My companion piece-slash-prequel to When the Sea is Rising Red is up at Tor.com.

How fantastic is that art? When I saw it I just about died of glee. I want to snuggle it and hold it and love it and squeeze it.

Artist Goni Montes talks a bit about the process over here. I am so glad they went with that final one – it gives me the shivers.

So anyway….I has a happy.

                          

I REALLY LOVE AFRICA

And with good reason, darling:

Afro-Lisa in Camps Bay

Also, you pretty much want to see Seven Nation Army being performed on lab equipment.

And this crazy maths video dug up via antisocial sexy hermit person Rae Mariz. If she has a google-alert set for her name, I shall soon find out.

i need to test if this really works but that involves me doing stuff…soo yeah.

A reader love affair: Books Love You – where people talk about the books that changed them. I adore this. Mwah. Look, I am covering it with butterfly kisses and geranium petals.

And last one. Vandalising advertising with poetry. Beautiful.

                          

It’s about witches? It’s set in England? I dunno.

I like that cover though. *fondles*

So. Hollow Pike, ladies and gentlemen. There’s a girl with birds in her hair. I’m pretty much sold.

                          

First, laptops made of paper. Yes please.

And the world’s smallest chameleons found in Madagascar. Yay, Madagascar, we knew you were good for more than just the setting for a dumb movie!

Also, a cool post about writing dirty books for teenagers, by Mike Mullin, author of Ashfall.

I also read this tor.com post with interest, about bad books you love. Well, this one was specifically about a Heinlein book, but anyway. It got me thinking – firstly about what makes a book fail? The thing most people were going on about there in the comments was plot, and how it fell apart, or had none.

Aaaand…I don’t know if this is a valid criticism. I’ve read and loved books that are probably considered plotless. My thing is character – It’s what I remember and hang on to – these amazing people who are not real, but almost. They’re real in my head, and that’s the most important thing for me as a reader – a character I can believe in. Believe in. I don’t even have to like them very much. *cough*bateman*cough

I noticed a couple of commentators talking about how characters are just games pieces for plot, and that’s all they should be, and I shuddered. That would be my worst reader experience ever – it’s the kind of book that makes my teeth hurt just thinking about it. I’m pretty sure said commentators are not my ideal reader and would hurl my book across the room with force.

We write the books we love to read (probably, unless you’re gifted with the ability to churn out books you can’t stand in a genre you hate, and still not gas yourself). And sometimes the books we love are considered bad. (I’ve talked about this before with my love of The Tombs of Atuan. )

What’s interesting to me is what those worst books are – the ones we hate, but still slip into our writing? While I won’t say TToA is the worst* book I love, I know it’s definitely influenced me.

What about you?

*Only because I refuse to believe it’s a bad book. Hah.

                          

The #dailyteatime came about mainly because I needed a highlight to my day. I stay home and write, and homeschool my spawn, and deal with the Sisyphean task of laundry and housework. Together that’s a recipe for melt-down. I needed one up moment in between the drudgery, and I also wanted to give the spawn a cool little break in the middle of their work.

And so I started doing little picnics at tea time, basically just tarting up the juice and sandwich and apple a bit. Slowly they became a little more elaborate, and would buy slightly more expensive fruits and make them last over several tea times. I realised if you give tiny bits of a lot of things, you can combine them in all sorts of interesting ways.

Then I started taking pics as a kind of spur to keep them creative. They are hardly amazing foodporn of the highest order, but considering my budget, I’m pretty happy with them.

Part of the fun is also finding new dishes to serve things in. Today, for example, I found this wooden bowl in the second hand store for R5.

I gave it a scrub, oiled it up, washed it again, and then introduced it to the wonderful world of picnicking.

Here’s today’s tea time. Custard yoghurt with bananas, home-made bread with mozzarella and tomato, pear, mango, pineapple juice.

                          

It will be lovingly signed by my very own hand. Or if I’m feeling suicidal, I will tape a marker to the cat’s paw, and use her as giant spitting feline brush.

I put this idea to her and she gave me this look:

So yeah, that’s pretty unlikely to happen, let’s be honest.

