Hippoi Athanatoi

As part of her April update (and no, its not a joke), Jacqueline Carey has put up the first chapter from Kushiel’s Scion on her website, providing a tasty sampling of the book that is due out in June.

Anne Bishop has posted to her sff.net newsgroup and two Yahoo Groups discussion lists dedicated to her books that her next project (following Belladonna, the conclusion of the Ephemera duology that started with Sebastian) will feature Surreal, Daemon, Lucivar and Jaenelle. In other words, we get to return to the Realms of the Blood, for a story that will take place after the stories found in the Dreams Made Flesh collection. This one will not be a collection, however, but a full-sized novel. As a bonus, the book will also contain a reprint of the Surreal short-story "By the Time the Witchblood Blooms".

Since I made that decision to start going through my logs, both to edit as many as possible and to put up select ones on the site, I’ve managed some slow but steady (more the former than the latter, though) progress with both these tasks. I still have hundreds of logs filled with OOC clutter, but also a growing collection of tidy ones, including some that I’ve deemed fit for public consumption. I’ve tried to pick logs that aren’t too boring, though in general I imagine all logs that involve characters you know nothing about or have no connection to are pretty darn dull. Still, there are degrees of dullness, and I think some of these might at least be of some interest to people we’ve role-played with over the years. Especially if they’re nosy. ;)

As Patrick Nielsen Hayden recently suggested at Crooked Timber, it looks like a couple of Tor’s novel nominees—John Scalzi and Robert Charles Wilson—are joining Charles Stross in making their nominated novels available as e-texts. Unlike Stross’s Accelerando, these texts will be available only to members of this year’s Worldcon in Los Angeles.

Instructions can be found at Whatever, Mr. Scalzi’s blog.

Via Publisher’s Weekly, we’ve learned that Eric Shanower—writer-artist on the multiple award-winning Age of Bronze, a fantastic retelling of Homer’s Iliad—is considering serializing new issues of the comic on the web due to poor sales of the single issues (the trade collections are both doing well). Linda and I both enthusiastically recommend the comic—Shanower is a rare talent.

We only discovered this today, but on the 24th of February Stephen R. Donaldson’s official site was updated with the news that he has finished the first draft of Fatal Revenant, the second book in the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. However, he expects that it will take about a year more of rewriting and editing before the final draft is delivered and a release date is set by the publisher.

Stanislaw Lem, the influential Polish science fiction of author of such works as Solaris and The Cyberiad, has been reported to have passed away today at the age of 84.

This one’s pretty amusing. Picked it up from some LiveJournals. Here’s how it works: set your mp3 player to shuffle, read the question aloud, and then write down the song title as response to the question. Here’s my results:

We are saddened to report that all those foolish rumors of the past have now come to pass, as Robert Jordan himself writes to Locus magazine to report that he has been diagnosed with a rare, likely-terminal blood disease. All the details can be found in the linked letter.

Our thoughts are with Mr. Jordan, his wife, and his family. We hope he gets the 30 years he wants so as to be able to write all the stories he wishes to write.

When I got to the stables this week, I found a new horse in Malupin’s stall (he’s injured again, so he’s resting in one of the shiny new stalls in the newly built addition to the stables); a gorgeous Fjord-horse mix called Prins. A touch on the small size (around 140 cm, I think), though he may be sturdy enough to carry my weight-group, and if so I really hope I get to try him. Today, however, I was back on Murphy, so I was pretty happy with that. ;) I was a little less happy about the fact that we’re now a full group (i.e, 10 people), plus we had one extra rider today by mistake. Better, though, than this group being cancelled, but I really do hope it thins out a little bit in the next year. Down to 7 or so would be nice.

Well, the Swedish call-in vote, anyway. How anyone can think its a good idea to send Carola to represent us in the Eurovision is just beyond me. That fake smile, fake voice and fake everything just make me sick. She should just have kept to singing in whatever church she’s currently in at the moment, as I really don’t expect this song to do well for us in the qualifier. It is decent, sure, but it is definitely dated and too much of a typical schlager to work well today. Then again, I am almost hoping it will do really badly, because if I have to hear Carola go ‘tack, tack!’ again I will probably throw up. ;P

Either BWO or Andreas Johnson would have been excellent picks. This was definitely a year where we should just have kept to the jury vote and sent Andreas Johnson. Or at least made the call-in vote count for much less, perhaps half.

Before I got to the stables today, I had read on the club webpage that they were temporarily cancelling the two classes following upon ours. They’ve had trouble filling those up enough for them to be profitable, so the decision was made to cancel them until it looks like another class for adults is needed. Initially, I worried that we might end up with a new instructor due to this, as she would get quite few lessons on Tuesday and might switch to another day, but it seems that isn’t happening. The change might also allow us to do a double lesson now and then, for example for jumping, or to extend the lesson to a full hour, so that’s good news. I am just hoping it won’t mean we end up with all the big horses to an even larger extent than before, since we’re now the only adult group of the day. We’ll see how it works out in the next weeks, I guess.

The papers finally arrived today. Hippokrene is now an officially registered company, of which I am the proprietor. Of course, it will be awhile before I have time to get the website up, not to mention before I have time to actually start taking on any projects. Well, I am thinking I might do something small during the spring, but that depends on which extra classes I’ll try to finish up outside of the Literature.

March 7th, and still winter, with piles of lovely white snow ... and wickedly cold evenings. I guess that’s what I get for wishing for a real winter for years. ;) And to be honest, I don’t mind it most of the time, just for when I go riding. I don’t want to pack on too much clothing (though the Mountain Horse jacket I bought last year is fabulous, so I do pretty well with that and two thin layers underneath), and its particularly tricky to keep hands and feet warm. Particularly when you don’t have much in the way of blood circulation. ;P

However, I really shouldn’t complain. After all, I got Murphy again! At first, she thought she had put me on Gamir, but then realized it was supposed to be Murphy. I told her I really didn’t mind, even if Gamir is a very lovely horse too. ;) As it happens, I ended up getting both Murphy and Gamir ready, because the woman who was given Gamir is a bit scared of him in the stables. No wonder, really, as he’s surprisingly acrobatic when he kicks, which he does for much of the time when being brushed and saddled. So, I got to deal with two slightly grumpy horses, but I really feel so much more confident on the ground these days, and I think they noticed it because both of them behaved quite well. Murphy is still not happy to move his right shoulder away from me, and just has to put on his best threat-face whenever I insist, but he does end up doing what he’s told.

As I had figured, my instructor had already forgotten about keeping me on Murphy for a while. Well, that or she wasn’t able to use him for our lesson today. Either way, I ended up with Sammy, the other Irishman in the stables. I think this was the first time since our not-so-successful lesson together between Christmas and New Year’s, when too little exercise + cold weather + firecrackers had Sammy what felt like half a meter above ground for much of the lesson. As a result, I was feeling a teensy bit nervous, and given the cold weather & snow I was expecting some friskiness today as well.