Month: August 2020

In which Luther isn’t here today, sorry

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Eleven hours in front of my computer today– grading, lesson planning, lesson recording, meetings, more meetings, trying to figure out fucking attendance which is an unholy nightmare, professional development, and okay I’d still rather be doing this than dunking my face in a viral petri dish every day but I cannot be arsed to be entertaining or interesting on ye olde merry website until school calms down a little bit and my brainmeats recover. This won’t last forever, it never does.

That said, if I die you are all instructed to toss my body over the White House fence. At least one of ’em.

We have a prewritten interview with Lisbeth Campbell tomorrow, as The Vanished Queen finally comes out! Check out my review, if you haven’t already.

How do Sundays work again?

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I mowed the lawn this morning, for the first time in … um … a while, after looking at it the other day and realizing that it really was starting to look like the house had maybe been abandoned. My lawn right now is a weird mix of 1) dead, yellow grass, because it hasn’t been raining much; 2) weeds, up to two feet tall in one specific place, because apparently weeds don’t require nutrients to grow, and 3) the occasional patch that apparently gets a better mix of sun and shade and needed cutting but wasn’t necessarily looking completely out of control. But there are definitely patches where nothing has grown in weeks, meaning that about half the time it was super obvious where I’d mown and where I hadn’t and the other half I was basically trying to find the tracks the mower had left in the dead grass.

9 years and counting in this house, and I still hate my lawn.

And then Dad came over, and he and the boy went swimming, and we had pizza for dinner, and now I’m trying my best to not remember that I actually have a small amount of grading and lesson planning to get done tonight, because this is officially the first Sunday of the school year and Sunday is Grading Day again. There’s nothing that will take too long– one advantage of e-learning is that I can justify doing everything electronically and mostly multiple choice, so the computer can do the grading for me and I just have to record it– but I’m still vaguely resentful of the entire process.

Oh, and I got manipulated into volunteering (that’s a thing) to be team leader this year, which comes with more responsibility and zero additional pay, so that’s an extra meeting this week. I think I can dodge some professional development for it, though, which is probably a net positive.

I’m still probably gonna go play video games after I finish this.

I realized a couple of days ago that I could read the titles on my bookshelves while sitting in my recliner in the living room. While yesterday specifically was definitely rough, I’m definitely officially healing up now, and I haven’t had much cause to complain about my vision at all for at least a week or so. The surgery was a month and three days ago, and I had a one-month follow-up last week and the same doctor who was concerned about my eyes being too dry last time proclaimed me “much better” and “healing perfectly” this time. My understanding is that nearsightedness takes a little longer to heal than farsightedness does, so I expect more improvement over the next few weeks, but honestly if it were to stabilize right around where it is I think I’d be pretty damn happy. Seriously, if you’ve ever considered this and you have the money I’d jump at it; if you’re local enough to use the same folks I did, let me know, as they sent me a couple of $500 off coupons that don’t have expiration dates on them.

Owwww

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Two non-entries in a row, I know, but my eyes are killing me today for some reason and even though I can’t stop looking at screens I really shouldn’t be looking at screens. Because ow.

(In general, things are a lot better, and I probably ought to post a LASIK update, but today’s been rough for some reason.)

(Possibly related to going back to work this week and spending seven hours a day in front of my computer as my job.)

Anyway, I’ll find something interesting to say tomorrow, promise.

In case you ever wondered…

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading3 Comments

… I am definitely an idiot:

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1294090113899794433

And the sequel has a definite unreliable narrator thing going on, so I actually went back to Gideon this morning to double-check. Maybe I was supposed to notice that.

Yeah. It’s Harrowhark.

I’m dumb.

#REVIEW: Savage Legion, by Matt Wallace

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

On one hand, I’ve read a lot of Matt Wallace’s work– his Sin du Jour series, an urban fantasy set in a high-end restaurant/catering business that caters to nonhumans, is seven books long, but they’re all novellas, and there’s a big difference between a novella and a 498-page epic fantasy. Savage Legion is, as far as I know, his debut at novel-length, or at least his debut with a traditional publisher. So this guy’s got a good track record of me enjoying his work (his Twitter is worth a follow as well; I found his Twitter feed well before I read any of his his books) but I was still really curious about what he’d be like at length.

Good news! Savage Legion is awesome, one of my favorites of the year so far.

