I finished reading Starcraft: Queen of Blades by Aaron Rosenberg tonight. Basically it's a novelization of the Zerg missions from the game, plus some of the Protoss missions.
Overall I'd say it could've been better. There were inconsistencies, plus one major typo ("whole" instead of "hole"), that could've been fixed if it had gone through another revision pass or two. Things like the MC, Jim Raynor, deciding at length all the reasons why not to tell his men something, and then a few chapters later they have a conversation that sounds like he'd already told them and it went without any issues. That happened at least a couple times. Then there were a couple places where the author went into lengthy exposition that could've just been cut out entirely - the kinds of things I might write into a rough draft to explain a character motivation as a note to myself for later. Some of the characters were wildly inconsistent too. And finally, I'm not sure the MC he picked was really the best viewpoint character for the story. Mostly he went around watching other characters doing things to each other, while being fairly useless himself. Also, the plausibility for how exactly he was set up was kind of weak - he wanders off alone in the mountains spying on the other characters while he has 51 underlings doing nothing important, for example. He was also unrealistically quick to accept situations that should've pissed him off for a lot longer.
Also, Kerrigan (the main villain) was kind of 2D and cliche. Down to the maniacal laughter, tantrums, and dramatic speeches about doom and gloom.
Of course, it probably didn't help that the storyline was fairly constrained by what other people had already written into the game. There were events that had to happen in it, in the same way that it happened in the game. In a lot of ways, the first half of the book probably wouldn't catch the interest of anyone who wasn't already familiar with the story, because it's really too weak to stand alone.
However, there were also a lot of really good parts, especially in the back half. The Protoss really came to life. I really enjoyed reading the parts after Raynor, Tassadar, and Zeratul all came together against Kerrigan. There were some really great character interaction scenes there.
The story doesn't really have a solid conclusion to it, though again that was by necessity due to staying canon to the storyline. Lots of loose ends stayed loose. No clue what happened to Kerrigan at the end, if you don't already know the story in advance. I guess the uninitiated would just have to wait for the next novelization to get published.
Meanwhile, I think I've figured out why I don't read as much as I used to. Physically speaking, it actually takes a lot out of me. There doesn't seem to be a reading position in existence where I don't eventually become completely stiff and sore - and if I do my preferred method of wanting to read an entire book in one sitting, that means I rotate positions until eventually my entire body is stiff and sore. I recovered from that a lot faster when I was a spry young'n ... but not so much anymore, alas.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
2007/12/23
2007/12/16
2007 Book Challenge Final Tally
1. Agent to the Stars - John Scalzi (sci fi)
2. Out of Thin Air - Peter Ward (science nonfic)
3. Memory of Running - Ron McLarty (mainstream fic)
4. The Paths of the Dead - Steve Brust (fantasy trilogy 1)
5. The Lord of Castle Black - Steve Brust (fantasy trilogy 2)
6. Sethra Lavode - Steve Brust (fantasy trilogy 3)
7. Core Performance - Mark Verstegen (nonfic exercise book)
8. Hellspark - Janet Kagan (sci fi)
9. Brokedown Palace - Steven Brust (fantasy)
I was aiming for 12 and ended up with 9. Next year I think I'll aim for 10. :)
I was also aiming to write up book reviews as I went along, but that went by the wayside after the third one, unfortunately. Right around the time I was finishing up Brust's trilogy was when I first got sucked into Wikipedia. So all my writing efforts went there instead. By the time I started wandering back in the direction of reviewing books, I'd moved on to read other things and never managed to make it back. Then I didn't want to review the things I was currently reading without first reviewing the stuff I'd already read, and therein went a gridlock that led to not writing any of them.
Apparently I did write a few mini-reviews in the forum thread, though. For Hellspark I wrote:
"I finally forced myself past the opening paragraphs of Hellspark. It turns out that this book is not very well written at all, and now that I've had some practice at the basic technicalities of writing, I'm a lot more conscious of what specifically is wrong and sometimes even how to fix it. I keep stopping to look at passages and thinking of ways I would've written it instead. However, I liked Kagan's other two books and I'm pretty sure there's a good story buried in the crappy writing, so I'm planning to read the whole thing."
I did read the whole thing. The plot was entertaining in a good but not spectacular way. I liked all of the characters but none of them really fired up my imagination. Probably the biggest flaw was when the story shifted suddenly near the end with the arrival of the main character's mother. Suddenly all the relationship dynamics went funny there. It still all wrapped up well enough, but it was definitely bumpy getting past that shift.
