telophase: (Faustus and Mephistopheles fireworks)
telophase ([personal profile] telophase) wrote2007-04-10 11:25 pm

Recently, at Camp Telophase...

1. Have sore shoulders from push-ups last night. Am ok with this.

2. Am in that Special Place as regards art for the inking on this project, which means I am utterly convinced it is complete crap, but I am ok with it because I no longer care. Artists will understand. (Have inked 11 pages so far.)

3. The temperature is warming up, and thus the cat is venturing away from her heating pad for longer then five minutes at a time, and is ok with this.

4. Saiyuki Reload 7 is in the Borders that is near my place of work, and thus have plans to not bring my lunch tomorrow, but to go to the bookstore during lunch. Am very, very ok with this.

5. The mail yesterday brought me [livejournal.com profile] ursulav's first published novel, Black Dogs: The House of Diamond, which is part 1 of a two-part fantasy story. I read it last night and today, finishing it. I liked it a lot - it's a first novel and there's a few spots that are a bit clunky - a couple of abrupt shifts in point-of-view, mostly, when I was reading along assuming I was in tight-third and all of a sudden the thoughts of another character intruded. But it wasn't enough to throw me more than momentarily. I know she wrote this a couple of years ago, and I've read snippets she's posted of current works in progress on her LJ, so I know she's gotten even better since, which means I will be eagerly looking forward to future books.

I won't summarize or blurb it, since you can read that on the Sofawolf website I linked to. The short version of my review is: she handed me exactly what I've been craving for a while, which is a reasonably standard fantasy novel, with a few unique touches and a concentration on character, with a good helping of what [livejournal.com profile] rachelmanija calls Cool Bits for me - little things here and there that are definite Yes! when I read them. I'm not going to be nominating it for any awards, but it's going to be something better - a comfort read that will get re-read many times. :) Now if only 2008 would get here so I can find out how the story ends...

6. There is nothing more annoying than being 30 pages from the end of part 1 of the Mahabharata and realizing you left the damn thing at work. At least Amazon delivered part 2 today.

7. Have received from the National Archives and Records Administration the Confederate Army records of a direct ancestor of mine, name of Joseph Folse, who served, along with his brother Norbert, in the Lafourche Regiment of the Louisiana Militia in 1862. His was a singularly undistinguished military career, which seems to have been entirely getting sworn in, the going into battle and promptly getting captured. with no record of what happened to him afterwards, not even a formal discharge. Mom and I are convinced that he and his brother realized after getting captured that the army isn't all shiny buttons and medals and girls swooning at the sight of sharp uniforms, said "Blow this for a game of soldiers," and scarpered off home after being paroled. Which sounds, we believe, like he's definitely a relative. If I remember, I'll scan his records so you can see just how undistinguished he was.

8. Am going to bed now. Am ok with that.
solarbird: (Default)

[personal profile] solarbird 2007-04-11 04:33 am (UTC)(link)
Am in that Special Place as regards art for the inking on this project, which means I am utterly convinced it is complete crap, but I am ok with it because I no longer care. Artists will understand.
I always found the Special Place kind of depressing. Not Special Hell depressing, but depressing.

[identity profile] telophase.livejournal.com 2007-04-11 04:38 am (UTC)(link)
The Special Place is when I am ok with producing crap, because I just want to get the damn thing done. The Depressing Place is when I am not ok with producing crap, and it frustrates the hell out of me because I still care about the project. :D

As always, looking back at them later, there's not a whole lot of difference between pages produced in the Special Place, in the Depressing Place, and in the Good Place where every line you lay down is utterly correct.

[identity profile] selenite.livejournal.com 2007-04-11 04:54 am (UTC)(link)
My g'g'grandfather served in the Civil War, got shot, and went back to fight for the remainder of the war. Pretty heroic as random ancestors go. 'Course, he was serving in the 142nd New York Infantry so he ain't gonna give me any braggin' rights here.

[identity profile] telophase.livejournal.com 2007-04-11 01:11 pm (UTC)(link)
:D I found out Joseph and Norbert's grandfather Antoine was a pretty big landowner/farmer/rancher, who can be found buying and selling slaves a lot in the records. It was more of a shock to me that my family was prosperous enough to do that than that they dealt in slaves, due to the time and place. Antoine was also a well-known traiteur, a folk/faith healer, who apparently specialized in treating slaves who were very sick or badly injured - I've run across records of people who owed him money for that.

He also had two wives (not simultaneously :D) and around 22 children. I'm not sure where he found the time. I'm descended from the second marriage - the first one seems to have been where he married well, and where all the Folses in Louisiana today who are interested in genealogy descended from, because all the family trees online that I can find split from mine right there.

