The Blurb:

For years, Grace has watched the wolves in the woods behind her house. One yellow-eyed wolf--her wolf--is a chilling presence she can't seem to live without. Meanwhile, Sam has lived two lives: In winter, the frozen woods, the protection of the pack, and the silent company of a fearless girl. In summer, a few precious months of being human . . . until the cold makes him shift back again.

Now, Grace meets a yellow-eyed boy whose familiarity takes her breath away. It's her wolf. It has to be. But as winter nears, Sam must fight to stay human--or risk losing himself, and Grace, forever.

The Prizes:

1. One signed ARC of SHIVER
   
2. Four signed copies of LAMENT
   
3. And for each of the friends that you got to comment, Maggie will critique the first 5 pages of any of their manuscripts!

The Rules:

1. Link to the pre-order page (see below)
   
2. Post these rules on your blog and let them know who sent you (Team AM! And YOUR friends will say YOU and it's like an awesome pyramid scheme where there's no scheme and everyone wins!)
   
3. Leave a comment on Maggie's entry here. If the click doesn't work, cut and paste from here: http://m-stiefvater.livejournal.com/105279.html Let her know I sent you. ;)
   
4. If any one person gets 50 friends to post, Maggie will make it THREE copies of SHIVER and EIGHT copies of LAMENT! Plus that awesome part about the first 5 page critiques.
   
5. You must get at least five friends (THAT'S YOU!) to post this on their blogs to be entered.
   
6. Contest runs from May 8-15 at 8PM EST.

PRE-ORDER THE BOOK HERE!

I'm not leaving LJ or anything, but I registered a DW account when I noticed that a few people were starting to post more there than here, and I didn't want to be out of the loop. Also, it does seem to be a well-designed site - I'm going to experiment with their cross-posting doohickey. However, I don't plan on disabling commenting here; I suspect most people will still comment on the LJ version of a post anyway.

I'm pandorasblog there too - wanted to change names, but I kind of like the continuity of having one name in fandom, and more importantly, it's less hassle when it comes to people finding each other on different journalling systems.

So... who are you?

- my tear duct (and, consequently,)
- that little triangle of flesh at the nose-ward corner of my eye
- my lower set of eyelashes (result of trying to 'draw into the lash line rather than above it')
- my eyelid (as in, 'curving up and across', not along the bottom edge like I meant to)
- my eyeball (don't worry, I didn't poke the eyeball with the brush; I put it on that line above the lower set of lashes, but it smudged when I blinked)
- my hand
- where it's supposed to be 

I don't look like these people, so am going out without any eyeliner at all, as it seems safer. Does this happen to other people (I had trouble with pencils, too) or am I just cursed, eyeliner-wise? 

ART SPIEGELMAN CREATED THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS.

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/story/art-spiegelman-wants-blood-test

.....wow.

:)

I'd misunderstood the LJ mail and thought it was going off now, but turns out it'll be 8.00am Pacific, not Eastern time, which means 4pm GMT rather than 1pm. And since it's 1pm now and I have a bitch of a computer crisis and need advice, that is a very, very good thing.

( In which moving from a PC to a Mac turns out to involve high drama in every respect so far discovered. And I haven't even investigated the internet part yet... )

The Day The Book Stacks Collapsed!

But after this I'm getting offline. Somehow still being online at six raises the chances of still being here at 8.30, and being knackered. Anyway, as I was saying:

OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! WANTWANTWANTWANTWANT!  I just about died reading this. Not only is here is a guy writing horror stories set in Northern Ireland, they're vampire books. And this is all just so encouraging considering that what I am writing is suspense/horror which is locally set and which very much relies on that sense of place...

*DIES*

See, I've come to the conclusion that there is a rich vein of good horror fiction in this place that is only just beginning to be tapped. (I can't apologise enough for using the kind of cliche beloved of the mainstream media when discussing the genre; I'm just tired enough that no other phrasing springs to mind.) I began to realise this when I heard about Battle of the Bone - and let me tell you, I wish I'd heard about it soon enough to participate in the shoot when they were looking for extras.