The setting was Kagan's strongest point by far, and the book would be right up the alley of people who like exploring really cool faraway places. As I recall her other book, Mirabile, the setting of that was the strongest point as well though the six connected stories were a lot stronger than Hellspark's one big story. Kagan is definitely better at writing short stories than longer works.
Then the last book I managed to read was Steve Brust's Brokedown Palace. I bought it because it's in the same Dragaera setting as the Jhereg series and Khaavren series, but it's a standalone story about four brother princes and the palace they live in, which is crumbling with old age. It reads like an allegory, and like all of his other work I've read, very easy to slip into and get started - which is an important point with me these days when getting myself started on a new book is a lot harder than it was in my youth. I enjoyed it quite a lot.
I might manage to read one more book before the end of the month. I've started on Queen of Blades by Aaron Rosenberg, which is a Starcraft novel. Should be a fairly easy read. Guess we'll see.
Earlier tonight I put in an order for five more books: Old Man's War by John Scalzi, Dzur by Steve Brust, Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and 1491 by Charles C. Mann. Since they're shipping to my work address, where they're much less likely to get stolen than if they came to my apartment, I won't actually receive any of them until work reopens in January. That should give me a good start for next year's book challenge. :)
2. Out of Thin Air - Peter Ward (science nonfic)
3. Memory of Running - Ron McLarty (mainstream fic)
4. The Paths of the Dead - Steve Brust (fantasy trilogy 1)
5. The Lord of Castle Black - Steve Brust (fantasy trilogy 2)
6. Sethra Lavode - Steve Brust (fantasy trilogy 3)
7. Core Performance - Mark Verstegen (nonfic exercise book)
8. Hellspark - Janet Kagan (sci fi)
9. Brokedown Palace - Steven Brust (fantasy)
I was aiming for 12 and ended up with 9. Next year I think I'll aim for 10. :)
I was also aiming to write up book reviews as I went along, but that went by the wayside after the third one, unfortunately. Right around the time I was finishing up Brust's trilogy was when I first got sucked into Wikipedia. So all my writing efforts went there instead. By the time I started wandering back in the direction of reviewing books, I'd moved on to read other things and never managed to make it back. Then I didn't want to review the things I was currently reading without first reviewing the stuff I'd already read, and therein went a gridlock that led to not writing any of them.
Apparently I did write a few mini-reviews in the forum thread, though. For Hellspark I wrote:
"I finally forced myself past the opening paragraphs of Hellspark. It turns out that this book is not very well written at all, and now that I've had some practice at the basic technicalities of writing, I'm a lot more conscious of what specifically is wrong and sometimes even how to fix it. I keep stopping to look at passages and thinking of ways I would've written it instead. However, I liked Kagan's other two books and I'm pretty sure there's a good story buried in the crappy writing, so I'm planning to read the whole thing."
I did read the whole thing. The plot was entertaining in a good but not spectacular way. I liked all of the characters but none of them really fired up my imagination. Probably the biggest flaw was when the story shifted suddenly near the end with the arrival of the main character's mother. Suddenly all the relationship dynamics went funny there. It still all wrapped up well enough, but it was definitely bumpy getting past that shift.
The setting was Kagan's strongest point by far, and the book would be right up the alley of people who like exploring really cool faraway places. As I recall her other book, Mirabile, the setting of that was the strongest point as well though the six connected stories were a lot stronger than Hellspark's one big story. Kagan is definitely better at writing short stories than longer works.
Then the last book I managed to read was Steve Brust's Brokedown Palace. I bought it because it's in the same Dragaera setting as the Jhereg series and Khaavren series, but it's a standalone story about four brother princes and the palace they live in, which is crumbling with old age. It reads like an allegory, and like all of his other work I've read, very easy to slip into and get started - which is an important point with me these days when getting myself started on a new book is a lot harder than it was in my youth. I enjoyed it quite a lot.
I might manage to read one more book before the end of the month. I've started on Queen of Blades by Aaron Rosenberg, which is a Starcraft novel. Should be a fairly easy read. Guess we'll see.
Earlier tonight I put in an order for five more books: Old Man's War by John Scalzi, Dzur by Steve Brust, Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and 1491 by Charles C. Mann. Since they're shipping to my work address, where they're much less likely to get stolen than if they came to my apartment, I won't actually receive any of them until work reopens in January. That should give me a good start for next year's book challenge. :)
2007/02/15
2007 Book Challenge 3: The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty
The Memory of Running is a mainstream novel about a middle-age man who takes a cross-country bike ride after he tragically loses his entire family. Basically he just starts riding. It's a little like when Forrest Gump started his three years of running, after Jenny left him, and this story has a lot of similarities to that part of the movie.
