Happy July!

Geez, half the year gone already! I'm still very busy with the house. For the second weekend in a row, my wife and I have barely left the house, focusing on what we need to do here, except for mowing my father-in-law's lawn. Progress is apparent, and yet there's still so much to be done that it's discouraging. I keep trying to focus on what we've accomplished and the good I feel from that accomplishment.

I've started writing RPG material for the home Firefly campaign again, which is good. I've got to get back into the groove before DexCon and GenCon. I dug out the scenarios I plan to run for those conventions and will be reviewing them in the coming weeks to make sure I have everything I need.

I've finished the professional education course I'd mentioned last month, which means that I've successfully read and understood over 5,000 pages of insurance/legal material. Now I can use the letters SCLA after my name. I'm not taking the trip to Las Vegas, though. I'll be cashing out and applying the money to the GenCon trip. So I do get a trip; it's just not the one they'd planned for me.

I've finished reading "Demons" by John Shirley. My feelings are mixed about this one. It has some wonderful ideas in it, but the human characters didn't feel at all realistic to me. They seemed more like plot devices than people. There were also some very well done descriptive passages of astral locations that made me feel as though I was really in the impossible place described. There was some very heavy handed political allegory that came off as more preachy than the author likely intended. And then there were powerful passages, such as the part where a sorceress summons and attempts to control a demon, only to find out the process doesn't go quite according to plan. I'd give it maybe a six out of ten, cautioning the reader that it varies wildly from a nine to a two at any given point along the way.

I'm currently reading "Viriconium" by M. John Harrison. I've finished the first section, The Pastel City, which was very well written fantasy, even if the vocabulary was a bit excessively obscure for the average reader. This book is the sort of thing Tolkien might've aspired to do and couldn't pull off. Where Tolkien is simply wordy, spending three pages telling you about the color of a doorknob and the history of said doorknob (even though that history has absolutely no bearing on the story), Harrison will spend two densely worded sentences telling you about the doorknob, but will leave you with a sense of dread and wonder about what might be behind that door in the process. I usually prefer more compact prose, but learned to enjoy this one for what it is, and I look forward to the next section.

I finished watching the first eight episodes of the Torchwood TV series this weekend. I'll have more on that another time, I think. For now, I'll just say that I enjoyed it and that it gives me a rockin' idea for a roleplaying campaign.