felis_ultharus

So for anyone who's wondering what's been going on with me outside of the book reviews, it's been mostly dull punctuated with occasional fun social events - a couple of great birthdays, a late-night movie viewing, Pride, a trip out west.

Last night was jenjoou's birthday party. Which is always a wonderful event - not just because she is a wonderful hostess and has a beautiful apartment, but also because all her guests are geeks. It is so nice to go to a party and not have to pretend to be conventional, which is what we geeks wind up doing at most birthday parties.

(Then I have to remember what Montreal's sports teams are called, and that's never pretty.)

Other than that, it's been mostly work, cleaning, and heavy novel-editing - I think I tipped the balance toward 30 hours this week on the novel. I finished the mostly gruelling chunk of editing about fifteen minutes ago. Now it's just light edits through September, and sending it out in October.

Another miscellany, after a long absence.

Same-Sex Marriage Became Law in Canada 5 Years Ago Today

We should've listened to the religious right. Canada now resembles a Mad Max-esque wasteland, a landscape of broken shells of buildings, where horrific mutants scrounge for cans of food in the ruins of supermarkets.

In other words, it's not just Esquimalt anymore.

Oh, we saw the signs. As the zombies crept through the streets of Amsterdam, infecting the last survivors, we should have realized. When that meteor hit Brussels, we ought to have known. In the last days before we got it - just as Spain legalized and every Spanish citizen abruptly married a dog - we should have heeded the signs and turned back.

But we walked that path - the path that has made Sweden, the Netherlands, and Canada synonymous with living hell on the lips of every person in the world. Even when dogs and cats began living together, we didn't heed the warnings. Now it's too late for us.

Trip West

It was a good vacation, if rushed. The miracle of Facebook means that I'm in contact with many friends long-lost.

Also, I'm back on good terms with a friend I posted about some time ago. I meant to post about that - sorry to anyone who was still worried about me there. But I've been 300 posts behind on LJ forever, and I try to read my friends page before posting myself.

I saw him every afternoon. That was wonderful, and we patched things up, but it meant I was juggling mornings and evenings all week to see others, and I couldn't get to Vancouver. It was nice to see old friends. But now I'm very, very tired. I had very little sleep. However, I am still on BC time, so sleep before midnight is so far impossible.

Oryx and Crake: The Video Game

So someone posted a request for people to respond to a short marketing survey. She's developing a concept for an Oryx and Crake video game - I don't know if she really wants to produce it or not, but even as an idea it's interesting.

At first, I wondered how many Margaret Atwood fans are also video gamers, and then I realized that that's half my friends-list. The survey is here.

So what do you think? RPG? Racing game? First-Person Shooter? It better not be a side-scroller, because this has the side-scrollers-based-on-Canadian-fiction category tied up for the year:

The party was lovely yesterday. I got to see a lot of friends I've seen too little of. I was showered with lovely gifts as well - though not literally, as two were fragile and some of the books were heavy.

Today, I relaxed. A little bit of writing and a few dishes, but otherwise I vegged. After three weeks of doing almost nothing but cleaning, working, and writing I figure I deserve it. And it's always easier to relax in a clean apartment.

It's been a busy few weeks. I cleared out my closet - there's more stuff in there than in the rest of the apartment, and I became concerned that Mr. Tumnus and Stockwell Day might start making off with stuff back there.

I also got more halfway through my second outline for the novel. I wrote an adventure, which seemed to satisfy. A historian contacted me about my website because he wants to quote me and use my research in his upcoming book (with credit, of course). Work has been a chaos of rapidly building to-do piles.

So how are you all doing?

So in the vein of reviewing books, I don't think I ever talked about The Gum Thief, by Douglas Coupland - though I finished it months ago.

I liked it. I was told it was his best book in years, and that's true, though it's really two books. The first is an epistolary novel about a washed-up middle-aged man and the daughter of an old high-school friend of his who both work at Staples. The other novel is the one the main character is writing - a story called Glove Pond, about the world's worst dinner party (the name is the first thing he Googled that came up with no real hits).

