So, here I am, working on finishing “Midwinter.” It’s 150 pages now. I’m writing chapter 11, but I skipped over chapter 10 to get there. I think it’s might actually be 13 chapters long. Or so. I suspect it’s going to be long enough in finished form to edit it properly and publish it as a novella, so we’ll see about that.
The big question: Can Rachel Finish This Story Before January?
Um, probably not, which is annoying. Not dire or anything, just annoying. It’s certainly a lot closer to finished than it was.
Did I mention I wrote a couple chapters of “Sekaran”? I did, so that’s underway, but I’m going to backburner that as I pick up Tano’s next story, read through the part I have sitting here, and get moving on that.
Meanwhile!
I can report that the audiobook of Illuminae is surprisingly good, though you do lose most (not quite all) of the cool text effects — the poetry in the shape of a heart, the text that radiates out from the center like spokes of a bicycle wheel, all the stuff like that. It’s a really well done full-cast production, with some clever (honestly, very clever) ways to handle some of the weird text. Craig got this audiobook from a library to listen to on his drive, and we listened to it while putting together puzzles, with the paper book there to refer to, because we were both curious about how they handled the weird text. As I say, it’s a quite good audiobook, though you do lose a lot of the text effects you get from the paper editions. I don’t know how it looks as an ebook.
Next: re-reading the other two books of the trilogy, because now that I’ve listened to the first book and that’s all fresh in my mind, of course I want to re-read the other two books.
Also, I can confirm that audiobooks work great as an adjunct to putting together a puzzle. No doubt it helps if everybody helping with the puzzle is on board with the choice of audiobook.
Okay! Practically January! Back to work!
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ooh can’t wait for Midwinter! I get the newsletter but in this case, I think I prefer to read the novella all at once. I’m actually re-reading Death’s Lady right now, so we’ll see…
I just borrowed the Illuminae ebook out of the library. I’m pretty sure it preserves all the text effects, though I haven’t done a side by side comparison. That does mean that the text is a bit small on some screens, and page turns sometimes seem to take extra time presumably due to the heavy use of images. I read the first book on my Kindle and phone with no major issues, but found the second was better on my iPad.
My response to the book is mixed. It has a lot of elements that are normally turnoffs for me, and which I still found kind of annoying (e.g., people in the 26th century whose cultural references mostly seem to come from the 20th, protagonists who I’d call “very YA”), but I still found it an incredible page turner.
Mike, the ridiculously overloaded plots would ordinarily ruin a book for me, but in this case, yep, incredible page turners.