Tag: Sentential Links

Linkage, huzzah! All of the links this week are to blogs of fellow NaNoWriMo participants. There’s a forum on the NaNo site for people in their 30s and 40s, and on that forum is a thread for folks to leave links to their blogs. I’m selecting some at random here. (Well, not that random, really — I’m going through from the top of the thread and checking out each blog I come across, leaving out the ones where the writer indicates along the lines of “I have a blog but I almost never update it”.)

:: Before spending money on romance novels (or any books, for that matter) I like to check out the reviews. I used to simply read whatever reviews were on the main page and then make my decision. Recently, I’ve started reading a few out of each rating level to see what I might be getting into. As a fledgling writer, I have to admit that one star ratings make me a bit nervous to put any of my own work out there for the world to see. I can’t imagine logging on and seeing them on a novel I’ve poured my heart and soul into. But then, I found a recurring theme in romance novel one-star reviews. (I worry about this particular concern. So far nobody has reported back on my manuscript to Princesses that they could see the ending a mile away, but…well, we’ll see!)

:: Today, my psychiatrist told me that I “look and sound better” than I have in a very long time. And I must confess, I agree with him.

:: But I do think, now here at the beginning, that the ending will also have something to do with music. With the ability of music to connect people, and to help them find what they are searching for, and to bring them home. (Her tale is apparently set in WNY. I wonder how she sees Future Buffalo — drying husk of a city, or once and for all risen from the ashes!)

:: So, I’ve already started National Novel Writing Month. I just couldn’t not start. Monday, on a flight, all that time to write, I had to get started. Now, sitting in the airport, waiting for the next flight, this one home, I am writing again. (I was able to resist temptation to start early…but then again, I am using a story that I had already started a couple of times before, so the opening scenes were fresh in my head, even though I completely started at the beginning. And I’ve already decided what I’m doing for next year’s NaNo, which is another story that I’ve taken a couple of whacks at and gotten nowhere!)

:: It was just one year ago that I decided to take a weekend road trip to Marion, Ohio to meet up with the Heaven’s Saints Motorcycle Ministry (HSMM). Once a month they load up a converted bread truck and head in Columbus to reach out to the people living in the various pockets of homeless camps. My wife and I knew then that we needed to come back and bring some youth from the church to engage in, essentially, an urban missions trip. (I love the title of this blog.)

:: Actually, a word like “landmark”—or even words like indelible or transcendent—probably can’t even begin to appropriately describe this song’s impact and where it stands in the landscape of modern music. “Unchained Melody” is one of the most recorded songs of all time; there are over five hundred different recordings of this song across multiple languages. This is the version that everyone knows. (This looks like a fascinating music blog. Gotta check back on this one.)

:: I’ve been thinking about what I am learning this month by writing my first novel for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). One of the things about writing fiction is describing the environment and getting the reader to see what is in your head. I’ve read from other writers that this is a balancing act. Too much, and you are boring the reader. Too little and you are confusing the reader. (I generally try for the ‘pick a few really standout details and then let the reader fill in the rest’ approach to description. Very few writers can do long passages of description without boring me to tears — Tolkien is one, I think. I also try to select words that connotatively suggest what I want the reader to see.)

:: Under any circumstances, the fact that the protagonist has an IQ around 140 (which is still somewhat lower than his author’s) ought to count as some justification for his speech patterns. Besides, readers who have trouble with the words on that list aren’t going to ‘get’ the story anyway, so why should I nerf my word choices for their benefit? (They make programs that check grammar? Never used one. Spell-check and several rounds of proofreading. Of course, sometimes that doesn’t even work…my Princesses beta-readers are finding all manner of whacked-out errors that I didn’t catch the first time!)

:: Nope, concurrently noveling is not for me. I’m forty-six, in overall good health, can plow through 5K mornings with a few flicks of my wrists. But I cannot write two books at one time. (Me either. That’s why I had to put Lighthouse Boy — not the actual title — on the back burner for a while, as I get Princesses ready to send out into the world.)

More next week! (And that’s just the first page of that thread! What a bunch of fine-looking blogs. Yet another nice side-effect of doing NaNoWriMo this year!)

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Hooray, the return! As promised, now that The Election is over, we can get back to linkage. (My reason for not doing these posts during The Election was one of self-control: I feared I would do nothing but link political stuff, and politics isn’t the focus of this blog.)

Anyhow, linkage recommences…NOW!!!

