In Which We Discuss Moving EBooks Around

I bought my Kobo Mini 3-4 years ago.  I was broke at the time, but it was a great purchase.  When I started working again in mid 2013 I upgraded to a Kindle Paperwhite.

Though I love my Kobo Mini, and it was a good friend to me, I've gravitated more and more to reading books on the Kindle Paperwhite, especially since the Kobo will no longer hold a reasonable charge.  In essence, I no longer use the Kobo at all any more.  Which is a shame, because I have some great books on there.

While I can still use the Kobo App on my phone, or use both the Kobo and Kindle apps on my Android Tablet or PC, I'm not likely to do that.  I'm not in the habit of reading books on my PC or laptop, and we actually sold the Android Tablet, which was a gift I rarely used.  Though it was briefly useful for reading Kindle graphic novels.

In short, this has been a barrier to finishing the six unread books I still have on my Kobo.  So I've spent the last few hours transferring them onto my Kindle, as well as converting them into a handy PDF format.

This has involved a great deal of frustrated googling.

It turns out the Kobo desktop app does not create a save file on your PC, so it cannot be used to manipulate books by opening the files in Calibre or transferring them.  What you actually need to do is follow the directions here.  In short, you download Adobe Digital Editions, create a log-in, then download your books from kobo.com.  This then creates a folder called 'my digital editions' which contains the actual save files for your books.  These you can upload into calibre and do kinky things to.

After converting the files to PDF or another format that Kindle can open, simply plug your Kindle into your PC and drag the files from the Calibre folder to the Kindle folder.  I just dragged the entire folder which was labelled with the books name rather than individual files, and that seems to work.

Edit:

My Kindle claimed it was too full for me to read beyond a certain point of a PDF.  It's also had a 'ghost' copy of Peony in Love on it for a while - by 'ghost' I mean I deleted it from the Kindle, but it's still there and refuses to be deleted again.  I also noticed a load of what appeared to be junk files when I plugged it into the PC.

So I've performed a factory reset after noting down the titles I had downloaded.  This time, I moved the PDF files from Calibre alone, without all of the other files that go with them, and it worked just fine.

In Which We Discuss Twilight and the Defence of Sparklepires

Do you remember when the media-cycle last turned around to Vampires?  Twilight was a big part of that zeitgeist, but so was True Blood, Being Human and a re-release of LJ Smith's Vampire Diaries, which was part of a previous vampire cycle in the mid-nineties.  If I recall correctly, it was preceded by witches - remember Charmed and T*Witches? - and followed by werewolves.  Then aliens, some more witches, and now we're stuck on zombies.  We've been stuck on zombies for a while now, actually.  It's a bit interminable.

I read the first Twilight book in order to see what all the fuss was about.  It was okay.  Went down easily, like junk food, but when you thought back over what it contained you felt a little bad.  Like the whole magical soulmates aspect; for a species that doesn't breed via sex why would you even need sexual attraction?  How would the mechanism for establishing one perfect soulmate even work, and what possible benefit could it have?  Especially because the same or a related factor made Bella smell delicious so Edward nearly ate her before realizing that she was his true love anyway.

There's also the way the book presented certain behaviours as romantic when they'd more typically come under domestic violence in the real world.  Abusers make their victims stay by convincing them that this is what love is - we don't need popular fiction helping to maintain the charade.  From my recollection, Edward hits three out of this list, and hits fifteen out of the one used by Kar3ning. For both, the point of concern is one.

At this point you may be wondering why I've entitled this post 'defence of sparklepires'.  That's because I've been thinking about vampiric abilities and the various explanations for them.

My favourite vampire story is David Sosnowski's Vamped.  The author has a wonderful way with words, and the world he's built is amazing.  Marty, the main character, is one of the original vampires who decided to take over the world.  Now they've succeeded.  Blood is grown in vats and can be ordered by the pint, all flights are red eye, and everyone's gone back to their day jobs.  There's some great world building in the book, and you can tell the author's considered every little aspect.  One thing he doesn't really go into though, because it's not strictly relevant and because Marty doesn't know, is how and why vampires work.

It was LJ Smith, I believe, who came up with my favourite theory for vampiric bloodlust.  I think it was in The Vampire Diaries where vampire blood was described as a virus which attacked bone marrow.  Someone who had been infected would not be able to produce normal, oxygen-carrying blood, and if they did not obtain some would go on to die of oxygen-starvation.  When they do drink human blood, their own blood rapidly kills the red blood cells, hence why they require regular top-ups.

