so much typing.

I just finished an epic fantasy book called Oathbringer, by Brandon Sanderson. I've been chewing through all of his books, and he doesn't seem to work on any scale below "big," which, along with being a fan, is probably how he was chosen to finish Robert "Died While Writing The Twelfth Book" Jordan's The Wheel of Time series (which turned out to need another two books after that).

I have a pretty high tolerance for thick fiction, and my conversion to ebooks means I can have a computer do the wordcounts for me. Moby-Dick, about which generations of students have justifiably asked "Really? You're serious?", punches above its considerable actual length of 214,000 words. For some reason we thought Neal Stephenson had reached new hardcover weights with Anathem (345,000 words) and Reamde (403,000 words), although the much earlier Cryptonomicon was 470,000 words.

Oathbringer weighs in at a healthy 454,000 words, but what really got my attention was the size of the file: 73 megabytes, well over the 50 megabytes accepted by Amazon's Send To Kindle app. Reading without the Kindle service is annoying, because I read dozens of books concurrently, switching between my iPhone, iPad, and actual Kindle, and the Kindle service keeps track of my location (and, less frequently, notes) in each book.

The series containing Oathbringer has a character with a genius for drawing, and this volume, #3, just has a whole lot more illustrations meant to be her art. Luckily, the nice thing about text is that computers are really good at manipulating it, and Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire--1.3 million words, but with a file size pushed over the edge by Piranesi's engravings--already drove me to figure out how to split up a book. This turns out to be pretty easy, since I'm already using the standard "I need the tool that does everything and it's okay if it's obscure" ebook app, Calibre.

Looks like I'm holding steady finishing a book per week. So many of them have been Sanderson's, though, I feel like I should get double credit.

not my first choice. or second, or third.

We're in what I really hope is a peak stress period dealing with Angry Biodad (ABD), but at the same time, J is magnificent. Standing up and telling his story to anyone who will listen, plus ABD, who won't. Growing up with courage and kindness, and adorably confused that I should think that was anything admirable or out of the ordinary.

We've tested the legal system a bit now, with both sympathetic and unsympathetic cops, and verified that while a cop might be really mean-spirited about it, he is not going to drag a kid kicking and screaming to go with a parent he doesn't want to go with. Jerkface Cop charged in with his own emotional baggage, and said all he can do is "enforce" the court order...but that turns out to be toothless, and limited to just being a jerk (to me and to the kid). As J talked and talked about these problems going back to when he was little, and all the ways he's tried to have an honest conversation with ABD, Jerkface Cop got quieter and quieter and seemed to understand that this was a very different situation than the one that caused him so much pain. I hope he takes the lesson from it, but who knows.

I myself am a bit of a mess, self-medicating with a combination of cookies and music. I'm still enjoying the fiddle, but it's also demanding, and I enjoy having the mandolins (3) and guitars (2) as easier outlets.

It's been a pretty shitty month, all things considered. But it could be worse.