:: Even at 19, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at lead guitarist Slash hiding behind that mop of hair and that dippy top hat, and lead singer Axl Rose is precisely the sort of scrawny little smart-ass who somehow manages to enrage me simply by breathing. (Heh! Like Jason, despite a general enjoyment of 80s hair bands, I never warmed to GNR. My reason was that I simply hated — and hate to this day — Axl’s singing voice. I just find him spectacularly unpleasant to hear, no matter what the song is.)

:: That realization helped me define what I mean when I use the term Jump the Shark. Instead of a vague realization that I’ve simply lost interest in a series, the Jump the Shark moment has become the point at which the illusion is shattered and I realize the creators have no idea where the story is going. (I think that’s a part of the very problem with series teevee: there’s no guarantee that the show will be around long enough to tell ‘the story’, so I often think that in the beginning, there usually is no ‘the story’ to tell — there’s just writers spinning all manner of situations that they can mine later on. Only as ‘the story’ starts to emerge do they start thinking in those terms. There’s an inherent problem to the very nature of season-based series teevee that’s always at the heart of things, isn’t there? At least for network stuff. You can have ‘planned’ series on cable, but then it’s one long-form story told in discrete parts, not a ‘series’ at all. Hmmmmm….)

:: “I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos in which we float, like a mote of dust in the morning sky.” (Yes, that’s Mr. Sagan himself, quoted in the rewatch of Cosmos that Tor.com is hosting. I watched the series again last year and remain convinced that it is one of the great creative achievements of the last fifty years.)

:: This is a cat post.
I’m writing about my cat.
It’s so pathetic that it comes all the way back around again to “incredibly cool.” (Nothing pathetic about it. According to legislation signed into law by President Gore, everything on the Internet must have a cat.)

:: Does this mean I’m going to let my daughter watch and/or read whatever she wants to? No. (Especially not now–she’s not even seven yet.) But I’m aware that part of the ritual of growing up is me telling her, “You don’t want to watch that movie. It’s too scary for kids…” And the other part of the ritual is that she’ll watch it when I’m not around. Because as sad as it makes me, she’s going to stop being a kid before I’m ready for her to stop being a kid. (You know what the weird thing is? I never once snuck into an R movie as a kid. Never. I was never even really tempted to try it. I suspect that in today’s megaplexes, it would be really easy, since most times they take the tickets pretty much as you’re entering the building, and nobody’s paying any attention to what you see. Heck, I sometimes think it would be ridiculously easy in some of these places to buy one ticket and hang out for three movies. Would they even care, so long as I bought multiple popcorns and buckets o’Coke?)

:: There are places that don’t get my business, or will ever get it, because I find their corporate beliefs or practices problematic. But I’m not going to stop going to the local ice cream shop because the owners put a Romney sign in their window. (Well, we could just go single-payer and eliminate all this nonsense, but…yeah, I know, that’s crazy talk. Sorry.)

:: It’s amazing to me that places like Liberty Tool exist at all. It would be easy to be cynical and say he’s just selling tools, but I don’t believe that’s all he’s doing. Whether they mean to or not, Liberty Tool is preserving a history, promoting a level craftsmanship, and giving artists and workers a focal point to leverage their skill upon — both now and in the future. It’s a simple but powerful concept we don’t see much of today, and for that our hat is off to you, sir. (Go watch the video over there. It’s only about 3 minutes long, but it’s really nifty.)

:: Sea levels will have risen by at least one, and possibly more than ten metres worldwide. Large chunks of sub-Saharan Africa, China, India, Brazil, and the US midwest and south are going to be uninhabitably hot — that is, too hot for non-GM plants and organisms to survive in during heat spikes, and with heat spikes over 44 celsius at night lasting at least two weeks every year (sufficient to kill off anyone without air conditioning). As 80% of today’s human population live within 200Km of a coast, there will have been mass migrations and resettlements: many of today’s great cities will be lost. London, New York, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Mumbai — they’re all going to be submerged, or protected by heroic water defenses and at comparable risk to today’s Venice and New Orleans (both of which will be long-since lost). (Huh…probably shoulda ended on a more cheerful note than that….)

More next week! Huzzah!!!

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It’s time for LINKS! Huzzah!!!

:: And so the Greeks destroyed Ilion and took back Helen
They squashed those Trojans like a ripened melon! (Sean celebrates completing The Aeneid as only he can. Hoo boy….)

