Yes, I’m back to doing the weekly Booking through Thursday book-related question-and-answer thing. This week’s topic is “multiples”:

Do you have multiple copies of any of your books?

Only one that I’m aware of: “Kushiel’s Dart.”

If so, why? Absent-mindedness? You love them that much? First Editions for the shelf, but paperbacks to read?

I picked up a copy, didn’t get around to reading it, and then my husband picked up a copy at some point for him to read, not realizing we already had the book. Whoops! The really silly thing? I still haven’t gotten around to reading it! By the way, the husband says the series is amazing, right up there with Anne Bishop’s “Black Jewels” trilogy, and that’s high praise indeed.

If not, why not? Not enough space? Not enough money? Too sensible to do something so foolish?

In general, not enough space or money for that kind of thing. I don’t have enough bookshelves as it is!

Word Nerd

One of my more recent blog finds has been Melmoth’s Inferno. I can’t resist it, thanks to such engrossing posts as An undead berry is a Lichee? (which suddenly reminds me that I have a delectable can of lichee nuts in my kitchen, hmm… You know, they actually do kind of look like undead berries):

Considering the sheer variety and culinary diversity that exists in MMOs these days and seeing as adventuring folk spend so much of their time masticating, why not making eating into a mini-game? Yeah, you could make it such that combining foods into ‘courses’ will enable bigger and better buffs as well as healing and replenishing mana. If you have a small soup starter and manage to follow it up with the lamb shanks and roasted vegetables, you’re allowed to try for the power combo finishing desert item! But only if you ate all of your brussels sprouts and you used the correct spoon for the soup. Otherwise the buff fails, and you go straight to bed without getting to fight Bregnip the Merciless.

Does it make me a bad person that I think this actually sounds hysterically fun? But then I’m one of those loons who totally enjoys the farming and cooking crafts in LotRO.

Anyhow, eating a pork pie and suddenly being able to bench press an elephant, or eating cheese and suddenly being more intelligent but only for thirty minutes! is totally bizarre. And what if you melt cheese on a pork pie and eat that, does that count? What happens then? Are you suddenly able to bench press an elephant with your brain? Can your pectoral muscles calculate pi to four hundred places? Food would become dangerous, you wouldn’t know whether to put mustard on your pie in case it combined in some weird way that gave your nipples the power to whistle dixie every time you’re struck in combat. For thirty minutes only.

Go on, read the whole post. I’ve barely scratched the surface of it. Make sure to always read the comments on his posts as well, because they’re frequently just as hilarious. Next in my list of new favorite reads is his entry, You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, which brings us the adventures (such as they are) of Timothy and Trevor, two troll guards sent to find out What’s Going On around the troll encampment:

Timothy: “You’re a peon at work. Good. Good. And you’re another peon, well done. Ok”

Trevor: “You’re a guard, that’s fine. And here’s a priest, lovely. Lovely.”

Timothy: “And here we have the corpse of Tony, who appears to have been smashed to a pulp with a large blunt instrument of war. Ok, good, good.”

Trevor: “Well I think that’s everything, shall we head back to base, Tim?”

Mark my words, someday this blogger will be getting his books published, if he isn’t already. If the rest of us are lucky, that is.

Lawful Stupid

I’ve posted my review of Dr. Jean Harvey-Berino’s The EatingWell Diet. It’s a good, solid book, and my only real problem with it was that much of the food in the cookbook section was too bland for my tastes. I have to admit, though, that when you have the attention span of a flea on crack (as I do), the concept of trying to consistently note your food and calorie intake is daunting, to say the least. Still, if I can even do it for a day or two here or there, I get a much better sense for how many calories I’m taking in and how much I need to cut out of my diet.

Perhaps more importantly, I learned that I really can’t expect much. If I look at the amount I’d need to cut from my diet in order to lose a whole two pounds a week, it dips below the minimum 1200 calorie diet recommended for good nutrition. Which means that, realistically, I can’t eat well and lose more than a pound a week unless I start getting some very serious exercise. It’s good to know this, because it means I’m less likely to get frustrated and feel like giving up if I go a month and only lose, say, three pounds.

The second article in Jervis Pax’s world-building series is up: Something is Amiss. (In case you missed it, you should read An Interesting Nexus first.) This is aimed at roleplayers, but of equal interest to genre writers, IMO.

I should be posting a review of “The EatingWell Diet” over at Errant Dreams Reviews later today (part diet book, part cookbook), and I’m close to finishing up James Rollins’s “Sandstorm,” so consider that added to the list of upcoming reviews.

Okay, I rather like some of the book-related memeing that goes on out there (meming? No, I think memeing looks better), so I’m going to allow myself to indulge now and then.

