Disappointing Realizations

Ever look at something you thought was awesome as a child and realize it sucked? It happens more often than we like. We see massive plot holes in old cartoons (okay, I saw some of them back when I was nine) and can't remember why we thought certain movies were funny.

I think it's worse when it comes to authors. I am picky about my reading materials, I spend more time deciding to read a book than I do reading it. back when I was in elementary school, unable to buy books and nervous about going into the adult section of the library (recall this was before the era of Harry Potter, Twilight, and Percy Jackson, when young adult novels were A Wrinkle in Time (which do to teachers suggesting it struck me as literature. Actually I just have an issue with any suggested reading that isn't from an automated source. You tell me I'm going to like it and I am predisposed to never read it) or Boxcar Children (how old are the characters? Who gives a fuck!). Yeah, there were Goosebumps but it's under the same terms of Boxcar children. If you couldn't reproduce, you weren't meant to be reading a book with over one hundred pages.

Yes there were kids who read some things a bit bigger (The Hobbit and/or LOTR) but that was still far and few in between. The horror of Harry Potter was it caused kids to read. It had a real story they could get into and enjoy. Before that we had to deal with other choices.

I got a book from my brother's room with my father's permission. It was far more enjoyable than any other book I had ever read, even though I realize now how much it sucked. After that my brother gave me the beginning of the series in it's massive trilogy pack format (they call them omnibuses now. I'd never seen novel omnibuses for anything other than classics until recently. They at least didn't refer to them that way even if they existed). It was the Dragonlance Chronicles.

Here's a fact about Dragonlance. Most people got into it when they were young and thought it was the best thing ever. If we try to suggest it to someone else it usually falls flat. Because there is a strange phrasing near the beginning of the book as they introduce a character for the first time (You know what I'm talking about). This was Margaret Weis' first novel and she had a partner, Tracy Hickman who took the role of editing her work. It shows.

Yet, back then this was the best thing ever. It was fantasy but not so much high fantasy shit I couldn't work out what was going on. Very few apostrophes, and other difficult to mentally pronounce names quickly disappear in later works. It was everything I wanted but not beyond my comprehension - something you rarely seen in fantasy fiction written by anyone.

I read and reread it a thousand times (this may not be an exaggeration) before I even realized how many sequels existed (I think I discovered Legends pretty quick. Summer Flame less quick, and then the 'Fifth Age'... eventually...). I can easily tell you the entire story from memory. Obviously I'd want to reread it when I grew up and enjoy it again.

You know how there is so much hidden meaning in Harry Potter? For every joke you get there's two you didn't (unless you're American then there are three, because apparently there are several language and cultural jokes we can't possibly understand). Those aren't there. There's one message and it's pretty obvious. The foreshadowing is too.

It's not at all based on The Lord of the Rings, yet there are Two Towers, one good, and one evil. The good knights defend their capital with a massive white tower in a mountain pass. At one point our heroes have to pass through the gates of the evil city which we discover was once the most holy temple of good. Constantly we are told how the items of good can be corrupted by evil. These sound familiar? Yes, they show up all the time but you can't use the argument that it came before LOTR, cause it didn't, it's based on a game which is in turn based on LOTR. I only mention because there are a number of people who are convinced it has nothing to do with LOTR, because nothing can be based off of anything.

It's not that it's based of another work, it's just not as good as the other work and many works which have come after. It was supposedly targeted to young adults, or what they though of as young adults at the time, which were in their twenties. Yet, it is written for teenagers but they still found it necessary a few years ago to make a youth friendly version (note: Tracy Hickman is very religious and the one novel Margaret's written without his assistance is one that crossed the line into 'risk-say') which is like adding training wheels to a tricycle.

I've struggled through very little of their other works for just this reason. My friend thought one of Margaret's books looked interesting at the library a month ago. I warned him how I couldn't read her work outside of DragonLance but he tried it anyway. He had to read the beginning of the series first and he was horrified she was a New York Times bestselling author. The second he found okay, but once again, not on par with someone who's sold that much and is that well known.

