Wow, I’ve sucked at posting here lately…sorry about that! It’s been a bit on the busy side the last few days, and making matters worse, the air conditioning at Casa Jaquandor decided to take a nose-dive, so things there haven’t been too comfortable and it’s taken a lot of effort just to work up the proper enthusiasm for writing in the first place. So, what energies I have been able to summon on that front, have been devoted to the book, which is kind of slow-going right now anyway because I’m in the stage of the game where the pot is a rolling boil and I don’t wanna screw things up too badly.
It occurs to me that this fall is going to be a mite busy.
The new Thor movie comes out in November.
The second Hobbit movie comes out in December.
Season three of Sherlock comes along in October. (It’s not set to air in the US until 2014, from what I’m reading, but that won’t stop me.)
Scott Lynch’s long-awaited third novel in the Gentleman Bastard sequence, The Republic of Thieves, arrives in October.
JW Rinzler’s The Making of Return of the Jedi also hits shelves in October.
Along with all this is the usual season returns of teevee shows I already watch.
Oh, and our annual fall getaway, which will be the first weekend in October.
And NaNoWriMo in November.
And in December, I should be able to start the editing of Princesses In Space II: The Fall of the Planet Reichenbach (not the actual title).
I guess I’d better enjoy the next 2.5 months, because I suspect that starting mid-September, things are gonna roll!
UPDATE: My friend and former college roommate and best man at my wedding, Mr. Chris Gustafson, points out that the title of this post should be Ageekalypse, and not that abomination that I actually used in my pre-coffee stupor. Ach!
(A repost of what I’ve run on July 4 the last couple of years)
Here’s a really weird story. It’s so weird, I’m not sure the historians didn’t make it up out of whole cloth. It seems that around 235 years ago or so, some folks living in a place under the rule of a King decided that they didn’t much like the way that King was ruling them. At all. They pretty much decided, en masse, that their King was behaving, to use a current term, like a douche.
Now, over the many centuries before these folks came along, lots of other folks in other lands have decided that their Kings and Queens were being douchey, so they came up with ways to replace them. They’d organize revolts, usually behind the banner of some obscure relative of the monarch’s so they could say that their person has a better claim to the throne, and off they’d go. So you’d expect that the folks we’re talking about here would have just said, “You know what? Our King is a douche. Let’s replace him with a new King.”
But these folks didn’t say that. What they said was, “Not only does our King suck, but he sucks so much that we’re now thinking maybe we won’t even have any more Kings. We’ll do it all ourselves.”
Over a year or so, there were some battles and skirmishes between these folks and the troops sent by the King to put down the pesky rebels, but it didn’t work, and that notion — “No more Kings and Queens!” — took hold. It became a really popular idea, so finally, these folks appointed some representatives to gather in one of their cities and talk these issues over. The conversation went like this:
GUY #1: So, we’re all agreed then? Kings suck?
GUY #2: Yes, Verily, they suck.
GUY #1: OK, so what do we do?
GUY #3: Well, we’re already fighting, so we just keep fighting. But we should probably tell the King that we’re being serious and we’re not just a bunch of rabble-rousers here.
GUY #1: Right! How do we do that?
GUY #4: How ’bout a letter? I’ve got some nice parchment, quills, and a new bottle of ink.
GUY #2: Good idea! But you’re about as eloquent as my cow. You’ll just write “Hey King, sod off” and be done with it. We should be a bit more poetic about it.
GUY #4: How about Tom? He’s pretty poetic.
GUY #1: Good idea! Let Tom do it. Now where’s that Adams guy with the beer?
So a guy named Tom wrote the King a sternly-worded letter. It was pretty wordy, given the standards of the time, so here’s a paraphrase:
Dear King,
We the undersigned, being representatives of the people of your colonies, have collectively decided that you are a douche and we don’t want to live under your rule anymore. Furthermore, we’re going to come up with a government of our own that won’t even have a King. Now, we’ve just called you a douche, so you’re probably thinking that we should be kind enough to at least tell you all the reasons we have for thinking you’re a douche, so there’s a list of those reasons later on. For now, suffice it to say that we believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. And you don’t. And since we like the whole Life and Liberty thing a lot more than we like you, we’re gonna take those and let you do whatever it is you do with your time in that Palace of yours.
So, here’s the list of ways you’ve pissed us off. Note how long it is. You don’t have to be a douche, you know.
…
See? Really, dude. There’s no reason for some of that stuff, right? So anyway, have a good life and all. You’ve still got your island, and Canada seems pretty happy with you for some reason (but really, they’re weird folks to begin with, what with that odd game they like to play on ice). But we’re out of here.
Signed, All the guys present
PS: Could you make sure your soldiers always wear those bright red coats? It makes it really easy to see ’em in the forests. KTHXBAI.
And so it came to pass that after some years of war, and some further years of cruddy government, they all got together again and figured out how they wanted to set up their new, “No Kings!” government. Their notion was to spread power out amongst a bunch of folks who were accountable to the people, and to further make sure that their government was required to respect certain rights that couldn’t be taken away. It was a really weird idea…and yet, these folks worked hard to make it work, and their children kept working hard to make it work, and their children kept at it, and so on and so on and son on, until today.
Does it still work? Sometimes yes, sometimes not so much. But we’re still here, and we’re still working at it.
So Happy Birthday, United States of America! You’re a wonderful, weird, beautiful, maddening, and awesome country.
Well…I’ll take it. I did fall short of the goal I set at the beginning of the month by nearly 3000 words, unfortunately. My daily average turned out nearly 100 words less per day than I had been aiming for.
It was a tough month, though — I lost two entire days to vacation-related driving, there was one day that involved a 4:00 am start at work, resulting in brain fry so extreme that on that day I only achieved 17 total words. Yes, one day I wrote two sentences. And there were a number of days when the going was pretty tough, because I was working my way through a part of the book that was a bit foggy in my mind going in, so I was doing the heavy lifting at the same time as the actual writing. Editing this book is going to be tough, I suspect; I know that there are a lot of fairly dodgy spots where I just basically cranked out prose that I mainly consider ‘placeholder’ prose. But one of my general attitudes on writing is “Ach, get something down and fix it later”, so this doesn’t bother me.
So, into July I go. I still hope to finish the first draft by the end of this month, but that may be a tall order. If that works out, then I should be able to let the manuscript age in a charred oak barrel until December! (That’s to leave time for NaNoWriMo.)
I’ll likely have some actual content here later today or this evening…but for now, here’s the stellar park job by someone in the Cape May, NJ fire department. Whoops.
Well, I could blog some stuff for you folks. Or I could do stuff like hang out on an Atlantic beach with my family, flying a kite that looks like a shark.
Yeah. See ya! (Vacation ends Saturday, normal life resumes Sunday, work resumes Monday. ‘Day Job’ work, that is. I’ve been writing this whole time.)