In Letters! We get letters, Booking Through Thursday asks:

Have you ever written an author a fan letter?

In general I don’t do this, because a) I have no idea what to say; b) I’m just not a fannish/cult-of-celebrity kind of person (I tend to go wild over the books rather than their authors); c) I’m semi-anti-social (the actual diagnosis was Generalized Anxiety Disorder); d) I don’t want to accidentally find out my favorite author is actually a jerk; and e) authors tend to be busy folks, so I don’t want to bug them unless I can at least overcome point a).

That said, I occasionally drop a note to an author whose book I’ve reviewed, particularly if the review was positive. My one real “fan mail,” however, was just a short email note to the delightful Anne Bishop (author of the brilliant “Black Jewels” trilogy) to let her know how much I have enjoyed her work.

Did you get an answer?

I got a very nice reply, in fact. This was a good handful of years ago so I don’t remember what it said, but I remembered thinking that she seemed a very pleasant person whom I’d likely enjoy talking to if I ever met her.

Did it spark a conversation? A meeting?

Nope—see point c), above.

Anyway, in semi-related news, I should be able to post a couple of cookbook reviews soon!

Write with Grace

I now know how I’m going to die: someday I’ll be buried under a flood of books. It’ll be so deep that I won’t be able to dig my way out, and I’ll suffocate under there. Unless one of the cats bestirs herself long enough to dig me out, but I wouldn’t put money on that. At most she’d probably dig out my foot and declare it to be breakfast time.

It’s my own fault, really. Sometimes the more review books I have to read, the more energized I get with respect to reading. I got a media mailing from one of the publishers I regularly receive review copies from recently and they had an unusual number of titles that interested me. I put together a list of all the ones I’d be happy to review and emailed it to them, asking them to send me whichever of those titles they’d like reviewed; it always seemed kind of rude to me to just say, “gimme these,” so I like to make it clear that whatever they feel like sending out of the ones I’m interested in is fine by me. I think, from the reply, that they might be sending me all of them. This will be a lot of fun reading!

Then I found some more publishers over the last week whose books I’m curious to check out (mostly from some of the book review blogs I’ve been listing over on the reviews blog), and I went ahead and sent off a few emails and faxes. At least one company is sending four books (I had originally requested two), and as I’ve learned from other companies, often the ones that like to get faxes instead of emails don’t let you know whether they’re sending you books or not—you just suddenly get a package someday. So I have hopes for those. Then there’s another company I often get books from—several times a year they send out a form with their upcoming books, you check off the ones you’re interested in, and every now and then one or more of them shows up. So I never really know when I’m going to get a book. I adore getting books, so it’s a bit like mini year-round birthdays.

I’ve been lucky to develop relationships with some very good publishers. How do I define good? As a reviewer, to me that means that the publisher appreciates a decent and fair review whether it’s a glowing review or not. A good publicist knows that even an ambivalent—or negative—review can generate sales if the reviewer provides enough information and explains their impressions and biases well enough. A good publicist also keeps track of reviewers’ areas of interest and contacts the ones they’d like reviews from when books come out. Many of the bigger publishers of course don’t have the resources to do the latter for all of the books they put out, so with them you’re generally on your own to keep track of what they’re coming out with and request it. I have to say that so far two of my favorite publishers to work with in this regard have been Alpha Books and 10 Speed Press. Neither one has ever given me grief of any kind when I’ve given a book less-than-perfect scores.

The only problem, of course, is that I have far more books than bookcases to hold them. I should find out whether our local library takes donations of lightly-used books.

Now if only I could find a furniture company that needs reviews of bookcases…

Books are a girl’s best friend

This is only my third MMORPG, but it’s the first time I’ve been able to so thoroughly customize a character. I’d gotten the impression from some of the blog posts I’d seen that the customization was largely just of costume, so I was amazed to see how much you could also affect personal appearance, including many aspects of body type and height, skin color, hair style, a wide variety of facial expressions and facial types, and so on. It completely and utterly seduces the character-creator in me, and I find that the various characters I make look nothing like each other. I also find it far easier to recognize and immediately separate out the various other player characters around me in game. (I couldn’t help going so far as to make a writers’ exercise out of the whole process.)

Needless to say, I’m head-over-heels for the character creation process. I did find that things got a little more confusing after getting into game, however. The tutorial is of limited use for some of the basic types of characters and learning the most basic functionality of the game, but there’s no specific material for teaching you to use the more complex character types—you’re simply told to take a break and go read the manual. Also, if you buy the “Good vs. Evil” version (i.e., the bundled CoH/CoV), which comes with the “VIP club” pass allowing you to teleport into the “Club D” pocket dimension from anywhere in game, I highly recommend waiting to use it until you’re high enough level to survive those areas that have doorways into Club D already. I couldn’t find a way out of the club that didn’t involve going through those zones, and unlike some other games you can’t just necessarily corpse run your way home—getting killed often sends you back to a distant hospital.

