News from the Western Front

Writing:

Well, most of the week has gotten by me. I have written a bit on most days, but I’ve been teaching a class every day at work, and that sort of saps my energy a bit. Toying with some of the shorts I started at WFC, for the most part. One’s a ghost story, one’s a fantasy about a boy who gets taken in by an assassin, and then there are two that involve Fey creatures. Very strange, me using Fey, since I’m generally not that into “foofy” fantasy, but I think the stories will be neat when I finish them.

I have to get back to “King Snake” and continue writing, but “opening the wound” as Lisa Gerrard called it, isn’t always a quick process. I made myself set the book aside while I prepared for WFC, and now it’ll take a bit of time to spin the turbines back up and get it moving. I want to have it done by February, so I’ll need to start moving soon. Wish me luck.

I’m hoping to search through the archives and find a few more short stories to post on Wolf Steel this weekend. We’ll see how that goes.

Reading:

So I finished Maria V. Snyder’s “Poison Study” the other day. It’s a great concept for a book, I think. A girl who’d been convicted of murdering a general’s son awaits the gallows. She’s given a last-minute choice, however, to become a military dictator’s poison taster instead. She takes it, and the story follows her through the travails that ensue. The tension stays high all the way through the story, and Ms. Snyder keeps the action coming. The thing that I suppose I didn’t know going in was that the book is something of a romance, as well as being a fantasy. That’s okay with me, but some readers might be surprised.

Strict sticklers in regards to anachronisms may find the world where this book set frustrating. It seems to me that it’s like, I don’t know, Bolshevik Russia in the 30’s, perhaps? Anyway, there are factories and modern concepts thrown around quite a lot, and it could be a turn-off for those of you who like your fantasy a bit more, ahem, Medieval. If you can move past the setting and the modern concepts it seems to embrace, it’s a strong novel. It seems primed for a sequel, and I believe one may already be out. I saw a cover for “Magic Study” at World Fantasy. I don’t know if that was an advanced reader’s copy or not.

I’m early in my next read, “A Princess of Roumania” by Paul Park. I’ll write more when I’ve finished that one up.