2005-07-19, 09:00 AM — Half-Blood Prince anyone?
Read Potter on the weekend. Still recovering. Mentally from the shock... oh yes, there are several shocks... and physically from not moving for something like seven hours at a time. My neck kills.
My personal review:
Good. Not as bloated with subplots as its predecessor. Fairly streamlined, even. However, not enough interaction with several of my favourite characters. Or... well, most other characters, really. The first two chapters are very promising, and then most of the rest of the book reads like a big conspiracy theory, and it's a little frustrating, frankly. I -really- missed hearing anything about Harry's school time. It reads a little like J.K.R. forgot that her protagonist was actually at school, and just kept throwing quick reminders in every once in a while. Not nearly enough Quidditch. It also doesn't have the same sense of humour as the other books do. The other books have their serious parts, but they have amusing parts, too; this book wasn't as dark in many ways as some of the others, but there wasn't much to lighten the mood, either.
All of that said... I liked it. It's better than Chamber of Secrets, certainly, and it's better in some ways than Order of the Phoenix, which I think I liked more, when I think about it. It doesn't top Goblet of Fire by any means, and it doesn't come close to Prisoner of Azkaban.
Now, of course, by reading it so quickly after it came out, I have two-plus years to wait for the conclusion, which is going to be a wee bit brutal. The last couple of chapters of this book threw everything I thought I knew out the window.
2005-07-12, 11:38 PM — eat my shorts, please
All right, you climate-change doubters. I DEFY you to tell me that the human race isn't superheating this frigging planet.
I write this as I sit, moving only my fingers to type, sweating like no human should have to sweat, and wearing the minimum clothing that decency allows.
There have been times these past couple of days where I have ignored decency. Just so you know.
It's so hot the plants are sweating. I'm worried that the mouse is going to die of heat exhaustion. She's taken to sleeping on top of her house instead of in it.
Ugh. So covered in a slick of unpleasantness that even though I desperately want to write, and have the inspiration to write, I can't bring myself to move that much.
And there's two more weeks of this coming, friends. Two more hot-as-hell weeks. JOY! I'm off to stand in front of the fan. The typing has caused my fingers to swell to unmanageable sausages.
2005-07-08, 08:35 AM — the story has landed
So, I have some rather exciting news. After playing with a particular story since 1998, it's finally done.
It clocks in at a whopping 283 (space-and-a-half) pages, which looks suitably impressive when printed double-sided and bound. It's a lot of words (over 100 000) which means there's probably about 50 000 extraneous ones in there. I know this because as I was glancing over it yesterday I picked out about three words that don't need to be in there. On one page.
Furthermore, as I was writing it, certain characters changed and others were dropped or added in, but I didn't make the changes retrospectively, so now I have to go back and do that. And tighten things. And all those things one does with a finished first draft.
Not that I know first-hand what one does with a first draft. I've never finished one before. 18 years of writing stories for fun and I've never, ever completed one.
I'd just like to say it feels fantastic. I know it's only a first draft, but... well, it's funny, because now that it's done, I know I can do it again. From this new vantage point, the possibilities seem endless.