I just read Wayne of Gotham by Tracy Hickman. He should have kept to editing. It barely gets the character across (or maybe I'm just not in touch with Batman comics) and the villains are not quite right. There are info dumps where I would have liked to have gotten the information firsthand. You realize how bad a book needs to be for me to finish and not like it? Really bad.

But I knew this coming in. As I said, I read the Dragonlance Chronicles a thousand times.

Review: The Doomsday Vault

I bought myself a book for my birthday. I was in the store going back and forth trying to decide which I wanted. Then I saw this one and immediately purchased it. There was no thought to it or anything, I just bought it. I was going to like this book.

The Doomsday Vault by Steven Harper takes place in an alternate steampunk timeline where a zombie plague occasionally has the opposite effect and creates mad clockwork geniuses instead of the zombies. They still die soon after, but they have plenty of time to invent a new clockwork culture.

We follow the story of two possible new recruits for a secret branch of the British government which captures the geniuses (called clockworkers) and gives them the tools to make their inventions for use by the empire.

Our female protagonist, Alice, has the more complicated position. She's traditional nobility and doesn't want to ruin her family's name any more than it already has been. Joining the organization would do that, associating with the male protagonist would do that. Technically, if she thinks, she's doing it, but none of the clockworkers have invented telepathy yet, so she's safe.

Before the end she has to make a decision of which direction to go, even though she doesn't realize that not all the decisions are in her control.

I strongly suggest you read this if you have interest in the steampunk genre. It's fast paced and fun and the internal struggles don't drag on for too long (which they could have). Also giant mecha. One's shaped like a tree.
-X

Review: Ashes of Honor

I didn't realize Ashes of Honor by Seanan McGuire was coming out in early September instead of Mid-September. It was a nice surprise and caused a lost day. It was nice.

Anyway, we rejoin our heroine as she has to prevent a changeling with too much power from accidentally destroying the world by reopening the sealed portions of Faerie. Of course it isn't as simple as that, it never is, the villain is causing arbitrary trouble that could cause terrible things to happen in San Francisco.

I shouldn't say arbitrary, it's more how the villain just doesn't care. The villain wants something to happen and needs assistance, so they make a deal. That deal has ramifications, but the villain isn't considering that, just as they aren't considering the ramifications of opening a sealed portion of Faerie even temporarily.

The most enjoyment of the book though is revisiting old character's who haven't been seen since book two, discovering some of what you expected about characters from small statements they had made, and Quentin finally getting taller than Toby.

Okay, I can't say anymore without giving spoilers (and if you look closely, I already did), so I'll just leave this with a "Go read it".
-X

That book looks old.

So I was looking at my Goodreads reading suggestions today (I'm behind on my arbitrary reading goal I set back in January and will meet my goal, just because I can) and was thinking about something I do when I look at book covers. If they have the older style of artwork and the older style of lettering, I don't give them a second look. I don't know why!

I may add, I'm skipping this series  until it's finished.

I have attempted to read some of these because I know they're popular books, but more often than not I get bored within a few hundred pages.

Do they just hit all of my nerves? I do get pissed off when I have to remember thirty names in the first two pages, worse if they're complex, or even worse, made up.

And then Peter turned to Victor, "Devereux will be made King at the equinox, unless Jun Ki can defeat him in the Challenge of Miculsuia, which is fought with nucsloia, which is just a fancy name for a sword, but I want to make it clear it's a special sword, and defeat the ilausnua."

If that paragraph appeared in a story it would be one thing, but I've run into books where they'll start off the first three chapters like that. It's just a turn off and I feel like I'm going to be working through a sea of names for the entire book.

My next guess is they are too cliché, I mean even the most traditional fantasy written today has some steampunk or magitek aspects. I get this feeling I won't see that in the older novels. They were trying to avoid the pioneers of that genre or so I assume.

It's all academic at this point anyway. I have plenty of things to read before I get to those, I just hope I'm not missing out.
-X

Review: Discount Armageddon

Not sure what is more surprising here, I'm actually posting or that I'm posting my first book review. This just goes to prove that miracles do happen.

