27 March 2010

Crunch time

There are many things I want to blog about, but I don't have the time. It's frustrating.

I've only got a few more chapters to read in Whipping Girl, then I can write a review (spoiler alert: I love it!). I'm only a few chapters in to The Persian Night, about life in Khomeinist Iran, but I like it so far. It's easy to read. And I have a stack of Turkish fiction to read, in addition to the stack on my shelf, plus a friend gave me David Drake's The Complete Hammer's Slammers (volume 1) for my birthday.

So I'm kinda drowning in backlog of books, but I keep not finding time to read them. Which makes me a little sad.

You may recall my post on Yoshinaga Fumi's manga Ooku, which reimagines Tokugawa-era Japan with women filling the men's roles because the men died of smallpox. (Many of them, not all; they're more susceptible.) It recently won the Tiptree award for gender in fiction, which is awesome. I'm glad this manga is getting recognition on this side of the Pacific. (It's won prizes in Japan already.)

Why I haven't been able to read (or spare brain-cycles to blog) is because I'm trying to get the first draft of my novel (current working title Iron and Rust) finished before I leave for Berlin. On May 1. It's beginning to look grim, though not yet dire. The contract that was eating my life ended, so I have time again, but I'm at the point in the story where everything is crap and I hate it (because, honestly, that section kind of is poorly-thought-out crap, and I need to fix it a lot). So it's frustrating and I want to skip it and get to the part that doesn't suck. But I have to make this part no longer suck before I can move on.

If I get an hour or so of editing in today, that'll help.

Also, my Yoshino cherry is blossoming, my herb garden isn't dead, my rosemary bush is massive, and my chrysanthemum didn't die in the overly cold winter (for North Carolina.) The Japanese maple we transplanted last spring didn't die, either. (It was a concern...)

And a friend of mine is working on a website for me. I'll let y'all know when it's ready.


Anonymous said...

Whipping Girl is a wonderful book, I loved it to death when I read it.

CD Covington said...

Enne loaned it to me after my 100th "dammit, girly isn't an epithet!" rant. I'm so glad they did.

(Oh, I'm a bit slow. I think I figured out who you are. Derp derp.)