:: Oh no, no, no…one does not wait 37 years for marriage to receive the Holy Kitchenaid mixer from her besties for her wedding shower to HIDE that gorgeous piece of equipment! (Don’t do this, men. Just…don’t do this.)

:: And then Reed is always yelling at him and ordering him around like a helper monkey. Jesus, Reed; first you disfigure him, then you browbeat him, and then you turn him into your servant and take his name away? Give it a rest, you yob. Poor guy can’t even masturbate anymore, fer chrissakes. Can you imagine the stress he’s under? (I’ve never liked The Fantastic Four, and I never read more than an occasional issue of it when I was actively into comics, mainly because Reed Richards is an insufferable tool. The one issue that I remember focused on She-Hulk, in a humorous story that had a paparazzi-type managing to get naked photos of her.)

:: Possibly all those years of bad-taste fat-Elvis jokes and ridiculous impersonators have blotted out the cultural memories of who he really was, and why he once excited us. Maybe it’s something more ineffable. Whatever the reason, though, Marilyn’s image (if not her actual work or personality) resonates with younger folks whereas Elvis’ does not. (Well, Elvis Presley’s reputation ain’t going anywhere so long as Sheila O’Malley is around! Read on….)

:: Elvis arrived in Germany on October 1, 1958. Except for a couple of shows in Canada, Elvis had never been out of the United States. He was greeted at the dock by throngs of screaming fans – if anything more insane than the fans in the United States. He signed autographs. You can see how happy he is in the photos and footage, that here he is in a foreign land, with girls who don’t even speak his language, and they all know who he is.

:: I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent on these two volumes, but it’s a lot. One of the best purchases I’ve ever made. I’ve surely gotten more than $70 worth of enjoyment out of them. (Wow, that is a heck of a find!)

:: ‘Blade Runner’ avoids that paradox for too much of its running length, which is why I would like to see someone else take a crack at it. It’s a drama about slavery where nobody ever suggests that slavery is a bad thing, which is a bit too bloodless for a movie with such an angry contradiction right at its very core. The only time we see even a hint of it is when Roy Batty rescues Deckard at the end, an act that gives the lie to the entire notion that androids are incapable of empathy and forces Deckard to confront the truth: He’s a mass murderer, and he never even thought about it. And given that he gets maybe two lines of dialogue after that, I’d call the film at least a little bit flawed. A sequel that really got into the idea, one that confronted the notions that androids could learn how to be human beings…and that human beings can all too easily forget…could be even better than its predecessor.

More next week!

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:: It’s this kind of ignorant trash that sets feminism back decades. Women who defend this book are, however unwittingly, participating in some of the most blatant misogyny I’ve ever witnessed, giving the impression that some women enjoy being debased, abused, and controlled (outside of a consensual dom/sub relationship). (Thank God I’m hearing awful things about 50 Shades of Gray now…if only more people had told me what an awful book Twilight is….)

:: That’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. As much as I love adventure stories, I’ve never been a risk taker. Presented with the easy way or a potentially more rewarding, but harder way, I’ve always taken the easier way.

:: You didn’t set out to get rich as a favor to the rest of us.

So stop expecting a thank you note. (Couldn’t agree more. The whole “Bow down and thank your Job Creating Overlords!” thing that we’ve got going on is utterly nauseating.)

:: Er…your brother got killed in a mountain-climbing accident! (In context, this is actually really funny….)

:: What I like most about all three Batman movies is Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon. The character developed a lot over the course of the trilogy and the whole storyline revolves as much around him as it does around Batman. While the flashy action scenes are usually left to others, I get a kick out of every single minute of screentime Oldman has. That man can say more with taking off his glasses than others with a five minute monologue. (I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I’m eternally fascinated by Gary Oldman, when he turns up in stuff.)

:: I’ve made no secret of the fact that I often feel a little lost here in the 21st century, but at moments like this, when technology gives us the opportunity to share things like this with the people who are making it happen, and the people all over the world who also get excited by the thought of something we built setting down on another freaking planet… god, it’s all so amazing. It almost makes up for nonsense like whether or not eating mediocre fast-food chicken sends the proper political statement.

:: The news these days is filled with polarization, with hate, with fear, with ignorance. But while these feelings are a part of us, and always will be, they neither dominate nor define us. Not if we don’t let them. When we reach, when we explore, when we’re curious – that’s when we’re at our best. We can learn about the world around us, the Universe around us. It doesn’t divide us, or separate us, or create artificial and wholly made-up barriers between us. As we saw on Twitter, at New York Times Square where hundreds of people watched the landing live, and all over the world: science and exploration bind us together. Science makes the world a better place, and it makes us better people.