( Review continues )

In other news, there's a lot to look forward to this month - starting with return from em_fish and sassysairs from Down Under, crossing both date line and seasonal divide to return home after the better part (or really, the worse part) of a year. I'm looking forward to seeing them again ^_^

Happy new year, and happy end to decade of evil and disaster. Somebody seems to have put the goddess Hera in charge of this decade: pointless Trojan-esque wars, suspicion and paranoia, scheming and bickering - but punctuated and relieved by some wonderful weddings, and the right to same-sex marriage.

(Let's hope Demeter or Artemis takes the reins of the next - we could use some progress on the ecological front. But I'd settle for Aphrodite. Making love, not war is certainly better than the alternative.)

I'm going to be ushering in this decade with Sean tonight, who I was with when this decade started. It's a nice bookend to the bad decade, and a good way of starting over the decade. Here's to getting a re-do on the last ten years.

Happy Christmas to those who celebrate it, and a belated Io, Saurnalia to those who don't. It's also my fourteenth year of being a Montrealer - I arrived on Christmas Day, 1995.

This is the first year that Yule has felt bigger than Christmas. I've been Pagan more than fourteen years now, too, but it takes a long time for a new set of traditions to become visceral, if that makes any sense. The last two years, I've held rits here when everyone is asleep. I don't know a single other Pagan in Victoria, though I know the community is huge, here.

I've been visiting Sean almost every day. He and his brother have a huge collection of games. One that's really captivating is Mirror's Edge, particularly if you like the Cyberpunk aesthetic - you play a courier running information for democratic dissidents over the rooftops of a shiny corporatist dystopia. I get a little vertigo watching that game, though.

It's been a chaotic week, so I've had no chance to post since our Yule party, and we had a pretty good turnout.

rougemacabre got me a game called Martian Fluxx, which is very strange and a lot of fun. From montrealais I got some excellent books, as well as some decent clothes. jenjoou got me Mass Effect, which I've heard great things about and I'm looking forward to as soon as I've got a new motherboard for my desktop computer. maidenofirisa got me a Shin Megami Tensei game, which is the series I've been playing now, and really enjoying. And archdiva brought his stories, which are always a wonderful gift. Thank you to all ^_^

I was going to review Shadow Hearts: Covenant in this space, but I've got to call a taxi in five minutes to make my flight to Victoria. Maybe next time. But to the Montreal crowd, I hope you have a good holiday, and we have to get together when after I get home - January 3rd this time. See you soon!

First off, Happy Birthday to montrealais. I'll be at work all day and so I might not see you. I hope it's a good one ^_^

The weather's been really nice lately, at least for me. I'm sure I'll hate it when it gets really cold. But for now the leaves have turned, and it's been raining. I love how the city looks in the rain. And lately I've been going to work at dawn, so when it is sunny I get all the dawn colours.

This morning, there was a cacophony of dozens of birds of different types, singing in the same tree. It was louder than any of the other city sounds in morning. If that's how they mark territory, it must have been an avian World War I.

So yeah. Almost all my waking hours are work and writing now, though I've still had a chance to read The Iliad in bits and pieces, going to and from work. I can't believe it's taken me so long to start this wonderful book.

So, yeah. I finished the novel about an hour ago. Not as in, pending another edit. Done done.

I'm reading up on general advice for submission. I'm going to keep studying up on it for another week or so. I've already selected a publisher for my first attempt, and gotten their submission guidelines.

That's the reason for my near-total radio silence this last little while on LJ, and the total deadness of my Facebook account. Well that, and all the overtime. I've worked six of the last seven days, and I've been bringing my laptop into work to keep up with the editing.

It's a little scary. But mostly I'm too busy to think much about it. I'll be full and more-than-full-time at work for the foreseeable future, I have a short story and poems to prepare for the CBC literary contest. Somewhere in there I'd like to sleep, too.

I hope everyone's doing well. I'm getting slowly caught up on friends' pages, I promise.