Personal Note: I'm baaaack!

So here I am, returned from Lake LaogaiRare Book School -- which was equal parts exhilarating and exhausting because it packed more information transfer per class-minute than just about any other short-term seminar I've ever taken. My goodness, what a ride. ( Read more... )

So, all in all, a good week. I also used my commuting time to zip through Noriko Ogiwara's first Good Witch of the West light novel (in translation from Tokyopop) and Jim Butcher's Grave Peril and Summer Knight. Ogiwara is quite light and YA-ish and the first book is all about introducing the characters and their world so that we can get on to the meat of things in the next installment, but I think I'll continue. Having read Butcher's more recent Harry Dresden stuff first, I'm finding it interesting to go back and observe him writing at an earlier stage of development. He's got the snarky narrative voice down from the get-go, of course, but I'm noticing that his handling of secondary characters is a little more slapdash at the outset than it becomes later (e.g. the way Meryl, Fix and Lily are dropped into Summer Knight with very brief introductions that don't quite prepare you for the roles they'll play in the climax). It's all good train reading, though. I'm now attempting to blaze through Cornelia Funke's Tintenherz (Inkheart for you non-Germanophones) before the movie comes out, having idiotically decided to be a language purist and read it in the original before trying the English translation. Argh. We'll see how that goes.

Must also catch up with my f-list -- of course everyone on it seems to have had a massive burst of creativity whilst I was away ...