Swag Bucks : a review

As a college student (though not for much longer!) I'm always looking for ways to save money. So I mentioned earlier that I had signed up with Swag Bucks, and I thought a post about the results thereof would be in order. Here's a list of the things I've paid for with SB, from May 2011 on.

1. DVD of The Full Monty. I love British comedies, so I've always wanted to watch this.

2. Lynn Price's The Writer's Essential Tackle Box. To join my collection of books on writing and publication. I'll do a review of it later.

3. William Rehder's Where the Money Is. The subtitle of this is "True Tales from the Bank Robbery Capital of the World", and it's by a former FBI agent. It's an incredibly fun read - not only did the information make me feel like an insider on both sides of the law, but the style is breezy and amusing. I especially liked the story of the Hole in the Ground Gang.

4. Barbara Branden's The Passion of Ayn Rand. Talk about a life less ordinary.

How does Swag Bucks work? Basically, you get points awarded (on a random basis) for using Swag Bucks' search engine, and it's possible to win three or more times a day. There are also a set number of points that can be earned daily for voting in a poll, clicking on a toolbar, playing games and so on, plus Swag Bucks gives out daily codes which can be entered for more points. Points can then be traded for gift cards, such as PayPal or Barnes and Noble. I always order the $5 Amazon.ca gift card, and I earn 5 of those a month (it's possible to earn more, but IMO you have to be pretty dedicated for that).

An extra $25/month comes in very handy. Especially since even third-party sellers on Amazon can be paid with gift cards, meaning I can buy some of the out-of-print books I've wanted for years.

So I recommend Swag Bucks as a great way to earn a little extra cash that (for me at least) can only be spent on books and DVDs. Before, I had a list of books I wanted for my collection, but because of my budget I would only cross off one or two every year, usually for Christmas. Now the list is shrinking. I feel thoroughly self-indulgent.

And here's my referral link. :)

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Which keys have you lost?

So two months of writing and editing that had me chained to my computer are over.

There were entire days I didn't leave my apartment, and since I live in a basement I like emerging occasionally, just to remind myself that the World Above still exists. Well, now I'll get more than enough of that, with clinical placement starting in just over a week's time. But I made a self-imposed deadline so I'm pleased about that.

I also noticed that several of the keys on my keyboard are worn away. The O is a semicircle and the I has vanished completely. A, S and T do not exist from the waist down. Both E and H are reduced to a single lonely angle and L is now |.

I mentioned that to a friend who said her Backspace key was worn away. Mine still looks new. Perhaps I should do more editing.

If you've lost any keys, which are they?

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A Dance with Dragons

Contains spoilers for A Dance with Dragons.

Short review : Better than A Feast for Crows, not as good as A Storm of Swords.

Long review : Where to start?

With the good, mostly Jon Snow’s chapters. Developments at the Wall are fascinating, and they tie together well with the return of Roose Bolton plus fake-Arya. Towards the end, though, Jon alienates some of his own men, pens up his direwolf and is then backstabbed by said men - in other words, Robb Stark errors and a Jeor Mormont ending. But at least he’s not likely to be as dead as either of them.

Another interesting character was a complete scum, but he’s captured and maimed by someone even worse. This results in a redemption of sorts and he saves an innocent woman who’s similarly a captive. He’s called Jaime Lannister or Theon Greyjoy, but despite the déjà vu, Theon’s chapters were gripping. His terror and degradation came through vividly, and Ramsay Bolton vies with Joffrey for the Most Hated Character award, though I could have done without the endless “Reek, Reek, it rhymes with…”

Tyrion and Dany fare less well. Tyrion’s chapters are a travelogue wherein he meets many, many people, at least one of whom was previously thought dead. And although he’s heading for Meereen, he doesn’t get to meet Dany.

Though perhaps that’s for the best. Dany was amazing in previous novels, but here she’s trying to recapture all her tweenage years, especially with Daario. She also marries one of the Ghiscari (which means he’s dead meat one way or another), vacillates endlessly about whether to open the fighting pits and takes dozens of hostages whom she cannot bear to harm, so they end up being much safer with her than with their own people. Finally she imprisons two of her dragons because they’re growing wild, which naturally makes them even wilder. Her story does end on a more promising note, though, and I still want to see how she eventually conquers Slaver’s Bay.

Not to mention Westeros, because Cersei’s days as queen there seem to be coming to a well-deserved end. The High Holy Septon makes her pay dearly for what she did… and that’s only the start of her troubles. I don’t think even FrankenGregor (who makes an appearance) can get her out of this.

