(no subject)

My cool photo of the weekend is couch and pillows, but the one after it, of the Hancock building with clouds is my favorite from the last few weeks at least. I love how there is both positive and negative space with some of the clouds, as well as the shade of the picture foreground vs the bright of the background. In related news, I'm up to 63 glove pictures.

And in the more physical picture news, while I didn't buy shoes for Italy, I bought poster frames for two of my posters, and a lovely picture frame for my snow picture from DC. I now have more art than walls--I think the grigg is going in the hallway, and the new David Armstrong, which doesn't have the right colors for this room, really, will go on the side of the room behind me when I'm on my bed. The snow picture should go at the foot of my bed, or maybe the Silent Light picture will move down here, and the snow picture will be between it and the door. But still. frames. Cheap, not as attractive as they could be, and not really the right sizes for any of them, but they're enough to get them out of the tubes and folders, and that's really the key bit here.

The Misted Cliffs

If you are going to write a romance novel with vague medival settings and characters etc, please, please, do not introduce characters which have big flashing DSM-IV codes over their heads and expect me to buy them as characters. Further more, do not give these characters stupid names like "Stonebreaker Chamberlight" (the autistic and abusive grandfather) and "Shimmerlake" and "Bricklayer." They sounded more like care bears than people. Stoopid cognomen aren't allowed either. "The Midnight Prince" is where Hannah put the book down very very fast, and that was the first sentence.

The romance (for all that it's a big book) is rushed--"Oh, you're really a nice person? Then I suppose I'll have sex with you,"--and I'm not pleased at the female lead's habit of giving in to the male lead on things that she thought were important, as I think it counteracted the general focus of the story. Also: the whole 'is his dad really his dad' insinuation was all the stupid ever since it never mattered. If you are going to introduce big scary ideas (or even little stupid ones) make sure they matter in the story or else you're just filling up words.

That said, I have read stupider. I may not have finished them, but I know they exist. The magic was fun. The writing was good. It just felt very much like a short story's worth of, well, story, without much filling in the extra words. It may be the first Luna book I've read (I can't remember if the Gilman is Luna or just like-Luna), and I know it's still a new imprint, but I'm disappointed in this book. It's not even like there was enough romance in this book to make it need to be kept seperately from the other books to avoid cooties. I keep thinking I should try to read Asaro, but this book may have cured me of that.