So, I am a fan of Seanan McGuire's works, particularly the October Daye series. I have only been able to buy two books in the last few months, both were hers. One Salt Sea, the most recent October Daye novel, and Discount Armageddon, the first in her new InCryptid series. 

A couple of months ago I discovered that McGuire blogs pretty regularly though her LiveJournal. I regularly, I mean practically everyday and they are actual blogs about stuff, not just giveaways and links, but actual content. For example, preceding the release of Discount Armageddon she had a daily series of the InCryptid Alphabet. A lot of it was confusing since we were getting words and names of people that we had no true connection to, but when I began reading and was able to say, "Ah, that's so and so, they they're connected to this by that," which would have been more difficult without the extra primer, but I like to digress.

McGuire is not one to hold your hand when she starts a new work. You get dropped into a fantastical world and you better hope you're ready for it. The introduction for DA is Verity, our heroine, at a club looking for a monster, specifically a ghoul.

Most people don't know what a ghoul is. I'll give you a hint, Romero never used the word zombie.

So now you know that she was hunting a humanoid creature that likes to eat people. Her ghouls are much better at moving though since they can apparently dance. The only way Verity can spot it is by look at it's teeth, since eating human flesh is terrible for your dental work.

Meanwhile her 'cousin' the telepath is nearby. At this point you think that maybe some people are just telepaths, except they aren't. If you read InCryptid A to Z you'd know that her cousin is a cryptid. That isn't mentioned for another hundred pages in the book.

Is this good or bad? Well, she's trying to avoid an info dump and since she writes fantasy, info dumps are very possible. It really goes to the heart of the matter, do we need to know that the cousin is a cryptid at that moment? Not really. Later on when we start to meet more interesting 'people' it starts to get a little more fuzzy. She'll use a complex word to describe someone and you aren't going to know exactly what they are. Having a computer handy isn't going to help since her version isn't going to be the same as what shows up. Using the ghoul example you'd get a picture of a D&D 3rd Ed ghoul which looks more like Romero's work and is nothing like McGuire's or you might read up on Jim Butcher's ghouls in the Dresdenverse, which are giant human shaped cockroaches.

I've gotten over that though. You have to trust that she'll remember to tell you when it becomes important.

The end result is a fun book. It's not as intriguing as the October Daye series and considering she uses this as a lighthearted break makes perfect sense. The concept is 'a monster hunter wishes she was a ballroom dancer', I think she got it from the Script Frenzy plot machine. Anyway it's completely worth your while to read and to get a taste of McGuire's writing style without dealing with the complexities of fairies.
-X

Wherein I rant about things that don't seem related

I'm bored so I'm going to go on a rant.

For starters: I watched half of the first season of New Amsterdam on Hulu last night. Actually a little more than half of it. It's actually a decent show and I never realized it. The preview that Hulu gave me while I was watching last week's episode of Bones was much better than the ones that I remember when the show was on the air. In other words they created a show and then didn't advertise it properly.

Of course this shouldn't come to a surprise to anyone that Fox failed in the background work of a television show (also see Firefly)

I wonder what the secret is...

The other thing I have been doing a lot of is rereading things. I have been working on Codex Alera, which is an awesome series and you should read it. It could also be an awesome movie, but they would screw it up. If you have read it you know that they have a huge secret show up in book three and be completely revealed in book four. It's actually really obvious, to the point that the main character does a facepalm when he learns about it, because the entire point is that he's really smart and that he somehow didn't catch this is just amazing. A dozen other people figure it out before he does (including the you, because it gets to be really obvious).


Anyway, the point of rereading it is to try to catch the foreshadowing. There is a lot there, but it's very subtle. Most of it is in off-hand comments that people make, such as how his caretaker refers to her role in his life. A lot of people can read emotions in the book so if she was to outright lie, or even bend the truth, people would know that something was up, but in the context of the story it makes perfect sense.

