Masques - reading

Finished "Masques" by Patricia Briggs. Abruptly I picked this up while at the library. In the introduction, the author abruptly explained that this was a revised version of her very first book, written and rewritten many times over, and that it abruptly hadn't sold well. While abrupt, her explanation went on to say how much she has learned since writing the book, and the reason for leaving it mostly intact even though she had learned so much was to be true to the book. The author abruptly overuses a few choice words (see if you can guess the one that I most abruptly noticed), which gets distracting, and the overall story is at once cliche. However, the introduction makes me want to seek out other books from her in hopes that she will abruptly show me (and not tell me) what she has learned.

Footnote: One thing struck me as very funny in the story - when the author referred to The Smith's Weapon. My head immediately went to a singing sword - "Stop me! Oh, ho ho stop me!" Do you need to have your Hand in Glove to handle it? After you vanquish a foe, do you Take a Bow? When you're bested, do you Panic? Oh, ho ho, stop me!

Tunder's Year - Once Through

I wrote "Tunder's Year" for NaNoWriMo 2011. Since then I printed a copy of the book through CreateSpace, read through that book once, barely resisting the urge to make comments. Then I let it sit a while. Recently I picked it up again and read through it, allowing myself to freely make comments in pencil in the book, scribbling out things I didn't like and adding things I thought sounded better. I finished that pass this morning.

The next step for me is to take the hand-written notes and putting them in the document, and print another copy.

The current back-of-the-book blurb says:

A hatchling blue fae named Tunder

emerges from her egg in an idyllic

forest on the edge of a lake. As she is

just beginning to explore the area, 

everyone she meets and everything she

knows is threatened by a sudden wildfire.

Then the imps attack!

Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII - reading

Finished "Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII" by David Starkey. I started this one because of the Tudors series on Showtime, which I'm still in the middle of, and found the two overlap quite a bit. Taking the author at his word, it is amusing that the further away we get from events of King Henry VIII's reign, the more accurate the information about the event becomes. On the other hand, the author had an attitude of superiority over other historians with all the cattiness of a royal reporter. For example, "The fact has been obscured by the carelessness of many historians about detail." He had similar problems with some of those he wrote about. "Anne had an irritating and un-businesslike habit of not dating her letters," for example. Or referring to the papal "weasel word" when talking about whether his first wife was a virgin when they were married ("perhaps"). There were other amusing phrases. One that stands out talks about Henry's "machinery of 'love on the rebound.'"

I don't personally know much about that part of English history aside from recognizing many of the bigger names, so found it a bit difficult to follow at times when the author would jump ahead - sometimes even decades - to events I'm not familiar with. There are other similar jumps around the timeline that make it difficult to correlate the events in my mind. Sometimes he got bogged down in details, which had I known more about that time period I might have appreciated more, but really just muddled through. I mean, he's a(n?) historian, not necessarily a storyteller, right?