                          

You can get your free download from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

Also, um, yeah, you want to wield a lightsaber in Skyrim. I know you do. (Via Tor.com)

                          

Sounds like a cool idea. If I wrote SF I’d be all over entering this.

In other news, you can read the first few pages of When the Sea is Rising Red on Amazon, and decide of it’s something you’d like to stick in your basket.

A couple of bookblogger reviews have mushroomed around the internets. I keep meaning to bookmark them and do a big review round up, but I am criminally lazy and this shall be my downfall. Here’s what I’ve dug up so far:

From A to Z says “It is a beautiful and haunting story that will stay with you for a long time.”

One Book at a Time found it meh and says “…was left with very mixed feelings.  It wasn’t what I had hoped it would be.”

Paperbackdolls enjoyed it, but felt it wasn’t for everyone  -  “Hellisen has written a unique story that is a blend of old folklore, mythology, fantasy and  her own personal style and the result is intellectually stimulating”

Findabookmark wasn’t expecting what she got, but liked it anyway.  Plus I kinda want what she wants – “Truthfully though I kind of just wanted Dash and Jannik to just kiss and make up.  God.  Those two.”

Alicemarvels also got a different book from what she expected, and didn’t mind at all. “If you put the writing of Neil Gaiman, H.P. Lovecraft, and Tamora Pierce in a blender, you’d closely approximate the reading experience of When the Sea is Rising Red”

Stackedbooks found the world-building confusing and thinks it should have been written in past tense – “I’d also recommend it to readers looking for a unique fantasy world, as long as they don’t mind not understanding a lot of it. ”

Intothehallofbooks loved the world of Pelimburg – “When The Sea is Rising Red is a beautifully dark and thrilling debut. I pondered it and was puzzled over it a few times, but mostly I spent my time fully immersed in it and I loved it from cover to cover. ”

So there you go…hope that helps you decide if you want to read it or not.

                          

But what I actually wanted to talk about is how being home can be really boring sometimes. There are days when school seems as much a chore for me as it is for the Spawn. Luckily these days are few and far between, and when they do happen, we can take reading-days and activity days and bake-many-many-cakes days and let’s-go-out-and-have-lunch days. Best of all, none of those days make me feel bad as a parent-teacher. My kids are still learning stuff, in sometimes not so obvious ways.

Writing’s a bit like that too. Mostly I can manage to thunk down a few words a day or edit a few pages and make some kind of progress, but those days when I stay in bed reading, or make cupcakes with my kids – they’re still writing days, you just have to change your mind-set.

What we’ve done in school this week:

Baked carrot cake. What better way to prove to spawn that carrots are not evil?

DIYed some paint out of grocery cupboard standbys and glitter.

This one’s for me. When it’s not school I get lazy with tea times, but when I get back into the swing of the things I love doing this – we have picnics at tea time.

And finally, today is such a gorgeous day. My garden is looking bedraggled because I basically live on a sand dune, so the grass needs love, but ignore that and enjoy the summery love. I think The Slave and I are going to head out for drinks after our mountain drive.

                          

This time both Younger and Elder Sprog are at school, and it’s a little intimidating teaching two very different age groups. The first day was pretty much the definition of awful. When The Slave came home I was despairing that I’d be able to cope with teaching both of them, and so he got to deal with a very Sad and Grumpy Cat.

Today was so much better. Obviously we had to shake the last of the holiday slacker vibes from our skins. One of the coolest things about staying home with them is hearing the weird and occasionally funny shit they come up with.

The Younger Sprog is not under any pressure to go to school because she’s Grade Naught, so we have a very flexible set-up where she plays as much as she wants, and she does “school” when she feels ready for it. This is way more often than you would think, by the way. This afternoon she came to me in the lounge and very seriously says, “Can we do school now – I need to take a break from playing.” Hah. Not quite the order you expect to hear those words in.

As for writing, well, let me get back into the school day rhythm before I make any commitments. I have the feeling that I’ll actually end up being more productive than I was over December. We can only hope. What a waste of time that was…