He starts out in Rhode Island as a fat, drunken loser with a rundown bike, no money, no ID, and only the clothes on his back. By the time he gets to California a few months later, he's on a completely different bike, has completely different clothes, and still no money or ID. But he has lost several dozen pounds and become fit, stopped drinking, and gotten into much healthier eating habits. In between he nearly drowns, helps take care of a dying man, gets beaten up, rescues a ten year old from a blizzard, gets shot at, gets threatened to be shot at, hitches a ride with a trucker, joins and leaves a biking rally, and hears the life stories of lots of interesting people.
More importantly, he spends a lot of time thinking about his past. The book jumps around from the present (him doing something interesting on the bike ride) to various points of his past. It's very jumbled. Much like the inside of someone's mind, I suppose. Most of it is focused on his childhood, living with his older sister who had schizophrenia and how the family dealt with that. Much of the rest was about his time in the army during Vietnam.
At first when I started reading it, it didn't look like much. I started reading it for the same reasons I read people's blogs. In a lot of ways, the book is like a really long blog. However, it held my interest really well, and I wanted to keep going, so it must've been doing something right.
The most interesting thing that struck me about it early on was how the book breaks a whole lot of the "don't" rules of writing. For example, the opening sentence has his family arriving at a cabin retreat, but then the rest of the page (and most of the next) is a gigantic infodump about all the past times they've been at this particular cabin. However, it works anyway, because the infodump is just as interesting as the story - moreso, in fact, as we eventually find out that nothing exciting happened in the "real" story (he and his parents arrive at the cabin and relax; the end).
Also, I noticed that the story violates just about everything Zette says about first-person POV in the Week 6 material. The MC comes across as being rather dim; he sees stuff happening around him and doesn't ever actually link events to each other. We as the readers seeing the view through his eyes, though, can readily infer what really happened, even if the MC himself has no clue.
It makes me wonder about how other people think. I philosophize constantly about everything. I make links every which way. Just last night, for example, it occurred to me that learning the basics of IDL programming is strikingly similar to learning the basics of organic chemistry, and I had to stop reading the IDL book to ponder that at length before I could continue. So I find it intriguing to see a glimpse into living a life where thinking isn't a terribly high priority, like it isn't for the MC.
The MC doesn't really have any thoughts about anything, either. (Well, aside from the fact that the whole book was a thought.) He reacts passively to stuff that happens to him and will let just about anyone lead him around. Someone says "do this" and he says "okay" and does it. It's how he wound up attending the deathbed of a total stranger. It wasn't until I was about 3/4th of the way through before he showed any signs of intelligence or willpower, and even then it was just a brief flicker. At the same time, though, he couldn't've been that dumb if he successfully rode a bike from coast to coast.
Another thing is that I don't normally care for travel quest stories. Especially the standard fantasy version. I find them really boring, and just want the protagonists to get to where they're going already so they can do the far more interesting (to me) things that they went there to do. For Memory of Running though, the journey is a lot more than just "stuff happens between point A and point B." The MC does have an actual reason to get to California - it's where his sister's remains are, and he's gone to retrieve them, - but the journey is the important part. The endpoint was just setup; not meant to be a major plot point, and not all that interesting in and of itself. One could certainly sum up the whole book by saying "Smithy Ide rode a bike from Rhode Island to California to make arrangements with the funeral home holding his sister's remains." But that's not what the story was about. And it spoils nothing to say that he got there and took care of the paperwork successfully.
Anyway. Just some random assorted musings in no particular order. I liked the book. It's a good, easy read.
He starts out in Rhode Island as a fat, drunken loser with a rundown bike, no money, no ID, and only the clothes on his back. By the time he gets to California a few months later, he's on a completely different bike, has completely different clothes, and still no money or ID. But he has lost several dozen pounds and become fit, stopped drinking, and gotten into much healthier eating habits. In between he nearly drowns, helps take care of a dying man, gets beaten up, rescues a ten year old from a blizzard, gets shot at, gets threatened to be shot at, hitches a ride with a trucker, joins and leaves a biking rally, and hears the life stories of lots of interesting people.
More importantly, he spends a lot of time thinking about his past. The book jumps around from the present (him doing something interesting on the bike ride) to various points of his past. It's very jumbled. Much like the inside of someone's mind, I suppose. Most of it is focused on his childhood, living with his older sister who had schizophrenia and how the family dealt with that. Much of the rest was about his time in the army during Vietnam.