Minor characters fare as can be expected. Victarion Greyjoy is still en route to Dany, Davos Seaworth is still the universe’s whipping boy and Melisandre is still mistaken. But Wyman Manderly and his pies were shocking and delightful.

All in all, though, there’s no way this series can be concluded in only two more books, not even if Martin tightens the prose to the squeaking-point and every character refrains from their favorite catchphrase forever. There are simply too many characters – for each one killed off, three new walk-ons are introduced and someone else rises from the dead.

And there’s too much description – granted, it’s usually well-written, imaginative description, but it’s only padding the book. In A Storm of Swords, what happened in Tywin Lannister’s privy was a darkly ironic joke that finished the chapter with a snap. In this book, what is achieved by describing the results of Daenerys taking a squat? The story’s realistic enough without all the body fluids.

I’ll still buy The Winds of Winter, but I’m not likely to shell out for a hardcover again. If you've read ADwD, what did you think of it?




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On vacation

Well, a busman's holiday. The draft of During the Fire is going well - I'm on the fifth chapter now - so I'm going to take a hiatus from blogging. I'll be back at the end of July, when Simulated Clinical will be over and hopefully the manuscript will be complete as well. I also have a pile of books to finish, some for reviews, so this will be a chance to dive into them.

Happy writing and blogging to all of you, and enjoy the summer!

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Katie Taylor and "The Dark Griffin"

What I enjoyed the most about Katie Taylor's The Dark Griffin (a 2010 release from Ace) was its gritty worldbuilding, especially regarding the griffins of the title. Eragon this ain't. I'm not surprised her debut novel was nominated for the 2009 Aurealis Award for best fantasy novel. Even better, Katie generously agreed to an interview where she discusses the publication of her book and the world of Cymria.

Tell us a little about your book The Dark Griffin, and what the journey from writing to publication was like.

The Dark Griffin is a dark fantasy story set in a country called Cymria, which I modelled (geographically, anyway) on Tasmania. I suppose if you wanted to categorise it, you could call it a tragedy, or perhaps a revenge story. I'd say it's both. I think the thing that's most interesting about it (and not everyone has picked up on this) is that the protagonist, Arren Cardockson, is actually the villain, or at least a villain to be. The meta story within the story is that it's a villain's origin story, and if you read it knowing that, it takes on a whole new meaning. The sequels make it increasingly obvious, and by the end it's staring you right in the face.

I wrote the first book when I was a 21 year old university student - at that point I had already published The Land of Bad Fantasy, which came out when I was 18. Getting it published was a lot easier for me than it was with my first novel, since I already had an agent - but even that took quite a while. In the end, as I've often said, publishing is mostly just a waiting game.

What’s the significance of the series title, The Fallen Moon?

Originally, the trilogy didn't have a title at all. In fact, to begin with it wasn't even a trilogy! I started out with a series in mind, and I wasn't sure how long it would be, but once it got picked up by Voyager here in Australia, I finally found out why all fantasy novels come in groups of three: it's because the publishers insist on it! They also insisted that the trilogy have a title, and it took a long time to finally settle on one. To begin with I was just calling it "the griffin trilogy", but this was deemed "too repetitive". I even ended up appealing to people on my LiveJournal, asking for suggestions, and one person finally nominated "The Fallen Moon". It fits partly because the moon is prominently featured in the book as a symbolic thing seen in the background of many scenes, and also because Arren's people worship the moon, and the "fallen" part is also symbolic because the first book is about Arren's fall from grace, and his people, the Northerners, are in a way a "fallen" race who have lost their land and most of their pride as well.

(Publishers also insist on the ever-present maps you see in most fantasy novels. And Now You Know).

The best thing about the worldbuilding – for me, anyway – is that the griffins aren’t ponies with wings. The blurb of one of the sequels even stresses that Arren’s griffin Skandar is “man-eating”. What gave you this idea?

Thanks! I think the griffins are the part I'm most proud of, and the reason why I wrote them is also one of the main reasons why I wrote the books in the first place. Since I was a kid, I've never liked the idea of dragon riders much, purely because I didn't like the notion that something so big and powerful would ever submit to a puny human. So I decided to do my own take on the concept, and I used griffins instead of dragons because I felt dragons were overused by this point, and if I used griffins people would go in with fewer preconceived ideas. I didn't want to explain things away with "magic", which is too often used as a cop-out in my opinion, so I decided to make it a social thing based upon mutual consent. The griffin is more powerful than the human physically, but the human has the brains, so both of them benefit. To the human, being chosen means becoming a noble, and to the griffin, choosing a human means becoming privelaged and important. So Skandar is Arren's griffin, but Arren is Skandar's human. It works both ways.

