Pale Gray for Guilt.

I am officially addicted to a pulp detective novel series. I'd been reading Spider Robinson's "Callahan's" series of science fiction short stories and novels when I there was this extended reference to a detective novel series that sounded vaguely interesting. I went to the library and checked out one of the books and never even got past the page that listed the books in the series. (I'd looked in the library and just grabbed the earliest one they had.) I decided that I'd read the first book first (at least) and promptly forgot about it. Then one day I was wandering around in a crappy used book store (I live in a town that isn't large enough by half to support anything else) and I decided to see if they had any of the Ian Flemming novels, since I'd wanted to read them anyway (I finally read casino royale, oodles better than any of the movies.) Being a crappy used book store they didn't have them, but being out of the miniscule science fiction/fantasy section made me remember that there were a few that I wanted to read that weren't in my major genres (I read mostly SF, fantasy, non-fiction, and any genre of fiction as long as it is written by Issac Asimov.) Well, I was there and I thought "hey John D. McDonals. I wonder if they have him. Well amazingly enough they did, and they had the first book, Deep Blue Gooodbye. So I read it. Then I went to the library and checked out all of their non-large print editions of the books over a period of a month or three. (I've avoided the large print ones mostly because I don't care enough to go to a different part of the library and try to figure out which ones I've not read.)

Well, I just bought (way cheap) an omnibus edition of three of the stories. I'd been hoping that one would be the one right after the latest one I'd read. They aren't but they are all new to me. Oh well. I looked it up today, and it appears that the latest one that I read was the last one he wrote before he died. That kind of blows a lot, since it set up more of a cliff hanger than usual.

Still no news from Ball State. I'm going to call them either tomorrow or the next day.

Lackey wrote a new book set in her Serrated Edge/West Coast Elves world, but back in the time of Henry VIII. It is kind of odd reading a book set just before Quicksilver. I'm afraid that either the research for this book was a little weaker (which is understandable since she not only puts out a lot of books a year but is writing fantasy instead of historical fiction) than Stephenson's or he was way off base in his research (I sort of doubt it. The only book by him that was way off base, other than Big U which was a parody of our reality, was Snow Crash, which was a parody of Gibson's Cyberpunk.

Oh well. Still no writing today. I think I'll bring in the plants tonight since it might fall below freezing. I'm worried about the trees in the back, but more because I'm afraid they may drown than because of the cold.