September 1, 1997 Labor Day. And I did anything BUT labor. Hah. In fact I spent most of the day soundly asleep or curled up on the couch reading a fairly decent book. Oh and an hour and a half at the movie theater watching Kull, The Conqueror. As any good barbarian movie, this had lots of gratuitous flesh shots of the lead actors, had an international cast and semi-good semi-hokey special effects with lots of flame and slime. I'm just as glad that we went to a matinee. I wouldn't have wanted to spend 7 or more dollars on it. $4.50 was plenty. Winnie is busily packing her stuff and is preparing to spirit herself away up North to Smith. *SIGH*. I wanna go too. I've given her boxes to pack her stuff, the same boxes which I carted my stuff to and from school in. I made mashed potatoes for her as a part of her send-off meal. She's got a lot to do. And I'll miss her. And, botheration, this summer just went by too darned fast. And I'm feeling shaky about my own plans for the future again. I just can't seem to see CLEARLY about anything. I get burst of clarity and then the haze creeps in again. Tomorrow I go back to work and the fact that I have to go back to work isn't making any sense to me, because this job doesn't make any sense to me other than as a medium to pay the bills. Whine whine whine, moan moan moan. The Fire Rose is a decent, modernish retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Frankly, I think Mercedes Lackey is a better writer when she's writing stand-alone novels. I enjoy the Valdemar books immensely, but like many other writers who do serial writing, she is a victim of what I think of as "Churn Syndrome" where you get into a rut of churning books out and don't pay as much attention to plot details and character development. About a month ago, I read The Firebird her retelling of the Russian fairy-tale and I thought that it was quite excellent. I guess humans get into habits very easily. And then have a hard time breaking them. History repeats itself, writers repeat themselves and in some ways, we just keep learning the same old lessons over and over again without taking much away with us. We take an awfully long time to teach, don't we? Next Previous