Sillybean

Ice cream

I’ve been making a lot of ice cream lately. Thanks to my friend Shaima, I’ve become a fan of David Lebovitz’s blog, and when the weather turned hot I finally broke down and bought his ice cream cookbook.

Holy crap, y’all. This man knows how to make ice cream.

So far we’ve made vanilla, chocolate, chocolate [...]

in lieu of a personal update, book reviews

Lots of big stuff going on in friends’ lives. It’s been a really crazy week, but I don’t feel that I can divulge their personal business to the internets, so I’m going to blather about books for a while. Between doctor’s visits (nothing big, just lots of little things: the annoying return of the cysts [...]

Amazon: staffed by hypocritical jackasses

Not five minutes after posting a quick word about #amazonfail, I skimmed my home page to see what I’d linked to lately, just out of curiosity, and visited the onion goggles from the Castle post.

What’s that category linked right at the top of the Health & Personal Care category? Sexual Wellness? That can’t be [...]

Changing Publishing

Can we put Michael Tamblyn in charge of US publishing? All of it? Like, right now?

Some highlights from his presentation, 6 Projects That Could Change Publishing for the Better:

DRM is the biggest problem with ebook readers. Not digital rights management, but date repulsion mode. The physical objects are not attractive! On Tamblyn’s scale of things [...]

Vorkosigan discussions on Tor.com

Jo Walton is posting about each Vorkosigan novel over on Tor.com, and there are now some illuminating remarks from Lois McMaster Bujold in the comments. (You might recall that I was in transports over this series when I discovered it last fall.) Here’s an index so far, since the first one didn’t get tagged with [...]

Improving IndieBound

Earlier this week there was a post on The Written Nerd about IndieBound (formerly BookSense), inviting booksellers and bloggers to share ideas on how it could better serve independent bookstores. I’m writing to the marketing person, but I thought I’d ping you guys for additional ideas first.1

As you know, Bob, I design websites for authors. [...]

Break it to me gently

I’ve just zipped through the Dresden Files series at a pretty spectacular clip. I’d meant to do it before Jim Butcher appeared at ConDFW, but, y’know. Life.

So. Exactly how bad was the TV series?

(ETA: pretty bad.)

Book reviews: The Agency, Beguilement

The Agency, by Ally O’Brien

What a snarky, raunchy, sharp romp of a book. It’s the story of a woman who works in a big London agency. Her biggest client is a somewhat dotty old lady who writes brick-thick environmentalist children’s books starring pandas, but her favorite client is a starving, strung-out SF author whose mind-blowing [...]

2008 reading list

I had a very quiet New Year’s. Allergies have been kicking my ass all week and I’m barely starting to feel human again, so I’m going to ramble at you about books for a while.

For the last four years or so I’ve made an effort to read more new fiction. I’d noticed that I was [...]

Miles and Miles and Miles

The reason I haven’t posted in a couple weeks? After kicking the cold I came home with, I started physical therapy for my ongoing neck and shoulder problems. (Turns out the muscles in my back are knotted up like strands of pearls. Not good.) The therapy is working, but it hurts to type afterward. And [...]

Mercy movies?

Of all the recent werewolf/vampire/etc. series, Patricia Briggs’s is the last one I would have picked to be optioned for movies, since it’s perhaps the least fluffy.

I’m just having trouble picturing this. Peanut gallery, what say you?

Ubiquity command for BookMooch

A couple of weeks ago I posted about Ubiquity, a new Firefox extension. Today I wrote my first command for it: mooch, which will search BookMooch for selected text on a page (or whatever you type in). If you’re using Ubiquity, you can now add the command to your installation. Enjoy! And please tell me [...]

Vicky Bliss PSA

Laughter of Dead Kings, the new Vicky Bliss mystery, is out this week.

Back to work. Frantically busy. First week of school. GAH.

Olympic stuff

How much do I love Shawn Johnson for using the August Rush soundtrack (”August’s Rhapsody”) for her floor exercise music? Lots and lots and lots.

And then they had to spend ten minutes on Bush. Who can’t even pronounce the names of the world leaders he’s been talking to, much less “Ossetia.” Melanie Rawn fans [...]

Crack for English majors, Elizabethan edition: Ink and Steel

I am madly in love with a book (other than the one I’m writing): Elizabeth Bear’s Ink and Steel. It’s actually the first half of what was once one long book; here’s the other half. I’m doling it out to myself in very small portions, lest I get drunk on Elizabethan dialogue and lit geek [...]