Some updates
Jul. 16th, 2014 06:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieMy rink opens back up this weekend! I am counting the days. All two days, thirteen hours, and sixteen minutes, in fact. Ahem.
(Seriously, though, three months of only skating on Saturdays, plus a month of enforced post-op laziness, has done a number on the fit of my pants. Yuck. I need to take care of this before dress-and-skirt season is over in October.)
My first of two giant work events of the year is over, yaaaaay! It went well, too. There were a couple of very minor snags, but all behind the scenes and nothing that affected people's enjoyment of the mentoring activity and the dinner and keynote talk afterward. It was somewhat smaller than usual this year, which ended up being a good thing, because that event really needs three staff members to run smoothly and we only had two this time. Butmy minion the new hire for my old job starts Monday, so soon we will have help. HURRAH!
In between reading about the debacle that was DashCon, this weekend I broke 110k on the not!drawerfic. I hit a pivotal event, yay! I also blazed through nine months in three paragraphs to get to that point, which I think was good for everyone. Better writers than I probably could've written things about those nine months that would make the Pivotal Event mean more, but I need to be done with this fic, it has dragged on for fourteen months, send help.
I read Among Others this week. I am undecided, but think I fall more towards dislike. It's about and told from the POV of a teenager, which is an automatic point deduction for me. I like that it puts sci-fi and fantasy novels on the same level as the literary canon, but I also felt that at times it used shared references to stand in for original thought. (Maybe it would've been better had I much grounding in 70s-era SF.) I was also dead certain that we would eventually learn Mor's magic was not really a thing, her mother wasn't a witch, the aunts weren't out to get her, etc., and this whole fairies-and-magic thing was her going bugfuck nuts over the death of her sister, and the ending nonplussed me a little.
(Seriously, though, three months of only skating on Saturdays, plus a month of enforced post-op laziness, has done a number on the fit of my pants. Yuck. I need to take care of this before dress-and-skirt season is over in October.)
My first of two giant work events of the year is over, yaaaaay! It went well, too. There were a couple of very minor snags, but all behind the scenes and nothing that affected people's enjoyment of the mentoring activity and the dinner and keynote talk afterward. It was somewhat smaller than usual this year, which ended up being a good thing, because that event really needs three staff members to run smoothly and we only had two this time. But
In between reading about the debacle that was DashCon, this weekend I broke 110k on the not!drawerfic. I hit a pivotal event, yay! I also blazed through nine months in three paragraphs to get to that point, which I think was good for everyone. Better writers than I probably could've written things about those nine months that would make the Pivotal Event mean more, but I need to be done with this fic, it has dragged on for fourteen months, send help.
I read Among Others this week. I am undecided, but think I fall more towards dislike. It's about and told from the POV of a teenager, which is an automatic point deduction for me. I like that it puts sci-fi and fantasy novels on the same level as the literary canon, but I also felt that at times it used shared references to stand in for original thought. (Maybe it would've been better had I much grounding in 70s-era SF.) I was also dead certain that we would eventually learn Mor's magic was not really a thing, her mother wasn't a witch, the aunts weren't out to get her, etc., and this whole fairies-and-magic thing was her going bugfuck nuts over the death of her sister, and the ending nonplussed me a little.
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Date: 2014-07-16 11:23 pm (UTC)Hurrah for the reopened rink!
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Date: 2014-07-19 10:11 pm (UTC)It's almost still plausible to me, except that Wim also saw the fairies, and I don't think he was humoring the narrator. Although maybe she made him up as much as she made everything else up.
Hurrah for the reopened rink!
Yaaaaaay!
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Date: 2014-07-17 01:33 am (UTC)Two things in particular. It seems to me that if both magic and all those books are real in our narrator's world, then our narrator has totally failed to learn the right lessons from her reading -- she should be able to cope far, far better than she does, and should take more direct action far more quickly. The fact that she doesn't strikes me as a choice by the novelist to privilege the autobiographical aspects of the narrative over the internal plot logic (the book is, I'm given to understand, very strongly autobiographical) and I think that's a mistake.
Having said that, I can absolutely see why large segments of both fandom and the literary side of the genre community bond with the book. Walton is a very good stylist, and between that and the autobiographical component, hordes of lit-minded genre geeks were definitely going to look at Among Others and go "ME!!!" As a social linchpin, it's immensely successful, and rightly so; as a novel, though, I don't think the book quite works.
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Date: 2014-07-19 10:12 pm (UTC)