Year End bits

• Oh noes! Elastic Press is ceasing to be... Andrew's done a full press release thingy on the Elastic newsfeed, a copy of which is also on the BFS boards. 'tis a great shame as Elastic always put out some neat looking books.

• Coo... Stan Nicholls of the The David Gemmell award thingy reports that they've had 800 votes since they opened the polls on boxing day. How cool is that! And that's just to get the long list to short list. If you've not voted for your fave heroic fantasy book of the year, get over there and do so as the voting is dead simple and you don't even need to register on their website or anything. Apparently, the final award will be given out at a do in June, at the Magic Circle HQ in London. Crikey! (Must remember to mention this to our Hell's magician boyf.)

• Ooh er... Newcon 5 is down for 26th - 27th September '09. Which, unless I'm very much mistaken, is the week after Fcon is due to be... Oh that's going to be interesting... :-> (Of course, the Fcon site is due a major relaunch next month so our details aren't up on the current site yet...)

Book blast:

And talking of David Gemmell, have recently read Legend and Waylander as I'd never read them before and thought I really should get around to it... Legend was pretty intense and it had me hooked right up until the end... and then there was a bit of a cop out with one of the characters and a miraculous resurrection when they really should have stayed dead. Bugger. Things were going so well until then. Didn't help that the purpose of the resurrection felt like a blatant rewarding of the hero chap by bringing his woman back to life. A woman that died a decent fighting death too. Sigh.
Waylander didn't quite have the intensity but the ending was a bit more solid and the characters were very well drawn.

Also read Ravens of Avalon by Diana L Paxson - which I picked up from our Jan at the last Fcon. Apparently this is connected to the Mists of Avalon series that Marion Zimmer Bradley did (which, of course, I hadn't read...) But Ravens was some serious fabulous stuff - it was a pagany telling of the Boudica story just busting with enchantment all over the place. So, quite naturally, I then had to read Mists of Avalon by MZB just to see where it all began and I was totally blown away by it. Utterly, absolutely, magical stuff. Doing the Arthur thing from Morgan le Fay's perspective. Brilliant!

Also read Duma Key by Stephen King. Definitely a cracking good yarn, that one. Bit of a heartrending death towards to the end and some great characters.

Now I've a pile of Xmas and birthday books to get through so hope everyone had a fab Xmas and have an excellent new year!

- X -

Daemons Are Forever

So I have just this minute finished reading Simon R. Green's Daemons Are Forever and I'm already champing for the next one. (Due around April next year, I think...)
Not that I'm at all unbiased, as I'm a bit of a Simon Green fangirl, but Daemons was ace! For why? Well, for a start, I always find Mr Green's stuff eminently readable, and Daemons is no exception.

Edwin Drood makes for a fun main character as he stumbles from hijinx to disaster and back again, saving the world with wild magics, weird tech and a fantastically depreciating sense of humour. And he's got the perfect partner in Molly Metcalf, witch of the wild woods. This would be another thing I love about Green's work, he always creates fabulous partnerships (Hawk and Fisher being my absolute favourite...).

There's family politics and bloody battles... and a Deathstalker crossover! (...and a very cool one at that! Yay!) As well as some promising things for future volumes.

Although Daemons does suffer from the first couple of pages being a bit on the infodumpy side it's generally one of those that begs the wild ride cliche to be liberally applied to any attempt to describe it. So if you haven't already read it, now would be a perfect time to add it to your Xmas list...

Nano Finite

And we're done! :->

Final Nano wordcount - 108,678! Woot! Thanks in no small part to a mini competition between me and two others yesterday as we updated word counts every hour until closing in the bid to out do each others wordage...

On the regional word war front - yesterday England Elsewhere managed to crawl to first place... alas, 'twas but a brief victory as by this morning and the final numbers, Ireland had beaten us over the head and snatched back their top place. So we end this year at number 2. Which is, if memory serves, a few places better than the very tragic placing we had last year.

Worldwide, still number 12, and still beaten by London. Bah, humbuggery.

However, all numbers aside, this one was a particularly good Nano. I'll lay claim to two (short) novels finished (one of which is even polishable), a very bad very short story, half a SF novel, and the opening chapters of two urban fantasies. Plus a few bits of random blathering. We like random blathering...

And now there's books waiting to be read, and work to be done...