What neither Smith nor Sosnowski cover is why vampires are photosensitive.  Traditionally, it's because the sun is 'holy' and vampires are 'evil' which isn't saying much.  What do the words 'holy' and 'evil' mean in this context, apart from two things that are in opposition?  What is the actual mechanism that causes damage?

In some ways, it would make more sense for zombies to be photosensitive.  Heat speeds decomposition; the virus which encourages the host to only be active at night, when it's cooler, and to hide in cold places during the heat of day would last long and spread further than a virus which ignores that and speeds the decomposition of the host.

Meyer, at least, address this in Twilight.  Her vampires avoid sunlight because...they sparkle.  She even has an explanation - the sparkling attracts prey.  She also explains the mechanism, which is to do with the structure of vampiric skin.  If you don't reject it on principle as non-traditional it explains itself very nicely.

It does, however, beg another question.  What was the vampires' original prey?  Humans certainly don't provide the arms race necessary to produce super speed, strength, and sparkly attractive skin.  We're very good specialized tool-users, but a predator could get by on just one of those, never mind all three and psychic abilities on top.

Which leads to my personal theory; the vampires are aliens.  The vampire virus originally came from somewhere it was necessary for those traits to exist, for survival.  Then they were dropped on this planet, where they vastly outclass their prey.

The other alternative is that their prey either disappeared - possible since they'd have to be very fast, probably became nocturnal, and very good at hiding - and at the same time vampires developed the ability to eat humans.  If vampires developed the ability to eat humans before their prey became so good at hiding the arms race would have ended there and then; why try to go after the hard prey when the easy one is right there, being a sitting duck?  And, of course, if they developed it much later they would have have starved.

In short; I like the sparklepire thing because it makes sense, but only if you then assume that vampires are aliens.  Which is still more logical than sunlight being holy.

I have mentioned this before, but I'm a huge fan of Luminosity and Eclipse, Twilight rewrites by Alicorn, with Bella as a rationalist heroine.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 10/52

Four books this week, between 14th and 21st October.

Two I've discussed already - Drawing of the Three and Misery, both by Stephen King.  Misery I'd read before, Drawing of the Three was new to me.  Both on Kindle.

Angels and Visitations was part of the Neil Gaiman humble-bundle.  Some of the stories I'd read before; Troll Bridge, for instance, is in another collection.  The final story, about angels, I'm also sure I'd read before, though I'd forgotten the details.

The first of Gaiman's work that I ever read was his share of Good Omens, when I was teenager.  It disturbed me.  I remember recognizing the maggots from the phone scene as not-Pratchett's work, and I assumed the initial portrayals of War and Death were all his too.  While sex and death do happen to the characters in Pratchett's work, they happen in a more comedic style, a style with softer edges.  Gaiman's work was visceral, more than I was used to.

I'm not sure what I read next of his.  Possibly some short stories, or one of his American Gods books; I know I read before of those before I was twenty-one, though I really can't recall in which order.

I enjoy much of Gaiman's work.  There's a pretty good venn-diagram overlap between what he likes to write and what I like to read, though it isn't quite as good a match as Pratchett or Tepper.  Some of it just doesn't work for me at all; one which stands out at the moment is Day of the Dead, his Babylon-5 script which came with the humble bundle.  Technically, I need to read it in order to take it off my unread pile.  On the other hand, it's for a show I don't watch.

When I write the dilemma out like that, the solution seems simple.  I deleted the file and removed the cover image from my 'unread pile' picture and my goodreads shelf.  If I ever get into Babylon-5 - a possibility - I'll just find the humble bundle link and re-download it.

Speaking of books I first read as a teenager, The Forbidden Game: The Hunter was one.  This week, I listened to the audiobook for the first time, which was quite a nice performance.

According to Goodreads I last read this book in 2011.  At the time, I noticed several similarities to Twilight in the series.  It's about a supernatural man in love with a mortal woman.  That's really where the resemblance ends though; while Jenny feels sympathy for Julian, and a part of her does love him, she never forgets about her relationship with Tom or changes her mind about her choice.  She knows the way Julian treats her isn't love, or the basis for a healthy relationship.

I've been thinking about this sort of thing a lot recently; the implications of characters ending up together or not in fiction.  That's because I've been writing Lavoisier (working title).  If you've been reading my updates on facebook, I suggest you stop reading this post now.

It's about a demon, Lavoisier, who's sent to make a deal with a mortal man, Hamilton Hart.  He falls in love with the man's daughter Cecily, and the negotiations go on so long that they begin a relationship.

