If truth be told, I’m still feeling a little shellshocked from Worldcon.  Usually I come back from events eager to push my writing harder but after a double weekend of Nine Worlds and Worldcon I instead find myself feeling like I still need to decompress.  As a result, I’ve got very little actual writing done.
It always bothers me, and especially so when I have so much work to do, when I get behind on writing.  I’ve tried to go a little easy on myself.  House buying radiates stress in the background and I keep reminding myself that some time, hopefully soon, I’ll be moved with dedicated writing space.  Then the word count will mount like the bodies in a George R R Martin novel!
Coming off the tablets for the duration of the events gave me some problems with the leg, so combined with out of hours on-call work from the day job there’s been no geocaching this weekend.  It looks like it’s stopped bleeding finally which is good because it kept sticking to my bandages, causing me to reopen the wound every night when I came to remove them.
The net result is a bank holiday weekend where I’ve not done much.
That would usually feel like a wasted opportunity but instead I’ve been reading a lot.  I’ve found, especially this year, that writing is eating into my reading time and I’ve made a conscious effort to claw some of that time back.
A nice incentive for me was my friend Steve Aryan who told me of his plans to re-read Dresden Files, one a month, up until Eastercon where Jim Butcher is putting in an appearance.
Now I was late to The Dresden Files.  Part of it was writing an Urban Fantasy myself and wanting to avoid anything similar “Lest it influence my work”*.  But there’s also a commitment involved in reading  a big series.  I don’t think I can binge like I would on a DVD bookset and I worry that doing so would ruin the enjoyment for me.  I have never been able to read two Terry Pratchett novels back to back – for some reason the second one always seems less funny.
The weird result is that I have plenty of series where I’ve read the first book and absolutely loved it only then never to find time for subsequent books (Malazan, I’m looking at you).  I’ve done a little better with Dresden and made my way to book 6.
But it turned out that I was only a book behind Steve and his plan to re-read up to date in time for Eastercon.
And so that’s what I spent my Bank Holiday doing, reading book 7 of Dresden (Dead Beat).  And, Oh My God, I’m glad I did.  There’s very few books where I squee with delight at various plot turns but this was one of them.  There’s even fewer books where I get to the end and find myself wishing I had written it – seriously that’s the highest compliment I can ever give to a book.  I loved this book.  Despite it being the 7th book in a series, it’s up there with Lord of the Rings, Lies of Locke Lamorra and Rivers of London for me.  Simply brilliant.
And so now I’ve moved onto book 8.  Steve tells me that the series gets better and better.  He’s starting on book 9 so I am a book behind.  But if Proven Guilty is anywhere as good as Dead Beat then I’ll be caught up in no time and have put my Bank Holiday Weekend to good use.
 
*I now know that this is bullshit.