It’s what we can do, and what we must do. (Amen. Oh my God, Amen.)

:: I tell you these summer days passed by with saddle, foot, and bow are becoming legend in my own life. I adore every hoof mark, stride, and knocked arrow.

And the very best part?

It’s Monday.

More next week. Or not.

(Actually, maybe not…I have family visiting from out of town this coming weekend, so posting may not happen much. You are warned. Heh!)

More next week!

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Links, and some such.

:: The gun nuts do have a point.

We do indeed accept a certain number of vehicular deaths each year, including those caused by drunk drivers and crazy people, as the price we pay for mobility. And nobody is willing to give up cars are they? And nobody is suggesting that they do.

It is a valid comparison.

But here’s the thing, even though we do accept a certain number of vehicular deaths each year, we constantly seek to reduce those fatalities through mandated improvement in the state of the automotive art and road engineering, through laws and regulations and increasingly uncompromising enforcement and stricter punishments, through vigilance and observation and monitoring, though mandatory training and testing and licensing, though tracking those who habitually break the law. We don’t let crazy people drive. We make drivers buy insurance.

(Here’s the thing: I don’t even grant that car deaths and gun deaths are a valid comparison, and it’s why I’m always pretty unimpressed with arguments along the lines of “People die doing X, so why not outlaw X!” It’s because, while people die using cars, causing death isn’t what cars are for. Cars and guns are both examples of tools, but the purpose of a car is to get you someplace. The purpose of a gun is to kill. There just isn’t any getting around it. You can kill with lots of stuff: hammers, knives, and as George Carlin once speculated, you could probably bludgeon someone to death with the Sunday New York Times. What can you do with a gun other than kill? Shoot at inanimate objects so as to improve your skill for when you need to use it to kill?

And no, I’m not presenting an argument in favor of outlawing guns. I’m jsaying why I think a particular argument in favor of guns is really unconvincing, to the point of being deeply silly.

While I’m on the subject, I heard another stupefyingly dumb thing said about guns this past week: “We should never allow the government to be better armed than its citizens are!” Mr. Wright utters the same thoughts I have on that ludicrous notion:

Just so I’m clear here, you’ve bought yourself the biggest, most powerful, most heavily armed, most technologically advanced military in the entire history of mankind, complete with nuclear weapons, stealth bombers, tanks, and many other advanced capabilities too numerous to count. You’ve given them a full decade of intense combat experience in multiple theaters under a vast variety of conditions from mountain terrain, to forest and jungle to desert, right on down to door to door urban warfare. They have more than ten years direct experience in counter-insurgency tactics against multiple heavily armed, experienced, and utterly ruthless civilian militias engaged in guerrilla tactics. But you figure that an invader that can take that mighty force down can be beaten by you and your drunken rednecked beer buddies and a couple of Chinese knockoff AK-47 replicas, do you?

OK, enough of the gun stuff…but I found Mr. Wright’s two postings on this topic very commendable. And lest one think he’s some liberal looking to get rid of guns entirely, well, he provides a long list of his firearm-related bona fides, as well. No overall-clad hippie living in the Northeast who wants nothing to do with ever handling a firearm much less shooting one, he.

:: “Blade Runner” is a great example of several things. It shows us how even a fantastic visual experience can’t hold our attention for two hours if we are not made to care about the characters or the story. It is proof that the latter two aspects are of even more importance for a feature to work. “Runner” may very well be the best of the worst pictures ever made, or perhaps the worst of the best, but this places it in a spot of mediocrity that no work of such phenomenal qualities should ever approach. I feel grateful for its existence and I’m aware there are plenty of readers who believe that its visual virtues automatically make it deserving of cult-classic status, but I also can’t help but ultimately see this (one of the most influential films of the 80s) as a one-of-a-kind wasted opportunity for greatness. (I like Blade Runner more than this fellow does, but I’m of similar mind. It’s a movie that, aside from a few moments, I invariably find emotionally cold and distant, every time I sit down to watch it. I have a habit of watching it every five or ten years (that it’s been out long enough for me to have a ‘habit’ regarding viewing it that involves such timescales frankly scares me), and each time my reaction is pretty much the same.)

