Mantis: still in my bathroom. He has relocated his tiny insectivore self to the roll of paper towels, where he has a higher vantage from which to snatch unsuspecting flies out of the air and devour their tiny brainless bodies. He's very yellow, and too small for my camera (which is actually Rey's camera, and not terribly high-tech) to be very happy about trying to focus on him. Which is a pity, 'cause he's pretty.

The mantis will probably be going to live in Kate and GP's garden tonight, where, as Kate puts it, 'he will grow fat and strong in the Bird of Paradise.' As they currently have no mantids, and I have an entire home-grown colony, this is probably fair, but I'm still going to miss him.

Lycanthropy: still finished. I was a little worried when I woke up this morning that I'd discover my belief that the book was done to be some sort of perverse, wicked hallucination, brought about by inhaling too many Sharpie fumes, but no, the book is really done. This draft of the book, anyway. Now I get to start doing the heavy lifting of revision and correction...but since you can't revise or correct until a book is finished, I'm really not finding myself all that concerned.

Although...



...just sayin'.

Lilly would like my attention now, and as I do not believe in thwarting Siamese when avoidable, I'll be back later.

The Summoning (Darkest Powers, Book I), by Kelley Armstrong.*
HarperCollins, hardcover
400 pages, urban fantasy/horror/young adult romance
Currently in print

( What happens when Kelley Armstrong decides to turn her attention from the adult Women of the Otherworld and take a look at what life is like for the teens just realizing what their true natures really are? Welcome to teen angst, the really, really hard way. No prior knowledge of the Otherworld required...but you want to meet these people.Collapse )

(*A brief footnote: when I review books, I provide links to their Amazon.com page, largely so that you can see what the cover looks like and get an idea of what other people -- who will presumably have biases that don't exactly match mine -- are saying. Please, support your local bookstores. If you're lucky enough to have specialty shops, shop there. That's what keeps them around, and gives authors like me -- and the ones I review -- a place to do signings and readings and other awesome stuff. Also, many independent bookstores have store cats, and you wouldn't want to make them sad, would you?)