At first when I started reading it, it didn't look like much. I started reading it for the same reasons I read people's blogs. In a lot of ways, the book is like a really long blog. However, it held my interest really well, and I wanted to keep going, so it must've been doing something right.
The most interesting thing that struck me about it early on was how the book breaks a whole lot of the "don't" rules of writing. For example, the opening sentence has his family arriving at a cabin retreat, but then the rest of the page (and most of the next) is a gigantic infodump about all the past times they've been at this particular cabin. However, it works anyway, because the infodump is just as interesting as the story - moreso, in fact, as we eventually find out that nothing exciting happened in the "real" story (he and his parents arrive at the cabin and relax; the end).
Also, I noticed that the story violates just about everything Zette says about first-person POV in the Week 6 material. The MC comes across as being rather dim; he sees stuff happening around him and doesn't ever actually link events to each other. We as the readers seeing the view through his eyes, though, can readily infer what really happened, even if the MC himself has no clue.
It makes me wonder about how other people think. I philosophize constantly about everything. I make links every which way. Just last night, for example, it occurred to me that learning the basics of IDL programming is strikingly similar to learning the basics of organic chemistry, and I had to stop reading the IDL book to ponder that at length before I could continue. So I find it intriguing to see a glimpse into living a life where thinking isn't a terribly high priority, like it isn't for the MC.
The MC doesn't really have any thoughts about anything, either. (Well, aside from the fact that the whole book was a thought.) He reacts passively to stuff that happens to him and will let just about anyone lead him around. Someone says "do this" and he says "okay" and does it. It's how he wound up attending the deathbed of a total stranger. It wasn't until I was about 3/4th of the way through before he showed any signs of intelligence or willpower, and even then it was just a brief flicker. At the same time, though, he couldn't've been that dumb if he successfully rode a bike from coast to coast.
Another thing is that I don't normally care for travel quest stories. Especially the standard fantasy version. I find them really boring, and just want the protagonists to get to where they're going already so they can do the far more interesting (to me) things that they went there to do. For Memory of Running though, the journey is a lot more than just "stuff happens between point A and point B." The MC does have an actual reason to get to California - it's where his sister's remains are, and he's gone to retrieve them, - but the journey is the important part. The endpoint was just setup; not meant to be a major plot point, and not all that interesting in and of itself. One could certainly sum up the whole book by saying "Smithy Ide rode a bike from Rhode Island to California to make arrangements with the funeral home holding his sister's remains." But that's not what the story was about. And it spoils nothing to say that he got there and took care of the paperwork successfully.
Anyway. Just some random assorted musings in no particular order. I liked the book. It's a good, easy read.
2007/01/21
2007 Book Challenge 2: Out of Thin Air by Peter D. Ward
Out of Thin Air is a science nonfiction that explains a new theory on the underlying basis for how and why animal life on Earth had the history that it did. In a word: oxygen. The one thing all animals (and plants, and fungi, and protists and most bacteria) must do is breathe - and in particular they must figure out a way to take up enough oxygen to exist. Oxygen levels have fluctuated up and down through the ages, from as high as 35% to as low as 10% (it's 20% today). Times of high oxygen means high species diversity; times of low oxygen means high diversity in body plans.
The book was written by a university professor, and although it was apparently marketed for general public reading, it really requires at least a biology degree for full understanding. I can easily see a semester-long graduate-level seminar course that uses this book as an outline. One chapter at a time, along with all the primary literature that gets cited in support of all the things each chapter says. Lots of discussion on what the heck the author means. In fact, I suspect that the author uses this book for exactly that purpose.
As books go, this one could've used some more revising. The logic is unclear and even circular in some parts. There are also parts where the author starts out stating one thing, then goes off on a tangent and never gets back to supporting the original statement. And many many parts where he makes leaps, assuming that the reader knows things and can follow along if he omits stating a few in-between steps. Overall, it needs to be written from a completely different angle; as is, it looks like he's beating a tiresome drum over and over ("the answer was oxygen levels!"). It could be rewritten so that you don't start with a bunch of questions that lead to the same answer, but with the answer first followed by all the consequences thereof. It would still have the same content, but be a much smoother read.
Several factual things bothered me:
a) Early on he mentioned that birds are able to survive and thrive at much higher altitudes (thinner air, lower oxygen levels) than mammals. However, it isn't until the last hundred pages where he even mentions the setup of their lungs. That is, bird lungs have unidirectional airflow. Instead of a bag that inflates and deflates like ours, where oxygen-rich air goes in and then carbon-dioxide-laden air goes back out through the same paths, bird lungs have a system where air goes in one way and out a different way, and it's coupled to blood flow that moves in the opposite direction. It's a lot more efficient.
