Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Captive Prince by C.S. Pacat/freece.

It's nice when a great fanwriter is picked up by a big name publisher.

Captive Prince is a story about relationships -- relationships between nations, between a leader and his people, between two men, and between many people and power. After a war, a power struggle in the country that won resulted in a younger brother successfully plotting to overthrow his older brother, after their father the king was killed. The older brother was sent off as a slave to the country that lost the war.

The older brother/prince had to hide who he is, since that country hates his, while trying to deal with a culture that's polar opposite the one he grew up in (his country is straight forward, value privacy for personal things, and generally say what they mean; the other country everyone is plotting, words have multiple meanings, and power shifts endlessly).

This story wouldn't have worked nearly as well if the author hadn't been such a great writer. Every character felt real, every one had a unique voice, and it was great fun keeping track of all of the motives.

I was very happy to see that Penguin has picked up this book series. It had originally been offered as free fanfic online (I think I must have read it that way years back, it was vaguely familiar now). It looks like the ebook version I linked above is the self-published one, so you might snag it for $4 before Penguin raises it to $10. (It's worth the $10 price, but who can resist a discount!)

Next up: The Hunger Gays. (They finally sent me a copy, yay!) I suspect it's going to be amusingly bad.

Ellie New Cat: I've created a monster. One of the first tricks I taught her was High-5 (she taps my hand with her paw to get the treat). That was fine, but with the introduction of the bird laser pointer? Some kind of connection has been made in her kitty brain. She now thinks tapping is the solution to her every want and need. Hungry? She endlessly taps my mouse hand. Bored? Taps my foot/leg. It's not just one tap, she taps again and again (because hey, one tap sometimes doesn't make the bird laser work, right?). So far she hasn't been waking me up in the morning, but I worry that soon will come a tap...tap...tap to my cheek because she wants breakfast.

Edit: Know those videos where they take a normal looking woman and photoshop her into a supermodel? There's a new one out for this year:

Video is 100% work safe, but the display image is a woman in bikini bottoms and what looks like no top (nothing shown), so I'm putting it behind a cut just in case.

I wish there were a longer version, I'd like to see more of the details of how they did that (especially the part where the grid was over the whole body).