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part one When last we left our intrepid Jedi – months and months ago – they they had just made their way through an immense space battle to land on General Grievous’s ship, through which they must now make their way to find the captive Chancellor Palpatine. This is pretty standard “infiltrate the enemy ship” stuff, but it’s all pretty fun to watch anyway, because Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen actually have pretty good chemistry together. In this whole sequence, I like how Christensen portrays Anakin as more self-assured, more confident, but less obviously-arrogant than he had been in AttackDown the rabbit hole….

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Onward and Upward!, originally uploaded by Jaquandor. I haven’t updated my progress on Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) in a while, so here’s where things stand. In the two months since my last word count update here, I’ve produced an additional 21,000 words, which is a nice total. That’s a bit off the pace of 500 words a day that I’ve been trying to maintain, but there were extenuating circumstances. (Sigh…aren’t there always?) First, of course, the last update came a couple weeks before Thanksgiving, so I had to get through the Holiday season, with all its distractionsDown the rabbit hole….

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Continuing my fanfic exercise in what a Christmas-themed episode of Firefly might have been like. part one part two part three “Those aren’t toys,” Kaylee said. “Those are agricultural supplies for a new colony. Did you change the job while you were out?” “Seal it back up,” Mal said. “That stuff is perishable, and by breaking the seal, we’ve started the decay process.” The crew stood around, staring at the crate that was supposed to contain toys for the children of the orphanage on Haven but really contained farming seed and fertilizer that had supposedly been destined for Whitefall. JayneDown the rabbit hole….

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Continuing my fanfic exercise in what a Christmas-themed episode of Firefly might have been like. part one part two “Weapons on the ground!” the voice shouted. “Now!” “Do it,” Mal said. He shot a look at Jayne, whose expression of disgust tended to be indistinguishable from his expression of being about to lose his temper. Slowly, Mal, Zoe and Jayne all laid their guns on the floor. “Put that package on the floor too, preacher,” said the voice. Book put the crate down. “All right, face the crates.” They complied. “Put your hands on your head.” They complied. “Stand onDown the rabbit hole….

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Continuing my fanfic exercise in what a Christmas-themed episode of Firefly might have been like. part one Wash put Serenity down on the landing pad, nice and gentle. So nice and gentle that Zoe complimented him on it. “You’re getting’ more gentle all the time, honey,” Zoe said. “You have such a gift for handling sensitive equipment.” “Thanks for sayin’ so, my love,” Wash replied. “But I could always use more practice–“ “All right, enough of that, you two.” Mal came up onto the bridge, fully dressed in his usual brown shirt, brown pants, brown belt, brown holster, brown boots,Down the rabbit hole….

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I feel a little bit dirty doing this…but only a little bit. I have no idea, had Firefly lived, if there ever would have been a Christmas-themed episode. Maybe, maybe not. But I got to thinking recently, that if Firefly actually had lived, and if it actually had done a Christmas-themed episode, what on Earth would a Firefly Christmas-themed episode even look like? Well, at the risk of committing an act of fanfic…I like to think that such an episode would look a little bit like this. Take my love, take my land Take me where I cannot stand IDown the rabbit hole….

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I’ll be taking a bit of a break from reading space opera, since I may well have OD’d on the genre over the last few months. Here are notes on the most recent books of explodey-spaceshippy goodness that I’ve read. :: Thumbing through my increasingly-bulky space opera collection, I found a book called Legends of Santiago by Mike Resnick. I know just by looking at the book that it’s something I bought from the Science Fiction Book Club, during one of my various periods of membership, but I have no recollection of actually doing so, which leads me to believeDown the rabbit hole….

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My Summer of Space Opera continues! :: Iain M. Banks’s ongoing series of space operas set in The Culture – hence the term, the “Culture Novels” – still represent mostly a rich field of unsurveyed reading for me, but I’ve at least knocked off another of them: Consider Phlebas. This is actually the first-written of the Culture novels, but, after Player of Games, the second I’ve read. My understanding is that the Culture novels mostly comprise stand-alone stories, so reading order may not matter all that much, although I do plan to mostly stick with the publication order, as muchDown the rabbit hole….

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Charting the Progress, originally uploaded by Jaquandor. It’s been a long time since I wrote about my progress (or lack thereof) on the fiction writing front, so here’s an update. This photo is a screengrab of the spreadsheet I use to track the word count of the Novel-in-Progress (code-named, Princesses In SPACE!). I’ve been trying to hit a personal quota of 500 words a day, which has produced close to 90,000 words as of this writing. I generally try to aim for chapters that aren’t too terribly long, but aren’t ridiculously short, either. I’ve read a few books that hadDown the rabbit hole….

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MD Jackson links this IO9 piece by Charlie Jane Anders about the fact that space opera has all but disappeared from filmed entertainment these days. It’s really a shame, I think, and I hate to think its partly reflective of a general slackening of interest in space, but I think there’s something to that. Two depressing facts became apparent the other day: 1) NASA is so desperate to get people excited about space travel, they were willing to consider collaborating on the horror mockumentary Apollo 18. 2) The fall 2011 season is the first time there’s been no TV show, on any network,Down the rabbit hole….