It’s interesting to look at the ways in which Savage Legion is willing to be a bog-standard work of epic fantasy and the ways in which it subverts the genre. Look at the cover, to start. The title, first of all, isn’t exactly subtle– a book called Savage Legion is unlikely to be a romance– and the text underneath announces right away that the book is part one of a trilogy, because, well, of course it it is! It’s epic fantasy! The depicted character is Evie, one of half-a-dozen or so rotating 3rd person POV characters, which is very much a modern, post-Song of Ice and Fire trope. The cover tells you a lot about the book, and what it tells you isn’t inaccurate– in a lot of ways, the weapon-bearing warrior standing proud over the corpses of her enemies, fire burning in the background, could have been the cover of any fantasy novel published in the last thirty years. Except, oh, that’s a brown-skinned woman, not a white dude. (I think they got her hair wrong, maybe, but that’s clearly Evie.)

Wallace’s characters are diverse as hell– most of them are nonwhite, one is nonbinary, not all of them are straight, and two have disabilities. A solid majority of the POV characters are women. All of this is utterly normalized– well, okay, the nonbinary character gets a bit of bigotry from some other characters, but no one ever fails to use anything other than they/them to refer to them– and I love how Wallace diversifies his cast simply by spreading around names and descriptions that fit different types of people and not by having, say, the nation to the south is like this and the nation to the north is like this going on, he simply diversifies his cast without relying on lazy stereotyping. There’s no attempt here to make the reader think oh, the Habloobians are the Asians in this world, and the Hammashammas are the Africans! and relying on whatever half-imagined shit they believe about Those People for the rest of the characterization. It’s remarkably refreshing.

And then there’s the actual plot, in particular the villain of the piece, which … well, it’s hard to talk about without spoiling things, because the last 20% or so of the book, where all of the various plot threads and previously-unconnected characters (rotating 3rd-person POV, remember) start knitting themselves together and you slowly come to realize that some of the characters you’ve come to like over the course of the book are the bad guys, or at least several of the other characters you’ve come to like sure as hell think they’re the bad guys. Sure, Martin had bad-guy POVs, and then there was Tyrion, who was sort of his own thing, but Jaime Lannister pushed Bran out of that window really early, and it was awfully clear really fast that the Lannisters were at least the antiheroes if nothing else, and that was before you got to the ice zombies up North. This is more like reading the whole book getting to like Arya more and more and then finding out she was the Night King. The twists at the end are great.

The setting is also post-monarchical and in some ways a socialist utopia. In some ways. Crache is like no fantasy world I’ve ever read about before, I’ll tell you that much. Again, I want to avoid spoilers, so you’ll have to read the book to dig into the politics here. It’s good shit, just trust me.

Wallace’s prose remains solid as hell; if you’ve not read him before, he’s a good guy to be writing axe-and-sword fantasy, and his battles and fight scenes (he used to be a wrestler, by the way) are superb. I’d compare his prose to Chuck Wendig’s, which it bears a lot of similarities to, except without as much of the deliberately fractured syntax that Wendig is so fond of. He’s not a flowery author at all, but for the type of books he writes, his style is remarkably well-matched.

So, uh. Yeah. I liked this one, and I can’t wait for the sequels. You’ll see it again toward the end of the year, I think, when my Top 10 list gets released. Go forth and read.

Savage Legion is available everywhere now.

Zzzzzzzzz

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I said in my introductory video for my kids yesterday that I was expecting this to be my second weirdest first day of school ever, only getting beaten out by the first day of school that I missed because my son had just been born the day before.

This may have been weirder. I’m trying to put a heavy emphasis right now on being accessible to my kids, right? I don’t want anyone anywhere to be able to use “I couldn’t reach my teacher” as an excuse to not do what they’re supposed to be doing. And I know that this is the first day of school and that things are going to calm down, and frankly that’s unfortunate. I was expecting to have maybe two or three kids at a time in my little Google Meet room for most of the day, with occasional periods of time where there was no one in there. What I was not expecting was that kids were going to log in and that they were just going to stay there. I had sixteen to twenty eighth graders in my virtual “classroom” for three straight hours this morning, some of whom came in at 9 and just stuck around for the whole time. Probably a dozen, at least, were in there for more than an hour, and literally all I was asking them to do was pop in and say hello, since we’re not doing any real instruction just yet.

