The Down Side of the Grandiose and other stories

Well, friends, your blogger feels much as a mountaineer must after struggling to a tough peak, waving arms and imbibing champagne at the traditional summit celebration, and, finally, strapping all her gear back on to glissade down.

After reviewing Brideshead Revisited, the Les Misérables movie, and A Memory of Light all in just over a week, it feels a touch anticlimactic to think of returning to books designed as fun reads rather than storm-covered Mt. Everests of emotion. The grandiose tends to temporarily spoil one for the everyday, no matter how good the everyday.

On the other hand, grandiose is a lot of work. The aforementioned mountaineer would certainly agree. If all reviews took me as long as A Memory of Light did... Well. They would be fewer.

Potentially bigger problem: A Memory of Light really made me want to write a fourteen-volume high fantasy saga of my own. About what, you ask? Who knows? Who cares? Something awesome. All that time with the same two hundred characters... No, Jenna. Bad Jenna. You have a lot of revisions to handle first.

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It's awfully tempting, right now, to bore you all with my to-do list. I'm headed to Seattle tonight for a couple of events including overdue catch-up time with a good friend. While I'm gone, Lou—bless that man; bless him from the very heights of heaven—is going to upgrade my computer from Vista to Windows 8, hopefully speeding it up and smoothing out some of the issues that even a good little soldier like my Dell develops after four years of near-constant action. This means that my today is crammed full of things like packing and printing maps and backing up files and settings, on top of the usual Friday housecleaning and whatever.

On account of which, I had thought to abbreviate this blog post. But I do have a handful of things for you:

1. Cat picture.

2. News to delight fellow fans of Jane Austen, Shannon Hale, Stephenie Meyer, and Jerusha Hess: the movie version of Hale's Austenland drew a crowd at the Sundance Film Festival. It also drew some powerful attention, and Sony picked it up for distribution. It's coming to theaters!!! No firm word on when yet, but it doesn't matter—I'm seeing it.

3. For Wheel of Time fans: In a chat recently hosted by Tor, Brandon Sanderson answered fan questions about various plot points in A Memory of Light. Warning: spoilers for A Memory of Light! But if you've read that book, this is a lot of fun to read.

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Music of the week: In honor of our shared birthday on Sunday—his two hundred and twenty-two years before mine—a little Mozart.

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Time to start backing up my computer, if I want to not lose pictures and music and bookmarks tonight. Happy weekend!