Oh, did some digging into the K J Parker pseudonym thing and although I've nothing definite, speculation runs that he/she is connected to Tom Holt (either wife, close friend, or mother!) - I think I'll stick with Ariel's assertion of it being the man himself though. I happened across an Orbit interview of KJ Parker yesterday, and some of the answers had a certain Holt wit about them.

Pout...sniffle...I used to have a great view from my window. We've got huuuuge trees around all the boundaries of our garden, nicely blocking off the view of anyone who happens to look up from the little lane that runs past the back of our house.
And our particular part of the 'burbs has enough trees left over from when it was open country/farmland, that you can't see any other red brick monstrosities (despite being able to hear the M4 which is just a mere spit away...) ...I digress... anyway, this morning all the lovely trees on our side of the fence have had major portions lopped off by Daddy dear in one of his feverish gardening fits. (as opposed to his usual pottering gardening m.o.) Grrr argh. It's all roughly sawn trunk ends and half-nekkid tree creatures now.

Still...at least it's better than when we lived near Heathrow. We lived so close to the airport that every night when planes flew over the house (very low over the house...) their headlights shone in through the window and tracked up the wall...

In happier news....! Finally got around to posting something on the Dead Cities boards without the violins of neurotica interrupting things. :->
And after indulging in a top 5 books post on the BFS boards I've started reading Steve Cockayne's Wanderers and Islanders again. (Actually that should be re-reading..) I picked it up as a freebie at last year's BFS I-can't-believe-it's-not-fantasycon thing in London.
Other books I've got lined up in the reading pile are Mark Chadbourn's Devil in Green & K J Parker's Memory. (Thanks Ariel for reviewing it on Alien - I'd forgotton that it was due out.)
D'ya know, apparently K J Parker is a pseudonym for one of the other Orbit authors..... Ariel reckons it's Tom Holt in disguise. Love to know the truth of it but I reckon Ariel's got something there...

Spam bastards
Grrr, argh. Bloody spam-heads. Right up until the early part of last year, I didn't get any spam email at all. Not a single one. Knew it was too good to be true. Now? Now half my inbox is f'king spam. It's the website that's done it mostly I think (especially noticeable when I get the same f'king porno message to both the addy's on the contact page & one of the addy's is fresh enough that it hasn't been used anywhere else.)
And then this morning I get some smart arse bastard sending me 5 emails about how to get off email lists. Oh just piss off and leave me alone you morons.

So I went searching for a way to stop the wankers from doing it (I'm getting so bored with adding terms and servers to the mail blocking list) and found Junkbuster who have some interesting tips to help make things difficult for people harvesting emails.
Some of it's worth a go, I think.

D'ya know what's really irritating? When you go to buy a book that was supposed to have been out a month ago and find out it's not due out for another three. Vertigo do this to me a lot - every month they put up their publication dates for various TPBs and when I hop over to Amazon to take a look-see, they've either never heard of them or have them listed as not coming out for months. Grr, argh!

Talking of graphic novels - just finished reading the first two Promethea trades (on Mark Chadbourn's [mind control]read his Age of Misrule books right now[/mind control] recommendation) - ooh that's good stuff. The second trade is more info heavy than the first and there's a nice mix of various (I want to say kabbalistic, but I'm not entirely crystal on what it means, so..) cross-associative disciplines. (ie. elementalism/tarot major arcana/symbolism etc.) Need to re read them a few more times and cross read with some other stuff to buff up that side of my brain again. (Sheesh it's been ages since I last got around to reading anything of that particular ouevre - practicing and making it up as I go along, fine, but the reading side has been shelved of late due to too many businesses on the go. I take after me dear ole mam on that one :-> )

But business on all sides is quiet - which is how I found the time to take in a bargain matinee of X2! Woohoo!
Talk about hefty sfx. Great action sequences. There were cracking scenes, and a few not-so-cracking scenes. And the foreshadowing.... damn, but X3 better be made or there's some portions of X2 that'll be wasted. (Pop over to the BFS boards for the sort-of review and discussions on it!)