She liked to give me money

Written on my little break:

-- 13 1o 2oo3
I'm walking down the hill from my Nan's when I receive a text from my brother, correcting me on a small misquote of a Darkness song on this page. Now normally you can go long stretches of time without hearing from him. Texts from him telling you when he's off work (so you can phone him and be sure he's free to talk) or telling you how he's getting on are few and far between, yet misquote a lyric from a song he likes and he can't get to his mobile phone fast enough.
Never mind the fact that what I wrote was actually what we, in our ignorance, were singing :)

-- 13 1o 2oo3
My dad and step-mother have gone on holiday, and I sit at the kitchen table, listening to Queen's Under Pressure and drinking tea. I'm trying to write, but Cookie, one of the manor's two cats, keeps sitting on the paper. I've told him he's not helping the process, but he's not listening.

-- 14 1o 2oo3
That's got to be the shortest holiday in the history of my family. My parent's are coming home early, only a day after they left. So much for peace and quiet.
I've finished revising Curiosity, so I'll be able to type up those changes when I get back to Swin. I'm going to see if I can work on something else before my parents get back and start making noise.

-- 16 1o 2oo3
I don't have a computer down here, so I resort to working on Eclipse, the story I've resolved to write by hand. Worked out a few details of plot and it looks like it will require nine stories in total.
Oh, and these quarterly reports I mentioned have actually been drafted. I'm a little scared :)

-- 17 1o 2oo3
Coke, not wishing to be outdone by Cookie, spends quarter of an hour batting the end of my pen as I write. He is responsive to my polite requests to stop as the other cat was.

She liked to plot

Legends of the Riftwar: Murder in LaMut by Raymond E. Feist and Joel Rosenberg.

I never really got into this book until about fifty pages from the end, and even then I don't think I really connected with any of the protagonists. The story centres around three mercenaries, long term companions whom I gather have been transplanted from Rosenberg's world into Feist's. They take a bit of bodyguarding duty after months of garrison duty, and gradually get drawn, much to their displeasure, into the politics of Yabon province (and the greater politics of the Kingdom of the Isles, that you'll probably only be familiar with if you've read Feist's Riftwar Saga).

I think one of the problems with this book is that it takes so long for it to really go anywhere. It's a long time before anytihng happens and you can begin to see where the plot is going. The three protagonists are reluctant to get involved in the politics of the earldom, and I was much in the same mindset. If I had wanted to get embroiled in all of that again, I would have reread Magician.

I'm going to stay away from the other collaborations unless there's nothing else on my list to read. These additions to the Riftwar Saga don't actually seem to add anything.

Later . . .