It does make a body sleepy, though, the day after.
In other news, I managed to hang my Christmas shelves in the laundry room, in a semi-grand, 2-day clean-out and reorg, and I'm pretty freaking happy about that. Only... seven months late. And change.
And, and... An Almanac for the Alien Invaders, my "colonialism is not for fun and profit" story (or my "anthropologists in space" story, if you prefer) is up at the grand ol' Escape Pod. The 20% of the commenters have thus far sussed out that this is really part of a larger work, though it seems to be that this realization is to their annoyance... Ah, well. I really should know better than to read comments, since my sensibilities are so tender. (Like young asparagus.)
In other podcast news, Adventures in SciFi Publishing is back, to my delight, and the first(?) episode back included a charming interview with this friendslist's own
gregvaneekhout. I think it was the first. I listened to it almost two weeks ago, and for serious, the memory has been like a sieve in these parts.In yet other podcast--well, news is perhaps the wrong word--information? I downloaded The Immortals by Tracy Hickman. The annoying thing is that I think I paid to download it from audible.com (as part of my monthly subscription--but still, it weren't free), when it is available for free from podiobooks.com. I was really looking forward to this because the Dragonpage podcast folks were saying how great it was (I think it was them, anyway), but then I got about ten chapters in and had to quit, because it was just too depressing.
I occasionally enjoy being in the choir and getting preached to, but for a mutated AIDS virus story that starts with US deathcamps in the desert and a reversal of all the last 20 years' efforts for gay and lesbian rights? I couldn't take it. Plus, the original book had been written in the 90s and took place in 2010; in the podcast, they move everything forward 10 years, and the book takes place in 2020, but I just felt totally unconvinced, somehow. So. No. I have abandoned a lot of books over the years out of boredom, always with the intention of picking them back up when I grow a new attention span, and I have abandoned a few outright because they've been badly written; this is the first book I've abandoned not because of boredom or bad writing, but because it was too upsetting, basically. Not just the premise, but the combo of the premise and the "but, wait" jolt of being told we were in 2020 and not feeling convinced about it.
So. Yeah. I'm deleting this off my hard-drive. I feel like a wimp. But I just couldn't take it.
And, in final podcast news, Jordan Castillo Price on her Packing Heat podcast, had a really interesting suggestion an episode or two ago, about how to go gangbusters on a really big daily wordcount. The goal is 800 words before work, 800 after, and 400 just before bed. (I think her plan was a little different--morning, afternoon and evening--but that's how it would work out for me.) Cut up that way, a 2000-word day seems sort of trivial. I'm going to try it this week and see what happens--if I have 14,000 words at the end of the week or just a puddle of mush I used to call my brain. Updates forthcoming.