:: Many people believe geekdom is defined by a love of a thing, but I think — and my experience of geekdom bears on this thinking — that the true sign of a geek is a delight in sharing a thing. It’s the major difference between a geek and a hipster, you know: When a hipster sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say “Oh, crap, now the wrong people like the thing I love.” When a geek sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say “ZOMG YOU LOVE WHAT I LOVE COME WITH ME AND LET US LOVE IT TOGETHER.” (I tend toward the ultra-inclusion approach to Geekdom. My reaction to learning that someone actually likes the Star Wars Prequels is not unlike Jar Jar’s reaction to being saved by Qui Gon Jinn: “Muy muy, I love you!!” I love it when people love the things that I love!)

:: Quality and convenience… the marketplace recognized a need, and no commercial company was willing (or at least was permitted) to fill it. So amateurs stepped in. Now the structure that’s in place — all, I might mention, volunteer — is huge and well-organized and efficient. It’s no wonder that the content producers are terrified of it.

But they’ve got no one to blame but themselves. When the tide is coming in, you can’t make it stop by ignoring it. (I disagreed with SDB last week, so this week, I agree with him entirely. That’s how I roll!)

:: Since we started writing this site, we’ve become aware of a strong flashlight sub culture; a group of people obsessed with lumens, watts, and focused beams. These apparent dwellers of the dark seem to go hand in hand with knife enthusiasts, because, when you think about it…if you need a flashlight…there’s a good chance you could also use a knife. (Hmmm…never really thought about it, but I do like knives, although I don’t really have much of a collection. Flashlights, though? Oh baby.)

:: How cool must it be to be David Beckham? Except for having to be married to that Skeletor of a wife of his, he’s got it pretty damn good. Speedboat! He got to race around in a speedboat and get’s to eat free at Hell’s Kitchen. (I have no idea about Beckham’s wife, but the other stuff is all pretty cool.)

:: Along the way there’s the expected amount of eye-poking, ear, nose, and hair-pulling, tongue-biting, head-knocking, belly-bumping, wall-thumping, heavy object dropping, pratfalling, and general mayhem creating.

No pie-throwing, amazingly. An oversight the Farrelly Brothers regret, I’m sure. (No pie-throwing in a Three Stooges movie? WTF?! Of course, even with pie-throwing, I was never a fan of the Stooges. Abbott and Costello were more my speed.)

More next week!

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Linkage….

:: In other words, part of the majority of gun violence is the attitude of “If I feel threatened, I can and should whip out my gun.”

:: Every day I read things that suggest that our left-wing friends are trying to stamp out manliness. Just after 9/11, there was something of a resurgence of masculinity, of the traditions of manliness. (Two different takes on the shootings of the other day…needless to say, I find SDB’s take rather, shall we say, odd. I’m on the left, and I have absolutely zero idea what he’s on about. I’m almost reminded of a certain laughable blog post from back in the day by a guy named Kim DuToit….)

(By the way, it suddenly seems to me that any attempt to enumerate a list of qualities that are shared by ‘real men’ is a sign of a bad way of thinking about things.)

:: I’ve never been to a midnight, opening night showing of a movie. I’ve gone to premieres, though, and I do know what cinematic anticipation feels like. There’s just something about seeing something before almost anyone else that provides an unusual sense of satisfaction. Your view of the film is not colored by what everyone else says.

:: Chuck Klosterman once said something along the lines of not liking Billy Joel as a pop star because Billy never made him see a pop star or something to aspire to: “the only thing he’s ever made me see is me.” That’s exactly what’s so amazing about his music to me.

:: Writing a book ain’t all fun and games, kids. Writing fiction isn’t any easier than writing non-fiction, and vice versa. Both forms can be stubborn and maddening and offer a whole lot of seemingly insurmountable challenges–just of a wholly different sort. But the mountain itself is climbed, I’ve reached the peak. (Having reached one peak already, I’m now aware of the mists dispersing…to reveal another peak. Sigh!)

:: I am a sucker when modern characters are re-imagined into old style projects. (Me too…these are really cool!)

:: I’m kind of like Monk. Very anal. I have my writing space and I never write anywhere else. I have my stuff all carefully arranged, and I don’t like it if something gets moved. I have several recourses that I can turn to when I am stumped or bothered about a piece of writing to remove the so-called block. I always write in silence. No sounds, no music, no interruptions. This is all weird, but it beats lying in a coffin! (Patrick Rothfuss and Terry Brooks have been interviewing each other, and posting the results back and forth on each other’s blogs. Cool stuff, from a ‘peeling back the writerly curtain’ standpoint. Follow the links from Rothfuss’s blog back to the previous three parts.)

