Yet Another Blogging Hiatus *Sigh*

I'm staying in a hotel this week and moving to Florida this weekend. I won't be blogging again until I get a good internet connection. Slow internet drives me crazy. I'll try to be back in two weeks. It depends on the cable and internet company.

Sorry.

Giveaway: Live a Life You Love by Susan Biali, M.D.

I rarely read memoirs, but when I was offered a book entitled Live a Live You Love by a woman who quit her Emergency Medicine residency to become a writer, you know why I wanted to read it. I wanted to hear her story. I wanted to see how she made it through. When I received the book in the mail and saw the subtitle, I thought, "Dammit, I don't read self-help!"

If Live A Life You Love were an honest memoir, it would have been interesting. Instead she glosses over her decision to leave medicine and makes her life after medicine seem easy and carefree.

She also offers some very classic self-help tripe. Raych from books i done read has already reviewed Live a Life You Love.

In the interested of keeping my book collection to a minimum and passing along books to people who might actually enjoy them, I'm giving away my pristine copy of Live a Life You Love. This book is so not the kind of book normally seen on my blog, so if you're on Twitter, tweet about this give-away.

Contest Rules:

1. Leave a way to contact you in the comments.
2. Tell me why you want the book.
3. Be in the US. (Sorry, I'm unemployed and trying to save money.
4. You have a week to enter.

FreeVerse: "Community Creatures" by Adam Rulli-Gibbs

I don't think any poem I post for FreeVerse will beat last week's. This week I searched teh internets for "fantasy poetry" and found the website of Adam Rulli-Gibbs. The site, Fantastic Poems, is devoted to his SF/F poetry. He says that he prefers funny and narrative poetry like I do. I thought the blogging community would especially enjoy this one.

Community Creatures

by Adam Rulli-Gibbs

A colony of bloggers secure in their topic

ranging in size from massive to microscopic.

The lesser ones surround and support the great

who set the direction for the others to debate.

A flock of forums grazing on knowledge

their shepherds guiding them to fresh foliage.

Free to chew the cud and relax within their walls

trusting the guardians to banish the jackals.

A hydra, a multi-headed oracle, it must be a wiki

tackling all problems from the simple to the tricky.

The multiple heads give it so much knowledge you see.

The only problem is... they do not always agree.

A mob of social bookmarkers, much like meerkats

take turns looking out and deciding what's good to peer at.

Hoping none of the sentinels is actually a pretender

directing them all according to their own agenda.

In the distance, a herd of social networkers

dashing all over the place. There's no room for shirkers.

Without any shepherds they all, every day,

have a role to play in keeping predators at bay.

©Adam Rulli-Gibbs 2007

Remember to only post permalinks in Mr. Linky!

Announcements, announcements, annou-ouncements!

The winners of the 2009 Nebula Awards were announced this weekend. Of the short-listed books, I've read three and reviewed two.

The nominees for best novel were The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, Boneshaker by Cherie Priest, The City  & the City by China Miéville, The Love We Share Without Knowing by Christopher Barzak, Flesh and Fire by Laura Anne Gilman, and Finch by Jeff VanderMeer. From the book cover I chose from this post, I bet you can guess which book won.

Flesh and Fire is the first in a fantasy trilogy, and I'll definitely be reading it (hopefully pretty soon). I have read The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, Boneshaker by Cherie Priest, The City  & the City by China Miéville—the three that were also short-listed for the Hugo Awards to be announced at AussieCon 4 September 2-6, 2010.

You can read my review of The Windup Girl and my review of The City & the City. Sorry that I didn't review Boneshaker. I will take this space to recommend it unequivocally even to those who aren't into steam punk. Boneshaker has alternate history that's well thought through. More importantly, Boneshaker is about a mother's love for her son and includes great backstory.

The Windup Girl is brilliant, but I found it to be the least enjoyable of the three. I had difficulty connecting to and caring about the characters. In a tweet conversation with @paolobacigalupi, he told me that his readers seem split down the middle—about half love the characters while the other half have a similar reaction to mine.

I do plan to read the other three novels on the Hugo Awards short list—Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America by Robert Charles Wilson, Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente, and Wake by Robert J. Sawyer (even though I'm definitely not a Robert J. Sawyer fan)—and reviewing them. Thanks be to God that I have until September. My reading and reviewing have definitely slowed down.

I most recently read The Mortal Instruments trilogy by Cassandra Clare. I've been putting off the review for almost a week now, but hopefully I'll get it up soon.

So what have I been doing that's been keeping me from reading?

I'm moving to Florida soon and have been trying to tie up my life in Northern Virginia. I've also had bursts of creative energy lately. Unfortunately, those bursts of creativity haven't added any words to my manuscript. Instead, I've designed a built in banquet and a built in desk for my mother's new kitchen/family room, I made myself a rosary (they're super in style right now) and made a beaded bracelet for my best friend (she finishes her bachelor's degree at the end of the month). Want to see pictures of my latest jewelry creations? Of course you do. Really.

The best thing about making your own jewelry is that it is more of an expression of your personality than anything you can buy in a store. Note the lack of crucifix and saint on my new rosary.