Are you working on future novels set in the same world, or a new series?

I've since written a sequel trilogy - originally, when I first signed the contract with Voyager, I pitched four books to them. They subsequently asked me if I could add two sequels to the fourth book and make that a second trilogy, and I said yes - and then proceeded to do just that. All three are now finished and have been sold to Voyager - we're hoping to sell them to my American publisher, Ace, as well. The second trilogy is currently titled The Risen Sun, and will probably stay that way. It has a different protagonist from the first trilogy.

I've also nearly finished the first in a third trilogy. It also stars a different protagonist from its predecessors, and is currently called The Southern Star (the protagonist is a Southerner). And I've now written the first two installments of a series for young adults - that series doesn't have a title but the working titles for the first three books are Scales, Claws and Spikes. My agent and I are about to start selling those. And apparently I've done all that in approximately... four years. Man, I have been busy.

No kidding! That inspires me to buckle down as well. Finally, what’s your favorite fantasy novel?

To be completely honest, I don't actually read much fantasy. I grew up reading young adult fantasy - I was a big fan of Robin Jarvis and Brian Jaques, but didn't like The Lord of the Rings. The only adult fantasy I ever got into is George R R Martin, but I also love Clive Barker and was a huge fan of William Horwood as a teenager. A lot of the time I actually read non-fiction. I also love movies. A movie made out of my books would be a dream come true... if it was a good movie, of course. Heh.

Yay, a fellow Horwood fan. Those are much harder to find that ASoIaF afficionados. Thanks very much for the interview, Katie!

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She-Devil

I watched this 1989 film when it first came out, and then saw it again last weekend. It's still entertaining, maybe even more so - not only is it light and fast-paced, but now I enjoyed everything about Mary Fisher and her writing. She-Devil is a hilarious film.

Ruth Patchett is a plump, unattractive woman married to Bob, a handsome accountant whom she loves dearly. One evening, though, they both meet Mary Fisher at a party.

Mary Fisher is blond, slim, beautiful and a bestselling romance novelist. Everything about her life is built up around that persona; she lives in a castle-like house, dresses in pink and speaks in a breathy whisper. She’s like a Barbie doll come to life.

Sparks fly instantly, and Bob drives her home that night. Ruth tries to remain loyal and devoted during the affair that follows, but the situation in the Patchett household devolves. Finally Bob moves into Mary’s castle and tells Ruth that while he has four assets (his house, his family, his career and the freedom to do as he pleases), she’s a liability. And also a she-devil.

So Ruth behaves like one.

If you enjoyed the revenge plot of The First Wives Club, you’ll like this as well – and there are other parallels between the two films, including Ruth’s outreach efforts to other women, which pay off handsomely for her. I also loved her way of dealing with asset # 1, the house, but then again I’m a fan of creatively blowing things up.

And she locates an unexpected ally in Mary Fisher’s irascible mother, who’s never forgiven her daughter for sending her to a retirement home where she’s kept drugged and locked away. Mrs. Fisher is like a really nasty Sophia Petrillo.

Bob : You know, Mrs. Fisher, I haven’t told you what a wonderful daughter you’ve got. You did a terrific job of raising her.
Mrs. Fisher : You’d never know it, the way she treats me. Miss Famous Writer over there. You would think a forty-one-year-old woman would have learned to appreciate her mother.
Bob : Mary… I thought you were thirty-four.

The acting in this film – on everyone’s part – is delightfully over the top. Scenery is chewed with abandon. I especially liked the way Mary goes from soft-spoken and giggly to sharp-tongued and bitchy as her life slowly crumbles and she finds that being a man’s de facto wife is not quite the same as being his mistress. And the scene where her newest book flops thanks to all the stress was actually a little painful – especially when she sits at a table piled with copies and everyone ignores her.

Don’t expect realism from this film, but do expect a boisterous, amusing ride.



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Forests in fantasy

I’ve always been fascinated by forests. Maybe because I grew up in the middle of a desert, albeit one with a lot of skyscrapers.

Or maybe because forests feature so prominently in fantasy, beginning with Mirkwood in The Hobbit. Forests are inherently mysterious places, and none more so than Mirkwood. It’s easy to get lost and visibility is low, hence Gandalf's admonition to never leave the path. I like the part where Bilbo, the smallest and lightest of the party, climbs a tree to find black butterflies flitting about the topmost leaves.

As for the trees themselves, even in ordinary woods they may cut off much of the light and they often shelter dangerous creatures.

