Rogue Angel: Destiny

(Internet was down due to storms yesterday, but this was already sitting in memory - easy to press "post" now).

I really want to like this book, not the least because it was a gift and I'd like to be able to tell the giver how much I enjoyed it.

And the premise is plenty promising - a tough, smart woman protagonist (hurrah!) with a sword (hurrah again!) is on an Indiana Jones-style adventure in which gets the baddies, saves the world etc. It kinda reads like an adventure movie, with all the predictability/simplicity that implies, but it moves along at a nice clip and the characters are sketched out ok. However:

I'm about halfway through and there's one thing that really wrecks the flow for me: the author is obsessed with irrelevant minutiae. For example, the main character posts to internet newsgroups for answers to her archeology questions and the author painstakingly describes the spam/wrong answers she got before arriving at a solution - this wastes time and neither adds to the plot nor builds suspense (that the replies are referred to as "hits" I'm trying to ignore - I can't expect everyone to be as familiar with internet jargon as I am :P). Neither does a list of the contents of her breakfast plate during a conversation add to the tension or really anything else. Times are described with unnecessary precision (43 seconds, or 26 minutes). I'm ending up with the impression that either the author or the character (IMHO the author, most likely) is painfully pedantic.

It's the first in a series and reviewers at Amazon seem to love it uniformly, so it might be just me. I'll probably continue to the end as it's fairly fluffy and short. However, for women + swords I have to recommend a better novel, The Hero and the Crown - a tomboy princess that slays dragons :)

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twit(s) of the day

• 15:21 Enduring the longest day IN THE WORLD. Cranky, partly caused by need to fence.

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Happy (belated) birthday to zen4me!

back in the saddle

I took my week off like a good girl, so I loaded up on anti-inflammatories tonight and hit the strip.

I fenced a good two hours without any strange incidents. My feet are tired but not sore, and I'm icing right now. Also I tried out a blade I cut down for pistol grip and refitted with a different socket, and I was pleased to find that it worked :)

Mostly I worked on my disengages - when and how. When trying something new it's hard for me to get into that "one with the Force" place, but the tradeoff is self-satisfaction when I do it right, and I DID get a few.

All in all it was a relief to fence for the first time in a month without fearing that "stepping on a small but cranky electric eel" feeling!

Also practicing not moving my upper arm around so much. I find I get the best feedback at home, in front of a mirror, so this is something I can do fairly often.

Not sure when I'll next compete again. I have Stuff(TM) for the next couple of weekends and want to have a few physical therapy sessions under my belt first anyway.

One of the Stuff is this historic fencing shindig Sunday (scroll down, should be obvious), but only if it's not a gajillion degrees in the shade :P