3 Random Things for a Rainy Friday that’s not actually raining September 5, 2008
Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Writing , add a commentCory Doctorow has an article in Locus Magazine about getting paid. He’s what you could call a Forward Thinker.
John DeNardo declares that JJ Abrams is the new Overlord of SciFi Fans. Well, duh. I been had known that since Alias. I’m not sure about the putting down of Joss Whedon, but we’ll see when Dollhouse hits the digital streaming media player formerly known as a TV.
3rd… Val wanted me to post this:
As someone who grew up in the Pac-NW, I do find it interesting that storms from the Gulf Coast just make their way up the Midwest through Chicago.
[Writing] Word Count Wednesday 9/3/08 September 3, 2008
Posted by fanaticalpupil in : The Nine Mothers, Writing , 1 comment so farFiction Writing This Week: 2,260
Non-Fiction Writing This Week: A bunch
I believe that’s the first time (since I’ve been keeping track) that I’ve topped 2,000 words in a week! I was inspired! I’ve been writing some somewhat tough scenes, too, in that, I already know what happens before and after the scene, but I’m filling in what actually happens so that readers don’t have to make spectacular jumps of logic to follow the story. And in doing so, I am now only 517 words away from 20,000 in The Nine Mothers of White Home. With a goal of 90-100,000 that puts me at 20% done! That actually seems like a decent number.
Anathem Advanced Blogger Reviews September 1, 2008
Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Writing , 1 comment so farNow, I don’t know who either of these people are or if they’re good judges of the quality of books, but they have posted advanced reading copy reviews of Anathem, and they’re both similar enough that I believe them.
Marcus also posted this picture, which I had not seen before:
So far, it sounds like a book that could have used a little more editing, but then, the publisher has probably given Neal Stephenson some sort of de facto right to just say whatever he wants. I mean…
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #36 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in these categories: (What’s this?)
#1 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction
#4 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary
It’s not every day that an author gets two vidoes on Amazon.com.
Also of note:
Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
So, yeah, I’ll probably be waiting for the paperback version before I give myself the opportunity to read this one. Of course, I still have to finish The Confusion and The System of the World, and by the time I’m actually able to finish those, there will probably be a paperback of Anathem. Hooray for slow readers!
[Writing] Writing Workshop: Building Characters August 29, 2008
Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Writing , add a commentDeepGenre’s David Louis Edelman provides 6 basic building blocks for creating characters. It’s a fairly quick read, and will help if you’re looking to make one of those character creation spreadsheets. Or if you just want to double-check that your characters are truly 6-dimensional.
[Writing] New Length Milestone! August 28, 2008
Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Writing , add a commentAfter adding 300+ words over the past 2 days to The Nine Mothers, it has now overtaken the length of my previous longest effort (Hear The Grass Grow) with 18,359 words.
[Writing] Creative Writing: Director Commentary
Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Writing , add a commentSomething occurred to me while watching Joss Whedon’s director’s commentary for Serenity
That’s what it is supposed to look like (in Google Docs, at least). Mine… well, it still sort of just resides in one column, with the director-like rambling that starts with “Well, in this scene, I did this, because of this, and we were trying to convey this.”
[Writing] Word Count Wednesday 8/28 August 27, 2008
Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Writing , add a commentFor the week ending 8/28: 353
Not much, but as I always say, it’s 353 more words than I had last week at this time. It seems like there is only one really obvious day for writing. That’s when I get my 300+ words per week in. So, now I just need to work on creating time on a couple other days, so I can get closer to 1000 words per week. I can crank out the 350 pretty easily, but I do it, and then I kind of rest on my laurels for a couple days, and then I get back to where I want to write more, but then I don’t have the time. It’s definitely a pattern, and I’m hoping that being aware of it will help me to change it.
What is Science Fiction as a Genre?
Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Uncategorized , add a commentThe following quotes are from a post that is actually about Science Fiction as an MMORPG, but it has some discussion which definitely applies to written fiction.
In my view, all the most-popular SF (Fiction or Fantasy, you choose) like Star Trek, Star Wars, SG, BG, etc. More closely resemble fantasy than SF.
In these, you’ll find all the character-centricity you need to make a compelling story. The setting (the technology) is incidental to the story rather than the focus. When you start throwing in goofy aliens with weird “powers” (or Chicago mobsters, or Nazis, or mutants, or ….) you are starting to get awfully close to reskinning fantasy in space. And honestly, thats not necessarily bad.
