Gearing Up

Only a few days until the start of WorldCon. Unfortunately I leave the day FFXIV open beta starts, which is a minor conflict - though not nearly so bad a thing as starting the day the game launches!

I've been in closed beta a while, and this game will certainly suck away a lot of my free time. It's the crafting which has hold of me, unusually enough. FFXIV is a very pretty game, and the clothing is excellent. An elaborate game of dress-up dolls, really. Plus an excellent plotline. FFXI's strength as a MMO was their story/cutscenes, and FFXIV definitely looks like it will surpass that standard.

In the interim I've been revising - well, a little, really! But I'm very much in games mode at the moment, so have been spending my time on hidden object games when I can't play FFXIV.

Must...Revise...

By Any Other Name

Twice this year I've found a name I've used in one of my books spending its time in someone else's novels.

To a certain degree this is inevitable, since names are rarely unique. My nephew, for instance, shares his name with a female guardswoman roleplaying character (and my space naga, for that matter). But distinctive or particularly well-known names are ones to treat with care.

It's entirely possible to use established real-world names which happen to feature in books (Hermione or Bella) and not cause a fuss (unless there are other similarities) but even so the reader will bring associations to the name, and may be jarred from your story. And distinctive names unique to or rarely encountered outside a particular novel or series (Rand, Menolly, Severus) are something which will almost always bring negative impacts to the reader/author experience.

In my current cases, my fallback term for magical schools (Arcanum) appears to have most recently shown itself in Patrick Rothfuss' novel. I will probably keep the name unchanged, since it is not nearly so distinctive as something like "Hogwarts". And today I found that the very distinctive surname of one of my main characters is the first name of a character in an extremely well-known series of novels.

Fortunately the spelling is slightly different, and almost everything else nothing alike, so I will also keep this name. But it was a close call. Giving up on a name you've spent a novel with is not an easy task. I can barely imagine how I'd cope if I found out Gandalf and Aragorn were also 'taken'.

Scott Westerfeld: "Leviathan"

I bought this book because of the illustrations. I'll buy the sequel for the story.

Illustrations are a rarity these days, even in YA, and these (by one Keith Thompson) are detailed, charming and definitely go an extra mile in bringing the characters to life. [Though I wish the image used for the girl-in-disguise had been used for the boy, and vice-versa - the pictures just seemed so appropriate for the opposite characters!]

Anyway, the illustrations made me curious enough to read the blurb, the blurb made me interested in reading the book, Book Depository made it cheap and easy to get the book, and it was a one-sitting read once my paws were upon it.

Despites some niggles (How does one remove a coat while strapped into a harness? How does Darwin manage his genetic engineering?) this was a fun, fast-paced story with likeable characters, an intriguing plot, and plenty to make me keen to read on. It looks like it will be at least three or four books to the series, and as ever with series I wish I'd discovered it at the end, rather than halfway between the beginning and the middle, and I'm guessing in a spoilerish way that whatever is in those eggs is likely to "impress" on the first person they see.

Well recommended.

Sabotage

I used to be the type of reader who folds the corner of the page to keep place, but I transitioned to bookmarks. I'm always losing the bookmarks, so I use my expired railway tickets, since I get a new one of those each week.

Picture my face when Pepper (small black dancing cat) trots up to a book innocently sitting on the floor, neatly pulls the railway ticket out, and trots off.

Too much of this house counts as cat toys.

Sheer Self-Indulgence

Final Fantasy XIV is coming up in a few short months, and while I will be able to run the game, I won't be able to run the game 'pretty'.

I want my pretty.

Which is an excellent excuse for a computer upgrade. Mmm, Alienware.

Cover Pipe-Dreams

I've been working on cover ideas lately - mere mental amusement at this stage since I have no books in production. Since covers are generally not something authors have much say in, I've always assumed that I would be very lucky if I ended up with an image I even liked, let alone an ideal, and for many years I've never put any energy into covers.

Thinking about what would be exactly right has made me realise how important covers are to me. I don't want just any cover, I want something which truly encapsulates the story.

Medair's cover has been with me for the last year or so - an image of her collapsed in a dark room, caught as ever between action and inaction, guilt and despair, while a fire burns outside the door.

Champion's followed along - Soren, made puppet by the Rose - and then Stained Glass Monsters, which wants to be about a sunlit Faille, instead of either Rennyn or Kendall. And now I have the covers for Cass's tale (and some new titles) which revolve around that typical schoolgirl's backpack.

As the year grinds on, I grow ever more eager for these stories to be tangible things, to have them on my shelf, to have something people can read.

I've never been a patient person.

Predators

Not bad at all. No really glaring logical errors (beyond, perhaps, identifying a plant when you're on an alien planet). I do wonder where I ran across one of the major plot developments (or if I'd unconsciously put the clues together), but it didn't spoil the story for me.

Not such a classic as Predator was, but worth watching.