(no subject)

MMmm, Indian food makes me happy.

Have an interview with Netflix tomorrow, nervous nervous. Will try not to get hopes up.

The boy thinks it's strange that I aim for mediocrity, but I am a total control freak and perfectionist, and if I actually start thinking about evaluation and ranking and that sort of stuff, I tend to go off the deep end.

And because minim_calibre just posted about adopting a new cat, I ended up at Petfinder.com. Look at these poor ratties! How could people just abandon them? They've got other groups of adult males that have lived their entire lives in the shelter too, and I feel so bad for them =(.

Sigh. Sigh. Sigh.

Argh. Now I am attempting to persuade myself that I have room for more rats.

ETA: Oh yeah... question for people with iPods. My computer's hard drive broke a bit back. I had a backup, so some of my music was saved, but it's all uncategorized. Is there any way to transfer music from my iPod to iTunes, as opposed to the other way around? So far I haven't been synching it because I'm scared somehow iTunes will erase all the music on my iPod.

Dean, Pamela - The Secret Country Trilogy

I really liked these, and felt they were a very good addition to the kids-from-our-world-discover-a-fantasy-world genre. I can't actually remember when The Secret Country breaks off and The Hidden Land begins, but the author notes in the back say that they were originally one book, so I guess that makes sense. It probably also makes the pacing of the two books more understandable as well.

I dearly loved the beginning of The Secret Country, probably because those kids were me. Granted, I could not quote Shakespeare at the drop of a hat -- in fact, I hadn't read much of anything remotely classic or educated, but my sister and my cousin and I used to get together every summer up till middle school, and those summers would be spent in our various game worlds. We had a whole variety of games, as opposed to the one linear story of the Carrolls, but oh, those brought back memories.

I got a bit more stuck in the middle, when the Carrolls managed to find their way into the Hidden Land and felt the action sort of stopped dead as they all worked out the ramifications of being in the Hidden Land, how time would work in their world and the Hidden Land, what they could bring over, etc. etc. And while it was incredibly nice to have people actually thing about this sort of thing for a while, it did drag a little. Also, like Yoon said, I had a very hard time keeping the cousins straight at first, with the exception of Patrick, who was very much unlike the others. It helped much when later on more and more points of view were added into the mix. The story really kicks off when Fence the magician returns to court, and Ted most of all is trying to avoid the turn in the plot that their original played out story of the Secret Country takes.

And everything just made so much sense -- all those stock fantasy elements which would have made me sort of sniff made sense because the Carrolls had imagined the Secret Country, or tapped into it somehow.

( Spoilers )

I also loved how the books were so concerned with the idea of being an author, of the problems of creating a story and having it come to life. There's this one point in the book when Laura, I think, sees a minor character and knows that if she had had her way back while playing the Secret Country game, he would have been killed in battle, and the realization of the power they all had as storytellers was sobering. The trilogy is very much a set of books about story and imagination, and I loved them because of that. Well, and because by the end, I had fallen for the characters and the world as well, as in all good books.