Stephanie Leary

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Miles and Miles and Miles

October 30, 2008 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

The reason I haven’t posted in a couple weeks? After kicking the cold I came home with, I started physical therapy for my ongoing neck and shoulder problems. (Turns out the muscles in my back are knotted up like strands of pearls. Not good.) The therapy is working, but it hurts to type afterward. And then I had the brilliant idea of going to BodyFlow… and I hurt my lower back. AGAIN.

The bright side of being flat on my back for nearly a week is that I got to blitz through the entire Miles Vorkosigan series. To everyone who recommended it: thank you, and I loved it just as much as you said I would, and I’m sorry it took me ten years to get here. Except that it appears Bujold is under contract for a new one, and by procrastinating I have cleverly avoided most of the agonizing wait between books. Procrastination pays, people!

Alas, this means I’m actually going to have to pay money for some Baen books. (I was reading library copies.) Damn, folks, those books are fucking ugly. None of the cover styles match. Nor is it possible to obtain the entire series in matching formats and sizes. Ugh. I’m tempted to wait until the new one comes out and see if they reissue everything, but unless Baen gets a new art director between now and then, the point is moot. Why, Baen? You’re so clever about ebooks. Why must you suck in all other ways?

Hmm. I’ve just noticed that the SFBC has the least offensive edition of Memory I’ve yet seen. Did they not do the rest?

The great thing about the series — or one of them, anyway — is that my writer-brain more or less shut itself off until the eleventh book. Ten whole books without my internal editor offering corrections or suggestions… do you know what bliss that is? But then I hit A Civil Campaign and the writer-brain flipped back on to critique some regressions in character development (or so they appeared to me on the first read), and it really got loud in the first half of Diplomatic Immunity. It settled down nicely once things started going boom again, but that was the last book, and now it’s muttering little blips of things back through the whole series. (“But if Miles had done that, why not…?”)

I’d utterly forgotten that the other Steph had been Tuckerized in A Civil Campaign until Lord Vorfolse popped up, and I nearly fell out of my chair.

I’m going back and selectively rereading now. Not quite ready to let go of Miles. The first few books are sheer fun, but the sequence from Brothers in Arms through Komarr is some of the best SF I’ve ever read.

Must give myself a break before I start in on her fantasy novels. Work is piling up around here!

Books, Life

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