Battle of the Bone (released on DVD today), a movie in which rival sectarian factions come together to kick zombie ass, came about because director George Clarke was advised that he wouldn't get funding unless the film involved the Troubles. I love the subversiveness of his riposte; the fact that it's a chance to mock both genre and local cliches, and the fact that this is a local film made by local people (that cliche was intentional, and there will be more LoG-ness later) rather than opportunistic use of Troubles-related stuff by film-makers from elsewhere who don't necessarily understand what they're playing with.

So, what was I saying about horror and Northern Ireland? Well, I've got a theory. The present generation of up-and-coming film-makers, novelists and other creators grew up during the Troubles and absorbed mordant humour, a sense of the fragility of life, and a polarisation of "good" and "evil" (which of course varied according to one's perspective) as prime influences. All those things can play into an appreciation of, and desire to play around with, the horror genre.

Historically, horror has been a genre which waned during major conflicts and prospered during peacetime; other people have written much more incisively than I could about why that's the case (this being but a humble fannish blog from one who hopes to turn pro), but it strikes me that there is a small but growing movement of people here who are synthesising both their heritage and the conventions of the genre to produce something distinctive, and an audience ready to appreciate these works. I'd happily count myself among the passengers/drivers of either bandwagon.

You might be interested in the website of Yellow Fever Productions, the people behind Battle of the Bone. The one caveat is that there are some flashing images in the site intro.

In other incoherence-inducingly exciting news, the Radio Times informs me that new TV goodness from members of the League of Gentlemen will soon be upon us. Psychoville (with a cast including many interesting people, of whom Dawn French particularly pleases me) began shooting recently, and - oh my stars and garters! - Mark Gatiss's Crooked House will be shown over Christmas, and is a portmeanteau horror featuring stories in the M.R. James mould. It will be on BBC4, appropriately enough, since the channel has already featured new James adaptations and last year repeated the very popular old ones during the Christmas period. As if many of you were not quivering with delight already, the cast will include Derren Brown in his first acting role.

*listens to thuds as everywhere, fangirls fall off their chairs raving that the Tivo must be set with the utmost care, etc. etc.*

I thought you'd be pleased.

Why was I not informed about this?

Okay, the cover is unbelievably 80s, and that's "unbelievably 80s" in the tragic way, not the "Oooh, they had some good tunes back then" way. Still. It's Razorlight. I thought they'd broken up or something...

Now, the real question is whether there are previews online anywhere...

As ever, some have linked reviews on BC (by InvisibleAng), others on Amazon. It was a good month for reading, with my concentration improving in leaps and bounds, and a vague theme of nostalgic biography early on. Oh, and whatever I read next will be my 50th book this year! It's going to be a lower-than-usual average by the end, but whatevs; I've had things to preoccupy me...

Moondust: In Search Of The Men Who Fell To Earth, by Andrew Smith - An unusual idea which makes for a compelling and sometimes moving book. When journalist Andrew Smith realised than only nine of the men who had walked on the Moon were still alive, he felt compelled to interview them before the day came when none of them survived; when nobody would be around to tell us what that experience had been like. In catching up with them and many others in the NASA space programme, he investigates what the dreams of going into space and walking on the Moon have meant to the world and to the individuals who actually did it - and why so many of them came back changed men.

( Somewhere, we have to cut this entry for length. It shall be here. )

The Books of Magic, by Neil Gaiman - If ten volumes of The Sandman have not satiated your Gamainia, this should be your next port of call, whether on its own or as your introduction to a constantly clever and surprising ongoing series. It skips around the universe and eternity as young Tim Hunter learns what it means to be a magician, from magic's primordial origins in the depths of human history to the various magical beings from the DC 'verse who are still around in modern times.

A Young Man's Passage, by Julian Clary - Funny, sweet, bitchy and poignant by turns, this book does exactly what it says on the tin, detailing Clary's growing-up years and experience of fame in occasionally naughty levels of detail. I really like how he relates his relationship with his parents, particularly when he reprints the letters he got from them at college, sarcastically (see where he got it from?) thanking him for including dictionary definitions of the big words he'd used in his letters home, but reassuring him that his parents are not completely ignorant and did understand his communications, thank you. Heh.