I spent a lot of the book wondering how he could've possibly overlooked such a basic fact, when he's writing something about oxygen and breathing. Fortunately for him, he eventually makes up for this lack by going into extreme detail on bird lungs for almost an entire chapter. Not only the details of how they're set up now (which I hadn't actually known fully), but lots of good nuggets of information from paleontology on when and from what it arose, and whether some of the dinosaurs had a setup like it (in the author's opinion: yes). But he needed to at least hint that such a section was upcoming.
b) There are whole sections in the book that strongly imply that lungs evolved from gills. No, they didn't. Lungs and gills are separate organs, and in some fish and amphibians you can even have both at the same time. Modern lungs (such as in us humans) are analogous to the modern swim bladder in bony fishes.
c) He also implies that reptiles evolved from amphibians. I'm fairly certain I read somewhere a while back that they both came from lobefinned fish, but did not evolve from each other. How controversial that was, I don't know - depends where I read it, and I can't remember.
d) Near the beginning he really should've talked more about how free oxygen first came to exist on Earth. The very first life on Earth was anaerobic. Oxygen is actually a toxin and was put out as a waste product. (It's still a toxin; we're just set up to make sure it doesn't do too much damage while we're harnessing it to do useful things). Eventually the first anaerobes polluted their atmosphere with it so much that there were no more rocks left to absorb it (by oxidizing).
Also, "descendant" is the correct spelling.
As for me and the Book Challenge. I actually started reading this back in December, so technically it's half a book I've read for 2007. I received it just before Christmas from a regular customer of the Chinese takeout where I work. He found out I have advanced degrees in biology, so he loaned me the book to read. He said he didn't understand it, and hoped I would be able to explain it to him. Having now read it in its entirety, I don't know if I can, unless I also want to teach him basic biology. It didn't bode well that one of the things he seemed amazed about was "wow, did you know humans came from fish?" This signals to me that we'd have to start with an uphill battle about evolution first...
The book was written by a university professor, and although it was apparently marketed for general public reading, it really requires at least a biology degree for full understanding. I can easily see a semester-long graduate-level seminar course that uses this book as an outline. One chapter at a time, along with all the primary literature that gets cited in support of all the things each chapter says. Lots of discussion on what the heck the author means. In fact, I suspect that the author uses this book for exactly that purpose.
As books go, this one could've used some more revising. The logic is unclear and even circular in some parts. There are also parts where the author starts out stating one thing, then goes off on a tangent and never gets back to supporting the original statement. And many many parts where he makes leaps, assuming that the reader knows things and can follow along if he omits stating a few in-between steps. Overall, it needs to be written from a completely different angle; as is, it looks like he's beating a tiresome drum over and over ("the answer was oxygen levels!"). It could be rewritten so that you don't start with a bunch of questions that lead to the same answer, but with the answer first followed by all the consequences thereof. It would still have the same content, but be a much smoother read.
Several factual things bothered me:
a) Early on he mentioned that birds are able to survive and thrive at much higher altitudes (thinner air, lower oxygen levels) than mammals. However, it isn't until the last hundred pages where he even mentions the setup of their lungs. That is, bird lungs have unidirectional airflow. Instead of a bag that inflates and deflates like ours, where oxygen-rich air goes in and then carbon-dioxide-laden air goes back out through the same paths, bird lungs have a system where air goes in one way and out a different way, and it's coupled to blood flow that moves in the opposite direction. It's a lot more efficient.
I spent a lot of the book wondering how he could've possibly overlooked such a basic fact, when he's writing something about oxygen and breathing. Fortunately for him, he eventually makes up for this lack by going into extreme detail on bird lungs for almost an entire chapter. Not only the details of how they're set up now (which I hadn't actually known fully), but lots of good nuggets of information from paleontology on when and from what it arose, and whether some of the dinosaurs had a setup like it (in the author's opinion: yes). But he needed to at least hint that such a section was upcoming.
b) There are whole sections in the book that strongly imply that lungs evolved from gills. No, they didn't. Lungs and gills are separate organs, and in some fish and amphibians you can even have both at the same time. Modern lungs (such as in us humans) are analogous to the modern swim bladder in bony fishes.
c) He also implies that reptiles evolved from amphibians. I'm fairly certain I read somewhere a while back that they both came from lobefinned fish, but did not evolve from each other. How controversial that was, I don't know - depends where I read it, and I can't remember.
d) Near the beginning he really should've talked more about how free oxygen first came to exist on Earth. The very first life on Earth was anaerobic. Oxygen is actually a toxin and was put out as a waste product. (It's still a toxin; we're just set up to make sure it doesn't do too much damage while we're harnessing it to do useful things). Eventually the first anaerobes polluted their atmosphere with it so much that there were no more rocks left to absorb it (by oxidizing).
