Dragons vs Robots!
Hiya!
It’s been another interesting week. I finally got a chance to hang out with an old pal from South Africa, Cindi Page. We hadn’t actually seen each other in around six years before that. She also immigrated and is now a successful romance author based in England. We hung out in a not rainy Glasgow (amazing!) and drank gin and talked about writing and new lives in new homes.
It’s also possible that I might have encouraged her to try pizza crunch while up in Scotland….
The Sekrit Dragon Art has been sent to Nerine Dorman and I can now reveal the cover for Dragon Forged! The specs she gave me for the dragon made this book sound utterly adorable (and I quote, ‘base the head on Ridiculous Doggo’), and the premise is fab.
For those who may not know who the Ridiculous Doggo is, she is, in fact, a most ridiculous dog.
May I present my graceful and totally normal dog:
I finished Sistersong, which was an absolutely gorgeous book with layered, nuanced characters in a fantasy medieval setting. Holland is an accomplished writer and she makes you feel for each of the siblings, weaving their paths towards their terrible conclusion with a skilful hand. Her background in history gives a real feeling of depth to the setting, but without making the work dry or didactic in any way.
It’s a fabulous, meaty book, and the way the magic and the characters interplay is so beautifully done.
Besides giving a great take on Merlin, Sistersong also played with the folk song the Twa Sisters in interesting ways.
(If that sounds at all familiar, The Twa Sister, or Bows of London, was the inspiration for my short story The Girls Who Go below, which first appeared in the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and later in my collection Learning How To Drown. You can read a review of the collection here, where they say things like, ‘The angles she uses to interrogate the questions of being ‘other’ work beautifully,’ which works for me.)
What I’m Reading This Week.
I’ve moved on to a new book with a complete change in direction. From ancient fantasy to modern SF, though music still plays a central role. I HEART ROBOT is an earlier YA novel by Xan van Rooyen, whose short fiction has been cropping up all over the place recently for good reason.
And that’s pretty much it from this side. I’ll hopefully be getting some ice time in tomorrow and I’ve heard rink rumours that give me a whisper of hope to hold on to.
In the meanwhile, I feel like going back to play Sims 3, where my poor loner character will feed his millions of cats and try to make friends over the phone because seeing people in real-time is too draining.
Until the next one,
Cat
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