Women of the Otherworld series and Canadian Book Pricing...

Sigh. I'm really frustrated and tired :( Tell me, why is it that everything always happens at the same time?!? Why?  As if my presentation was not enough work, my co-worker's great-grandmother is at the hospital and that means we don't know how long my co-worker will be absent. Then, they've been doing some work on the building where I work since November (yes, yes, why do it during the winter?!?) and it hasn't been fun. Because of that, they've been having difficulties controlling the temperature and that means we've got extremely cold and warm temperatures, our pipes have frozen and burst, dust, etc. Now, I'm being told I have to clear the windows (they've been boarded up by the way, so no sunlight since October) so they can start working on it. So I have to clean up the area around which is not much, but where am I going to put all that stuff, no idea.

The worst though? The kitchen faucet at home :( We've noticed some problems with it on Wednesday... it was working for hot and cold water, but not warm (I have the kind of faucet with only one valve, so it swings from left to right) and if we opened too much, it leaked. I figured we could live with it for a while before getting someone to repair it... but I was wrong. Yesterday, it stopped working completely as in we couldn't shut the water anymore... Called a plumber who didn't want to come (fine!), then tried to change the faucet ourselves and seriously, I have no idea how it's been attached, but it doesn't look like I can fix it myself (not fine!). Arrghhh. So right now, I'm trying to track down the man who did the renovations on our kitchen recently and I'm crossing my fingers it can be resolved soon.

Okay, thanks for reading my rants. Enough about it though because I actually have real book news.

Let's start with the Women of the Otherworld series by Kelley Armstrong. This is one of my favorite series - although I still haven't read Waking the Witch ^_^; Anyway, in her most recent newsletter, Ms Armstrong has announced that Women of the Otherworld series is going on hiatus. All the details are here, but the gist of it is that she was considering ending the series after Book #13 - which would also end Savannha's trilogy, but still had more stories to tell. However, she didn't want to reach the point where she or the readers were sick of the characters. So what Ms Armstrong has elected to do is writing those stories as novellas or perhaps coming up with a full-length novel or two eventually in the future. However, for now, the series is going on hiatus.

I don't exactly know how I feel about this news. Women of the Otherworld series is one of my favorite UF series and hearing that it goes on hiatus, my initial reaction was: Oh NOOOO! But then, hiatus is better than permanent end, right? Also, I've always wondered how Ms Armstrong would end this series... The difficulty of Women of the Otherworld series is the number of characters... They are so many and at different age/stage of life. I mean, personally, did I want to see Cassandra die? No, not really. Did I want to see Jamie grow older than Jeremy? Not particularly. Personally, I don't think Ms Armstrong could wrap up everything in a neat, nice bow. Well okay, she could, but would it be really realistic? Nope. So I think Ms Armstrong chose the best option. I'm also happy to hear that she's going to compile all her short stories from different anthologies and include new material :) If there was one complaint I had about this series in the past few years is that it was really spread around and that not all novellas were accessible. So yeah, overall, I guess I'm happy :)

The other news I have concerns the Canadian readers... Prices of books are finally coming down!! Woohoo!!  It seems that starting late April, some publishers have finally adjusted the price, given that the CDN$ is on par (even higher) than US$. Avon books will be 10$ instead of 10.99$ and Berkley books, 8.99$ instead of 9.99$. Okay, it's not much, granted, but it's better than nothing right? Other publishers have already started a while back (Grand Central Publishing, New American Library)... In any case, I hope it's there to stay :)

So that's it for today :)