Week of January 23-29

Three rejections, no acceptances. Obviously, because I'm never going to sell a short story again. I just continue to send them out to plague editors. I'm mean like that. Sometimes even to people on my friendslist. Muwaha etc. (My heart is just not in the evil laugh tonight. I am too cheerful. And, because it's January, bloody-minded. Beware of bright-eyed Norwegian girls in January. When they smile at you and it has glints in it, take perhaps two steps back. Perhaps three. Not just in January, but especially then.)

I've just finished reading Pawn in Frankincense, and I'm a bit confused about which bits were meant to be revelations and which were meant to be obvious 200 pages before they were revealed, but I still enjoyed it. What I like about Dorothy Dunnett -- among other things -- is that I trust her to be ruthless and twisty. Like Anthony Price, only completely different. If you have an author who's ruthless but not twisty, you have a pile of corpses at the end, but it's not interesting. If you have an author who's twisty but not ruthless, you know exactly how many horrifying situations you will end up with, and with whom, and the only interesting bit is how to get from point A to point B. With a twisty, ruthless author like Dunnett, you know that a difficult situation is not going to be resolved into something easy, and you don't know how in advance. (Contrary to timprov's claim after reading A Game of Kings, she does not just go through killing off all characters who look like they might be sympathetic.)

( Juvenilia and me )