Where Did It All Go Right? Growing Up Normal In The 70s, by Andrew Collins - Curiously enough this riposte to the misery memoir sub-genre was published in 2003, long before Waterstones had a Traumatic Lives section. Early on it threatened to be rather dull for obvious reasons, but I ended up getting hooked, perhaps by the novelty of the author including extracts from his diaries, and the fact that he still has every single one, having kept a diary since the age of six. I wish I'd done that. It's all rather nice and soothing.

How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, by Toby Young - Young is a British journalist who tried to make it big in the States by working on Vanity Fair. Unfortunately, he had entirely the wrong temperament, no common sense, and the ability to magnetically attract trouble of all kinds (so basically, he's a bit like Bella from Twilight, of which more below). It would be easy to suspect that his guilelessness was a front to allow him to make a good story out of his experiences, but nobody could be this crashingly inept merely as a ruse, and despite his evident personal failings, it's rather humbling how he recounts every last cringe-making detail of his descent to rock bottom AND wrings some very fine social commentary out of it.

The Ship Who Searched, by Anne McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey - The premise is that in the far future, people born with profound physical disabilities can have their nervous systems wired up to starship technology, with the Brainship as a hyper-sensitive body surrounding the original physical one. These 'Shellpersons' have their own education and culture, and partnered by 'softperson' Brawns, they make their lives running cities and flying across the universe in a variety of capacities, from law enforcement to supply runs, the aim being to buy out their contract so they can go where they choose. Tia Cade is unique, though, in that she took on her machine body after catching a virus which incapacitated her at the age of seven. This is the story of how she lives her life, and gets to know her partner, Alex. Tia is definitely not your Passive Disabled Fictional Cliche.

( More? C'mon, it's good... )

The Hound Of Ulster, by Rosemary Sutcliff - Rosemary Sutcliff retells the ancient Cúchulainn mythos with her inimitable flair for language, but even she can't save these tales from being incredibly annoying. I desperately wanted to be more enthusiastic about Irish mythology's precursor to Conan the Cimmerian, but these are basically stories where shit happens, and then more shit, and then more, and most of it happens because the men are too proud and too dumb to listen to the women. Yes, I do realise that one cannot always be revisionist about these things, but...

( Anna? Somebody? Can I get a considered, scholarly, mythology-appreciating take on this? )

Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer - Yep. This one. *grins* I didn't find it too annoying, and it even got to be quite fun. But hey, I read an Anite Blake: Vampire Hunter book recently; Twilight would've had to plunge a fathomless nadir of awfulness to even begin to eclipse the memory of that.

( I wasn't going to rip into this, but then I sort of did... )

So, you're in the market for pompous self-aggrandisement and OTT-ness. Where do you go? That's right, baby: the Official Tom Cruise Website. I only found out about this because at the bottom of my LJ there was a banner ad featuring a Cruise silhouette (ooh, tasteful) and "25 years". It seemed that some anniversary was being celebrated. I clicked through, and sure enough, was confronted with a video.

Well...

It's hard to know what the daftest thing about this is. Maybe it's the fact that he must be the first actor I've seen who feels the need to commemmorate 25 years in the business. With a clip reel. Maybe it's the fact that the theme tune of the first few minutes is the 2001 theme. Maybe it's the fact that the music's crescendo is accompanied by an image of a bubble (snot, water, who knows?) leaving a sub-aqua Cruise's nostril and making for the surface. Maybe it's the fact that the video is still going MINUTES later and there's no commentary or anything. I'm just surprised he didn't decide it needed a commentary...

I've been meaning to get back to posting monthly reading lists for a while, especially after seeing how interesting rebness makes hers. So here we go again - the ones that have been registered on BookCrossing at this point have my reviews (username there is InvisibleAng) linked, otherwise it's Amazon.

Sorry it's not behind a cut, but since I need to use bold etc., that would be a rather unsafe option. :S

So, here's what I read in July...

Old School, by Tobias Wolff - I adored this; it earns the rare accolade of joining my permanent collection. It's also responsible for the classics bender that followed. (You can get it on Amazon.co.uk, by the way; I just linked to the .com because it is the one with a detailed review.)