Also, "descendant" is the correct spelling.
As for me and the Book Challenge. I actually started reading this back in December, so technically it's half a book I've read for 2007. I received it just before Christmas from a regular customer of the Chinese takeout where I work. He found out I have advanced degrees in biology, so he loaned me the book to read. He said he didn't understand it, and hoped I would be able to explain it to him. Having now read it in its entirety, I don't know if I can, unless I also want to teach him basic biology. It didn't bode well that one of the things he seemed amazed about was "wow, did you know humans came from fish?" This signals to me that we'd have to start with an uphill battle about evolution first...
2007 Book Challenge 1: Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi
Agent to the Stars is available as a free online read in its entirety. It's a humorous science fiction story about a Hollywood agent who is assigned to figure out a way to introduce Earth to an alien race that looks like gelatinous blobs. The blobs in question are mild-mannered beings with great senses of humor.
It was John Scalzi's first novel, and he originally had it out as "shareware" - but by this point he's doing well on the whole novel-writing front and no longer asks for donations. It's been put into print by a small press, and at some point it'll be a Tor mass-market paperback, at which point I'll probably buy it.
I was at work for 16 hours yesterday, trying to meet a deadline that I hadn't known about until an hour into my workday, wherein I had to do over two days of work in one day. Much of that work - about 10 hours of it - was mindless data crunching; all I had to do was sit there and click some buttons every 5-10 minutes. I was bored out of my mind.
I figured that it was a good time to finally read some fiction from the guy whose blog I'd been reading for the past several months. I wasn't expecting much when I started, figuring I'd read a chapter to see if I liked it, and if not there were other things on my list of things I could read instead.
By the time I finished work, I'd read the first 19 chapters. It's a great fast read. Sucked me right in and kept me extremely well entertained all night. The whole thing is 22 chapters and based on the comments from past readers, most people read it in one sitting.
Some nitpicks: The grammar is a bit crummy in some places, especially when he shifts between past and present tense at random. There's typos and missing words everywhere, though really only one that actually slowed me down when I had to reread the sentence to figure out what it was trying to say. I assume these get cleaned up for the print versions. But it's definitely a story that demonstrates well that, if you have a good, fast-moving plot and interesting characters, mechanics can be easily overlooked.
The ending is a bit of a stretch in my opinion, but works well enough if you stick with looking at it as comedy. And there are a few questions that never got answered, such as why Michelle was so dead set on playing Rachel Spiegelman. The surface answer wasn't plausible enough to me by itself. Also I wanted to know more about the newbie agent Amanda; her subplot was short and though it did resolve, she disappeared after her part ended and never came back.
Overall though, it was a very well constructed story. Aside from reading it for entertainment, I was also looking at it in relation to chess, Celtic knots, and organic linear plots. So it was educational as well.
My favorite line: "Away put your weapon. I mean you no harm." I had to stop reading to laugh my head off when I saw it. (And I'm not going to explain the context here because it'll spoil it.)
It was John Scalzi's first novel, and he originally had it out as "shareware" - but by this point he's doing well on the whole novel-writing front and no longer asks for donations. It's been put into print by a small press, and at some point it'll be a Tor mass-market paperback, at which point I'll probably buy it.
I was at work for 16 hours yesterday, trying to meet a deadline that I hadn't known about until an hour into my workday, wherein I had to do over two days of work in one day. Much of that work - about 10 hours of it - was mindless data crunching; all I had to do was sit there and click some buttons every 5-10 minutes. I was bored out of my mind.
I figured that it was a good time to finally read some fiction from the guy whose blog I'd been reading for the past several months. I wasn't expecting much when I started, figuring I'd read a chapter to see if I liked it, and if not there were other things on my list of things I could read instead.
By the time I finished work, I'd read the first 19 chapters. It's a great fast read. Sucked me right in and kept me extremely well entertained all night. The whole thing is 22 chapters and based on the comments from past readers, most people read it in one sitting.
Some nitpicks: The grammar is a bit crummy in some places, especially when he shifts between past and present tense at random. There's typos and missing words everywhere, though really only one that actually slowed me down when I had to reread the sentence to figure out what it was trying to say. I assume these get cleaned up for the print versions. But it's definitely a story that demonstrates well that, if you have a good, fast-moving plot and interesting characters, mechanics can be easily overlooked.