Lavoisier is called back to hell so they can get an update on the situation.  While he's away, another demon steps in and closes the deal with Hamilton.  That deal needs to be sealed with a human sacrifice.  Lavoisier returns in time to overhear a conversation between the demon and Hamilton, which reveals that Cecily is in the process of drowning in the lake of Hart Hall.  Lavoisier tries to save her, but is unable to free her from her bindings.  She drowns.  Lavoiser kills Hamilton and burns Hart Hall to the ground.

Lavoisier then goes to the soul office of Hell, to find out where Cecily is now.  She's not in hell, because that was part of the deal that Hamilton made, that she wouldn't be sent there.  She's not in haven because she was sacrificed in a Satanic ritual.  They determine that she's been reincarnated and, some twenty years later, they find her.

Here, I need to mention a little something about how the bureau of souls works.  They don't identify souls by names but by another factor which IDs them.  They locate Cecily when Lavoiser describes the time of death.

They also do not experience linear chronology in time with the rest of creation.  They experience linear chronology internally - time moves forward - but not in the same way as everyone else.  This is because souls don't experience linear chronology; they're not moved to another body after one has died.  They're moved to another body at a random point in time.

This explains why the lives are typically around the same timeframe and location; Lavoisier isn't finding Cecily in all of her reincarnations, he's finding her in the life and body closest to him.

This is also why it takes so long to locate her; they need to search through every soul in existence to find Cecily's unique ID tag.

Anyway, they find her and Lavoisier goes to meet her, and explain what's happened, and who he is, and that they're in love.

At least once, she goes for it.  She's a teenager who finds the idea romantic.  Lots of times, she doesn't.  In one life he's a gay man, which disturbs Lavoisier who has always thought of himself as masculine and heterosexuality as normal, despite demons not being strictly bound to this.  This is because demons are influenced by how humanity thinks of them, and that means demons are predominantly formed by what the Catholic church thinks of them.

Which, I've just realised, is a bit of a contradiction, because I'm pretty sure the Catholic church does think of sodomy as demonic and therefore Lavoisier would also consider it totally normal.  So I can't explore the idea of a man who always thought he was straight being in love with a man unless I think of better justification.

Anyway, whether Cecily goes for it or not, every time he finds her, she dies shortly afterwards.

This is the section where the tracks get a little muddy; I know the ending, but I'm not so sure how we get there from here.

The reason Cecily dies is because Hamilton's deal specified not she wouldn't go to hell but that she would never be possessed by a demon.  The deal interprets death as the best way to get her away from Lavoisier, which is fair since it works for at least nineteen years (the quickest time he ever finds her).

That deal applies to both sacrifices, which is the other issue.  While Lavoiser knew that Hamilton was a womaniser, neither he nor Cecily realised that he had another daughter, around the same age and bearing a startling resemblance to Cecily.  Her name was Alice, and when Hamilton needed two sacrifices, he went and found her (he always knew she existed, they just weren't in regular contact).  Sacrifices are stronger when they're blood relations.

Alice drowned.  Cecily burned.  She was in another part of the mansion - which was intended to burn down anyway - and died faster when Lavoiser drew on the power of the flames to wreak destruction.

The bureau of souls didn't recognise the name 'Cecily'; they found the woman who had died at the time and in the manner Lavoisier described, the person he believed to be Cecily who was actually Alice.

Lavoisier finds a way to go back in time.  He may know some or all of this beforehand; he may not.  He might only realise when he hears Hamilton and the other demon discussing the matter.  Either way, he is able to save both of them this time.

Then we come to the choice.  Part of what I wanted to illustrate with the reincarnation sections is that he doesn't get the girl because he fulfilled a specific checklist.  He doesn't get the girl just because he wants her.  He gets the girl if she chooses him, and while he can influence that choice with his actions it isn't something guaranteed.  Maybe it would have worked better if it had actually been Cecily, or maybe who you love is purely a product of experience and personality.  I'm not sure.

Either way, Lavoisier is now in a position where he's spent centuries pursuing the wrong girl.  He had a relationship with Cecily, but he's had many quasi-relationships with Alice.  Yet the question isn't which one does he choose.  It isn't his choice.  His reward for saving them both isn't to take his pick.

At the moment, I think he'll leave the two sisters to get to know each other.  It's a little bit complicated by the fact that Cecily isn't confused; she was in a relationship with Lavoisier yesterday, as far as she's concerned, and she knows no reason for that to change today.  Then there's the fact that, in saving them both, Lavoiser isn't sure whether or not he's undone the future lives Alice might have lead; he may not have - timey-wimey ball and all.  And I may be writing about a world where there is only one soul, that eventually lives every life, though Lavoisier might not think of that, especially with the implication that that means it both really was Cecily and really wasn't any more Cecily than it was anyone else in each life that he was pursuing, if that makes sense.

