The DWJ Project: House of Many Ways

Charmain Baker gets sent, against her will, to look after the house of her Great-Uncle William, who is also the Royal Wizard of Norland, while he's away being cured of illness. The house turns out to have all kinds of dimensions not immediately obvious to the naked eye, but there are problems from rebellious kobolds and a dangerous lubbock, as well as difficulties for the Kingdom of Norland, which is very nearly bankrupt.

(Random aside: can I just say how distracting the lubbock was to me? So far as I can determine, that's not anything from folklore. And I associate the name with a rather dreary city in Texas, known to me mostly because a) it's where we stopped for lunch on road trips to Arizona, and b) it's the home of Texas Tech University, from whence came the various correspondence courses I did in high school. So yeah, that's what I kept thinking about.)

Like Castle in the Air, this is less a direct sequel, more a related book. Howl, Sophie, and Calcifer appear (and their influence is more apparent than in Castle), but mostly they're there to facilitate someone else's story -- in this case, Charmain's.

( I wish I liked her better. )

Derkholm series next!

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Thirteen: The (Forgiveness of the) Internets

'Cause I, well, forgot to post yesterday. I remembered at one point during the afternoon, but I hadn't yet picked a thing to post about, and then next thing I know it's, well, now. (And I already did the meta "get out of jail free" thing with being thankful for days off. Clearly, weekends are hard.)

So I'm thankful that you all forgive me for missing a day. You do forgive me, right? Right???

To avoid totally copping out on this post, though, I'm going to be thankful for the internet more generally. I was talking with kniedzw the other night about signal to noise ratios in our current society, and he complained about internet searches: fifteen years ago he could go to Altavista or whatever and type in [some kind of techie query; I can't remember what his example was] and turn up a useful tutorial on how to do that thing. Now he has to wade past various auto-generated SEO traps to get to the actual info. I conceded this may be true . . . but on the other hand, fifteen years ago I doubt Altavista could have pointed me at an online account of the exact route taken by Elizabeth I's coronation procession. The Internet back then was a paradise for techie topics, maybe, but not so much for everything else.

These days, I may indeed have to wade past random crap -- but the information is out there, so often it simply boggles me. I can, without leaving my office, look at a topographical map of the area around Dover Castle, or read back issues of the London Times, or get instructions on embroidery stitches. The sheer amount of info contained in Wikipedia alone is astronomical. When I try to imagine writing the Onyx Court series without the 2007-2010 Internet to help me out . . . well, actually, I try not to imagine that, since it leads to me curling up under my desk and wibbling. (I dunno. Maybe it would have been great, because I wouldn't have had so much red meat to feed my obsessive tendencies.)

So I'm thankful for the Internet, and all its wonders.

You do forgive me, right?