I stayed up much too late last night (3 am!) reading Naomi Novik's latest Temeraire novel, Empire of Ivory. Great! I really enjoy this series (dragons in the time of the Napoleonic wars) and this new installment lives up to the previous books. There are three earlier novels in the series, with plans for more.

I was able to hear Novik interviewed at Nippon2007. She was very interesting, talking about her tech writing and fan fiction roots. The only drawback was her interviewer was her Japanese editor (I think) and so there had to be translation of everything that was said on both sides.

Novik has a website with a wiki that has lots of fan participation with details about actual history vs her alternate history. Plus, she's got a livejournal!

My old buddy Dan Sanderson at Brainlog gets titlelessly geeky about pens. I don't write enough by hand to have preferences here but I find it entertaining to read folks giving their opinions about topics like this. "I'm still on the fence: It's clear gel pens have benefits over traditional ball point pens in terms of consistency and reliability, but I haven't met a gel pen that didn't slather the page too much. Every time I use a gel pen I feel like I'm making a mess. Rands disqualifies the fine point gel early in his trials, but I'm eager to try one after his review, because a fine point might win me over."

Dan was inspired by Rands and the joy of pens.

Two years ago, the fire department spoke at my son's school for fire prevention safety week. They spoke about many fire safety rules and stressed the importance of changing the smoke detector batteries in your home. My son John took to heart the fireman's words. He came home and started in on his dad about checking the batteries of our smoke detectors. My husband told John that he would check them but he put it off for "later". My tenacious son kept after my husband for two weeks straight. Finally, he checked the smoke detectors and was shocked to discover that the batteries in every single detector in our house was dead. He took John to the store and bought new smoke detectors with backup systems for the entire house. Two weeks later on Thanksgiving morning, we woke up at 4:00 am to the sound of smoke detectors going off. We had a fire in our family room which was at the other end of the house from the bedrooms.