:: As a lover of words of all sizes, levels of subtlety, and countries of origin, I’d like to speak to you on behalf of the Citizens for Creativity in Cursing.

I’m a fan of cursing. Not just your standard, four-letter scatological words, crude words spoken without thought, words used by the drunken, the lazy, or the uninspired.

Why limit yourself to four letters? (Why indeed!)

More next week….

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Links! Get ’em while they’re…well, here’s some links.

:: It has been easy for a lot of people (mostly non-drummers) to take Ringo’s gifts for granted through the years because he was pretty happy to sit back there on his riser (no one had ever done that before), contributing his steady, reliable backbeat. He has always been the most overlooked Beatle. A lot of people have described him as a “meat and potatoes” drummer, but I beg to differ. (Me too. There are some moments in “A Day in the Life” when Ringo fills in a silence with something interesting on the drums — something interesting that lasts all of a second and a half. But that’s what drummers do. They’re the ultimate in music’s temporal, ‘in the moment and now the moment’s over’ nature.)

:: I guess he figured that if I knew who Ryan was I knew everything I needed to know and if I didn’t know who Ryan was then I also knew all I needed to know or at least all it was my business to know. (My parents once told me a story about a time they were driving out west, as they used to do every summer, and stay in campgrounds. They would stay up late, sitting by a fire, and sipping beer. Well, at one campground, apparently a bunch of bikers pulled into the campsite next to theirs, and one of them, a big burly lad all in leather, came over to ask: “Are you folks gonna stay up late and make a lot of noise? ‘Cause we’re really tired and we got a long way to ride tomorrow.” I love that.)

:: It might be different in other cities but you know, Buffalo is in Western New York. It, really as far as the layout, the landscape and the area was kind of like the South, in New York. It’s not anything like the city. It’s real laid back in the country, but the people are horrible. As far as getting in trouble in Buffalo or socially, there’s nothing to do. (That’s a quote from former Buffalo Bills receiver Josh Reed, who decided to leave town as a free agent a few years ago and seek his fortune elsewhere, after two contracts here with the Bills. He was drafted in the second round way back in 2002, which means that in his time here he never played for a single playoff team, and in all honesty, despite some flashes here and there, Reed never rose much above the level of ‘guy who’s nice to have on your team but he’ll never make the big clutch play for you’. Now, over the last bunch of years we’ve seen a lot of such players leave the team and badmouth the city afterwards — Rob Johnson, Willis McGahee, now Reed — and hey, if you didn’t like it here, fine. But then, you didn’t really contribute much to a team that wasn’t very good, so what do you expect? It’s telling that none of Reed’s attempts to catch on someplace else have succeeded; he signed with the Chargers after his last season here but was cut in training camp.

What also interests me is when these young athletes complain that their particular brand of fun isn’t to be found in Buffalo. That’s entirely possible, as this is neither a particularly big city nor a particularly rich one. But here’s the thing: these guys make a ton of money. If it bothers them that the kind of club they like to hang out in doesn’t exist here, well — real estate’s cheap in Buffalo and these guys are getting paid a ton of money. Why not open your own place and create the kind of scene you wish existed here? Why the sense of entitlement? I don’t get this. Anyway, enjoy your post-NFL days, Josh. Oddly, while you were never a great player, I never disliked you…until now.)

:: My life is now one where campfire stories are becoming another word for Tuesday – to which I mean adventures are the new normal.

:: I’ve used it before on several novels, notably ones where the plot got so gnarly and tangled up that I badly needed a tool for refactoring plot strands, but the novel I’ve finished, “Neptune’s Brood”, is the first one that was written from start to finish in Scrivener, because I have a long-standing prejudice against entrusting all my data to a proprietary application, however good it might be. That Scrivener was good enough to drag me reluctantly in is probably newsworthy in and of itself. (I read this post all the way through, and I barely understood it. I’m generally fascinated by matters of writerly process, but now I’m wondering if I’m doing it wrong now, by just writing my books in OpenOffice.)

:: Apparently some people read “getting a PhD in English” as “getting a PhD in creative writing.” I find this hilarious because it demonstrates a profound ignorance of what studying English entails.

