Updates

So the new housemates have two dogs. Their own is a beagle, a little less than a year old. He’s a sweet little guy. The other dog they’re fostering for the landlady, whose daughter wanted a largish dog, but they don’t have room for it where they’re living on campus. She’s a husky mix, and she’s very sweet with people, and gets along with most dogs, but wouldn’t you know it, the one dog she hated on sight was my poor Lucy! (we think it’s a dominant females thing) 🙁

Finished another two books recently. One for Iambik called Getting Sassy by D. C. Brod. It’s for their new Crime collection, which they’re supposed to be releasing any day now. It was lots of fun to read. It’s a sort of mix of crime, thriller and comedy. The other book I just finished was a critical edition of Mansfield Park for Ignatius Press. It’s the full text of MP plus an additional ten or twelve sections of modern criticisms, and some contemporary opinions that Jane Austen collected of the novel.

Up next I’m starting a children’s series for Iambik called The Chronicles of Valonia by Katie Paterson. They’re Arthurian legend, which I’ve been partial to since I took a lit class in college that covered everything from Mallory’s Mort D’Arthur through Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon. Ignatius has given me a book called Poor Banished Children by Fiorella de Maria. I’m about a quarter of the way through my pre-read of it, but it promises to be very interesting. It’s set in the sixteenth century, and begins with a shipwreck off the coasts of Cornwall. The only survivor found is a young woman dressed as a boy. She’s taken in, gravely ill, by the local gentry and is found to speak Latin. She asks for a priest (dangerous, because this is after the dissolution of the monasteries) to give her final confession, starting from her early childhood. Still working on Sense and Sensibility for LV, though it fell a little by the wayside while I finished the last two, as I had definite deadlines for them. My next LV book will be The Big Time by Fritz Leiber, which I’m doing for the 5th Annual SFFAudio Challenge.