Pretty-pretty please?

So true, I was watching The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (I figured a depressing movie in French was just the ticket post Paris attacks) and the main character’s standard old guy father suddenly has me in tears—not realizing that it’s Max von Sydow. It was a “who the hell was that?” moment.

I was thinking of what those ghostly gatherings would be like . . . inharmonious.

Don’t watch the show, but viable populations can come out of tiny founder populations—the population of Tristan da Cunha is thought to have all descended from 15 people—all white, but from several different countries. Main health issue is an above normal incidence of asthma.

I like your answer. I think mine might also be Greek Mythology—specifically, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. My mother showed me the book because I wanted to know about Pegasus. I was in second grade and the stories were so different than what I was used to—people weren’t always nice, bad things happened and stayed that…

Sigh, as probably one of the few reading who eats Dungeness crab, this is really putting a damper on my Christmas Eve and New Year’s celebration. Fresh Dungeness is delicious. Go ‘way bad algae.

P.S. I’ve been out of the greys at i09 for a long time, but now that I’ve followed Annalee over to Gizmodo, I found myself in…

In addition to that, he can only be a watcher on the walls while there’s a wall—no guarantee whatsoever that the wall makes it through the season. No wall, no watch.

True-you never want to be the narrator of ASIOAF prologue. But if they’re dead and gone, I don’t have to look them up. :)

I don’t have a series to add, but thank you Charlie for giving me a place to whine about WOT as I slog through the middle books.

Ooh, good choice—I stopped after Queen of the Damned, I think. Even that just kind of meandered.

I hear it goes a lot faster when Sanderson takes over. Or so I tell myself as I am on Book 10 and it’s going very . .. . . . . very . . . . . . . . .

very . . . . .. .

Don’t give him ideas.

Rowling has said that she thinks Prisoner is her best-written book, so I think she knows that she sprawled in the later books. Her post HP books have all been pretty short. So I don’t blame her as much as the deadlines and the editors. (The world quidditch cup sequence in Book Four really did go on and on.)

He wrote best-sellers and his wife was his editor—there you go.

I am now on Book 10 and pretty much every book has a *great* 100 pages in it—usually the end. It’s just enough to get me jazzed about reading the next book. But, oh man, getting to the wonder 100 is such an effin’ slog. I love having lots of women characters, but even I am sick of the umpteen-thousandth Black Ajah.

Ha. I am currently on Book 10 of the Wheel of Time—GRRM is a master of concision next to Jordan. No endless descriptions of local dress styles. No POVs from characters you meet once and have a name similar to five other of the series *2200* characters.

Ooh, Romeo and Juliet together at last as zombies.

I have a lot of respect for Cherryh’s world-building, plotting and character development. (Her aliens are alien.) That said, I think she’s weak in terms of actual writing—it can be a real slog to get through some of her paragraphs. I’m always happy to have read one of her books—there’s food for thought—but I don’t…

Plenty of the Bay Area ends up underwater, but both San Francisco and Oakland are hilly, so they won’t disappear. About a third of Palo Alto goes under. The Googleplex is doomed. San Jose north of the airport gets wet. As far as the East Bay goes, 880 and parts west are houseboat country.

The bigger change is actually…

And it’s creepy as all get out. If I’d heard that story as a young child I’d have been totally traumatized.