A mini book review and some other thoughts

My main internet forum of choice has been mostly down for days now.  It's making me half-nuts having it gone, even though I've lately been making a concerted attempt to keep myself off the internet as much as possible because I feel like it's sucking away my ability to concentrate -- and this coming from someone who's already ADHD.

However, even what with trying to spend less time on the internet, said forum is still very much the backbone of my non-Brownie social life - it's where I get the vast majority of intelligent conversation, lulz, and genuine friendship.  I hate having it gone.  I hate not knowing if there have been any new datewrecks, any job interviews, wild familyfail stories, or whatever else may be going on.  So to those who might be reading:  hello, mah h0rs, and my the forumfail be fixed as soon as possible.

Other than that, I've devoured the City of Bones/Ashes/Light over the past few days, which were generally quite awesome.  I'd highly recommend them to anyone into YA Fantasy.  Highly.  Clare does a great job with urban fantasy, melding the fantastic aspects of the story seemlessly with the weird awesomeness of New York City, and she does a particularly good job of getting the teenage mentality down well:  the characters are flawed, but not detestably so; they have a tendency to believe their own ideas a little too fervently; they don't always understand themselves or what they're doing, but they're not idiots either.  They're teenagers who, despite special abilities, act more like real teenagers than the twenty-somethings that populate teen dramas on tv.  I have my gripes with the series (namely that Clary's special ability, once discovered, seems to fix everything a little too easily), but I really enjoyed it.

Thinking about it, that's probably the closest approximation to a book review I've ever had on this blog.

Anyway.  On the writing front:  the book idea which I've been playing with that I mentioned in the last post is, if I didn't mention it then, YA fantasy.  Partially because that's the age of the main characters, partially because the idea itself is firmly fantasy, and partially because YA fantasy has been the vast majority of my reading lately simply because I've had more fun reading it than I've had reading anything in YEARS.  I love teenagers-as-chosen-ones: they're already busy trying to understand themselves in normal life, trying to understand where/how they fit into the world and what might begin to form their place therein, so putting them in the position of "chosen one" as it were both gives them a way to frame the identity-angst as well as a way to begin to work their way out of it and toward a better sense of self-understanding.  Anyway, between loving the genre and having a hook that fits better there than anywhere else, I'm playing with it.  If it ends up going somewhere beyond the roughly 2K words I have now, great.  If it doesn't, then that's fine too.  When it gets farther along, maybe I'll actually post a sample.