:: Le Guin’s argument appears to be that all human societies are prone to dysfunction and corruption, no matter how well-meaning people are. (I read this book when I was in seventh grade. I did not understand it, and I definitely should read it again. I’ve heard it cited a lot as an SF classic in the years since I read it. Come to that, I’ve read a pathetically small amount of Ursula Le Guin.)

:: When you consider the amount of time spent making this film and the amount of people who were involved in it, it is really quite baffling. Someone had to write the script (namely Akiva Goldsman). That script undoubtedly had to be approved by the higher ups at Warner Bros. Then actors had to be cast, costumes and sets had to be designed, an entire production crew assembled and at no point did anyone stop and say, “Are we really making this movie? This movie?”

More next week!

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:: In my personal life, I have an eight-year-old, and that dictates a lot of my life. In the world, there are things (war, environmental catastrophes) being done, sometimes in my name, and it appears than I have absolutely nothing to do about it. (Roger answers the same questions that I answered a few days ago.)

:: I honestly don’t even think about money anymore. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I don’t think about being able to spend it. (So does SamuraiFrog.)

:: So c’mon — gimme all your hot monkey love! (Oh, you have got to click through on this one. Trust me…especially if you had any love for the X-Men back in the day….)

:: Whenever I sit back to take a closer look at a series like Star Trek: The Original Series, a series that helped define who I am, I get an almost fuzzy feeling. I’m probably the wrong person to look at this series objectively. It can rarely do wrong and when it does, like your child, you are forgiving and still love it unconditionally. But more often than not it succeeds as it does here. (This is why I’ve long-since stopped believing in ‘looking at something objectively’. It’s a fool’s quest, seeking a target that simply does not exist.)

:: The thing about biographical movies is that for the actors playing people who were actual Real People In History, and particularly for recent Real People, there is a fine line you have to walk between “this is who that person sounded like” and “this is who that person actually was.” People become famous for their verbal tics and how they generally hold themselves, but that’s not who they were, not when you get right down to it. Any person is infinitely more complex than their public persona, and a good actor works to capture the person’s interior life (as best they are able) and use that to bring out the public side of things. (Interesting post about the Oliver Stone movie Nixon, which I blogged about myself a while back.

:: The whole notion of State’s Rights, and the necessity of state representation in Congress has caused a great deal of mischief, and I think the time has come to start rethinking it. (I tend to agree…but I’m not at all sure what to do about it.)

:: It’s not cool to like The Patriot, especially these days after the Fall of Mel Gibson, but even back in the day it had a bad reputation as the American Braveheart. That’s not fair. (As I pointed out in comments, I was liking this movie just fine up until the extremely gratuitous, ‘let’s ratchet the bad guy’s evil all the way up to 11’ torching-the-church scene….)

:: Whether you’re a reader or a writer, reading poorly-written dialogue is the same as being a musician and listening to music being played off-key. There’s only so much of that you can take before it becomes almost painful — and I think that’s why so often bad dialogue is a book killer. (This is what makes me most nervous about re-reading my own stuff…I’m afraid that my dialog is shit. We’ll see…editing starts [gulp] tomorrow….)

More next week! (or not. You can never tell, with me.)

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The linkage never stops…it just keeps coming and coming and coming…always the links…always always always links links links….

:: In fact, it could be said that if you cannot afford the things on this list, then you should not be having children. (Interesting list. I’d dispute, in part, the bit about a bucket of screws, bolts, and nuts — not that you shouldn’t have one, but I would disagree that you will use them. In my experience, hardware multiplies like rabbits — and eventually you reach the critical mass of the Jar O’Random Fasteners, which is when you know there’s probably a screw of the size you need in there but you’re damned if you’re gonna spend the time to search through the jar for it so you’d just might as well go to Home Depot and buy however many screws of that size you need, which is also preferable because, Hey, trip to Home Depot!)

:: There was a time in my life when Doug McClure was the biggest action adventure hero in the movies. He seemed to always be in pictures set on some mysterious island or at the center of the Earth.

:: Today is Canada Day. What’s so great about Canada? (Canada is all sorts of nifty, I have to admit. But then, I’m in Buffalo. We stare wistfully at Canada and think, “If not for a couple of battles two hundred years ago….”*)

:: Alright ladies! I’ve never said this before, but let’s be friends. I’ll buy you a fruit drink and listen to your cat stories if you don’t mind if I tell you a funny story about how you should never ask a stripper how much a Blumpkin costs. Hell, I can even show you how to tie a proper knot to a head board, after you tell me how to fix my goddamn hair already. Maybe we can finally understand each other now.

