And for my next trick... (and a contest!)

[alanajoli]

Did you all like my disappearing act? Next, I'll saw my assistant in half! But really, what have I been up to in the past month?

• Copyediting. A lot.


• Watching Leverage. (Thanks to lyster and publius513 for the recommendation!)


• Watching Eureka, on which my friend Margaret Dunlap is a writing assistant.


• Realizing that catching up on back episodes of cool TV shows takes a bite out of my reading time.


• Spending time with Bug, who is awesome and amazing to watch as she learns all about the world.


• Going to kempo with Twostripe.


• Reading books to review. I'm all caught up on my PW reading, but I have a review to write, and a pile of SLJ books, and some Flames Rising books and comics still piled up.


• Writing fake romance novel back cover blurbs as a game for a friend. I may post some here at some point, with the names changed to protect the innocent (or not so innocent, as the case may be).


• Reading books for fun. I just finished Ally Carter's Only the Good Spy Young and am reading Breaking Waves on my nook. (Breaking Waves is an anthology edited by tltrent to raise funds for the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund. Great writing and a worthy cause? It's totally worth checking out.)


• Keeping up on industry news. The NYTimes published an article about color e-ink displays. Remember how I was asking about this earlier this year? Yay news!


• Sending the Viking Saga team through Europe. This weekend: Italy! Next weekend: Crossover game with the Mythic Greece group! I can hardly wait.


• Finishing up at the library. I've decided I can spend my time more the way I'd like to spend my time -- on both writing/editing and on being a mom -- without those library hours. As much as I love my coworkers and my library, it's a good move. And we'll still be storytime regulars.


• Traveling for cool events. Last night I went to see Abundance with niliphim. Friends of the blog Mark Vecchio and Richard Vaden are involved in the production (Mark is the director; Rich is performing). If you're in Pioneer Valley over the next two days, go see it! And check out this article about the production, and a sense of the mythic in the Old West.

And finally, I've been writing. Not as much as I'd like, but I am doing it. I'm back to owing lyster a chapter of Blood and Tumult, but I'm also working on the sooper sekrit project -- which I can now say is a comic, and as soon as I tell my editor I'm going to start talking about it, I'll start writing about it here! The portion I'm working on is actually due sooner rather than later, so if I want to talk about the process, it'll have to be coming up soon!

In honor of my return, and to help with my going-digital initiative, I'm giving away my mass market copy of Happy Hour of the Damned by Mark Henry. Answer the following question by Friday the 24th, and I'll pick a random winner!

If you were stranded on a deserted island (with comfortable amenities and the knowledge that you'd be rescued within a week), what five books would you want to have in your luggage?

Comments

[dcopulsky.livejournal.com]

I'm tempted to name five long books I've been meaning to read--say The Bible, Sandman, Finnegans Wake, Atlas Shrugged, and War and Peace--but I probably wouldn't get through those in a week, or actually enjoy reading a couple of them at all. So I think I'd like to have the five books I'm in the middle of right now: Carol Queen's The Leather Daddy & The Femme, Samuel R. Delany's Times Square Red Time Square Blue, Barron's AP Pyschology, Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus, and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning. Then I might actually finish all of those before starting Tekkon Kinkreet and whatever other new books I'm inevitably going to pick up.

[mishamichelle.livejournal.com]

I think even if I was stranded with comfortable amenities I would want something funny and something long.
I would choose The Exodus Gate by Stephen Zimmer, cause I have been wanting to read it and it is a heavy read.
Other People's Rejection Letters By Bill Shapiro
Bone - One Volume edition - Jeff Smith
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter :: Seth Grahame-Smith
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

[tltrent.livejournal.com]

Thank you for getting BREAKING WAVES. Hope you enjoy! And I think catching up on TV is sometimes quite a worthy cause--creates alpha waves in the brain, you know. ;)

[beverly gordon (from livejournal.com)]

honestly be a hard choice id have to pick 5 books i havent read
so ill go with
the whole demonica series by Larissa Ione

Pleasure Unbound
Desire Unchained
Passion Unleashed
Ecstasy Unveiled
Sin Undone

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Hey Bev -- you won! Send me an e-mail with your mailing address and I'll send HHotD out to you in a jif. :)

alanajoli at virgilandbeatrice dot com

[lyster.livejournal.com]

Good question! I'd say Proust because honestly when else am I ever going to read that book, but maybe it would be hard to relate with on a desert island. For rereads, let's prioritize books with a robust value for nature, exploration, and the ties of people with their land, and for to-reads, authors that immerse without feeling mannered.

Rereads:
The Once and Future King
Les Miserables
East of Eden

To-Reads:
The Sound and the Fury
The Long Goodbye

There's no way I'd finish more than half of these and still have time for cooking, exploring etc, but I'm allowing myself some extra travel time after I get rescued from the desert island and so forth.