Stay right where you are

Looks like Yuan Yuan's going to Korea again. She just got back two days ago from a luxury cruise tour there, where her responsibilities included holding onto her clients' passports and doing whatever the hell she wanted. Poor girl can't catch a break. This time she's flying, and it's a sight-seeing tour rather than a shopping tour (the 20 min sight-seeing / 2 hours shopping per site ratio is flipped). I don't see why people book tours at all, when they can just go by themselves or better yet, not at all. Which brings me to my second point. People should just stay where they are. What is the point of seeing places? The places would have to be pretty amazing to offset the annoyance of getting there, coming back, and dealing with housing and overeating issues (going somewhere else makes people think they should eat twice as much as usual). Until teleportation is invented, I'm going to sit tight and hang out in my room, which is already as amazing as a place can get.

I started A Mote in God's Eye today, while running errands. I feel like I'm being forced to get to know the characters before the interesting stuff starts happening. I don't like it. It better start cruising soon.

I finished The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman the other day. It was good, I felt completely immersed in the story. The characters were a tad stereotypical, but the world he created was quite magical. He used one of those cool literary devices that I like a lot in Strugatsky Brothers fiction, which they call "Refusal to Explain," where they don't even try to explain some of the bizarre things that happen. It's a bit of a wild card technique, but when used right it gives the reader this incredible itch that forces him/her to keep reading in hope of getting more clues to the mystery. All in all, quite an itchy book.

All by myself

Yuan Yuan's off on a cruise to Korea (as a tour guide), so I'm left to fend for myself. This is a survival test. Without anyone to tell me when to eat, why to put on clothes and who I can't safely ignore, I feel very dangerous. What if Yuan Yuan's mom comes to visit and no one's there to tell me to open the door? What if zombies attack and I find I have latent zombie-wasting skills and then when Yuan Yuan gets back from Korea I mistake her for a zombie and waste her? What if I accidentally watch an episode of Chuck by myself? If that happens, I may have to go off the grid. These are the questions that plague me.

Meanwhile, Yuan Yuan's 15 stories above sea level, thinking about whether she should get the steak or the lobster. As the opportunities for a free pass on a luxury ocean liner are scare, she's generously forgiven herself in advance for the inevitable breaking of two 30-day trial oaths - no sweets and no meats. She also has no qualms about rubbing it in the faces of the more faithful.

I bought myself yet another sketch pad today, as well as pencils and an eraser, so I'm all set to continue my quest of drawing lopsided things. In the fantasy literature I've been reading lately, the characters are endowed with prodigious art and/or music skills, and sometimes I feel like I might not have what it takes to be a fantasy hero. It's a highly depressing thought. So I'm smoothing out the rough edges - learning to draw, sing, squaredance, whatever it takes.

While zooming around Bejing yesterday, I finished the latest novel (reading, not writing, I only write novels in November). Legend by Marie Lu. It was good. This "good" is especially good since the novel is in the YA dystopian / action hero genre, where it seems every other novel lives these days, since Hunger Games' success. Legend is way better than Hunger Games. It may have some plot holes, which I wouldn't know about as I suspend all disbelief when reading anything with good language, but at least the premise isn't completely retarded.

I'm also done with Daughter of Smoke and Bone. It was pretty good overall, but the overly girly dialogue and ubiquitous mid-conversation thoughts in italics bothered me. I also didn't really dig the whole seraphim / chimaera "forever war," it was a bit silly. If you're going with something that silly, you might as well take it all the way to This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It. Patrick Rothfuss, you can stop wishing you wrote it and finish The Doors of Stone already.