Next on the pile of books I’ve collected over the past few months, and been unable to read, was Jasper Forde’s The Last Dragonslayer. I’ve always liked Fforde’s quirky style and prose, and when I heard that he had done the leap from his very successful (and wonderfully imaginative) series The Thursday Next Chronicles, and into Young Adult Fiction, I knew had to read it.
In The Last Dragonslayer, 15 year old Jennifer Strange manages a contracting firm full of wizards in the unUnited Kingdom of Hereford. Wizardry, for various reasons, is slowly losing its, um, charm, and the few practicing wizards who remain, are a rather odd bunch who can, on a good day, barely manage a simple spell to replace the wiring in a house. But when these wizards begin to experience a little extra juice in their spells, and a soothsayer makes a very specific prediction, Jennifer’s life becomes all the more, um, strange.
If you like odd books, full of puns and allusions to the impractical, you’ll love The Last Dragonslayer. If you like ordinary books, and have trouble letting go and enjoying this book, it may confound you. I’ve read many of Fforde’s previous works, but even then it took me a couple of chapters to make the switch to get in the ‘Fforde mode’. Suspend your disbelief. Throw out your expectations for a normal book. This book is odd. But it’s laugh-out-loud funny at times, and very good.
To say this is a YA book greatly cheats adults out of an enjoyable reading experience. Actually, I suspect that many of the jokes in here would go over the head of the average teenager. They’ll probably go over the head of the average adult reader as well. But if you like British wit at its best, pick this book up. At just 290 or so pages, and lots of fast moving dialog, it’s a quick read for a rainy day. Curl up in your favorite chair with a good, hot toddy, and enjoy.
It was quite the battle, but I think the candy won.
Apparently, the weather on the west coast is jealous of all the attention Sandy is generating for the east coast. It’s decided to drop a few million gallons from the skies over the Pacific Northwest, thanks to the Pineapple Express.
But just a couple of minutes before the skies opened up, I grabbed this shot of my favorite tree in the backyard. It’s positively luminescent against the darkening skies to the southwest.
Last year I read, and thoroughly enjoyed Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel Ship Breaker. It set a new standard for YA Fiction for me, and raised the bar for my own writing.
The Drowned Cities is the second book set in the world we crawled into in Ship Breaker. Global warming has inundated the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. The cities are under water, and home to the militias that still fight to restore their version of America, though it’s unlikely any of them actually remember what America was.
In this world, every meal may be your last, and generosity expects quid pro quo. When Mahlia—a young girl, cast off by retreating Chinese Peace Keepers—and Mouse, a boy who survives on his own wits, stumble across a genetically engineered super-soldier, their generosity, and their will to survive, is put to the test.
This is one of those books that ends up in your jacket pocket when you take your kids somewhere, just in case you get a few seconds to read—you don’t want to leave it alone. At home, you plop yourself down in your favorite chair, and time just flies. It moves fast. Every character is perfect, but flawed in some way. The scenes are drawn with an artist’s brush, and the chapters shift points of view and flow into the next, until you suddenly find yourself done, and wishing for more.
While this is science fiction, numerous times during the book, I realized that many of the scenes were likely inspired by the evening news. You only have to look at recent events in Rwanda and Darfur to see the kind of horrors illustrated in The Drowned Cities. While you may personally believe that could never happen in America, Bacigalupi makes an excellent argument through his tale that the difference between places like Darfur and America could just be twenty or thirty extra meters of water. The only question is, how long would it take to descend into anarchy, not whether or not it could happen.
If I have any criticism of the book, it’s a nitpicky one. Since I just finished back-to-back edits of my books, looking for passive verbs, every one of them now jumps out at me, and there were a few in this novel. But I also began to wonder if eliminating all passive sentences isn’t overkill. I mean, while Strunk and White say to cut and chop them all out, it is a valid sentence structure. Should it set off the alarm klaxons it does for me, or am I just being over sensitive?
