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One of the things I said about The Bone Raiders, the first book in Jackson Ford’s Rakada series, was that you could go ahead and judge it by its cover. The cover of that book was five badass women of color, draped in human bones and carrying weapons, plus a giant, fire-breathing lizard that is not technically a dragon but may as well be.

I am tempted to point out that this cover features two fire-breathing lizards, hit “Publish,” and retire for the night.

I fucking loved the first book, about a group of raiders in a heavily Mongolian-inspired steppe setting, who decided to try and tame the aforementioned fire-breathing lizards so that they could ride them into battle. By the time this book begins, they have mastered taming said fire-breathing lizards (which are called araatan, by the way) and all four of them have their own. Which means that the psychic crazy lady from the first book who thinks she’s immortal until she makes good on a deal she made with God now rides a dragon.

Its name is Sponge Bath. I’m not sure there are sponges in this world. I definitely don’t care. Ford can have that little anachronism for free. Two others are Tooth Monster and Princess. The fourth’s name is a plot point and I won’t reveal it.

And then the araatan start getting sick, and all four women have the same vision at the same time, featuring the words “You can save them,” and we’re off to the fucking races.

Jackson Ford is so good that it makes me sick. My jealousy is off the charts; this shit is simply not fair. I’m coming off several books in a row that didn’t hit the way I wanted them to and I needed my ass kicked, and I’m glad I saved this book for when I needed my ass kicked, because damn. Somehow a book about four women wearing bones and riding dragons also gets way deeper into everyone’s character than the first one did, and the ending is so crushing that I didn’t believe it at first, fully expecting a particular plot development to let one character hit the reset button on everything that had happened, and … nope. If you are a crier, in addition to kicking your ass, this book will make you cry, and you won’t see it coming. I am not a crier and it still almost got me.

Violence and humor and violence and world building and violence and lesbians and violence and rebellions and violence and family drama and violence and betrayal and violence and possession and gods. Because like hell we’re not going to up the stakes on this one.

Go get it.

Screen Shot 2014-02-15 at 2.43.39 PM Guys, I am wasting my several hours of relative solitude and time-to-get-work-done at OtherJob in an epic fashion today; the most active I’ve gotten has been to go outside and hack at the ice in the parking lot, since I managed to wipe out on the way in the door (I’m fine) and now I have a vendetta against it. But holy hell there is just nothing else happening around here right now. So let’s give you some information you don’t care about at all, and provide everyone with an update on how my ongoing project to have every country on Earth view my blog is going. It’s a lot better than last time! But there are still some holdouts and dangit world get off your duffs and come look at my blog.

North America: Done, technically, or at least the parts that I recognize as “North” America as opposed to “Central” America. I’m not sure exactly where the continental divide is; I think technically all of Central America belongs to North America? This is not impressive, though, because there are only three countries in what I’m calling North America and I live in one of them.

Central America: Still missing: El Salvador and Nicaragua. Plus Cuba and probably some tiny islands. Belize showed up yesterday. I just got my first hit from Puerto Rico a couple of days ago, too, which was startling; I’d have figured they’d have shown up earlier. This makes me wonder how many of the fifty states I’ve actually gotten traffic from but I don’t know of a way to find that information. I figure of the three Cuba is probably the biggest longshot, although I don’t actually know if they heavily filter the Internet down there the way other Communist nations do.

South America: Missing three: Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. I can’t find the link right now but I had an entertaining conversation a couple of weeks ago with a guy who was also chasing hits from French Guiana for forever to the point where his blog was showing up in Google searches for the country. This makes me think that that will probably be the last of the three, but as I know nothing about any of them other than Jim Jones’ people killed themselves in Guyana, I don’t have a good idea about what’ll be last.

Australia: Done! Also New Zealand and most of the nearby island nations, not counting most of the super-duper teeny-tiny ones.

Europe: Mostly done. Liechtenstein and Vatican City haven’t shown up, but they probably shouldn’t count, and it turns out that WordPress lands on the Kosovars’ side on whether Kosovo is part of Serbia or not. I actually thought Europe was done until I figured that out. I was missing Albania for a long time but I finally got a spate of hits from them a couple of weeks ago. Pretty much once I get a hit from Kosovo I’m gonna call Europe done.

Middle East: Missing Yemen, Syria, and Iran. Yemen seems like it ought to show up sooner or later, particularly given the number of hits I get from neighboring countries; I suspect the ongoing civil war in Syria and totalitarian government in Iran will keep me from getting traffic from there for a while, as those folks seem to have other things to worry about other than visiting my blog.

Africa: Currently a mess, which is unsurprising. Hard to say which country will be last; I’d have thought Ethiopia but I’ve already gotten half-a-dozen hits from there. Somalia, maybe? South Sudan? Who knows.

Asia: Mostly done; missing some of the breakaway Soviet republics (Tajikistan; Turkmenistan, a couple of others) as well as Mongolia, Nepal, and North Korea. Obviously North Korea is on the “probably never” list. I was gratified to see a hit from China about a month ago, as I’d figured I’d need to write them off forever.

Miscellaneous: The Svalbard Islands, which are those islands east of Greenland and north of Russia. Not nearly as big as they look due to the way the map works and technically part of Norway. That said, searching for posts tagged “Svalbard” produces a surprising number of posts so I figure I’ll catch them sooner or later.

Please tell me I’m not the only person who cares about this. Anybody else out there have a geographic white elephant they want to share?