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• 9:26 am on October 29, 2007 Permalink  

  Ringworld and Shriek: An Afterword 

  My “currently reading” has been stalled at Ringworld for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t manage to slog all the way through it. I’m not sure if I should be ashamed of not being able to get through A Larry Niven book or not. I mean I gave it a shot, right? I suppose I can understand why it’s a classic: it has some pretty amazing ideas contained within it’s pages.

  Many things I have enjoyed greatly over the years have been clearly influenced by this book. The Star Control series of PC games seems like a good example. The Spathi race definitely seems very puppeteer-like to me.

  One recurring problem I had with the book was that the single female character seemed like a throwaway. She never got to be more than a good luck charm and a love interest. And maybe she redeems herself later, but her sitting around doing nothing for the whole first half of the book irritated me.

  Ah well. More time to spend on books I like. I checked out Jeff Vandermeers Shriek: An Afterword from the library, and knew that it would be one I would not want to put down from the very first sentence on the very first page.

  It has everything I like. Historians. Old forbidden books. Fungus. Ambergris feels like a city you could actually visit, even if only in dreams. It has a continuity, a feeling that it really does have a history. I’m halfway through and I want to keep reading straight through until the end, but I also don’t want to put it away after I’m done.

  Also, I should point out that I’ve been reading his blog for some time, which is great.  And I really should have read this book before now. I can’t even remember where I found that blog originally.  I’m going to guess it was Warren Ellis.

  Ok, I’m going to go read more now. Stay tuned for Nanowrimo updates.

   

• 4:27 pm on October 18, 2007 Permalink  

  Reincarnation Love Story 

  The story I am going to write next month is going to be sort of a cross-genre world hopping thing. I think giving myself permission to write about any topic at all will be good for keeping me interested and pushing the story forward.

  The as yet unnamed story is a reincarnation love story, a tale of a man’s journey from total despair and ruination through life and death into a world bigger and weirder than he could imagine.

  A desperate unemployed man is thrown from disaster into a dizzying multiverse the scope of which extends to such worlds as: a computer constructed steampunk paradise, a world that obeys strict laws of magic and sacrifice, an apocalyptic nightmare of telepathy and all pervasive surveillance.

  Well, that’s how I envision it occurring anyway. I’m sure it will become more defined and concrete as I write it. In the mean time here are some ficlets I’ve written as sort of practice for it:

  The thread starts here.

  A Night Out

  “Yes that’s right.” she said. “In the old days you needed quite a lot of ‘money’ just to survive. ‘Cost of living’ they called it then. It was barbaric, people starving and living on the streets and such.

  These days of course you don’t have to do that. You can always feed your body the free food, and it’ll be nutritious and taste terrible but it’ll keep you alive.”

  (More …)

   

• 9:39 am on October 9, 2007 Permalink  

  Alright I’ll do it 

  Ok well after some consideration after my last post I’ve decided to go ahead and try the Nanowrimo again. The site appears to be bogged down a little right at the moment, but what do I have to lose, right? I’ll just need to practice more and get into a regular writing mode. A thousand words in the morning and a thousand words at night. Can’t be that hard, right?
  
  And anyway, I have the perfect Nano-writing software in Scrivener. Seriously, it’s a fantastic writing tool and it would be a waste to not do a Nano having this stuff. I particularly like the full screen mode.

   

• 10:08 pm on October 7, 2007 Permalink  

  Dreams of Writing 

  Every day November looms closer, and with November comes, of course, the dreaded NaNoWriMo. Well ok, maybe not dreaded for everyone, but as you can guess by the sporadic nature of this very blog, my own writing tends to come in fits and starts.
  
  I’ve attempted the Nano on a number of occasions, and haven’t yet managed to complete it. It is a daunting task: 50,000 words over a period of 30 days breaks down to roughly 1,666 words per day. That number of the beast might not seem like much to a seasoned expert writer or other masochist, but it really makes me hesitant to even attempt such madness.
  
  No as for me, for now I will stick to updating here when the mood strikes me, and to also keeping a somewhat more steady stream of ficlets going.