Clearing the mental registers
Latest reading / writing progress: Finished a re-read of Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, which is like The Lord Of The Rings of military thrillers; long and complicated, but internally consistent and plausible and worth the read if you can stick it out. Trying to read Terry Pratchett’s Men At Arms or The Truth, but I keep stalling in the early pages of each. Last year, Witches Abroad did a much better job of sucking me in.
Wrote a bunch of flavor text last night, and a few hundred words for “Cat Out Of Hell” over the weekend. Also figured out what the MacGuffin should be for “That Goat Doesn’t Belong To You”, making it more a part of the story and slightly less of a MacGuffin.
Our Lord of the Rings CCG is addictive, and I’m not saying that as an employee, either. raininva keeps killing me at the Bridge of Khazad-Dum, though.
I got honked at on the way to work this morning because someone mistimed his sudden acceleration and wasn’t able to cut me off as he’d planned. I guess he was trying to say, How dare you prevent me from being rude to you!
I did nothing for Mardi Gras last night, continuing a tradition I’ve maintained as long as I can remember. I will probably continue that tradition next month in a few months for Cinco de Mayo too. But at least Card Night will probably be a go this weekend – MarsCon and sicknesses have put a damper on the last few.
Just discovered NeoOffice, the OS X port of OpenOffice. Basic MS Word / Excel functionality, for free? I knew this had to suck… except it doesn’t. Now I’ve got it installed on all the machines I use at work or home.
And that’s Wednesday morning.
Dare… to Believe You Can Tonight
raininva bought the Director’s Cut of Daredevil the other day, and I realized one of the things that dissatisfied me about the theatrical release. The story arc is almost completely pointless – there is little character growth and almost no resolution to anything. The minor character Joe “Pants” plays gets more growth than anybody, as he considers whether there are things out there more important than his next story.
Devil in the Details
My writing suffers from an issue I’ve had since 3rd grade: I often find settings to be more interesting than plot. I eagerly bought the Atlas of Middle Earth when it came out, enjoy looking up technical speculations on the construction of the Ringworld (or even the Halo), and spend time considering how Hogwarts was built with such odd geometry, and why.
I think I sympathize with the authors of old Dungeons and Dragons game modules in that respect. Many of those old booklets contained fascinating, detailed maps, but the purpose to explore those maps generally centered around “looting”. Recognizing that, I tried to resurrect my old copy of Vault of the Drow as a basis for a campaign a few years back, but I didn’t do enough prep work and the effort failed. A sizeable underground metropolis shouldn’t be a place that the characters pass through with three sentences of description.
Short stories don’t tempt me as strongly to lose myself in world-building: the characters have things to do, and I need to get on with discussing what they’re up to. But a setting for a novel’s resided in my head for almost 15 years, and none of the conflicts I’ve hung on it seem adequate. In fact, many of the plots I’ve considered have a strong derivative aroma, and given my complaints that 68% of the SF/Fantasy section at Waldenbooks is actually the same book with the names and dates moved around, I’d like to make an original contribution to the field.
The work I’m doing for Decipher is having the effect of making me pay more attention to my style, anyway. I’m watching passive voice even more carefully than I had been, and checking out web pages such as Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See.
Wet Christmas
They have mounted speakers on the side of downtown Norfolk buildings for the holidays. Christmas carols don’t sound quite right when it’s 60 degrees and raining outside.
I hate that I’m not buying software anymore, but a software license. Half-Life 1 was fun, but I don’t like the idea of playing Half-Life 2 enough to go online and beg for the publisher’s permission every single time I want to play it. That’s an irony, too, because a Mac version of HL2 has a much better chance of seeing daylight than the Mac HL1 did. I’d almost certainly have bought it.
DHTML Lemmings on the web. One more way to kill a few minutes anywhere there’s an Internet connection.
Ever type up a really long rant for LiveJournal, then realize that typing it’s gotten it out of your system and it’s just not that important that the rest of the world see it? 🙂
The Matrix was built near Radford
I had no idea that William Gibson was originally from western Virginia.
I’ve not been too impressed with anything he’s written since Mona Lisa Overdrive, but Neuromancer still holds up well. If you’ve ever played the Shadowrun RPG, you should certainly read it.