:: I feel very blessed, very grateful, I haven’t slept a wink, and I’m still floating in outer space. I love my friends, my family, my acquaintances, and am so grateful for all of them showing up last night. (Sheila wrote a play, and has had it read several times in different cities, and each time, apparently it goes even better. Where next? Maybe a small, rust-belt city on one of the Great Lakes that has an unusually vibrant theater scene for a city its size…one can only hope!)

:: I think I’ve learned one of the basic wisdoms of writing. That is, it’s always a good idea to take a few steps away from a story before you venture into a major rewrite. It’s even better to do this before you publish. More importantly, I’m falling out of love.

:: My mother had a stack of 45 rpm records that were several years older than me. Of course, when I was a kid that was really old old, antique, ancient, not like we, as adults think of songs from the previous decade. I was fascinated with these records. I liked the idea of listening to something from “so long ago” and I actually liked quite a few of the songs.

:: Vin Scully is in his 63rd season of calling Dodger baseball. The probation period is almost up.

But seriously, he is the Mozart of baseball broadcasters and I can’t imagine another announcer ever being as good.

And he’s always been there. Night after night, summer after summer. (By the way: as I write this, the Pirates are more than halfway to win #82, and less than halfway to loss #82! Go Bucs!!!)

More next week!

* No, we don’t really think that. But we here in Buffalo do love us some Canada! Especially when they have a day off up there, stream across the borders, and spend money in our local emporia. Huzzah for Canada!

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Links…yup…links. Hoo boy. Links. Everybody needs links.

:: So there I was, at the work house, holding a knife. And you know what it’s like when you’re holding something like that. When you pick up a nice baseball bat, you want to swing it around. You pick up a hatchet, you want to cut some wood. Some things yearn toward their purpose. Some things are the embodiment of a purpose. Some objects are practically crystallized verbs.

What I’m getting at, is that I was filled with a powerful urge to stab something.

:: An Italian millionaire sets out to make his version of Star Wars and dang if he didn’t do just that. (Oh yes, folks…Starcrash! One of the absolute worst things I’ve ever seen…I love it so!)

:: What I would really like to have is a camera that needs no more light than my eyes need. (I wish for the same thing. If I can see, why can’t the camera?)

:: On the other hand, extras can sometimes kill you. One idiot will be looking into the camera or not reacting and it distracts from the scene. So if you ever get to be an extra someday DON’T DO THAT. You’ll find your career is a very very short one. Someone else will be hanging out with George Clooney instead of you, and if that isn’t a deterrent I don’t know what one is.

:: Lindelof presented it as a sort of revelatory creative epiphany. I saw it as a case of a grade-A asshole of a father traumatizing a child (something I sadly recognize all too well), who then rationalizes a horrible experience as a positive one (ditto there, too). Of course, your mileage may vary. (Wow. Interesting anecdote over there.

:: Based on all the mean things I say about it, you might think that I don’t really look forward to reading Funky Winkerbean every day. Nothing could be further from the truth! (Oh, I totally look forward to reading Funky every day! Imagine if you learned that each and every day you could drive by a horrible car wreck on your way to work, that you personally would never be in the car wreck, and the car wreck would not slow up traffic too much? That’s what Funky Winkerbean brings to the table! A daily car wreck with no danger at all to me! Huzzah!)

:: It’s a vision that I hope comes true. I can see it so clearly in my imagination: hundreds of passengers lining a futuristic version of a modern-day cruise ship’s promenade railing, pressing against floor-to-ceiling viewports that have been uncovered for just this occasion, straining to catch a glimpse of a historical treasure. The anticipation builds. A couple of people point excitedly at spots that turn out to be nothing at all, false sightings. Then the ship’s officers helpfully announce over the speakers where the crowd should look… and there it is, the legendary Flying Dutchman of space… a tiny, fragile-looking thing, pitted and scoured by centuries of exposure to interstellar dust and micrometeorites, glistening faintly like a dragonfly in the glare of the liner’s external floodlights. Its nuclear powercells are going cold, its transmitter no longer calls home, but somehow, improbably, it’s still going — still voyaging — ever outward… (I told Jason on Facebook that I think he sells himself short and that he wrote the idea better than Lileks, who reminds me of something Christopher Moore once said, I think about PJ O’Rourke: “He’s a guy who reminds you that all the fun that was ever there be had, was had already before you were born.”

More next week!

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