Reading Slump

So, I visited my book yesterday, and that always makes me feel awkward. I thought more authors did this sort of thing, but the people at the stores always act surprised when I offer to sign their stock. Then they think I want to do a booksigning right then and start talking about setting up a table. I pointed out that there were five books and I could sign them in just a few minutes right there.

If you don't find the book when you visit the bookstore, ask for it. It took me a while to find my own book in a store where I knew there were copies because someone had tweeted a picture of them. I was looking in Teen Fantasy, and it was in Teen Fiction (flashbacks to the Enchanted, Inc. series being shelved in Fiction instead of in Fantasy).

I'm narrowing in on a solution to my story problem. When in doubt, look to the folklore/mythology. There's probably something that will provide the solution.

I've been in a bit of a reading slump lately, and I've finally decided to give up on the book I've been trying to read for six weeks. It's not that it's a bad book. It's just that it's a little too long and slow for the amount of emotional investment I have in it. I'm intrigued by the premise, but it's paced as epic fantasy, which means events are really spread out, with descriptions of every single meal they eat in between each major event. Seriously, what is the deal with food and epic fantasy? I've noticed that most books in the genre really get into food, even when one of the points is that because of the way things are going, they eat the same thing at almost every meal. There are entire scenes comparing whether the fruit, bread, and cheese at this place is better than the fruit, bread, and cheese at the previous place. I don't care about the food. I want to get to the part where they blow things up with magic. Or even where the main character has anything resembling a relationship with another character -- not necessarily romantic, but something that feels like a connection that makes me care about whether or not it continues or where I know she'll feel some kind of pain if something happens to the other person.

So I'm moving on to rereading a lot of Terry Pratchett before WorldCon, and it counts as work! Right now, I'm rereading Nation, which is a non-Discworld book. But I still love it. When I was a kid, I was very fond of shipwreck/survival type stories where the characters had to fend for themselves for a while in some difficult environment. I love it now, but when I was a kid, I'm sure I would have been utterly obsessed with this book, would have read it over and over again, and would have researched (or tried) some of the stuff in it. I'm afraid I'm a bit too much like the girl characters he tended to write. Then again, I'm planning to be Granny Weatherwax in my old age.