not badSince December 16th, I've written three stories: "The Voyeur in the House of Glass," "Metamorphosis B," and "The Sphinx's Kiss." Three stories in eleven days. All for Sirenia Digest (subscribe today), and I have a feeling that "The Sphinx's Kiss" is likely the best of the bunch. I wrote 2,038 words yesterday — quite a lot for me — as that's what was required to find THE END of the story.
And then I spent the evening wiped out and drowsy, fading in and out, grateful there would be no fictionalizing today. And maybe tomorrow, too, if today is not enough.
I'm getting word that both Daughter of Hounds and the mass-market paperback of Threshold are showing up in bookshops, a week or so ahead of their actual release dates. Of course, you can order from Amazon and save yourself a trip Outside. Plus, right now Amazon's offering the two together for only $18.19. As of about 10:45 a.m. (CaST), Daughter of Hounds had an Amazon sales ranking of 9, 631. And that's a bit of a relief.
And my thanks to Alison Boehm, who has just finished reading Daughter of Hounds and from whom I received a very nice e-mail this ayem. Here's a bit from it:
Having just finished it, I felt the need to write you and tell you how much I utterly loved it. This is the first time I've worked up the courage to do so, unfortunately (only unfortunately because it took me this long). As with all your books, I can't wait to read it again and pick up on things I invariably missed the first time around. I'm sorry this isn't more coherent or in-depth, and perhaps when I've read it at least once more I'll have more useful things to say. But hopefully it will suffice to say that the characters and the locations and the settings were fiercely alive, and held me absolutely transfixed (at times I felt that this book had its teeth around my throat, which doesn't often happen but I love when it does). I loved chasing the plot down the rabbit hole, and reading more about the ghul and changelings, and meeting Emmie and Soldier. I loved that it didn't end the way I expected. (I know it's something people have complained about before, but I love your endings with a deep and abiding love. I think it's wonderful when a book resists our desire to have everything neatly explained, and leaves so much up to us.)
Thank you, Alison. If only I had a couple million more just like you, the platypus and I could take a breather.
And on the subject of Mary Magdalene and Sophie Neveu and The DaVinci Code, David Kirkpatrick (
corucia) writes:I haven't read the book or seen the movie yet, but if your description is correct, it's even more egregious than this... given the number of generations between then and now, recombination and chromosome segregation during the meiotic divisions that occur to produce each generation's eggs and sperm would essentially eradicate any possibility of determining direct ancestral relationships. Imagine that they could identify 1000 unique DNA sequences that 'mark' the genome of the body in the sarcophagus. Each parent contributes 1/2 of their genetic content to the next generation, so on average 500 of the markers would be inherited by Mary's sons or daughters. Once a marker is lost, there's little chance that it will be re-acquired, if you assume uniqueness; it'd have to be restored by a newly-occurring mutation or be introduced again by mating (which would mean that there are other lines of descent from Mary, invalidating the 'one last descendant' part of the plot). In about ten generations, there'd be no contribution that could be traced back to Mary. Given that there's been at least 60 generations since 1 AD (minimum of 3 generations/century x 20 centuries), there's essentially no chance that ancestry could be proven. However, if it had been an uninterrupted line of sons from Jesus rather than Mary, with all of the unique markers occurring on the Y chromosome, there might have been some chance of verifying descent even over this time interval...
Has anyone checked to see if Michael Crichton had a hand in the science of this film or book? It sounds like his level of incompetence...
David is a cellular biologist, by the way, and is not talking out his ass (like, say, Dan Brown).
Okay. This is a day off. Time to stop writing.