Saw Addie! :D

That's a primary-school friend of mine. We've been keeping up with each other's blogs on and off since I rediscovered him years back on DiaryLand, but I haven't physically seen him for years - before he left the country for one of the good bits of that big continent to the west. 'Twas nice to see him, and looking adorable too.

We chatted and mooched around Mcr for a bit while he bought pressies for his friends. Erin & co. will laugh at the fact that I pressed a copy of Jerry Springer - The Opera upon him. *eg*

(I saw a copy of KJ Parker's Shadow in WHSmith and considered that too, but they didn't have the second two books and I'm a completist evangelist. Also not sure if he'd like them [though I suspect so]; I'd really like to buy a set of those for another friend. Man, I sound like an obsessed Parker fan... but really it's just that I like sharing my enjoyments, when they're not mainstream things that everyone else discovered before me, like Terry Pratchett.)

In conclusion, it was nice. Oh, and I played him Lords of the Rhymes and told him about Overclocked Remix. Hahaw. Geekery.

P.S. for Adam: NEDM!

[this is mainly here as a note to myself to decide whether I want to write up something about the bird]

Mutt: [talking about Shade and there being no native vampirism or wereism] As far as native 'shapeshifting', there are amphibians that have several stages of life, various creatures that can change their surface colour (and, to a limited extent, texture) by different mechanisms, a kind of bird that can reset its life cycle, and various species that go [through] reasonably dramatic changes brought about by hormones during one or more periods in their life.
Anke: bird turns to egg?
Mutt: Bird turns to stem cells.

Sometimes I wonder if certain parts of the background to my writing are too deeply thought out. Is my magic physics so complicated and nonstandard that nobody cares? (Input from people who haven't seen it before would be welcome, I guess.) Is it bad that Shade has no vampirism and doesn't suffer constant divine intervention? Are my worlds too unfantasyish? (I don't find them so, obviously; I tend to concentrate on the similarities to everything generic, and of course the ideas make sense to me...)

But most of the time I'm actually quite pleased with them. *shrug* Always room for clarification and improvement, of course, but I have a system I can work with and a rough idea of what's possible and what isn't, and that's terribly exciting.

Systembuilding is so much more fun than drawing arbitrary continents or making up pedigree lists of kings and prime ministers. (Guess. At school did I study: a-history b-geography c-physics & biology)