Book Gushing

Have to write more about books.

Crucible of Gold is coming out soon; if you haven't read the Temeraire series (temerer, temperistaire, it's a hard word), you ought to. Do you like dragons? Yes you do! Do you like the Napoleonic Wars? Of fucking course! Do you like military campaign drama? Oh hell yeah, now I'm talkin' your language!


Naomi Novik is doing something really interesting. If dragons existed, what would be different? A lot, actually. She's taking a well-known (well, well-documented) point in history and seeing how it would play out differently with dragons involved. Sounds SO BORING I know but seriously, you'd be so wrong to think that! First of all, it's all character-driven, and the characters are great. Second, I don't really believe that Novik would just make Napoleon lose just because that's what really happened. Things at this point don't look so great for people who aren't in Napoleon's empire. I honestly don't know what's going to happen - that's very exciting.


I've been re-reading a lot lately to save money. Re-read a lot of The Dresden Files, re-read The Way of Kings (caught a bunch of details the second time through) and now I'm mostly through The Night Angel trilogy, which is good again. Mentioned re-reading all of the Robin Hobb books I have, which should be a good time. The last new book I read was The Wee Free Men (part of the Discworld series) and I've noticed since then that I'm more driven toward creativity than when I was reading Discworld books. I love the Discworld, don't get me wrong, that's why I was reading them nearly to exclusion of other books; but somehow, these other books make me feel more creative. I don't understand it. Still, I haven't been participating in prompts - my own prompts, the ones I wrote. Haven't done any of them.

What I have done is start on a separate work, already over 1500 words (not much really) that may be the first chapter of a book. It's a story meant to be a scene from that book, anyway; I don't have the idea for the book fleshed out, and I'm really missing some important details, but until now I was missing the most important detail - the words in type that are meant to be read by the reader. Those have all been missing, and looking back I see it's a huge, monumental oversight. I'm working on fixing it, though, and hopefully by the time I'm done with that the other problems will work out.