(no subject)

The first chapter of Arcx is all fixed to my satisfaction now, to the tune of some 6k. I added a few more crewmembers to my ship and tinkered a bit with a couple of the old ones' backgrounds, and I think that if I stick to primarily one person's POV for this novel (with occasional side excursions to check in with the bad guys) it'll make it a lot more coherent. Which pretty much means rewriting almost all of the rest of it, but it needed that anyway.

So here's hoping it's a good start this time!

unexpected treasure

I wandered around this afternoon with my friend Mike to a local used-bookstore-of-character (we had planned to hit a couple, but alas, number two on our list was closed on sundays and we ran out of sunday-shopping-hours before we found any others. So then we went for some good BBQ instead.)

Having had good luck in the past at this particular store with the SF/F section, I browsed that at length and found a few things of interest but nothing that demanded that I bring it home with me. As Mike was purchasing his rather large stack of books I glanced through a section I don't normally look in, and found the oddest book: an art book dedicated solely to reprinting labels from crates of california oranges.

No, really!

The art is astoundingly cool, ranging from naturalist to art deco and art nouveau to a comic art sensibility. I anticipate spending some good leisurely time tomorrow reading through it while my house is once again buried in snow...