I have also learned that Google Meet is going to be entirely unacceptable for trying to actually do synchronous teaching, because I don’t have remotely the level of control over the meeting that I need to have. I can’t boot kids or mute them because they can literally unmute themselves or come back in immediately. I don’t really want to have to boot kids, and I don’t know to what extent disruptiveness is even going to be a thing in this, but I need the ability. So we’re trying Zoom tomorrow, which I think they have installed on their Chromebooks but I’m not 100% sure. We’ll see what the numbers look like compared to today.

And then, after three solid hours of listening to 8th graders try to yell over each other, which doesn’t sound tiring even as I’m sitting here typing it but trust me, I had to do three hours of professional development this afternoon, and … Christ. It’s 6:30 as I’m writing this, I’ve basically been working since 9:00 this morning, and I still need to record tomorrow’s lesson in its entirety, so I’m not done yet.

This will get easier, it always does, but man, am I tired.

KAMALA!!!!!!!!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

Best piece of news I’ve had in a while?

Hell yes.

Now announce that Obama is going to be the first pick for SCOTUS.

#REVIEW: The Vanished Queen, by Lisbeth Campbell

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews4 Comments

Let’s start with some disclaimers: while Lisbeth Campbell and I have never met, we’ve been mutuals on Twitter (you should follow her) for long enough that I don’t remember not following her, and I saw a very early draft– like, pre-alpha, where there were bits that said things like <and then cool stuff> here and there, and I’m mentioned in the back of the book in the acknowledgments, which will never ever stop being cool. I suppose technically I also got a free ARC, but my hardcover has been preordered and will be here on the 18th when the book actually releases.

The first sentence of The Vanished Queen is — spoiler alert — When Karolje became king, he ordered rooms in the library to be mortared shut. That is an admirably well-chosen first sentence, because it does a lot of work, and really sets up the events of the novel impressively. The book takes place in the capital city of the nation of Vetia, a nation ruled over by Karolje, a despotic king moving into the twilight of his life and the end of his rule. The book revolves through several POV characters, but the two most important are Mirantha, the titular “Vanished Queen” and the mother of Karolje’s two sons, and Anza, a young resistance fighter who finds an old diary of Mirantha’s in the first chapter of the book. Karolje’s two sons are also POV characters along with a couple of others, but this is mostly Anza and Mirantha’s story, with Anza’s taking place in the present and Mirantha’s taking place through diary entries, although her presence is cast over the entire book. She has disappeared by the time the events of the novel begin, and while there is an official story explaining her disappearance, everyone (including the princes) assumes Karolje has had her killed.

While The Vanished Queen is going to be shelved and categorized as a fantasy novel, it’s very low-fantasy, with only occasional hints at magic (the king’s interrogators have abilities that can’t be easily explained) and has serious elements of a political thriller and even a bit of a ghost story to it. While there is a single organization that is called “the Resistance” in the book, they’re not exactly monolithic in their goals, and both of the princes and Anza herself have different ideas about what should happen to Vetia once Karolje is gone, assuming they are still alive to see it. Karolje himself is an interesting villain; he’s not personally a physical threat, of course, and in half of the scenes where he’s present he’s literally in bed. But no one is ever sure where anyone else’s loyalties lie, and the threat of imminent discovery by or betrayal to Karolje hangs over nearly every conversation in the book, particularly once Anza and one of the princes happen to meet after Anza is arrested early in the book. There are scenes where the people talking to him reflect on how they could kill him on the spot if they wanted to, if only they had any idea what the guards might do afterwards.

There’s a great atmosphere of dread and paranoia throughout the entire book, and while fantasy books where the line of succession is a kingdom is unclear aren’t exactly rare, I don’t know that I’ve seen a lot of them where there’s a debate as to whether there should even be a new king once the current one dies. Simply replacing the current king with a “better” king isn’t necessarily what everyone wants, and even the princes are repeatedly shown as being unsure about who and/or whether they want to take up the crown. Beyond the plot, the characters are all well-drawn and interesting, and the utterly casual reaction by everyone to Anza’s bisexuality is refreshing. It’s clear that her sexual orientation is completely normalized in this setting; at least one previous girlfriend is a character and their relationship doesn’t get any different sort of attention than anyone else’s.

Plus, my God, that cover. Look at that cover.

I enjoyed this a lot, y’all, and I think I’ll have an interview with Lisbeth on the release date. If I quietly never mention it again assume we couldn’t get it scheduled, but we’re working on it. 🙂

The Vanished Queen is Lisbeth Campbell’s debut novel. It releases on August 18.