Mobs of various levels tend to be scattered around and intermixed a bit more than I’m accustomed to from other games, so it’s easy to round a corner and quickly realize that you’d better turn around and run back the other way. Mind you this seems rather genre-appropriate, so that’s okay. I have yet to figure out how to tell how level-appropriate a mission I’ve been given is until I enter it and view the mob levels; I wish that wasn’t the case. Also, as far as I can tell you can only be on one mission at a time, so if you find it’s a bit much for you, your only options seem to be to either group with others or go beat up random mobs until you level up a bit. In general I prefer to be able to pick up a variety of quests at once and work on whatever seems convenient. Of course, offsetting that is the fact that when you’re playing with superpowered heroes and villains combat can be much more entertaining and fun than in some games, so pure beating up of mobs does have its appeal!

I absolutely adore the three-dimensional aspect of the game. In most games there are very limited ways to, for example, get to any upper levels that might exist in a city and explore them. In CoH/CoV you can use flying abilities and items such as jump packs to boost you up to virtually anywhere—and you’ll find mobs up there when you arrive! You can run and jump over exactly the kind of rooftop terrain you might find in your favorite genre movie, which is just fantastic.

The creators seem to have taken the convenient genre excuse to do away with one of the traditional MMORPG nuisances—travel time. Every character can use a sprint ability to move quickly through the city, and you can buy enhancements to that run speed if you wish. Subway trains link the zones, and travel via them is virtually instantaneous. When done with a mission, a single button can return you to outside the instanced mission area, so you don’t have to run through all that space you just cleared.

All in all, it’s a truly fun game. I’ve only run into a few difficulties with things that were a little confusing, or odd little bugs that I haven’t found my way around yet. (I can’t seem to use the /tell or /t command to talk to anyone… no matter how many variations on the supposed syntax I try it tells me I have the wrong format. But I can at least /reply, so I don’t have to be entirely rude!) I think my husband was quite amused by my evil cackles last night as I ran around playing a petite, young-looking girl less than four feet tall with stony skin who hits like a ton of bricks, complete with massive-punch-landing sound effects.

How could I resist?!

In unrelated news, the Deep Fathom Review is up. Deep Fathom wasn’t as good as Rollins’s Black Order, and definitely was more of a sort of light beach read than Black Order was, but it was still enjoyable!

This is my ALT

I was doing a little bit of restructuring of the links directory. I was about to delete an empty subcategory of the “advice for writers” link category, and I’d swear that’s what I clicked on. Yet somehow I ended up deleting the entire advice category. Hopefully when my husband gets home he’ll know of a way to recover it. If not, well… if you know we linked to your site from that category, come back in a couple days and re-submit it, please, if we haven’t managed to recover the category.

*hangs head in shame*

I don’t even have the traditional excuse of not yet having had my morning cup of coffee.

Well, I’d better go write my “Deep Fathom” review instead of doing any further damage.

Update: WAHOO! Yes, my husband is awesome. We have the links back. It’s possible I may have undeleted some links that should have remained deleted (i.e., they were deleted previously), so I’ll go through later and check the sites. Huge, huge thanks to Jeffrey!

I still think it’s a riot that we have baby-wear at Caffeinated Chicanery and Gamers’ Heaven. I never would have thought of it on my own (I don’t have children, and don’t particularly have plans for any), but it came about thusly: When deploying designs in the stores, I tend to add them to whichever items I think they might make sense on. On a lark, I added them to things like baby-wear because… well, because you never know. Then it started selling; folks bought RPG sayings on baby-wear, things like I don’t need Wisdom. I’ve got Charisma. or High Intelligence, Low Wisdom. FEAR ME! (both which, come to think of it, might be appropriate for a baby).

Anyway. When I told our business partner (who is a crazy-efficient idea man) about this, he immediately started coming up with more ideas for baby-wear. And yesterday I found this: What the Fashionable Baby of Geek Parents is Wearing this Season.

Yes, the pictured infant bodysuit is one of ours.

In unrelated news, coming hopefully sometime this week: a review of James Rollins’ “Deep Fathom” (I just finished it this morning), and some preliminary thoughts on City of Heroes/City of Villains. Okay, okay, so I’m late to the party. Story of my life.

I also finished with the reading part of “The EatingWell Diet,” but more than half of the book is a cookbook, so I still have to try a few recipes out.