[identity profile] riot-o-curls.livejournal.com 2007-04-11 05:26 am (UTC)(link)
highly recommend you getting saiyuki reload 7 'cause it's teh sh**.

[identity profile] telophase.livejournal.com 2007-04-11 01:13 pm (UTC)(link)
Cool. :D
snarp: small cute androgynous android crossing arms and looking very serious (Default)

[personal profile] snarp 2007-04-11 08:32 am (UTC)(link)
The "Am ok with that"'s in this post are very soothing for horrible caffeine jitters at 4:30 AM; I thank you for your apathy. My flist is being much more cooperative about this tonight than it was Monday, when everyone was just writing about outer-space-apocalypses and breaking things.

[identity profile] telophase.livejournal.com 2007-04-11 01:02 pm (UTC)(link)
My entire friendslist is breaking out in babies at the moment.

[identity profile] rayechu.livejournal.com 2007-04-11 12:16 pm (UTC)(link)
Cool. I didn't know anything about the book before but that seems to be right up my alley. Thank you for linking.

[identity profile] telophase.livejournal.com 2007-04-11 01:05 pm (UTC)(link)
:) I've been wanting a ... I don't want to call it "generic", but something with the standard trappings of fantasy, only with characters I like who don't do really stupid things in the service of the plot. And this delivered, kept me reading, and left me wanting more. :) It's pretty much mail-order only: I don't think Sofawolf gets much distribution outside of their own website. You can get [livejournal.com profile] ursulav's collections of her webcomic on Amazon.com, but not this book yet.

[identity profile] rayechu.livejournal.com 2007-04-11 09:37 pm (UTC)(link)
Our library is one of the best in the country and it didn't fail me this morning when I ordered a copy. It should be here in less than a week. If I was totally broke this month I would just order a copy for myself, but I owe my parents too much money to pretty much buy anything for myself for a few paychecks.

[identity profile] telophase.livejournal.com 2007-04-11 09:40 pm (UTC)(link)
Sweet! And this way, once you finish it, it should be available to introduce other people to it. :)
ext_99196: (yaay teamwork)

[identity profile] celestriad.livejournal.com 2007-04-11 01:40 pm (UTC)(link)
omg, i can't believe i forgot that saiyuki reload 7 came out yesterday! o.o;

[identity profile] vom-marlowe.livejournal.com 2007-04-11 02:50 pm (UTC)(link)
I kind of like that Special Place. It's restful. I get stuff done with so much less emo. Course, it's not as cool as the Awesome Place, where I care and the art goes perfect, but you can't have everything and it beats the snot out of I care and the art sucks.

[identity profile] rachelmanija.livejournal.com 2007-04-11 05:09 pm (UTC)(link)
Hey, let me know when you start Part II, because I will go back to my original plan and start posting chapter-by-chapter updates, and then there will be at least one person who is following along!

[identity profile] telophase.livejournal.com 2007-04-11 05:33 pm (UTC)(link)
It should be in the next day or two, depending on when I finish the last 30 pages of part I. :D I was originally going to do that during the part of lunch that was not occupied by purchasing Saiyuki Reload, but ended up getting taken to lunch by a coworker instead. (Will leave 30 min early to go by the bookstore instead. XD)

And please, please tell me that when my head hurts like it does now because I didn't get enough sleep, that it's OK to cut short the evening and go to bed early to abort a migraine, because if I don't, I'll be useless for inking for two nights instead of one. Aarg. This whole "being a night person" thing rather sucks.

[identity profile] heyoka.livejournal.com 2007-04-11 08:30 pm (UTC)(link)
*whiiiines* Need Reload 7!

[identity profile] kungfufighting.livejournal.com 2007-04-13 01:33 am (UTC)(link)
Ahh, the Special Place. This is quite familiar. I'm the writer in a two-person comic team, and because we do chapters of our pirate manga at about 20 pages a go, I'm used to my artist drawing everything, loving everything, then getting through about 9 pages of inking before she calls me and informs me that everything she's done is complete, utter crap.

You could set your watch by her artist mood swings. Seriously. ^-^

I suppose it's just payback, though, for all the times I've made script changes unnecessarily, added lines, and covered up parts of her work that she really loved with hugeass word bubbles so all my wonderful words can fit.

[identity profile] telophase.livejournal.com 2007-04-13 01:54 am (UTC)(link)
Ah, yes, you understand. XD You may need to reassure [livejournal.com profile] rachelmanija that it doesn't mean I'm about to rip everything up and go screaming off into the distance, never to be heard from again. This will be our third story and fourth project together, and I don't think she's quite got used to this type of artist angst. :D