The ending is a bit of a stretch in my opinion, but works well enough if you stick with looking at it as comedy. And there are a few questions that never got answered, such as why Michelle was so dead set on playing Rachel Spiegelman. The surface answer wasn't plausible enough to me by itself. Also I wanted to know more about the newbie agent Amanda; her subplot was short and though it did resolve, she disappeared after her part ended and never came back.
Overall though, it was a very well constructed story. Aside from reading it for entertainment, I was also looking at it in relation to chess, Celtic knots, and organic linear plots. So it was educational as well.
My favorite line: "Away put your weapon. I mean you no harm." I had to stop reading to laugh my head off when I saw it. (And I'm not going to explain the context here because it'll spoil it.)
2006/12/26
End of Year Summary
(I wrote this over on SFFMuse, and then decided to put it here as well, since it covers everything. And then I added more to it too.)
Well, for starters I need to finish Nano 2006 - Amulet I. I managed another 2k words this month, and every time I pick it up it sings to me again. I just need to find the time and motivation to start each time. As Uncle Jim (Macdonald) would put it, Butt in Chair. ;)
The second Nano 2006 novel - Janis - turns out to be on the backburner for a while, until I figure out the rest of the backstory behind it. Also it has occurred to me that I've got my plotlines reversed. The side plot should be the main plot and vice versa. If that's the case, though - if the main plot is really about the plague - then what I'm really writing is the sequel to Triangle. (I haven't written Triangle yet.)
Then of course there's the minor problem that I've yet to finish any of my prior projects. Amulet II has at least a third left to go (probably around 30k more words). Temple, meanwhile, is rapidly falling apart as I shift around the backstory while writing Amulet I. Approximately a third of the original Temple setting is obsolete at the moment.
Outside of Fortress Launne, Stranger on a Bus still has a couple chapters left to go. Dragonfly needs to be revised.
I suspect what I most need to do is finish something. Anything.
Beyond that, I've been spending a lot more of my time learning about the industry in general, and ruminating on nonfiction things I might be able to do. The problem there is, I'm not convinced I have anything worthwhile to say. But I do have the 2007 edition of Writer's Market, bought after reading some advice from John Scalzi's blog, and I've been browsing through it while reading things like Miss Snark.
So, what about 2007 then? Well, for starters, I'm trying to come up with a project that I could use for Zette's 2-Year writing course at Forward Motion, which will be starting up in January. I haven't officially signed up yet since I don't have any workable ideas (now I wish I'd written down all the plot bunnies from back in October, while I was getting ready to write Amulet I and Janis). She wants people to start out with something that's not had any development to it yet. Just basic plot premise. Which means I can't use anything I already have.
While reading back over some of my past blog entries last night, I came across the whole debacle with RPoL's move to a new server. The migration disaster with the Russian mafia and all that. Apparently the Russian mafia is cliche' according to Miss Snark, but in this case it really was them... Anyway. At the time it was happening, I noticed that it would probably make for a good fictional story, so maybe Zette's thing would be a good chance to try turning it into one.
And while I'm tossing around links willy-nilly, the other main site I've been reading regularly in the past several months: Making Light. A lot of it is liberal politics, but they talk about writing, publishing, and a variety of other interesting topics as well.
Meanwhile, over on roleplay, I'm currently playing 10 characters in 7 games, running one game, and helping run another. Theoretically. However, in practice all of them are dead. This may just be due to Christmas though, as everything tends to slow down in December and not pick up again until mid-January, so I'm not too terribly worried overall about most of the games.
My game is slightly more worrisome. As far as I can tell, I really only have one active player right now, out of nine. There's two more in active chargen but they haven't said anything in a few days. If things don't pick back up by the end of January, I might just let it end. It had a good run of things, about a year and a half or so, a year of which was very active and fun. I'm a bit burnt out with roleplay in general anyway, so it would be somewhat of a relief to not have to keep running it. Really, at this point it almost hinges on whether one particular player finishes up the last of his chargen or if he's already disappeared to greener pastures (as I somewhat suspect he has).
In other news, I've started reading the first book I've opened in months. (That whole reading thing, heh. I used to be a voracious reader in my youth; now I don't read hardly at all. It's a little strange....) This one is a science nonfiction about the history of animal life on Earth. Out of Thin Air by Peter D. Ward, a professor at the University of Seattle. The author purports that the observed history is due in large part to levels of oxygen in the atmosphere (and oceans) and how this has fluctuated up and down over the eons. I've only just read through the introduction so far, but it looks interesting.
