i cant get to sleep becUSE I AM TRYING TO SLEEP IN MY WUBG XGAIR/I admit it, i bought an expensuce piece of furnityre for a fictipnal character. I could o sree gideon comfortably enscoved ih the wing chair, i had it custom upholstered in bugundy.
(pardon typos it' the jsames joyce thing)
why iam trying to sleep on the chair is comp;icted. o-11 is tired ppf me caLLING THEM TP LIFT ME OUT O F BED AT 7 AM. LONG STORY, DONT ASK).
SO I AM UP AND GOUNG TO WORK ON SEQUEL. CLEVER TITLE, YES?

[lease tell me how the hell james joyce wrote whhole novels wiyj only one eye whilr i cant even type anemail without mistakes?

She created Vampira; one of the first tv hostesses. May she rest in peace and come back to visit!
A fond fare-thee-well.

Hospital. Pneumonia. Stupid compromised immune system. Sigh.

At the suggestion of my publisher, http://bylightunseenmedia.com/, I am looking over many of the stories on Oakwoods with an eye to beating them into Sequel. As a result, they will no longer be on public view. I want people to have to buy the book, after all.
Yay, a sequel. Rhis book will focus more on Joshua rhan on Gideon. :) Hopefully, I will have the time to finish it. I don't feel ill, other than the neuralgia, but I have no idea when the big C is going to come down on me like a ton of bricks...

Now this was a fun read. Any book that involves both the Russian mafia and vampires has got to be pretty exciting. There are time when the excitement is a bit too intense, but it makes for gripping reading.
Shanna Whelan is a dentist who is afraid of the sight of blood. Needless to say, she's not very good at her chosen career. But her life changes drastically when the head of a local vampire coven breaks off one of his fangs in a sex doll and needs her to reimplant it before the place where it was heals and he ends up having all the other vampires call him names and don't let him join in any vampire games.
She eventually discovers the truth about good old Roman and his army of kilted Scotsmen (Och, I would like to drink yer blood, lassie!) and her emotions are thrown into turmoil because she's already more than half in love with Roman. But the Russians are after her. She's in the witness protection program because she saw the Russian mafia slaughter a cafe full of people, including Shanna's best friend. But it's Russian vampires, including Roman's arch enemy Ivan, who are after her. There are some great chase scenes involving a very sympathetic taxi driver, and quite a few chills, spills and close calls,

Likeable, sympathetic characters. I liked this book so much that I would happily read the sequels... how could you resist a title like "The Undead Next Door"?

Good stuff.

I just watched a show on the National Geographic Channel that challenged the science in popular disaster movies. Everything from Tornados through earthquakes, hurricanes, etc. They consulted experts in the field of each movie, and graded their science. Man, they werre BRUTAL to the Day After Tomorrow! F! Hee hee heee. (Best quote: "Yes, the climate changes shown are possible. But in 50 years, not 50 seconds." BWA hah hah). The only movie that got a passing grade, A-, was The Perfect Storm. But I loved the vulcanologist they interviewed for Dante's Peak. After criticising everything from the way they showed the lava flow to having someone melt when he stepped on lava, she looked directly at the camera and said, "Another thing this movie got wrong: there are no vulcanologists who look like Pierce Brosnan. *choke*) I was entertained and educated. Too bad I don't remember the title...

2008 has just GOTTA be better than 2007, right?
If it's worse, I really don't want to know about it.

I can't find where I set this book down, so I can't tell you the publisher or ISBN. But you all know how to use amazon.com, I presume.
I have read some of this author's early mystery fiction, and there has always been a breezy, good-natured, amusing tone to her work.. With a name like Sparkle, she probably can't help it. So I was expecting Naked Brunch fo be something along those lines, especially with that title.
What I found instead was a very sombre-toned werewolf novel. Annie, more or less the chief protaganist, finds herself turning into a werewolf every full moon. Lycanthropy is not supernatural in Hayter's world, it is a recessive gene and both parents must carry it for the child to get all hairy on the full moon. This is a very complicated plot, and its overall theme of love betrayed is very sad. Annie struggles to understand the changes she is going through, and is helped by some folks named Marco and Carla, who run a sort of werewolf shelter that confines its patients so that they will not go out and kill. It outlines the horrible tragedy of being a vegetarian werewolf and waking up with meat stuck between your teeth (okay, yes, that was kind of funny, but Terry Pratchett did it first). There's a lone wolf named Jim who wants Annie and tries to get her away from Marco. The tension between Jim and Marco is palpable, and concerns another female werewolf who died.
What I found interesting was the premise that werewolves can smell souls. The more corrupt and rotten the smell of your soul is, the more you smell like dinner. So I guess that makes it okay that you get your throat ripped open... dubious morality again. But it was a fascinating idea.
I won't reveal the ending to you, and it ends on a note that says "sequel" to me. Overall, this is not a funny book. It is well-written but left me feeling very sad, not just for Annie but for the state of mankind.
Recommended if you like werewolves.

