DEADLINE open thread. Have a party.

I am well seasoned by this point, and damn if that ain't GREAT. Proof positive you can't spoil me. No, not quite done yet - they just killed Kenny, er, Kelly - and I'm sure the last bits are going to be just as fab as the rest. This book is an absolute joy to read - I'm not stumbling back and forth, reading and re-reading bits to get the cadence or bits of info. The biggest problem with FEED, for me, was rushing to get to that next bit of info - I just couldn't get to it fast enough. With a little seasoning, reading this was something one can savor slowly. About 200 pages an hour. ^^ (No, I'm not getting hours together to read anything right now.)

I knew that retinal KA was going to be key beans - it wasn't just virology being believable for the story, it was Very Important Stuff specific to moving the story at some point. And when it belonged to the first person narrator? Gonna die. I have no illusions about your ability to deal with characters as the story wills it - so no, throwing book across room not happening here. This one neither.

As far as the Shaun/Georgia thing? If I could have said it to them, it might have been couched as 'I know you're doing it, you know you're doing it, we all know you grew up together - it's not the incest, it's continuing to cave and use the wrong words, okay? We know you're in love - own it. Come on - the truth is worth dying for, right?' I've known too many cases of actual full sibs coming together, separated all their lives by parental drama - that met, fell in love and went on to do the horizontal bop, produced progeny (with the predictable results) and so forth - for this to make me squick.

I am certain, beyond the shadow of a doubt that if anyone went out and polled the infant-at-the-time survivors of the first Rising, they would find other couples like them. Certain of it. (And hence, even more reason to identify first parents, neh? There's a twist.)

BTW, a word about the parental thing? These books are murder on people identified as parents. They are nearly all uniformly malicious idiots. Maybe successful in business, like Maggie's - but still, uniformly indifferent, absent, egocentric to the point of oblivious - twits. The only taste of the elder Masons we get is at arm's length, hardly concrete except for 'that shit is OVAH' and we're kind of left to write them as ugly and awful as one wills. Yup, zombies - and nasty, nasty people using zombies to further personal agendas at the expense of EVERYONE. But if you're still short on awful people, there are all those parents to hate on - deservedly so. Maggie is spoiled beyond belief - but is that love? Without even so much as a phone call without some bill prompting it?

(I'm left with one example that doesn't fall into this category - and hmm, is it possible the President is immune too? No spoilers for Blackout, okay?)

Bug vectors. Of course! But KA doesn't care about retroviruses? Aww, man - we still got herpes & shingles to worry about? That's mean. Then again, where *does* KA go to sleep, anyway? *winks*

Feel better - the fact you have promised a last zombie in the next book is intriguing all on its own. No, I wouldn't want to live in this world - and a big part of the appeal is the happy ending. We all want a happy ending, right?