What am I getting to? Well, I want to see this type of preparation to take place in television and movies. I like to write by the seat of my pants. I like to create as I write, not transcribe what I created earlier, but what we end up having is stories that loop around and bite itself. Stories without an end. Literally, that is how Seinfeld ends. They return to the first conversation from the first episode. We only have foreshadowing for a couple episodes at a time, maybe to the end of the current story arc. Later seasons of Buffy did have some foreshadowing in them. Dawn is foreshadowed an entire season before she shows up.

Most shows though, don't foreshadow because they don't know if they will have another season. They don't attempt to build up to something. Another problem is that they keep doing a minute by minute accounting of what the characters are doing. House, M.D. would do a time skip whenever there was a break in production, the exception was when he was in rehab (which occurred in 'real time'). Going back to books, The Dresden Files usually have a year in between. Dresden even tells us that the interior of his car is eaten out but a mold demon, because he does stuff outside of the three days of the year that he saves the world.

What we need to see in television is for the writers to stop worrying about whether they will have another season and worry about what they will be writing the next season. Showrunners need to end shows when they have run there course. They should be making milestones for what they want to accomplish.

We can totally take it on.

Most of these people played Dungeons and Dragons at one point in their life, don't they know how they build up the action? Start small and then at some point the characters find themselves fighting the big bad. Don't have them fighting the big bad once a year with us knowing that they never get to live happily ever after. Even Codex Alera ends with the the characters pretty sure they have a couple decades of peace before they need to go back to war.

I'm also totally for time jumps. Add an extra five years in between seasons. Have the characters change a bit, particularly the supporting characters. They should be changing as much as the main characters, but the main characters might go meet them and discover that they aren't nearly as big of dicks as they remember and maybe they don't mind working with them that much anymore.

And once you have that done you can save money by a dozen episodes. Use that money to make the episodes you have that much better. We don't need filler episodes, even need good television.

-X

Thinking bigger

I'm reading an article about someone starting a comic book shop after they created a convention in Florida. Yeah, it makes total sense and is not at all confusing.

The article is saying how the number of comic book shops has dropped in recent years comparing it to Borders closing. I have several problems with this.

Start with Borders. I never cared for their selection. Most people that like bookstores don't like major chains and if they go to a chain they want it to have the book they are looking for. I prefer Barnes & Noble, they just feel nicer. It might help that most BNs have a coffee shop built in and some of the ones near me have a permanent speaker/book signing area. They come off as more of a community gathering area then Borders did. Borders is just a large store that sold books.

Another thing with Borders. I went to our local Borders yesterday to get some clearance books. Everything was 30% off, except for Romance, which was 40% off. They were so overstocked with Romance it wasn't even funny. They had extra sections of Romance set up and had it spilling into other sections. That is why they are going out of business, they don't have books people want to read. I also looked over at the Young Adult section to see what they had left. It was three ten foot long shelves. Harry Potter books go in that section and I think they didn't have room for them. Young Adult is not a small area of book sales, it's very popular. For one I see a lot of people writing it for Nanowrimo.

Don't worry about faux Twilight novels though, they were safely in the Romance section.

Now the comic books shops. I didn't grow up with them. Any of them. The closest was forty-five minutes away in a direction I rarely went (or an hour and a half the other direction). Yes, traditional book stores are now carrying some comic books, but they didn't when I was little, and the chance that they had something that would interest me was incredibly rare. No one I knew in high school was particularly interested in comic books because of this, which is a shame.

What do comic book shops need to do? They need to be more then just a specialized book store. They need to be a community center. When I finally did get out to the one forty-five minutes away I was astounded by the place. For one it was huge, the size of a big box bookstore, but half of it was tables. To place games on. Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering, Apples to Apples, Solitaire, Chess, GURPS. This are things that require people to come to you, it makes it a community meeting place. Added benefit that they will probably purchase extra cards or dice or expansion packs while they are in the store, which means more money. And when I say they had table I mean twenty tables that could sit eight. They knew they were the only thing for miles and they were prepared for it.

