several weeks of having none at all. The rescue med did take the edge off, but didn't keep and every time I laid down or tried to sleep, it was just so much worse.

When I was awake and feeling less awful, I kept playing Uncharted 4, which I bought myself for my birthday with some gifted money. I knew I'd probably finish that sooner than if I started with the Horizon Zero Dawn complete collection, which proved true. I finished Uncharted 4 early this afternoon and I'm really happy with how it turned out and how they ended the series. I know there's no definitive answers about if they'll ever do a fifth game about Nathan Drake and I'm kind of okay if they don't. I know there's a "Lost Legacy" game with two of the female characters off adventuring together and I'll check that out eventually because I've heard good things. I love how those games play and it made me a little nostalgic for the Tomb Raider games which I feel like are a little bit better in terms of variety in game play.

I'm also slowly making process in Harrow the Ninth. It's a slower, tougher read for me, this book. I'm less engaged with the main character and with the storytelling technique in this one. So it's definitely taking me far longer to read it than I read Gideon. I have picked up The Babysitter's Coven by Kate Williams as an ebook. It's and easy YA read and easier to transport around the house, so I've been switching back and forth.

Over the weekend, I picked up and finished the first book I've finished since before we were sent home to work in mid-March. I got the recommendation from Smart Bitches Trashy Books, it was cheap to pick up the ebook from B&N at the time, so it was easy choice to try and pick up something that was something of an easy, low engaging read. Romance isn't really my genre of choice, but I often find them easy and quick and requiring very little effort from me.

Let's Talk About Love by Clair Kann
Let's Talk About Love is about a college woman named Alice who is biromantic asexual. It begins with her breakup with her girlfriend and centers on her struggles with her own asexuality, especially after this breakup.

There's a lot of positive in this book. The author does not shy away at all from the themes in the book. The struggle with her asexuality is at the forefront of his novel, despite the romance that comes into play. Alice is strong in who she is in many ways: a black woman, a huge nerd, desperately loyal to her good friends. She also has a lot of growing up to do, and even though I'm many years older than her, I found her struggles pretty relatable, even if they didn't match my own exactly.

This was a short read and I think I would've enjoyed more of it. The beginning really tosses you headfirst into everything messy in Alice's life. I would've loved to see more build up to her as a character, more backstory maybe, and more detailed moments in her life with her roommates/friends after her breakup. There's a portion about midway through where she's not talking to her best friend for a period of time and it's a strange dynamic that I felt could've been explored a lot more, given how we're introduced to their relationship early on.

I rated it a solid 3 on GoodReads because while I enjoyed it, it was both too short and a little to twee for my liking. But I think the exploration and explanations of asexuality and biromantic were really good. The support for mental health was well done overall just a solid, but solid read if you're a fan of romance.

I do appreciate the length for one thing, it made me sit and read and finish a book for the first time in along time. It made me want to go back to the books hanging in limbo that I haven't finished yet, because the pandemic interrupted my regular reading time. Short, engaging novels have that effect sometime. I plan to pick back up Polaris Rising from Jessie Mihalick again (other romance, but a sci-fi one). I was about a quarter of the way through it before when I stopped reading, so it's high time I went back.

If you also like to make dumb fandom pinterest boards, feel free to follow me there: thestorminme

I get very annoyed about pre-ordering books when they then don't actually arrive on or around the date the book is released. For me one of the whole points of pre-ordering is so that I can have the thing in hand as soon as it comes out (without the whole standing in line thing no one really does anymore). TBH I don't pre-order many books, usually it's books that are likely to sell out on day one if stores near me carry them, books that won't actually get carried in stores near me, or special editions that require pre-ordering to get in the first place. The most recent of which was last week's release of "Gideon the Ninth" by Tamsyn Muir. I pre-ordered it from Barnes & Noble specifically because I am in LOVE with the look of the black edges on that edition and wanted it for my very own. I am also just excited to read the book. Barnes & Noble shipping on pre-ordered items has been slow before, but I'm really disappointed that it took me an entire week to get the book. That said, it's just as pretty in person as I'd hoped it would be.

It's here and it's so very pretty.

— Elizabeth 🐺 Don't forget to love each other (@singedsun) September 17, 2019

I wish I'd taken a picture of it outside the dust jacket too, the embossed skull on the front cover is so cool. This is only the second book I've seen with black edged pages. "Burial Rites" by Hannah Kent is the other. I know it's likely expensive, but I really wish more books did colored pages. Like, I was picturing how neat it would be if the Wicked Saints books by Emily Duncan had red edges. The books are already stunning to look at, but red edges would just looks so neat.

I also pre-ordered Rainbow Rowell's book, "Wayward Son" earlier this year because as much as I'm not usually into mlm romances, "Carry On" just hit me in such a very specific fandom part of me when it came out. (Which like, I'm not even a Harry Potter fan, nor do I generally enjoy this kind of AU.) I just love it a lot and I'm very excited for the sequel. They did a TON of special editions for "Wayward Son" with different covers and endpapers. I'm getting the version from Barnes & Noble for that one too because I loved the look of it the most. It's the 'moon' edition with silver-foil and I think it has the flowery endpapers that match Baz's suit from the UK covers of the book. This one comes out next week, though based on the way it went with "Gideon the Ninth" I'm guessing it'll take an extra week for me to get it.

Does anyone else pre-order special/specific editions of books? Do you order from somewhere specific?

These days I'm usually pre-ordering from Amazon just so I can get the books within a day or two of release. A few fluke times I've gotten it ON the release date which is how I wish pre-ordering worked more often. I know there's an issue with release dates and breaking street dates but there's definitely something not working right if it's taking a week, given that I live in the middle of the country and shipping from the USPS does not take 7-10 business days if I'm paying for shipping.

While I've been off recovering, I got to read one of the other books I'd pre-ordered this year, the new TAZ graphic novel. The Murder on the Rockport Limited arc is so funny. I haven't listened to anything from The Adventure Zone in probably 9 months or so? and reading this volume reminded me how much I loved listening the McElroys tell this story. The way the graphic novels frame their storytelling is just so perfect. As an aside, I know the Critical Role comics aren't told this way, but reading these makes me wonder a little what it would look like if they were. Specifically, I wonder what they'd look like with Scanlan interjects. Or just generally if they were told in a way that made them as funny as they can be watching live, with the jokes and asides from the cast. *shrugs*