Every time one of the "Cecilys" (Alices) died, Lavoiser brought their body to their lake in which "Cecily" (Alice) died, to let them sink and join the one he thought he knew.  It was like a promise to himself, a ritual that proved to him that one day she would come back to herself.

Maybe I'll end it with him gazing at that lake.

In Which We Discuss The Drawing of the Three and Misery

I have remembered why I liked Stephen King in the first place.

I'd forgotten.  Making myself read all of his books in published order makes some of them a bit of a chore.  Like when I read The Gunslinger and I was just going through the motions.  But it also means I get to discover things I hadn't thought I'd enjoy, like The Drawing of the Three.

In Misery, writer Paul Sheldon describes "the gottas".  "I gotta finish this chapter," "I gotta know if she got out," etc.  I got the gottas from The Drawing of the Three.  And Misery, which I've read before.

In the introduction to The Drawing of the Three, Stephen King talks about his inspiration.  He wanted to write an epic, like Lord of the Rings, but modern and American, and featuring cowboys.  With The Drawing of the Three he's sold me on cowboys as knights.  I can see how they'd have the same kind of grandeur and mythos if they'd had just a little more mystery and a bit more time to get settled in.

I'm quite excited to read the third Dark Tower story, so here's an update to show how far away I am.

Carrie - 1974 -  June 15th 2013
'Salem's Lot - 1975 - June 30th 2013
The Shining - 1977 - July 28th 2013
Rage - 1977 - July 31st 2013
Night Shift - 1978 - August 28th 2013
The Stand - 1978 - March 20th 2014
The Long Walk - 1979 - March 23rd 2014
The Dead Zone - 1979 - June 2014
Firestarter - 1980 - August 16th 2014


- 06/13 to 17/8/14 - 9

Roadwork - 1981 - 23rd August 2014
Danse Macabre - 1981 - 7th September 2014
- BONUS: Small World (Tabitha King) - 10th September 2014
Cujo - 1981 - 20th September 2014
The Running Man - 1982- 22nd September 2014
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger - 1982 - 30th September 2014
Creepshow - 1982 - 1st October 2014
Different Seasons - 1982  - 24th October 2014

- 17/8/14 to 25/10/14 - 8 (17)

Christine - 1983
Pet Sematary - 1983
Cycle of the Werewolf - 1983
The Talisman - 1984
Thinner - 1984 

- 25/10/14/14 to 14/07/2015 - 5 (22)

Skeleton Crew - 1985
It - 1986
The Eyes of the Dragon - 1987
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three - 1987
Misery - 1987 

- 14/7/15 to 18/10/2015 - 5 (27)

The Tommyknockers - 1987
Nightmares in the Sky  - 1988
The Dark Half - 1989
Four Past Midnight - 1990
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands - 1991 

Needful Things - 1991
Gerald's Game - 1992
Dolores Claiborne - 1992
Nightmares & Dreamscapes - 1993
Insomnia - 1994

Rose Madder - 1995
The Green Mile - 1996
Desperation - 1996
The Regulators - 1996
Six Stories - 1997

The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass - 1997
Dark Tower: Little Sisters of Eluria (Legend) - 1998
Bag of Bones - 1998
Storm of the Century - 1998
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - 1999

The New Lieutenant's Rap - 1999
Hearts in Atlantis - 1999
Blood and Smoke - 1999
"Riding the Bullet" - 2000  
On Writing - 2000 

Secret Windows - 2000 
The Plant - 2000      
Dreamcatcher - 2001
Black House (with Peter Straub) -2001
Everything's Eventual - 2002

From a Buick 8 - 2002
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla - 2003  
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah - 2004
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower - 2004
Faithful - 2004
- BONUS: 20th Century Ghosts (Joe Hill) - Jan 2005
- BONUS: Josie & Jack (Kelly Braffet)  - Feb 2005
- BONUS: We're All in This Together (Owen King) - 2005

The Colorado Kid - 2005
Cell - 2006
Lisey's Story - 2006
Blaze - 2007
Duma Key - 2008

Just After Sunset - 2008 
Stephen King Goes to the Movies - 2009
Ur - 2009     
Under the Dome - 2009
Blockade Billy - 2010

Full Dark, No Stars - 2010
Mile 81 - 2011    
11/22/63 - 2011
American Vampire (with Scott Snyder) - 2011
"Throttle" (with Joe Hill) - 2012

The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole - 2012 
A Face in the Crowd (with Stewart O'Nan) - 2012
"In the Tall Grass"  (with Joe Hill) - 2012
"GUNS" - 2013
Ghost Brothers of Darkland County - 2013

Joyland - 2013
The Dark Man: An Illustrated Poem - 2013
Doctor Sleep - 2013
Mr. Mercedes - 2014      
Revival - November 2014

Finders Keepers - 2015

...four more novels and three more years.  Now we're going from the year before I was born until the year after my sister was.

