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How little do you dream about the dangers of the seas
I am still in possession of a massive headache, but I slept a little more than ten hours last night, and at the end of a week of escalating insomnia I'll take it.
I dreamed of a vacation during which I watched and wrote about movies. Especially since the sea was involved, I give my subconscious no credit for subtlety, but I guess it's good to know its wants are in line with my waking ones. I owe a lot of reviews and would enjoy the time to write them. I also dreamed that I had broken my arm and needed it cast, but I had injured the same arm slightly during the day and I suspect I just rolled onto it in my sleep.
I have just begun reading Katherine Addison's The Witness for the Dead (2021). Thara Celehar was my favorite of the supporting cast of The Goblin Emperor (2014) and I am delighted to see him get a book to himself. It is also slightly difficult for me not to think of it as the Ethuveraz analogue of the Kyle Murchison Booth novel I have wanted for years. I am appreciating the presence of opera.
I am involved in a secret project. I haven't been involved in a secret project for years. By nature, I can't say much more about it at present, but it's exciting and a bit weird.
I dreamed of a vacation during which I watched and wrote about movies. Especially since the sea was involved, I give my subconscious no credit for subtlety, but I guess it's good to know its wants are in line with my waking ones. I owe a lot of reviews and would enjoy the time to write them. I also dreamed that I had broken my arm and needed it cast, but I had injured the same arm slightly during the day and I suspect I just rolled onto it in my sleep.
I have just begun reading Katherine Addison's The Witness for the Dead (2021). Thara Celehar was my favorite of the supporting cast of The Goblin Emperor (2014) and I am delighted to see him get a book to himself. It is also slightly difficult for me not to think of it as the Ethuveraz analogue of the Kyle Murchison Booth novel I have wanted for years. I am appreciating the presence of opera.
I am involved in a secret project. I haven't been involved in a secret project for years. By nature, I can't say much more about it at present, but it's exciting and a bit weird.
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And I'll be interested in your eventual reaction to The Witness for the Dead--I haven't read it, but I did read, just this year, The Goblin Emperor and liked it.
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I am honestly loving it so far. It is a murder mystery—it may be more than one murder mystery—and I have my fingers crossed that it may also be a romance, although in time-honored fashion the potential romantic interest is also potentially a suspect in the main case. The setting is the provincial, industrializing city of Amalo rather than the capital, so we get to hang out in a part of the world previously glimpsed only in a letter, and because of the shift in perspectives, we also get to see pieces of the same world that were not formerly so front and center; I can't remember if Maia had any particular feelings about tea, but Thara has opinions and consequently the reader learns a small monograph's worth about blends and varietals and preparations and the cultures of different teahouses just from his casual remarks in the first chapter or so. He remains a wonderful character and, in different ways from Maia, one whose self-image lags badly behind objective reality. He has good reasons for being a loner: aside from his sexuality and his complicated professional status, he follows an emotionally taxing calling that usually ends with headaches, nightmares, and his petitioners upset with him, since the dead rarely say what the living are hoping to hear. He really needs to notice that nonetheless there are people who like and respect him and even enjoy his company, because he's intelligent, impolitic, steadfastly committed to doing the right thing by the dead and their living regardless of the expense to himself, and not actually a complete downer to spend time with. As a narrator, in fact, he's a wry, sympathetic, sometimes wincing delight. Also he's been adopted by a colony of feral cats, which is always a good sign about a person. I'm not sure he's figured that out, either.
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Ahhh, you make me like him very much.
Also he's been adopted by a colony of feral cats, which is always a good sign about a person. --quite!
One thing Little Springtime and I agreed on when we read The Goblin Emperor more or less together was that the whole letter-from-Amalo portion seemed to represent a Jupiter's worth of gravitational pull for the author, so I'm glad to see she's settled on that for the sequel.
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I like him very much!
This was not the kind of day when I could read a novel in one sitting as I prefer to do, but I did finish it and I loved it all the way through. I hope the author has not promised, as she did with The Goblin Emperor, that there will be no—direct—sequels.
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Thank you.
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I will talk about it when I can!
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Thank you! Fingers crossed.
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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
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The secret project sounds cool and intriguing.
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Thank you!
The secret project sounds cool and intriguing.
I don't have a lot of secret projects! It is semi-charted territory.
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Thank you!
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Thank you! Of all the things the pandemic has wiped out of me, for whatever reason the ability to read—knock wood—hasn't been one. I hope yours comes swiftly back online.
(I even think I know what I would want a sequel to deal with, though I have no idea if it interests the author the same way.)
And I hope the headache gives up.
Thank you. It hasn't yet, but hope springs etc. I am feeling sufficiently awful at the moment that I am trying to decide whether I have acquired a plain, ordinary, unpleasant cold, and if so, if I can get it to go away as mysteriously as it came.
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Although hurrah for dream books... and possibly dreams? *hugs*
ETA: Btw, saw this on tumblr and thought of you: https://foreignobjecticus.tumblr.com/post/655788381010313216
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It's better today! And dreaming is, as a sign of my general state, better than not.
ETA: Btw, saw this on tumblr and thought of you
Thank you! I would like that waistcoat.
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Thank you. Today is better and I'm hoping it keeps up.
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Sovay Sovay all on a day
She dressed herself in man's array
With a brace of pistols all by her side
To meet her true love, to meet her true love, she ride
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It does—I learned the song first from Touchwood and later heard the earlier versions by Martin Carthy and A.L. Lloyd. I like the ballad and it has the advantage of being a cousin of my own name, so I don't feel weird answering to it.
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