Dressmaker, Dressmaker, Make Me a Dress

Or make me a costume, more accurately.  I'm super stoked for my Halloween costume idea.  I'm going to be a peacock, but a vaguely burlesque/old west dance hall girl peacock.  I bought an old wedding dress and am going to cover it in blue satin, then pull it up into a sort of bustle to be the base of a tail I'm going to make out of layers of satin & sheer mesh fabric.  I might even go crazy and put the "eyes" on the tail with sequins.  I've also bought a tiny little cap and some feathers to make the little crest that peacocks have.  Guuuuh.  It looks so awesome in my head.  Of course, I don't ACTUALLY know how to sew, so it's going to be a crap shoot, but I'm crossing my fingers because I'm super in love with the idea already.  Now if only I could find a dressmaker's dummy, it's kinda hard to sew a dress WHILE you're wearing it...

Joooooooooy!

I shouldn't be this excited about a shirt.

BUT I AM!!!  My T.A.R.D.I.S shirt is heeeere!  Bless you, Threadless.

Several Weeks, Several Things

• Boating to happy hour with friends on a PERFECT evening.
• Babysitting a toddler was really fun.  The zoo was quite an excursion.  Children are filthy little creatures and now I'm sick.  Hooray.
• Wild Waves for the first time - water slides, sun, roller coasters, soft serve and Icees.
• Chiropractors are awesome.  It's very satisfying to have your spine snapped around, and I need it - apparently my spine is all kindsa wonky.
• Attempts at challa bread from the food processor.  Attempt 1: fail.  Attempt 2: success.  I've never had much of a desire to bake, but something about bread is so very, very appealing.
• The carrots in my garden are crazy huge, I must eat them soon.
• The tomatoes are finally starting to ripen, maybe one a day.  I've eaten a few and they're ridiculously sweet.  I forgot how AMAZING tomatoes straight from the vine are - you can taste the sun.
• Bookcase Debacle: black stain is VERY unpredictable.  Disappointed with the results, so I've sanded & primed it, now I'll try PAINTING it black.  The roomie said it will be the most impervious bookcase: pre-stain, two coats of stain, a primer, and then 1 or 2 coats of black paint.  It will last through the apocalypse.  It better work or I'm gonna burn that mother to the ground.
• CraftFest2011!!! Kara and Yo are coming to Seattle THIS WEEK! I will see them THIS WEEK!  And we will craft.  And we will eat.  And we will be awesome.

Dream Big

I've been fantasizing about buying a hot glue gun.  

Work is boring today.

Graveminder, Schraveminder

A new installment in my infrequent yet verbose series of disappointed book complaints reviews. Maybe someday I'll learn to be positive.  Maybe.

In an idyllic small town, the Graveminder tends the funerals and graves of the dead to make sure they "sleep well and stay where I put you".  When the Graveminder is killed, her granddaughter comes home and finds out that the position is now hers and she has to deal with the restless, hungry dead. Awesome, right!?  I was hoping Melissa Marr's Graveminder would be a sort of magical Our Town with zombies.  No. Such. Luck.  There was so much potential to dig into a unique lifestyle, lore and community and instead I felt like I'd been tricked into reading a bland relationship drama with a promising but dully written background.    

PROBLEMS

Who Cares if Rebbekah and Byron Get Their Romantic S@$* Together?

Frankly, my dear, I didn't give a damn.  I thought a huge amount of space was wasted detailing the main characters' past, present and possibly future relationship.   Marr starts to explore an interesting, created mythology only to shove it to the back burner so we can listen to her whitter on about how frustrating it is that Rebbekah just can't LOVE.  Guess what, Melissa?  It was frustrating for me, too.

Maybe Their Love Is Boring Because They're The Same Person?

Poor Byron, his story arc is the exact same as Rebbekah's: finding out your older relative's weird ass mystery title has been passed on to you.  So the "holy shit, what am I!?" shock/learning/readjustment process is uselessly doubled - his "different" perspective didn't feel interesting or useful, just extra.  I would have been perfectly happy if his character had been cut out entirely.

The Land of the Dead is Lame

The Graveminder can go between the worlds of the living and the dead.  The Land of the dead is  full of mixed up time periods, weapons, violence, death, commerce, dinner, intrigue, sex, a handsome and charismatic leader named Charles, and we're told it's so beautiful and overwhelming to the Graveminders that they sometimes forsake the world of the living.  And yet I found every scene set there to be frustrating and boring as hell.  I never got a sense of why it's so great for the Graveminders other than I'm told it is and that it's...colorful?  Flowers...feel nicer? And all the other bits just created a LOT of (unanswered) questions for me. I could tell I was SUPPOSED to find the LotD interesting, but it just wasn't the case.

