Blogging, birthdays, and blogaversaries

The wonderful Audrey Writes Abroad launched this blog birthday tag to celebrate her blog year anniversary! Then Elizabelle tagged my buddy-read mischevian-in-crime Tash who tagged me, and so here we are. Happy Blogaversary, world!


The Rules:-

  1. Say you’re a champion out loud.
  2. Write a post in which you answer the questions below. (You can change or add questions if you want to.)
  3. Tag as many blogging champions as you wish so we can all create a huge chain of Champ Happiness and enlighten everyone’s day and possibly prompt a full hour of perfect World Wide Peace.
  4. Link this page in your post so I can read everyone’s answers and know more about you!

How old is your blog?

As of me writing this, my blog is exactly this old:

5 Years
8 Months
14 Days
18 Hours
25 Minutes
46 Seconds
Give or take a few days. My blog is a January baby that took its first steps on Tumblr before being unceremoniously dumped here.
Astrology sign: Aquarius.
Birthstone: Red garnet.
Mission: Books.

What was your blog’s first words?

My first ever post and book review starts, rather ominously, “A novel of the Liaden Universe, the front cover says.”

This first post (later reposted here from Tumblr) was a review of the space opera read, A Conflict of Honors by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. Rather tellingly, it is a scathing one-star. It was closely followed by another review, titled, There’s a terrified reader down there.

While there have been a great number of five-stars, the dead canary hall of fame has included…

What are you most proud about your blog?

I should probably say something about books and reading and literature, but five years. Five years. That’s like, half a lifespan of a domestic canary.

Dude.

If you had to describe your blog in one picture what would it be?

canary_chariot_by_naoko_tori-d4xaecu

What are your hopes for your blog’s future?

I wouldn’t mind another five years of amazing.

In what Hogwarts House would your blog be and why?

Ravenclaw, because that raven wishes it were a bright, yellow canary.

 


I nominate anyone else who wants to celebrate their blog birthday!

[Small Chirp] A zombie apocalypse in context

One aspect of Mira Grant’s Newsflesh series I particularly enjoy is how the reader is simply plopped down in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse and then left to fend for himself. The narrative only drops little tidbits of back-story when the plot requires further explanation of the zombie issue and how the zombies came about. This tactic is the exact opposite of what critics lovingly call an ‘info dump,’ and the text in both books in the series is all the more engaging because of this deft narrative choice.

But for all my appreciation of author Mira Grant’s decision to limit background information, I was left a little wanting. After all, a true zombie-phobe like myself needs to know the precise details of any hypothetical apocalypse in order to properly prepare for the coming doom of humanity. So imagine my delight when Grant produced a filler story between Deadline and the soon-to-be-released Blackout. Countdown is a tight novella (the audio was only about two and a quarter hours) chronicles the days just prior to and through the worst of the first Rising–Grant’s term for the zombie apocalypse that takes place in very-near 2014. Continue reading