The reason I'm reading it is because one of the regular customers at the chinese takeout where I work gave it to me yesterday. Or well, lent it to me. Basically, as I understood things, he tried to read it, couldn't understand it, and now wants me to read it and tell him what it says. This could be interesting, because one of the comments he made was something like "did you know we came from the sea?" So it possibly means that I have to explain the basics of evolution to him. Which, I suspect, is going to be chock full of the creationism debate. Fun fun fun...
I guess that pretty much sums up where I am at the moment.
Well, for starters I need to finish Nano 2006 - Amulet I. I managed another 2k words this month, and every time I pick it up it sings to me again. I just need to find the time and motivation to start each time. As Uncle Jim (Macdonald) would put it, Butt in Chair. ;)
The second Nano 2006 novel - Janis - turns out to be on the backburner for a while, until I figure out the rest of the backstory behind it. Also it has occurred to me that I've got my plotlines reversed. The side plot should be the main plot and vice versa. If that's the case, though - if the main plot is really about the plague - then what I'm really writing is the sequel to Triangle. (I haven't written Triangle yet.)
Then of course there's the minor problem that I've yet to finish any of my prior projects. Amulet II has at least a third left to go (probably around 30k more words). Temple, meanwhile, is rapidly falling apart as I shift around the backstory while writing Amulet I. Approximately a third of the original Temple setting is obsolete at the moment.
Outside of Fortress Launne, Stranger on a Bus still has a couple chapters left to go. Dragonfly needs to be revised.
I suspect what I most need to do is finish something. Anything.
Beyond that, I've been spending a lot more of my time learning about the industry in general, and ruminating on nonfiction things I might be able to do. The problem there is, I'm not convinced I have anything worthwhile to say. But I do have the 2007 edition of Writer's Market, bought after reading some advice from John Scalzi's blog, and I've been browsing through it while reading things like Miss Snark.
So, what about 2007 then? Well, for starters, I'm trying to come up with a project that I could use for Zette's 2-Year writing course at Forward Motion, which will be starting up in January. I haven't officially signed up yet since I don't have any workable ideas (now I wish I'd written down all the plot bunnies from back in October, while I was getting ready to write Amulet I and Janis). She wants people to start out with something that's not had any development to it yet. Just basic plot premise. Which means I can't use anything I already have.
While reading back over some of my past blog entries last night, I came across the whole debacle with RPoL's move to a new server. The migration disaster with the Russian mafia and all that. Apparently the Russian mafia is cliche' according to Miss Snark, but in this case it really was them... Anyway. At the time it was happening, I noticed that it would probably make for a good fictional story, so maybe Zette's thing would be a good chance to try turning it into one.
And while I'm tossing around links willy-nilly, the other main site I've been reading regularly in the past several months: Making Light. A lot of it is liberal politics, but they talk about writing, publishing, and a variety of other interesting topics as well.
Meanwhile, over on roleplay, I'm currently playing 10 characters in 7 games, running one game, and helping run another. Theoretically. However, in practice all of them are dead. This may just be due to Christmas though, as everything tends to slow down in December and not pick up again until mid-January, so I'm not too terribly worried overall about most of the games.
My game is slightly more worrisome. As far as I can tell, I really only have one active player right now, out of nine. There's two more in active chargen but they haven't said anything in a few days. If things don't pick back up by the end of January, I might just let it end. It had a good run of things, about a year and a half or so, a year of which was very active and fun. I'm a bit burnt out with roleplay in general anyway, so it would be somewhat of a relief to not have to keep running it. Really, at this point it almost hinges on whether one particular player finishes up the last of his chargen or if he's already disappeared to greener pastures (as I somewhat suspect he has).
In other news, I've started reading the first book I've opened in months. (That whole reading thing, heh. I used to be a voracious reader in my youth; now I don't read hardly at all. It's a little strange....) This one is a science nonfiction about the history of animal life on Earth. Out of Thin Air by Peter D. Ward, a professor at the University of Seattle. The author purports that the observed history is due in large part to levels of oxygen in the atmosphere (and oceans) and how this has fluctuated up and down over the eons. I've only just read through the introduction so far, but it looks interesting.
The reason I'm reading it is because one of the regular customers at the chinese takeout where I work gave it to me yesterday. Or well, lent it to me. Basically, as I understood things, he tried to read it, couldn't understand it, and now wants me to read it and tell him what it says. This could be interesting, because one of the comments he made was something like "did you know we came from the sea?" So it possibly means that I have to explain the basics of evolution to him. Which, I suspect, is going to be chock full of the creationism debate. Fun fun fun...
I guess that pretty much sums up where I am at the moment.
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