Airy Delights
March 5, again
Whee! A nice day. It's so nice to have a nice day. No feeling sick, no lamentably low energy levels (after this morning, anyway), nothing bad.
I'm reading Peter S. Beagle's The Folk of the Air. Karen recommended it to me some time ago. I didn't buy it. I looked for it in the used bookstores, but I didn't go out of my way to acquire it. So last time I saw Karen, she loaned me her copy, saying "This is a Tim Pratt book."
She knows me so well. This is totally a Tim Pratt book-- I love it, and it's the kind of novel I'd like to write. When I saw the cover I was a bit skeptical-- it features a guy with a lute, a guy in a furry shirt and a horned helmet, a bunch of guys in armor... it looked like the sort of High Fantasy stuff I normally run away from at full speed. Not that I'm one to judge a book by its cover, but if the novel was even in the realm of that genre... still, I trust fair Karen's judgment, so I read it.
Imagine my delight at this first sentence: Farrell arrived in Avicenna at four-thirty in the morning, driving a very old Volkswagen bus named Madame Schumann-Heink.
Oh, man. Loveliness. And, as I read on, it becomes clear that the medieval stuff on the cover isn't inappropriate after all-- and that it's interesting to me. It's not a quest-fantasy-goblin-bashing-unicorn-riding Epic at all.
All I've read by Beagle in the past is The Last Unicorn (which is also one of Blah's favorite movies). I appreciated Beagle's out-and-out weirdness in that book, and that weirdness is in evidence here, too, but... it's so much better than that. Maybe just because I love contemporary fantasy best. Beagle's writing is almost flawless, his choice of detail wonderful, the way he gets at fantasy elements through really concrete detail choices... I'm in awe. I've got a good two-thirds of the book left to read, and I'm torn between the desire to devour it and the desire to draw-out the pleasure of this first reading. I say first reading because I expect to re-read it in the future.
Mmm. Thanks, Karen.
Otherwise, tonight I chatted online with Amily for a good little while, which was nice-- I'd felt just a bit starved for human contact, and then she logged on and said "hi." I got my contributor's copies of Asimov's-- the post office managed to bend them up pretty well when they stuffed them into my box, alas. I tried to write a poem and failed, because it wanted to be a story instead and I didn't feel like writing the story. I also made some notes toward the Next Novel... which is going to be lovely. I think I'll start it in earnest after Meg's visit-- in the meantime I'll brainstorm and outline and follow all my weird mental digressions to their (il)logical conclusions. I'll tell you more about the book soon... but I will say that, if I can pull it off, it will be far and away the best thing I've written. Full of joy and darkness and love and wonders, dust and fireballs and underused monsters, comic books and threesomes and caffeine, stars and plastic and chewed cigar stubs. Glory. I'm so excited. I love writing. Writing's the best.
