Hippoi Athanatoi

The last week has been quite chilly (but I’ll take that over our usual October rains any day), so made sure to wear my thick stable jacket. I did, however, forget to switch from my jodhpurs to my boots and a pair of thicker socks. Still, not too bad, and with a jumping lesson to look forward to, freezing a little didn’t bother me so much. Especially not once I was assigned to Murphy.

A Feast for Crows, that is.

Elio’s got first reader rights, though, since I go riding in an hour and have work to do when I get back home. He has just had to promise not to exclaim “Oh My God!” (or gasp, squeal, squeak or whimper) while I am in his presence; I am nervous enough about the fates of the characters I like without having him make it worse. Although I love the setting, love the backstory and love much of the writing, I keep wishing that GRRM was a bit more like Guy Gavriel Kay when it comes to killing off characters: that is, deaths should be heroic, significant and poignant.

Even so, I am really looking forward to my turn with the book, and I know I will squeal excitedly about numerous revelations. Oh, and guess who’s in the acknowledgements? Whee!

From Newsarama we learn that Fallen Angel, an excellent creator-owned series by Peter David that was originally published by DC, has recently moved to IDW and will be restarting. In an attempt to gauge reader interest, PAD and IDW are offering for free the first half of the new first issue in PDF form to those who request a copy.

Today is the 17th of October. Today should have been spent reading A Feast for Crows, or at the very least watchingElio read it.

Not so. We didn’t order from Amazon.co.uk because at first we expected to have an ARC by now, and when both Bantam and Voyager let us down in regards to that we at least expected SF Bokhandeln to have it in today. But no, they didn’t get their books on time from Voyager. 

Argh, and argh again. On top of losing our MUSH host over the weekend, and having to read fricking Strindberg for this week’s assignment, these last few days have been pretty sucky indeed. I am expecting some karmic compensation in the near future.

Since my cold assaulted me with a vengeance after we returned from Levade on Saturday, I have not yet managed to get all the pictures we took readied for the gallery as I had hoped. Perhaps later in the week. I did, however, feel well enough today to go to my riding lesson. Then again, I’ve dragged myself there while on medication too, so it would actually take a lot more than a nasty cold to stop me from going riding.

Today (well, technically yesterday now, since its past midnight here) we went to see the Levade Noble Horse Gala for the second year in a row. This year, the focus was on French rather than Spanish acts, although they still had plenty ofbeautiful Andalusians along, and like last year it was a very enjoyable experience. I almost forgot entirely about the nasty cold that snuck up on me a day or two ago, although once I got back home it hit me at full strength again.

Since last week was a theory lesson, the riding lesson today was greatly anticipated. I need my weekly dose of riding to keep my mood up, especially in autumn, and even though I was pretty certain I wouldn’t get Murphy I was looking forward to the lesson.

Every year in september Gothenburg hosts Bok- & Biblioteksmässan, a book fair/trade show. I used to attend pretty much every year, because it was the best way to get all the information I could ever want about upcoming books. These days, of course, the Internet supplies that, and I get most of my books from on-line bookstores, so chasing bargains at the book fair is less of a draw. As a result, it has been some years since I attended, but today we decided that it could be worth a few hours of browsing. Initially, I had planned to go in on Friday, to leave today free for seeing off Ostindiefararen G

Yesterday, I finally got a chance to talk to my supervisor about my paper. She’s the head of the faculty, so its taken her some time to go through it and find an hour free in which to speak with me about it. Naturally, this has lead to much worrying on my part; when I hand something in, I really want to know as soon as possible how I did. Fortunately, she had reassuring things to say. The overall quality was very good, with good ideas and good reasoning, and the stuff that needed fixing was primarily structural formalities. The only issues she had with the actual paper as such was my usage of one article that she felt had too many problems, but as it was the only article focusing on that particular aspect, she could see why I had ended up using it. She also wanted me to work in something more about the nature of the relief plaques in terms of what kind of occasions they probably depict; I do have quite a bit about this in the paper, but spread over several sections rather than presented as a cohesive thought.

So ... the end result is that it shouldn’t take me long at all to get it read to be presented. Of course, I have my Literature class to deal with at the same time (this and next semester I am taking a part-time Literature course), but so far it hasn’t been too labour-intensive. Spring will be worse, though. Oh, and of course, it has to be mentioned that just as I thought I was done with the Classical Archaeology & Ancient History (barring the miracle needed to get me into the post-graduate program, that is), they’ve decided to add two more years for a ‘real’, EU-compatible Master’s, and my supervisor asked if I was interested. Which, of course, I am. Especially as the second year of it would actually count towards the post-graduate program, reducing it to three years and hopefully increasing one’s chances to actually get in.  But for now, its back to Ibsen (ugh) and polishing up the current paper.

DB Pro has recently announced that they plan to package their graphic adaptions of Raymond E. Feist’s "The Wood Boy" and Tad Williams’ "The Burning Man" (both from Robert Silverberg’s Legends, which also containted "The Hedge Knight" which DB Pro later successfully adapted) as a single graphic novel. Some early preview art from "The Burning Man" can be found here.

Today was, unfortunately, a theory lesson. Not that I don’t enjoy theory, because I do, but its always frustrating not to get my weekly dose of riding. Still, we had made some pretty interesting plans for this lesson last week.

Recent news on the Internet is that Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder is coming to a close—at least when it comes to printing single issues. The singles, according to McNeil, have acted as a "loss leader" for the trades, where the real profit has proved to be. The single issues had become a signficant enough money-eater that McNeil has decided to turn Finder into a free webcomic.

This is incredibly amusing , at least if you grew up watching He-Man. Combining one-hit-wonders 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Going On?” with the old He-Man cartoon is simply off wall, and it works.

Anne Bishop (author of The Black Jewels Trilogy) has put up a tempting excerpt from her next book, Sebastian (forthcoming in hardcover February 2006), at her website.

J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, has announced that the scripts of all the episodes of the series that he wrote will be published in a series of volumes, which will include new material. Notable among the new material will be the outline he wrote for what would happen over the course of the series had the character of Jeffrey Sinclair remained on the show. The website offering the scripts is not yet live, but you can sign up to recieve an e-mail notification when that changes.