The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene - this is another book I will have great difficulty giving away, though I feel that I must for the simple reason that you can find modern classics anywhere. I fell in love with the Neil Jordan film a few years ago, and I'm ashamed it's taken me so long to get around to the book. It's very astute on the subjects of faith, lust and love, and the situation depicted was close to the author's own heart.

The Girls of Slender Means, by Muriel Spark - this didn't appeal to me as much as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It was hard to care about the characters until the devestating final events...

Out of my Time: Poems 1967 - 1974, by John Hewitt - okay, a primer for the Norn Ironly challenged: This is John Hewitt, a poet from Northern Ireland who had much to say about the nature of the place and the people. This is the bar, named after him, which is the Belfast BookCrossers' usual meeting venue. But the reason I have this book is more personal: it contains a poem about my father and his linguistics work, which I intend to transcribe here one of these days...

Nine Stories, by JD Salinger - when stories here are good, they're more fun than The Catcher in the Rye. When they're bad, it's because the society the characters inhabit renders them shallow, and/or because the stories are snapshots rather than being fully formed.

Dubliners, by James Joyce - I approached this with trepidation because I remembered having to get my head down and dash through Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in order to have any hope of reaching the end. But it was much easier, stylistically, to get through, if a mixed bag enjoyment-wise.

X-Men: Days of Future Past, by Chris Claremont, John Byrne and John Romita - well, it's a classic within its fandom. ;) It's interesting to read stuff from that era now, years after I was fully immersed in X-Men stuff, and to find it relatively unsophisticated compared with later works. Which isn't to say that it's not good, or that it doesn't offer a reasonable dose of time paradox and alternate future. (Don't buy from that link, though; it is available more cheaply. This page is linked for the review.) I'm curious as to how the hard-hitting God Loves, Man Kills reads now...

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad - I wanted to like this much more given that it's a classic and all, but the restraint vis-a-vis Kurtz just seems plain out of place in light of how Conrad goes into rhapsodies of description over everything else...

Postcards from the Edge, by Carrie Fisher - I love Carrie Fisher to death, and there are lots of good things here in her first novel, including a female protagonist who, unlike those in many other contemporary novels, actually has something to say about life and an insight into herself. But for me, nothing beats Delusions of Grandma, and if you only buy one Fisher book, it should be that.

The Books of Magick: Life During Wartime, vol.1, by Si Spencer and Dean Ormston - this collects issues 1 - 5 of an ongoing series which was cancelled after 15 issues. The series was an alternative take, with adult-oriented content, on an existing series, The Books of Magic (note the lack of a 'k') which had originally been conceived by Neil Gaiman, who continued to act as advisor/Brit-picker to the writers who followed. Confused yet? Well, that is a sign that you should definitely not buy Life in Wartime until you've got a passing familiarity with the original. C'mon, get there before the movie adaptation does...

I must emphasise that the title is my paraphrase of the Government's position on the Robinson affair.

One wonders just what an MLA or MP would have to say before it would become the Government's constitutional responsibility.

(Note: the UK has no written constitution.)

Meanwhile, the psychiatrist Robinson referred to in her comment as being able to 'cure' homosexuality has resigned from his post as part-time adviser to the politician, as well as temporarily standing down from his hospital job.

Interesting times all round...

Dear Translink,

I'm finding your Journey Planner system very unclear. I tried planning a journey by bus from ***** to Belfast (specifically, to the "Belfast Donegall Pl Boots" bus stop) and found that it gave me radically different journey times depending on whether I specified the departure point as "***** Centre" or "***** High Street".

Since ***** is a small place the High Street and the Centre are the same place, and the website doesn't tell me what the difference is in bus stops. What it does tell me is that departing from "***** High Street" means the journey will take 1 hour 19 minutes, while departing from "***** Centre" takes only 46 minutes. Obviously I want the shortest journey time, so can you please tell me which bus stop you have designated as "***** Centre" - is it the one outside the Northern Bank, or a different one?

[Customer]



This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

    feedback@translink.co.uk.

