Selenay's Ramblings

Today was the great "brave the crowds and finish the Christmas shopping trip". Never fun when there's just over a week until Christmas. Ick.

But I did it all and now everyone is sorted with presents that I very much hope they'll love.

The disappointment of the trip was not finding a new pen :-( My lovely, gorgeous, Parker Frontier ballpen in purple that I bought last year and is absolutely beautiful to write with...has been killed my a leaky inner cartridge thingy. This is the third pen in two years that I've lost to this fate. I've decided to switch to using rollerballs instead so I wanted to find a gorgeous Parker Frontier rollerball in purple. Sadly, all I could find was chrome :-( Apparently they don't make a purple one and although they do make a blue one I can't find anywhere that actually sells them. So after Christmas I'll have to make a trip to buy a chrome one so that I actually have something comfortable to write with for college.

I am such a pen snob :-) I can't seem to write fiction using anything other than a fountain pen with black ink (I currently have a purple Frontier that is absolutely fabulous) and I can't actually seem to write coherently with cheap bics. So I'll get myself a fabulous rollerball that has no clicky mechanism to gunk up with ink and hope that this one lasts a long time.

The good thing that happened on the trip was meeting the author of one of my big book successes from last year. I read The Greenstone Grail last year and it was one of the books that stood out in my mind as being really good. Inventive, great characters and hard to put down (kept nearly missing my bus stop because I was reading it!). It's impossible for me to go into town without popping into the bookshop, so I went in and heard someone discussing fantasy novels. Of course, I had to wander over and spotted a display with The Greenstone Grail next to the talking women. Picked it up and remarked out loud that I remember this being really good. Turns out that one of the women was Amanda Hemingwawy, the author, and she was really chuffed - said I should stay to tell everyone how good it is and make them buy it :-) She was promotng her latest book. I haven't read the middle book in her trilogy, The Traitor's Sword, so I now have a signed copy of it :-)) Amanda Hemingway was thoroughly lovely, very enthusiastic about her books and I'm really hoping that she managed to pursuade lots of people to buy them. I can thoroughly recommend her books - I encourage everyone to pop out and buy them to read over Christmas.

Er, I also bought a Robin Hobb book. Bad Sel. One day, I will learn how to pop into a bookshop and browse without actually buying anything. Possibly