Overall though, this was a great book. If you love reading YA Fiction or Post-Apocalyptic Fiction or Science Fiction, I think you’ll love The Drowned Cities.
Yesterday, my kids’ class took a trip to a pumpkin patch. My mom (who is in town for a few days) and I, tagged along. I couldn’t walk very far, but I did get a few before and after pictures, on a very rainy afternoon.
After the outing, we returned home, heated up some apple cider, made some popcorn, and watched a movie.
Not a bad way to spend a Friday afternoon.
Today, I am proud (and a little nervous) to announce that I have joined the ranks of the “small business owners”, with the launch of Devscape Consulting, LLC. Devscape Consulting will provide technical writing and software development consulting services to clients looking for assistance a few hours per week, or per month, or as needed.
For details on what we do at Devscape Consulting, I ask you to take a look at the new website. This will probably be the last time I ever mention Devscape Consulting here, as I will be very strict about keeping my blog and my business separate, but I thought I would answer a few quick questions before I split my personality.
Q: Why the name Devscape?
A: I have previously blogged at http://devscape.blogspot.com and the Devscape name was not yet in use by anyone I could find within Washington State. I once thought of “Devscape” as representing the whole landscape of software development—from requirements gathering to project management to software development to testing to documentation, and that pretty much represents what I plan to continue to do going forward.
Q: Don’t you already have a day job?
A: Actually, right now, I’m not employed full time. While there is a likelihood that I will, at some time in the future resume working full time, I have been presented with some part-time and freelance opportunities that fit very well into my life. That work will be done under the Devscape Consulting, LLC moniker.
Q: Was it hard / expensive to set up a consulting business in Washington State?
A: It was probably a bit more expensive than I thought it would be. I set it up as an LLC to protect my personal assets should someone sue me for some reason down the road. I consulted with a lawyer to better understand the forms I needed to fill out, and an accountant as well to understand the tax implications. By the time I get everything done to set up the infrastructure, including business license, miscellaneous government fees, attorney’s fees, accountant fees, domain name, business cards, etc., I think it will have cost somewhere around $400. It’s significantly cheaper if you set up a Sole Proprietorship, but I wanted the liability protection of an LLC. I also looked at an S-Corp, but that was far more complex than I need.
Q: Are you hiring?
A: No, not at this time. My wife may also do some work under the Devscape Consulting name in the future, but I have no plans to grow Devscape Consulting into an empire, unless empire building is a lot easier than it seems. Adding payroll functions to my life is not a complexity I want to deal with right now.
Q: How does this affect your novel writing?
A: It doesn’t, except that as I do more technical writing, I should become a better writer, and that will allow me to either be more prolific or more efficient when I write my books.
Q: Are you looking for new clients?
A: Absolutely. Please check out the contact me form at www.devscapeconsulting.com/contact and let me know you are interested.
Fall is my favorite season for many reasons—one of which is the tree in our backyard turns a lovely shade of red.
And on a completely different arboreal note, last winter, we had a massive ice storm that just devastated the trees around here, in particular, a Japanese Maple in front of our house.
But with a little pruning, trees can be rather miraculous healers. This is what that poor little tree looks like today. It’s not the prettiest tree, but it is a survivor.
Recently, it has come to my attention that I have been missing out on some great music by the wonderfully talented, Emm Gryner. I should have known about Emm, since I rode the school bus with her and her brothers Tony and Frank to grade school every day for years. But, for some reason, I lost track of many of my elementary school classmates until very recently. Turns out that Emm has just released her greatest hits album The Best of Emm Gryner (which I just downloaded from iTunes for the bargain price of $9.99 US).
But she also has a brand new band called Trent Severn which will release it’s first album November 6th, just in time to distract us all from the US Presidential Election nonsense.
Here is their first single – Snowy Soul, and I think it’s awesome!
Enjoy!
Joe Beernink 