SUMMARY: TOO.  F-ING.  MUCH

There was a LOT going on and a LOT of people saying it and there really didn't need to be (I can remember at least 7 POV's).  Who or what were we supposed to spend time with?  If you're flitting from story to story, person to person, the reader can never invest in anyone or anything.  If your novel is about Graveminders through time, go ahead and introduce a lot of characters/settings/stories, we're expecting an overview.  If your novel is a thousand pages long, go nuts jumping around.  If you're writing the story of a single Graveminder and it's just 300ish pages, then I think you've got a lot less leeway.   Stick with Rebbekah, she's the frickin' Graveminder.  If you absolutely MUST have a romance (siiiigh), cut the years-of-pining crap.Finally, forget the Land of the Dead; Rebbekah can settle the dead without having to physically go on a day tour and meet-n-greet of the place.  It's OKAY to leave some things to the imagination, it really is.  I promise. Marr wanted to put so much in as an author that I got very little out as a reader.

Maybe it's just me.  Maybe she's the best writer in the world and this really is the "dreamy" "creepy" "gothic" "romance" that everyone's gushing about and I'm just a whiny little creep, but I was badly disappointed by this detail-heavy yet weirdly uninteresting book.

Lest you think I'm an interminable grump, LOOK, I like books. I've liked these books this year!  Neverwhere! The Passage! Touch! The Eagle of the 9th! The Help! Bloodroot!

Things I Read 'N' Things I Thought 2011: Part 1

I think it's time for Part 1 of my 2011 Things I Read 'N' Things I Thought post.  See 2009 here, 2010 Part 1 here, and  Part 2 here.  Does this make it a tradition?  I'm going to pretend.  It does.  Hooray for me - I'm traditional!

