GrimSqueaker

People always wonder how I find the time to read about 50 books a year but the answer is simple - I don't watch TV. It is really fascinating how much time you have after quitting to stare at a monitor for hours after hours.
So, I am a really passionate reader. I read everything from high literature to cheesy fantasy but only few authors have managed to really catch my heart. If I have to choose I will mention my ultimate top five: Terry Pratchett, Patrick O'Brian, Andrzej Sapkowski, Umberto Eco and Tad Williams. I know it is a rather weird combination, but then my taste in literature is considered rather weird anyway. I tend to like the books best that are considered boring by lots of people. I tend to put a lot of emphasis on the characters and if the characters fascinate me I don't have any problem with nothing important happening over a hundred of pages.
It all started with Terry Pratchett. Discworld just hit me like a hammer, and especially the City Watch novels. Then there appeared the computer game Discworld Noir, on which I got completely hooked - Film Noir Discworld style, just what I always craved. Shortly afterwards the novel Night Watch was released, which fulfilled my desire for Noir-style discworld even more and lead to some serious fanfiction writing. The longest story, which I still consider to be my best so far, went by the name 'The Witcher', inspired by a German pulp fiction series based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft, which in turn was called 'The witcher of Salem'.
Then some years later I watched the movie Master and Commander and found out there was a 20 book series by an author named Patrick O'Brian the movie was based on. Book addict that I am I started to read the series and discovered anoter all-time favourite author. Patrick O'Brian didn't care about toda<'s writing conventions where something important has to happen every 10 pages or so. He manages to simply suck the reader into the time between 1799 and 1815 where the war at sea between Britain and Napoleonic france raged and wrote multi-faceted characters that stuck to the mind.
Then again some years later I discovered Andrzej Sapkowski. It was as if Terry Pratchett had written A Song of Ice and Fire. Dark Humour paired with gritty fantasy and really interesting characters - just my line of a really good read. And the best thing was that Sapkowski didn't care about the typical anglo-american style of fantasy writing. He just told his story no matter if nothing spectacular happened over some 50 pages - just like Patrick O'Brian did. So I started to call Sapkowski the Patrick O'Brian of fantasy. Then I found out that there were computer games that continued the story. Hell yeah. Couldn't it get any better? I remembered Discworld Noir and the fact that the best game I ever played had evolved of one of my favourite book series. So The Witcher games just couldn't be bad. And I was proven right. Those games hooked me just as Discworld Noir hooked me all those years before.
So this is my personal resume from all those pointless ramblings: The best games always come from really good book series...

- Nothing interesting going on here -

Well, I think 2007 is going to be quite interesting. After scribbling a lot on a paper tablecloth on a friend's birthday I really have got the urge to draw something again.