Bad Writing and Good Writing

I finally gave up trying to read Empress by Karen Miller. The writing was compelling for most of the book, but I never cared about any of the characters. I finally stopped about 20 pages from the end.

Also today, we had a pre-field meeting for some drilling we'll be doing next week. Our staff geologist from Japan was going down our checklist, and I noted something interesting about her notepad. While she was taking notes on tasks required of her for after the meeting in English, I noticed that the notes on the folded over pages were in Japanese. It just tickled me that she was doing that. It's like a totally different form of shorthand.

Well, that's over with...

The Holidays are over.

My time game-mastering is over for a while.

I'll likely have no field work until February.

This is a real lull.

I do have a lot of books set to read, because of course books come from the library in swarms.

The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman

Living with the Dead - Kelley Armstrong

Empress - Karen Miller

The first is an easy choice, Neil is always good. The second is a continuation of Armstrong's "Women of the Otherworld" series. The third was a referral I got from some webpage or another. It's an alternate world where the land masses are the same, but the names and events are different. We'll see.