Christmas Day will always be
just as long as we have we.

May rhis day generate wonderful memories.

My brother Andy, his wife Kerry and their two girls, Lindsey and Kelsey, are coming to spend the afternoon with me. I'm so excited I can hardly stand the wait! Boing, boing. Yes, I will try to get a photo of me and the girls. They are both teenagers now (15 and 13), oi!
One more sleep til Christmas.
May you have a merrry one if you celebrate. If not, a belated happy Solstice to you.

send them here:

http://www.icq.com/img/friendship/static/card_7944_rs.swf

*thud*

Here are some photos of my tree this year (it's my tree every year. It comes in a box. Is plastic. But the decorations change position. LOL) plus a couple bonus photos of artwork I did in the Respite Centre.

http://picasaweb.google.ca/Anne.E.Fraser/ArtAndTheTree

Enjoy

It took me quite some time to get into this book--nearly a year, in fact. It wasn't that it was badly written, or slow to start the story, it's that I took it to work to read during breaks and could never really concentrate on it there so I stuck it on a shelf and forgot about it. When the gang from work came to visit me once I got out of hospital, they brought me the books I had forgotten (How to Marry a Millionaire Vampire was the other one. I shall read that soon).

Set several years after a bioengineered virus inside tomatoes has wiped out half of humanity, Dead Witch Walking is about one witch, one of the "Inderlanders" who survivedd the virus, Rachel Morgan by name. The Inderlanders are occult beings, everything from pixies to vampires, who coexist very uneasily with the remaining humans. Rachel works for Inderlander Security, the police force that keeps the Inderlanders towing the line. But she's been getting crap assignments and leaves, taking Ivy, a living vampire, with her. Their official job title is "runner" which of course made me think of Logan's Run. Rachel and Ivy set up their own firm of runners in an old church. Living vampires can withstand daylight and enter churches, the undead type cannot.
But somone is out to kill Rachel, especially when she starts investigating a local bigwig accused of making and selling bioengineered drugs, which have been illegal since the Turn. Is it her former boss? Her target? Or someone else? Plus she is having difficulty sharing her living quarters with Ivy. What does that hungry gleam in the vampire's eyes mean?
At times, this book is outrageously funny, at other times tense and scary. You really come to care about Rachel and her ragtag bunch of friends and cohorts. Even when she's not Rachel, but a mink named Angel. Read the book. :)

I am now happily into the second book in the series. If you haven't read any of them, I can recommend this series highly.

I haven't dusted off any of my old poems recently, and since a couple of others on my flist are doing it, I will too. Here is one I'm rather fond of.

An Old Wolf Remembers
by Anne Fraser

I remember
the forest
dark womb of trees
frost between
paw pads
running
with the moon

I remember
the kill
hot blood and fur
soft guts
sharp teeth

I remember
coupling
hot frenzy
bitch whining
the love bite

I remember
pups nuzzling
soft whines
play nips
mock hunts

I remember
pack calling
muzzles raised
silver howling
moon shadows

I remember

gakked from sbweber

24 ( first things )

swiped from halfmoon_mollie The first sentence in my blog for each month this year.

January: Welcome, 2007.

February: The sun is just POURING out its rays; and we all know what that means on feb 1st... right.

March: I am not feeling well.

April: A very happy birthday to heatherhouse!!!

May: I woke up barely able to move my leg, my knee hurt so bad.

June: Fuck them. Don't intend to go.

July: Heave ho, thieves and beggars, never shall we die.

August: All I can do is add to the number of glaze-eyed people going "HUH?" (actually, this is cheating slightly as it's the SECOND line in the first post of August but the first line is just "gakked from...")

September: [happy birthday] to Anderyn.

October: Anne Fraser has sent you a Care2 e-card!

November: If you're not posting about other stuff, there's a new project I'm launching.

December: I woke up at three am (I do that a lot) and thought "Gee it's awfully light out for the time of day" so I walked over to the window and peered out between the curtains.

Conclusion: I have lj's lamest blog.

"...the report he'd been working on looked as if a lizard had escaped from the inkwell and run madly about the page."
From Barbara Hambly's Fever Season, second in the Benjamin January series

I want to write like Barbara Hambly when I grow up.