Brackets bad

I have a fairly constant dislike of brackets in fiction ("fairly constant" because I have used them once myself, and recently, for some bitter ironic point that I cannot now remember but it seemed to me to suit the tone of the piece, and also perhaps play up the game that no one ever acknowledges in first-person fiction, that sliding relationship between the narrator and the reader). Just sayin'.

In other news, I went down to Durham yesterday and spent a happy evening, a sleepsome night and a cheerful morning with friends. Going down, though, and coming back? Brackets. Not matching, but brackets none the less. Hence, bad.

Going down was walking half an hour to the train station through what I will once again call frozen rain. It was horrid: ice in the face and ice underfoot. Ugh.

Coming back, I reached Durham station at 11.15 and was still there at 1.00pm. First there was a queue of idiots at the ticket machines, who managed to take just exactly long enough to allow me to miss the train that came in at twenty past. And then there was a forty-minute wait till the next train - and by then the football crowd had started to arrive, and the train was overchoked and couldn't take us all. And the next train was running twenty minutes late, so that was another forty minute wait, and... Yeah. Like that. I may have uttered foul and opprobrious epithets not quite under my breath, and been almost polite-ish.

But I drank coffee and read in my Kindle and it was kind of okay really, except that even an eventual mere ten-minute journey is all kinds of no fun at all when it's standing-room only among chanting football fans.

Anyway. Am home now, and more or less resigned to doing more or less nothing with the day. I shall put some books into some boxes, and make believe that that's enough.

Not by bread alone, but b(u)y every word about bread

I'm not entirely sure quite how many books about baking one man might actually need, but a careful examination of the situation leads me to suppose that "not this many" would be correct.

And I haven't even found my favourite yet.

Still, I have sorted out one that I can live without. The rest - well, they're just too lovely to leave behind.

In other news, I wonder why - given that I prefer French food to Italian - a little ruthless purging can reduce my French cookery books to a single box, where I require two for the Italian books, even without being able to find my favourite of those either?*


*The attentive reader may be suspecting at this point that there is a cache of cookery books somewhere in the house that I have not yet uncovered. I suspect that the attentive reader may be right.

Locus poll, and Borderlands

I'd forgotten that being on the Locus Recommended Reading list also means that you're in the Locus poll for best-of-the-year. I'm notoriously uncomfortable about the whole shilling-for-votes thing, so I won't do that; but, y'know. Best SF/F of the year. You can vote for all sorts of fabulous books, and if your favourites aren't on the list, you can write them in.

So I think you should go and do that.

Also, while I have your attention: March 17th is not only that day when beer apparently turns green. (No. I am not going to drink green beer, 'k? I'm just not.) (I'll drink Guinness, though. Even in America.)

This year, March 17th is also the date when you can come to Borderlands in SF and hear Caitlin Kittredge and me, reading new stuff. We'll do Q&A and signing too, of course; and after discussion about whether I ought to be Chaz Brenchley or Daniel Fox for the occasion, I think the vote has fallen on Ben Macallan. So I'll probably read a bit of Pandaemonium.