Books read 2012

*The Reluctant Widow, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Friday’s Child, Georgette Heyer (read aloud with Steve)
Dragon Ship manuscript, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (e)
Kim, Rudyard Kipling (e)
Regency Buck, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Pollyanna, Eleanor H. Porter (e)
Chimera, Rob Thurman (e)

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*The Reluctant Widow was the very first Heyer I ever read and includes the character on which Pat Rin yos’Phelium is based. In which “is based” obviously does not mean “was snabbled up and copied, word-for-word and action-by-action” but does mean that I thought a very great deal about what sort of man would behave in the way this character is shown as behaving, what sort of training he must have had, with a side dish of how doing the right thing is so very often thankless, and even personally painful.

Edited to add:  Steve reminds me that the character above also got me to thinking about the dangerous person who doesn’t present as dangerous — something that we play with quite a lot in the Liaden Universe® — and indeed isn’t dangerous. . .until and unless necessity exists.

Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.

The Odin Protocol OR The Writer, Goofing Off

So, last night, I gave myself a scare.  I picked up Cygnus, and pressed the On button, meaning to reading another paragraph or two of Stealing the Elf King’s Roses.  But what came up was not the Galaxy 7.0 Plus home screen, but an Android standing over the words,

DOWNLOAD IN PROCESS
Do not turn off target!

…while in teensy tiny print up in the left-hand corner, it said, ODIN PROTOCOL…and some other things I can’t remember right now.

OhmyghodIbrokemytablet, is what I said.  Steve thought matters were less dire, which is how we work — in any given situation, I believe The Worst and Steve believes the Best.  Rarely are either of us right.

So, anyway, back to the computer to look up ODIN PROTOCOL, which seemed to fall somewhere between dire and awful.  I logged into the Samsung page, tried to email support, but the drop-downs were broken, pinged live chat and got Henry, whose solution to the problem was a hard reboot.  Which, I figured, if I was going to do that, I might as well…just…lean…really…hard…and…long on the Off button, and hold my breath.

…which I did and!  The tablet rebooted and all is well.

Cabana boy!  A glass of wine over here for the grey-haired lady with the cool tech!

Phew.

So, anyway.  This morning, I spent a couple, three hours formatting Legacy Systems (an eChapbook containing “Intelligent Design” and “The Space at Tinsori Light”) for Smashthing.  It is now up and live, right here   Thanks very much to Smashconsumers, for your patience.

“Tinsori Light” has, yes, been taken down from Splinter Universe.  And, no; there’s no paper edition of this volume.  Still haven’t figured it out.

While I was formatting “Tinsori Light,” I bethought me of something a reader told me at Boskone last week.  As I was reading it aloud, she told me, she noticed that there were things going on in “Tinsori Light” that she had missed when she had read it to herself, because she had been so eager to “get the story.”

This intrigues me.  I am not, myself, a fast reader, and, as a writer, I sort of hold the opinion that writers put all those words down in a specific order for a reason.  Certainly, if there were a way not to have to write 100,000 words to hit Novel, and speaking as someone who is well-known to be lazy, I’d be perfectly pleased to do that.

So, you fast readers — how do you read “for the story” and how do you know which words are important?  This is a serious question.

Note:  I’m not dissing the woman I talked to; we had a nice chat about reading protocols and the difference between reading to one’s self and reading aloud to an audience, and she helped me forget that my cellphone was dying, so it was all good; but the conversation did get me wondering…which, yanno, may be less good.

Or not.

So –?

Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.