I started doing this in June of 2013.  Since then, Stephen King has added seven titles in the time it's taken me to read twenty-seven.  So another three to four years before I'm caught up?

There are several links to King's other work in Drawing of the Three.  Denis and Thomas from The Eyes of the Dragon are mentioned, and the Overlook hotel from The Shining is mentioned in Misery.

The first time I met Roland the Gunslinger and The Dark Tower was about fifteen years ago, in the short story collection Legends.  I bought it because it included the Discworld story The Sea and Little Fishes. As I touched on above, I was born in 1988, six years after Roland met the world when The Gunslinger was published.

James Smythe - who I am starting to feel oddly close to - is three years ahead of me.  His article from 2013 points out the high barriers to entry for The Dark Tower series; because it ties together so many threads from other Stephen King novels, it works a lot better if you've read them.  Maybe that's why it's started working for me now.

Here's James Smythe's Misery post; I have gone off him a bit now because I skipped ahead to read his thoughts on Rose Madder and he's managed to confuse two characters as being the exact same person.  Like if you read Harry Potter and thought Quirrel was another name for Snape.  It's kind of a glaring error that reflects badly on the rest of his writing.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 9/52

Five books this week - 8th to 14th October.  One audiobook, two library books, one reread, and one new Kindle book.

I've mentioned before that The Last Girlfriend on Earth is one of my favourite short story collections.

I watched the DVD of Slumdog Millionaire shortly after I read the book.  I've had the DVD for several years but never actually watched it before.  I've always felt a bit bad about it, so when I spotted the book in the library I decided to go for it.  I liked the book better than the movie; it was dramatic and over the top in a way that was fun and exciting.  The movie toned it down for realism, but that made it somewhat patronising.  And I liked the fact that the book heroine was allowed to actuually be a prostitute while the movie heroine was constantly rescued from that fate.  The movie pushed the virgin-whore dichotomy; the heroine had to be the first and not the second, else she wouldn't be the heroine.  The book let her be both.

Frozen Charlotte is a horror story ostensibly aimed at older teens.  What I found mosty horrifying is the fact that frozen Charlotte dolls aren't fictitious.  The victorians really did make little naked dolls in image of a character who froze to death.  That's weird and macabre.

Mortal Engines is a collection of cyberpunk short stories.  Robot fairy tales.  I quite enjoyed it.

Finally, The Lost Steersman is part four in Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series.  I love Kirstein's fiction; she writes such intelligent and rational characters, and I loved the truly alien civilisation in this one.  Speaking of aliens, I have a theory.  Spoilers ahead.

To whit, my theory is that the whole series takes place on an alien planet.  The routine bioform clearance program is intended to clear out the native life forms to allow human beings to terraform the planet.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 8/52

Six books this week - 1st October to 7th October.  Two I'd read before, a library book, and three books from my unread pile.

The Forbidden Game is an old favourite.  Like Labyrinth meets Jumanji, and I know those are both movies, that's why they're not bolded.  A girl buys a board game for her boyfriend's birthday party and ends up working her way through a house full of nightmares, fending off the advances of a kind of Hades-Loki figure.  This was the audiobook version, which was pretty good!

Amanda's Wedding is another book I've loved since my teenage years.  Again, the audiobook.  I liked the reader.  She did the accents quite well, and this is the first audiobook to make me start giggling like a lunatic while walking to work.

I liked The Secret History much better than The Little Friend.  The Little Friend is written from the viewpoint of the most annoying character, while The Secret History is about the death of that character.  Much better.

The Lie escalated quickly.  It goes from being a little bit mysterious to dead bodies being basically everywhere.  And I was never quite sure what the titular lie actually was.

Fairest was a great addition to Marissa Meyers series, and now I'm really looking forward to Winter.  It took me an amazingly long time to realize it was a Snow White reference.  Now that I know more about Queen Levana I want to go back and read Cinder again.

Finally, Tale of Murasaki.  It's a fictionalized account of the life of Murasaki Shikibu author of The Tale of Genji.

And an update to my unread pile.  89 books left, after buying a collection of Gaiman's work on Humble Bundle, which bumped it up by 18.  I quite want to complete an entire line, like in bingo.  Maybe line 9, since there are only three left in there anyway.  I'd also like to read one from each row.