David Wells is going down tonight like a fat drunk in a bar fight with a midget.

Oh, wait. That WAS David Wells!

Let's go Marlins!!!!!!!!!

In other news, Bard was a bust so I'm looking for something else to read. Got about 10 pages in and just couldn't get into Llywelyn's style of writing. Too bad, as I was hoping for something along the lines of an Irish version of Aztec. Grabbed Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory off our bookshelf this morning and got through the first chapter on the train before giving in to a nap. Nothing to do with the book, I was just tired. It does start off as a rather cliched immigrant story, though, but I've been intending to read it for years so I'll push through it even if it doesn't pick up.

I'm still waiting to get my copy of The Glass Mountain, the sequel to Children of the Shaman that I had to order from the UK Amazon.com as it hasn't been published here yet. Apparently, Shaman's sales weren't impressive enough for ROC to pick up Mountain for US publication. I wonder how much marketing, or lack of, had to with that. Judging from the amount of praise the book received and the way ROC is buried in the depths of the Penguin web site, I suspect a whole lot. (For a while, I actually thought TOR was the publisher!)

As it is, I think Shaman might be a little bit too different for the general fantasy audience that it was likely marketed to. It's definitely not a hack-and-slash dungeon crawl! Judging from Mountain's cover, it looks like the UK publisher tried to force Rydill's round story into the fantasy genre's square peg. That, combined with the tagline, The Spellbinding Fantasy Novel of Empire and Enchantment would have totally turned me off and I'd have never picked it up. The first chapter she has posted on her site has me hopeful that she's retained the magic of Shaman, not giving in to whatever corporate pressure there might have been to make it more marketable. That's like faulting the hammer for not being a screwdriver!

It's things like this that make me appreciate the Soft Skulls of the world and reinforce my desire to go into publishing for myself. As the past year has found me completely reshaping my creative outlets, I'm thinking 2004 may be the year to get that particular project off the ground.