I'd thank Bonekickers for giving me the opportunity if it wasn't such a pathetic excuse for television... granted, I went in expecting it to be a bit shite, but it was much worse than I expected:

- Cardboard Christians stereotyped as either power-hungry and other-worldly or meek and other-wordly. I can't tell you how much this bothers me. I'm not a Christian any more, but I was for much of my life and a lot of my friends still are. It frustrates me no end that if I see a Christian character on TV, 99 times out of 100 that person will bear no resemblance to any Christian friends I've ever had.

Look at the part where Magwilde writes off  Viv's parents as god-botherers, and that's only treated in the script as a Mean Thing To Say because Viv's parents are dead, and not because "god-botherer" is a nasty, derogatory term. So, well done, BBC, on yet again finding a whole cross-section of society who it's okay to diminish and stereotype.

- Not to mention that the production values were just so horrible during the scenes with the modern Templars being all prayerfully angsty - ugly Big Brother-type camera angles, stupid tension-generating music that audiences are now so accustomed to that it generates no tension, and that blue filter that's so popular these days.

Same goes for the broadcasts by the evangelist - it's so angelically fluffed up with lights and tone of voice and so forth that the guy plays as very creepy, and just doesn't come across like anything I've SEEN on British TV. As for the evangelist's personal appearance, I really lolled when I saw the black leather gloves, television's reliable shorthand for Gestapo officers. I half-expected him to come back to life at the end, after being burned alive, such was the action movie style of the final ten minutes. It's like Indiana Jones in thirty seconds as performed by bunnies, only not performed by bunnies, lasting much more than thirty seconds, and not remotely entertaining.

- Let's not get started on the archaeologists. I did like that one glimmer of humour when Magwilde (why do these kinds of characters always have such artful names? just once I'd like to see a Carol Blenkinsop who fights crime while conducting archaeololgical digs, or something) asked the creepy phonecaller to identify himself, but otherwise the archaeologists were as much a collection of cliches as the Christians.

- Where Christianity and archaeology meet: OKAY. O-KAY. Let's get one thing straight. Regardless of the excitement of unearthing things nobody's seen for centuries, regardless of any beliefs they might have or once have had, the archaeologists are not going to go all silent and reverent over a (very unrealistic-looking) lump of wood because the Templars who'd been carrying it believed it was part of the True Cross. 

Real archaeologists would go, "Oh, look, it's another bit of the True Cross. What is that, the eleventy-billionth to be found or rumoured in the whole of history?" because in medieval times the trade in holy relics was brisk and any major church worth its salt had a bit of the True Cross, or the bones of a saint, or the foreskin of Jesus Christ (yes, really - at one point, several churches claimed to have it at once). Not all Christians even buy into the idea of relics, or if they do, they don't necessarily treat all relics as equally likely to be genuine.

- In the end, the show's biggest problem is that, in addition to all of the above, it doesn't do what it set out to do. It was supposed to distill what people love about Time Team and other popular history/archaeology shows into a cult TV-type format, but so obviously misunderstood why people love Time Team and the like in the first place...


All the same, I had been hoping to somewhat enjoy it. Someone (forget who, wave if you read this in the cross-post) on my IJ flist was saying that they don't find much to like in recent TV; that they couldn't find something that made them want to be a fan. I miss that too... though by coincidence I have the last ep of Doctor Who taped. I hadn't been watching it but I'm sort of curious about how they pulled the ending off, based on rumours... will watch it and report back.

This is Entertainment Weekly's Top 100 movies of the last 25 years list.

Bold the ones you have seen
Put an asterisk after the movie title* if you really liked it.
Cross it out if you saw a film and really disliked it
Underline the ones you own


63; not bad... I see there's quite a few that I've taped and not seen yet. My only quarrel is that EW seems to think that the vast majority of really good movies in the past 25 years were made in America.

http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co.uk/article.php?id=4910

Seriously, how weird is that? :O

I particularly love the part in the comments where someone mentions the developer being snooty about not wanting the Wii remote to be used to control the whip. For the love of God, man, that kind of thing is what the Wii remote was made for!!

Thank God they're still doing trad Castlevania games for DS, that's all I can say...