dee - viscerate.com

GIRL
Diana Evans
called Dee
since May 25th, 1980
terrorising inner-city Melbourne
consuming flat whites
producing words, hers and other people's
contact dee [at] viscerate [dot] com

SITE
viscerate.com
consisting of personal reflections
photography by Amy Q
archives here

Saturday, January 05, 2002

Meanwhile, The Ill-Made Mute is much better written than the other pfaff I've been reading. In fact, Ms Dart-Thorton is positively verbose. I think she's Italian, or something. Never use one word when you can use four paragraphs. I wouldn't mind it, except this verbosity seems to be hiding the fact that there's bugger-all actually happening.

The story is sort of a meld of Robin Hobb and Mervyn Peake (yes, Gormenghastliness - it's got his Dickens-on-crack sort of gothic tinge) and a huge slug of Celtic mythology. Seelie faeries and daonie sidhe and other unusual blends of vowels all over the place. It's... I dunno. I don't quite like it. The characters aren't really all that interesting to me. At half-way through, there were really only two of them. Now the love interest's popped up (two thirds of the way through - he believes in being fashionably late) and he's some sort of laughable cross between Aragorn (big, tough and manly!) and Legolas (cat-like, silent and lithe!). In general, it's getting a Tolkien-esque feel to it, now (which, as you know if you know me, is not necessarily a good thing at all). But they're just wandering through the wilderness, having random encounters with faeries. Long-term plot? What's that?

So, in summation, it's a 'beautiful tapestry of mythology' and crap like that, but I'm not sure it's a good story.

10:16 AM - link to this - (0) comments

Tuesday, January 01, 2002

This year, I:
  • went to see Rammstein in concert (rah),
  • was a tutor in my college, and enjoyed it,
  • made great new friends, both in 'real' life and online,
  • found another soulmate in Je,
  • wrote some kick-ass essays,
  • turned 21, though this wasn't as big a deal as it sounds,
  • played Werewolf and thoroughly enjoyed myself,
  • started writing again, seriously, with help from gil,
  • shocked everyone by being more exhibitionist, goth, loud-mouthed, confident and generally out-there than they thought I was, and hence
  • was more myself, and had more fun, than in any year previous.
Happy New Year. Forget regrets; just make it good in 2002.

7:32 PM - link to this - (0) comments

Monday, December 31, 2001

I've become such a curmudgeon. I'm reading another book, now, but it's not up to my high standards, either. Must every Australian fantasy author write as if to five-year-olds? I'm so tired of See-Spot-Run plots and simplistic sentences. I'm such a bitter, cynical critic.

1:55 PM - link to this - (0) comments

The Male is in London, getting lost with minicab drivers, and my mother is saying how he should have taken a Black Cab, because those drivers have to have the Knowledge.

Yes, with a capital letter. It's mystic, it's magic, it's something for initiates only. There's a novel in that, and no mistake about it. A cabbalistic, Rosicruician novel.

10:08 AM - link to this - (0) comments

Sunday, December 30, 2001

I've been writing. Actually writing. Hear that, gilmae? Get your little Bundabergian arse in gear, because I'll be a-sending you stuff tomorrow.

Why am I suddenly writing? It's combination of being so bored I could quite happily comb the cat just to have something to do (take away my internet and my ready access to lots of other people and I am a very bored Dee) and the fact that I just finished reading a mediocre-ish fantasy novel. It was one of my Christmas gifts, and it wasn't really all that bad. But it was... bland. It was a small story, just about a couple of people, not involving the fate of the world, or of nations, or even of large groups of people.

I mean, honestly! I read fantasy because it's epic. Big. Broad. Swashboggling. If I wanted to read a story about a handful of people with no real bad guy beyond one petty and very human schemer (who gets thwarted in the end), I'd read Enid sodding Blyton (which I will, don't mistake me, but that's not what I was looking for here). It wasn't even brilliantly written. In the not-so-gran tradition of Australian fantasy, it was very simply told. With grammar mistakes the copy editor should have picked up.

Anyway, the book was The Magicians' Guild by Trudi Canavan. (Yes, the one with the disputed apostrophe, gil.) I'd been looking forward to it, too. I hope my other Christmas books are better.

9:28 PM - link to this - (0) comments