It’s also fun to come up with names for those trees. Poul Andersson has braidbark, copperwood, jewelleaf and gaunt lightning-rod in “The Queen of Air and Darkness”, and the Cinderbark Wood in Alan Campbell’s Iron Angel is a petrified forest where the flora has been treated with poisons. As a result, they have turned to vivid colors, and are extremely dangerous – the jab of a thorn can mean death.

Naturally, Cinderbark Wood is in a desert and the only water for miles around is a spring at the forest’s heart.

Other dry forests could be made of ice or metal or crystal (since crystals do grow). The sharp-edged shards could seriously injure anyone trying to pass through such a forest. Maybe the trees prefer blood to water. And some of the leaves could be lenses that focus the sun’s rays to start a fire – which could harm travelers but wouldn’t seriously damage the glasstrees.

Living forests can be dangerous too. For instance, they could grow extremely rapidly, meaning there’s little point in cutting a trail through the woods. They could have sprung up over the ruins of a city – which would have its own defenses, traps and perhaps stores of toxins.

They might act as prions, slowly but steadily altering people in their own image and likeness. So if you take longer than a week to travel through a certain forest, either you won’t come out or you’ll emerge with chlorophyll-colored skin, leaves for fingers and roots instead of feet.

They might have a powerful but hidden guardian – not the pretty unicorns of Dragons of Autumn Twilight or The Last Unicorn, but a creature far more disturbing. I’m thinking along the lines of He Who Walks Behind the Rows, from Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn”.

Because of this, forests often act as barriers, magical or otherwise, to lands. Or they protect a treasure. I especially like it when the treasure is a natural part of the forest, like a special tree – Yggdrasil or the Tree of Life – so it can’t be removed.

What do you like most about forests?


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Surviving the Extremes

The subtitle of Surviving the Extremes is “What Happens to the Body and Mind at the Limits of Human Endurance”. And it more than delivers in that respect. The author, Dr Kenneth Kamler, has been to the Amazonian rainforest and on an Everest expedition and those parts are written from experience. But he discusses desert and underwater and high seas survival just as well.

The book examines the effects of environments in which the human body never adapted and was never meant to experience, much less live in. It also provides examples of people who both survived such conditions and those who succumbed. The saddest of the latter, to me, was the story of Audrey Mestre, who attempted to beat her own record for free diving by ascending from a depth of 166 metres.

Dr. Kamler explains the biological effects of such environments in detail. I loved those parts. From the atomic level up to the cellular, the book depicts how platelets and the immune system and the finely regulated chemistry of the brain respond to stress and starvation and lack of oxygen. Pulmonary edema due to the high altitude of Mount Everest, treating snakebite in the Amazon, how exactly camels thrive in the desert, it’s all here.

The book even includes a chapter on what it might be like in outer space, as a member of an expedition to a distant star. Yes, that will carry its own biological and psychological risks.

My favorite chapter is the one about surviving in a desert, because I lived in the Middle East for 18 years. Granted, most of those were spent in an air-conditioned room rather than, say, digging up roots in the bottom of a wadi to suck a few droplets of moisture from them. But I’d recommend this book to any writers hoping to throw their characters into such environmental danger zones.

You could learn ways to make it even more difficult for them.



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The Cover Cafe Contest

If you haven't already seen the Cover Cafe's annual contest for romance novel covers, check it out. Not only are there plenty of beautiful covers in the categories of historical, series, contemporary and alternate reality (I think one of Samhain's is in the finals for this), there's also a Worse Cover section. This one is always entertaining.

And voting is open to anyone until May 31. So pick out your favorites - for the Worst Covers, mine is the one with the woman who looks as though Hannibal Lecter has been at her. Have fun!

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Once a winner...

Cool, I got a blog award!



This is from Becky Regalado, who blogs at Beckah-Rah. One of the rules is to share seven random facts about myself, and although I don't have that many, there is some very good news I was planning to mention.

Remember the lottery to determine who would stay in Toronto? I was so relieved at not drawing the black spot that I decided to be happy (or at least accepting) of whichever clinical site was assigned to me. Even if it was a two-hour commute away, at least I could stay in my apartment and keep my job.

I just found out that I'll be doing my clinical placement in the Hospital for Sick Children. Not only does that have an excellent reputation, it's only a forty-minute commute away and downtown as well, so most of my friends will be in other hospitals a few steps away. And of course, it's such a big hospital that they're not likely to ask me to draw blood. Performing venipuncture on adults makes me nervous enough.

But for the moment, SimClin (the simulated clinical semester) is going well. I just finished the hardest rotation, in Hematology; the grand finale of that was a test where 90% accuracy was needed to pass. One down, four to go.

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