Married with Zombies

Yesterday I got my copy of Married With Zombies, thanks to the kind author Jesse Petersen. A signed copy no less! It's Evil Editor's book of the month and it would be great if you'd come along and join the chat! It's a nice easy read that's played for laughs and although it's rather gruesome I enjoyed it.

The top photo was my submission to @SatScenes this week. While we're on the cat photo theme, here's Rufus in affectionate mode. I had to get my Beloved to take the picture quickly. He doesn't stay cute for long!

Why did they even bother?

Imagine Ireland have compensated us for the appalling state the holiday place was in when we arrived. They sent us a cheque for £30. It won't buy my son and his fiancée a posh meal anywhere but it'll more than cover a McDonalds, so that's all right then.

Oh, and they sent us a £70 voucher for any holiday we might be mad enough to take with them in future. Anyone want a holiday voucher? We won't be needing it.

Extinct stories

In case you missed it, Phoenix Sullivan is calling for submissions for an anthology called Extinct doesn't mean forever.

I first met Phoenix on Evil Editor and she's now so good at critiquing query letters that she has her own blog for people to submit revised queries to, after Evil Editor has done his worst. Now here she is branching out into publishing!

The deadline for stories is the end of January, and it's a paying proposition. You might want to pop across and take a look.

Breathing Water

I've just finished Tim Hallinan's Breathing Water and now I'm desperate to read more.

I admit that I only started to read it because I was so grateful for all the help I've got from Tim's Finish Your Novel advice to writers (which I highly recommend). Then he kindly sent me a book about writing (not by him) as a prize in a competition he ran. After all that, how could I not read one of his books? The trouble was, they didn't look like the kind of thing I'd usually read. How wrong I was.

For me, the book started out slowly but after a couple of chapters I was reeled in and couldn't put it down - although I also didn't want to get to the end and not have it to read any more. You know that feeling?

What drew me in:

• Great descriptions of place with just the right amount of detail. I found myself in another world.
• A huge variety of characters. I identified with the main character, Poke Rafferty, and enjoyed the range of goodies, baddies and the more ambivalent folk who share his world with him.
• The tension racheting up so that I desperately wanted it to come out all right for the main characters.
• Wonderful dialogue that seems entirely natural and is very entertaining. 
• And finally, a satisfying ending.

His newest book The Queen of Patpong is out now and it's going on my Christmas list. (It's a hardback.) Meanwhile, I've ordered A Nail Through the Heart and The Fourth Watcher from amazon UK. I hope they get here soon.

Making girls into boys

Photo from Sociological Images

Did you know that in Afghanistan if you don't have any sons you can designate one of your daughters as a boy? You see, girls can't go out in public without a chaperone or work outside the home, but a girl that's classed as a boy can, and what's more she can chaperone her sisters so that they can go out and run errands. I read about it here and it's an article worth reading.

I don't quite know what to make of it. I think it shows that the status quo can be so embedded that challenging it feels impossible. The families don't let girls do the forbidden things, they have to create a 'boy' instead. It also tells me that people will perform any kind of mental gymnastics to enable them to support the way things are.

What I can't help wondering is if girls can do those things when classed as boys why can't they all be allowed to chop off their hair and dress as boys with all the freedoms that allows.

The end of an era

I've given up on Google Reader. I've had it on my iGoogle page for a long time and it's been very convenient to turn to when I want to catch up on all you lovely bloggers but it has one major flaw. You can't unsubscribe from anything.

Some time ago I decided to stop following Cake Wrecks and I unsubscribed in my Google Reader. A few days later Cake Wrecks was back with forty odd posts marked as unread. I deleted it from the reader. It came back. I unsubcribed in my Bloglist. It came back. I googled for a solution. There isn't one. Not one that works anyway.

So now I'm using BlogBridge. I'm hoping it will do what I tell it to and not decide for me that I really, really never want to unsubscribe from anything I've ever wanted to read in the past. Goodbye Google Reader!

How did I miss this?

Image by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid  some rights reserved 

A leading cannabis researcher has called for cannabis to be legalised for recreational use.

Now, to be honest, I can't get wound up about recreational use one way or the other. I like a glass of wine with dinner and I don't see why someone who prefers a puff shouldn't do that instead. (I can't stand any sort of smoking myself but that doesn't mean I want to stop everyone else doing it.) On the other hand, if wine were banned I'd still cope so not having your recreational drug of choice available doesn't seem appalling to me.

What I do feel strongly about is the people I know who are ill and who would get better pain relief from cannabis than they can from traditional medicine. I have a friend with fibromyalgia who'd be up and around if she could legally smoke. My Mum would probably have got relief from her arthritis - but how was a housebound old lady to get hold of an illegal drug?

Of course the other advantage to legalising cannabis is ending the drug trafficking in it and getting clean drugs to people.

My mind always wanders onto the sci fi implications of the news. I wonder what drugs they might use in other worlds.

Mind what you tweet

You may have heard about the guy who was fined £1000 for making a stupid joke on Twitter. He's since lost two jobs because he was convicted of sending a menacing message but all he did was express his exasperation that an airport was shut so he couldn't see his girlfriend. He wrote:

Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week… otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!

OK, his comment was ill-judged but who knew Twitter was so tightly policed? I didn't.

I've a feeling that anti-terrorist laws in both the US and the UK make life harder for ordinary people while not actually preventing terrorism. Or do you think they're worth it for the sake of greater security?

Pirate kitty

Today be talk like a pirate day. Arrr!

Uh, that's it really. Have a nice day!

So many ways to be wrong

Tweeted by @vaughanbell (Mind Hacks).

I couldn't help thinking that this gives us so many ways for characters to mess up and drive the plot.