Here, where SF can stand for Science Fantasy (an obvious oxymoron if I’ve ever seen one), I think a more appropriate SF would be: Space Fantasy (as the other can be called “High Fantasy” - a term I’ve heard before, which I believe applies to things like A Game Of Thrones). It takes place in Space, and it’s basically a Fantasy.
Too often pure SF is more about the idea and not the character, or if about the character, it has a dependency on a technological element that is both critical to the story and too susceptible to being over taken by our headlong technological rush into the future potentially rendering the dramatic heart of the story irrelevant or to quote Wil, downright silly. Its much easier to keep our disbelief suspended when we’re talking about the Force in another galaxy than to disregard what have become now-glaring factual inaccuracies (or implausibilities) in light of scientific advance. FTL travel or the gravity problem anyone?
And that is why most laypeople (I believe) just call it SciFi no matter what narrower definition could possibly be applied. It’s not technically Science Fiction, the narrow definers argue, but it certainly is Fiction. And the term SciFi differentiates it from pretty much every other sort of fiction there is. It’s not (usually) horror, mystery, romance, fantasy, chick lit, or anything else. Sure, it can be a mix of SciFi with any other genre, but it’s still going to be distinguished as SciFi.
I accepted this concept starting with Neal Stephenson’s lecture at Gresham College in which he basically asserts that Science Fiction doesn’t really need to be narrowed down as a genre since (these days) everything that is not another genre is Science Fiction. It’s not a hard and fast fact, but more a byproduct of the way we are currently producing content. Science Fiction has become so mainstream that it, as a genre, can encompass just about everything that isn’t cordoned off by another group.
LOST, You Kind of Lost Me August 26, 2008
Posted by fanaticalpupil in : TV , 1 comment so farFinally finished Season 4 of LOST. I think it only took about 8 months to get through the entire body of work. And honestly, I think I’m done with it.
*** Just as a warning, if anyone else on Earth hasn’t seen all of LOST, this post will probably spoil a lot of it for you ***
I’m just sayin…. cause I was extremely careful not to take in any information about the show until I’d seen it all, so I don’t want to go and ruin for anyone else.
Back to the point of the post…
Going in to the show, I really only wanted to see how (or if) they got off The Island. Now that I know, I don’t really care what happened after that point. I can imagine how people would care, but the characters whose plot lines are still a mystery just aren’t interesting enough to me to want to watch the show to learn what happened to them.
First example: Locke. Sorry, but I slowly stopped caring about him over the course of Season 3. By the end of Season 3 and throughout Season 4, Locke was nothing more than a plot driver for me. Not only that, but he was the least surprising and/or intriguing cliffhanger ever. Sure, when JJ Abrahms did cliffhangers in Alias they were always on the verge of the absurb, but at least they were surprising and hinted at something more, or something mysterious, or at least something. The end of Season 4 was just kind of like, “Oh, OK. That actually makes sense.”
Next up: Ben. I never really cared about him. I felt sorry for him, sure, but he’s the villian, and he’s engaged in a battle with another villian. And they both apparently have vast resources and/or wealth. I’m not sure I even want to know what happens there, because I don’t think I’ll be happy with the outcome no matter what it is.
Who else? Claire? Sorry, but leaving your baby to follow the ghost of Jack’s dad doesn’t exactly make me care more about you.
Juliet? My wife was really into her and her mentalness, but I just never quite connected there.
Sawyer? Yeah, OK, maybe I care what happened to Sawyer. But only because we all know that he should have ended up with Kate.
In the end, I know there’s only going to be 34 more episodes. And with all the time I’ve put into it, I suppose I’ll just end up watching the rest just to have seen the whole thing. But all the while, I’ll be wishing JJ would have just left us with the simple idea of a mysterious island and people surviving on the island. I mean, Gilligan and Co pulled off that idea for 98 episodes. LOST basically wrapped it up in only 83.
Anathem is close August 24, 2008
Posted by fanaticalpupil in : Books , add a commentSo close that Amazon has videos of Neal Stephenson talking about it, and even reading from it!
Still not sure if I’m going to buy the hardcover when it comes out, because (as previously stated) I just don’t like having to carry around heavy books. And this one is already 928 pages, so it certainly doesn’t need any added tonnage.
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