1. The Amaranth Enchantment by Julie Berry -  Do you ever read a book and then, shortly thereafter, forget completely what it was about?  Boom.
2. Beasts of Burden (Vol. 1) by Evan Dorkin - Dogs (and cat) fight the supernatural.  Good illustrations. Entertaining but not mind-blowing. 
3. Black Beauty by Anna Sewell - Be nice to horses.
4. Bloodroot by Amy Greene - Appalachia. Very lovely.  Very sad.
5. Bumped by Megan McCafferty - Teens "pregging" for profit in a no-one-over-18-is-fertile future.  Kinda irritating at first, but all the lingo kinda grew on me.  Not un-likeable.
6. Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein - Fairy tales aren't evil, but turning "princess" into a merchandizing behemoth that adds another layer to a world of warped cultural messages aimed at girls just might be.
7. Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susana Vreeland - Stained glass is totally bitchin'.  Women are awesome.
8. Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier - Retelling (reimagining?) of The Six Swans.  First half of the novel: awesome. 2nd half: okay.  Summary claimed she was kidnapped by enemies, turns out she just sort of fell in with them.  Slightly less dramatic that way.
9. Divergent by Veronica Roth - In future-Chicago you can supposedly only be one thing and must live with people exactly like you: brave (Dauntless), honest (Candor), happy (Amity), selfless (Abnegation) or smart (Erudite). I'm all over Amity - they play banjos.
10. Duma Key by Stephen King - Art is going to kill your loved ones.  Dolls are scary.
11. The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff - I liked it SO MUCH. I wanna go off and have super sweet bro adventures in ancient-y times!
12. The False Princess by Eilis O'Neal - Inoffensive. Princesses. Some stuff. 
13. The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan - Zombies own the world.  There is one compound of humans left All is not as it seems.  Things go horribly wrong.  As usual, an obnoxious love triangle...damn you, YA fiction.
14. The Foretelling by Alice Hoffman - Amazon warriors are kind of badass.
15. The Help by Kathryn Stockett - Extremely engaging.  Read it in 2 sittings.  They're making a movie.  We'll see what that's like.
16. The High King's Tomb; Blackveil (Green Rider Books 3 & 4) by Kristen Britain - I wish I rode a super smart horse and had magical powers.
17. Invincible (Vols. 3-5) by Robert Kirkman - Still rad.
18. Locke & Key (Vol. 3) by Joe Hill - Also still rad.
19. The Lost Saint (Dark Divine #2) by Bree Despain - Even more boring than the first one.  EXCEPT someone gets stuck in wolf form and can't change back.  That kinda made me smile (but I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a bad thing in the book...).
20. Mermaid: A Twist on the Classic Tale by Carolyn Turgeon - Admit it, it's obnoxious how the Little Mermaid gives up everything for a boy she's seen once.  Carolyn Turgeon expands on why the mermaid loves him and the human world and it almost makes sense! Beautiful descriptions of the undersea world.  Damnit, why am I not a mermaid?  
21. My Life In France by Julia Child - I will travel back in time and move to France and be Julia's best friend.  We will be tall and loud and eat together.
22. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman - My GOD, but does Gaiman's use of language make me wish I were British.
23. The Passage by Justin Cronin - A pretty darn entertaining post-vampire-apocalypse story.  Can't help but wonder just how long canned goods and clothing really remain usable.
24. Plague (Gone Series, Book 4) by Michael Grant - My gosh, WHY is it so fun to read about horrible things happening to children and teenagers?  Also, the plague had very little to do with this story - disappointment.
25. The Raging Quiet by Sherryl Jordan - Sign language is NOT of the devil, I swear. Also, people are horrible.
26. Red Garden by Alice Hoffman - As usual, very well written.  A quick, pleasant read.
27. Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley - Beauty and the Beast retelling.  Meh.
28. Secondhand Charm by Julie Berry - Inexplicable, essentially useless "I'm magically bonded to a sea serpent!" story line tacked onto your basic small-town-girl-is-more-powerful-than-you-think-and-saves-the-kingdom plot. It could have lifted right out with no trouble - I felt like I was reading two books at once and just getting them confused with each other.  While trying to develop a mythology around the "Serpentinas" (pardon my eye-roll), she forgot to develop the kingdom in peril plot into anything even remotely tense or weighty.  Aren't coups sort of important? Maybe she should haveOH LOOK!  A SPECIAL GIRL WITH A SPECIAL SEA SERPENT FRIEND! SQUEEEE!
29. Small Acts of Amazing Courage by Gloria Whelan - Young British girl in colonial India learns that people shouldn't be stomped all over no matter what your dashing military father or terrifyingly stingy aunt might say.
30. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell - SpecTACular word-smithing! Relatively interesting but strangely detached characters!  The regular world is a fascinating but horrible place full of off-putting people!  Sudden child molestation! 
31. Touch by Alexi Zentner - An amazing Canadian-family-ghost-history-monster-small-town-fiction story about loss, connection and the presence and power of the past in our lives.
32. The Uncertain Places by Lisa Goldstein - Fairy tales are real and can make you both lucky AND unhappy!  Also, hippies.
33. The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown - I want to live in a small town with my family and read and bake bread all day.  But I will skip the cancer, embezzlement, extramarital affairs, unplanned pregnancy and self-imposed guilt.
34. War Horse by Michael Morpurgo - For the love of God, BE NICE TO HORSES!  Like Black Beauty but with war. Read it in an afternoon, loved it, went online and instantly became a little obsessed when I found it's already a play with the most BITCHIN' puppets (I want to see it so badly!  I own the amazing soundtrack! It won the Tony for best play!), and has been made into a movie! I'll probably cry like a baby when I see it.
35. What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz - Serial killer ghosts.  God dislikes horrible murders, fights them with time travel.

My goodness, I'm so proud of myself! As of now I've read 92% new stuff.  That's unheard of for me, a lifelong re-reader of books.  

19% General fiction

17% YA fiction

25% Sci fi/fantasy/horror

25% YA sci fi/fantasy/horror

6% Non-fiction

8% comic books

Things Happen

• My pea vines sprouted their first flowers!
• Garlic greens are crazy delicious!
• Mahler's Symphony No. 2 is ridiculously dramatic and entertaining and it's super fun to belt out the last two pages.
• NOT super fun is sitting through the FIRST FOUR MOVEMENTS because the choir doesn't sing until movement 5 but we're on stage the whole time (probably a solid hour).
• I'm intrigued by dreams that seem horrible and frustrating and nerve-wracking while you're dreaming them, but when you wake up, you realize they're ridiculous.  Last night's example: I was late for school and couldn't put my clothes on.  I kept trying and trying but my bra hooks kept unhooking and my shirt and pants kept twisting so I couldn't get them on.  Finally I was dressed and at a choir performance, but I was from an alternate universe and had somehow replaced my double in her vocal jazz quartet.  The guy in the quartet was so attractive I didn't want to tell him I was just a doppelganger, but when it came time to perform I was so terrified by the fact that I didn't know my part that I decided I'd say that I was sick and couldn't go on, and at this point the dream transformed to me camping with my family while vomiting continuously through the entire trip.
• It sort of feels like spring today, which is nice considering summer starts tomorrow. 
• Too much coffee, not enough food.
• Super 8 was an awesome movie.  "Drugs are so bad!!!"
• One of the group of kids from said Super 8 was in a short film about a child genius inventing a time machine and thwarting Nazis.  Watch Ollie Klublershturf vs. the Nazis.  I love him.