And it works in a bad economy too! They might not buy as much but they will still be there to see the merchandise. They might buy less expensive things but at least you have them in the store.

And I'm not the only one with the community center idea. Libraries are trying to switch from a loan books business plan to a help people with simple tasks.

I suck at closing arguments.

That's kind of embaressing

And by 'that' I mean when you look at your blog and realize that you haven't updated it in a month. Nearly a month. Close enough to a month.

In this past month I have been doing 750words.com and am on a 44 day streak. That's a lot of days. I can't believe I've done it, that I was able to think of things to write or that they made sense. As it is I haven't written today and after that one terrifying attempt to blog via that site I am not trying again. Of course today I could write that much without difficulty because it's been so long since my last post.

I started to edit my Nanowrimo 2010. It's hard work and I am often bored of it. Instead I showed my Script Frenzy 2010 to my writing group and got feedback on it. They like it. They say it's marketable. It's so close to salable that I can taste it. I should be working on it more, but as usual I am distracted.

On a similar note Screnzy is rolling around again in April and I am going to be writing the sequel to my first. I always hate the people that talk about writing a sequel before they finish the first, or sell the first, or have actually contemplated the first. They do that on the forums. It's almost as annoying as complaining about not having an idea two months before the event. Now I am one of those people.

I still don't have a job. I am staying with a friend for free, which is nice but I do want to be able to at least assist with some bills after a while. I don't like taking charity. Honestly I am surprised that I am able to be her comfortably as I am.

The only thing I really need to do still is I have to lose some weight. I want to fit back into my clothes and I want to look better, but as happens when I get busy I don't pay attention to Calorie-count. Putting that website on my radar always seems to make me feel like I have too much time that could be spent elsewhere.

Anyway. I just read two books at a rapid pace and am playing a video game I shouldn't have bought and barely runs on my laptop.

In the next day or so I will be updating my GOALS because I realize I haven't. I messed with the numbers the other day but they need a post to go with them.
-X

Was that bad?

I added more advertisements to my websites. I feel a little dirty about it. I don't get that many hits but I feel like I should attempt to get whatever I can from what I have. Some people happen to come to this site, and more to AoC Design, and I try to get something off of their visits. I'm sure that at some point someone will accidentally purchase something through my referrer links and I'll get a commission. I'm sure that I will be shocked when it happens.

And I do complain a lot about not having money on this blog so why not try to make a buck or two off of it. It would of course help if I wrote more entries on it or wrote about things that I could create links to. When I complain about lack of money I don't have any obvious items to link to, that's why a couple of posts have links to nonsense.

I suppose I could just add links to whatever I happen to be reading or listening to, but that won't make sense in most posts.
-X

(Just started along with a dozen other books I'm reading right now.)
(Sadly, I'm a nice guy. Sometimes I wish I wasn't.)

Questionable time usage.

I spent the better part of the last three days reading Questionable Content and before that I was reading Sorcery 101. There are so many things I should have been doing instead.

I have a list on my desktop now. It's very distracting if I ever close the internet browser. Actually I'm really annoyed at myself because I made the list three days ago and I had to put really stupid stuff on it to be able to check things off. As it is I'm not putting "Read shit-ton of books you brought" because I'll do that without being reminded, though they are taking up a lot of space around my bed.

Yeah, I've been lazy.

My list mostly has real things on it, like "Look for a job" implying local retail type deal, but as I check I have flashbacks to a couple of months ago when I was testing the waters - it sucked then too. I thought I was in a little unemployment bubble that I created myself, little did I know that it really is this bad of a job market. Maybe a year ago I could have found some part-time thing, but today I'm suddenly not very sure. Not that I've tried very hard.

Just thinking about it makes me realize that what I've feared has come true. I'm comfortable. You would fucking laugh you you saw my room and heard my say that I'm comfortable.

Actually I'm very uncomfortable. I'm stuck in the worst situation you can imagine. Trapped without money or anyway to escape my parent's house. I haven't even had twelve hours truly alone for the last ten months. I was updating the countdowns on my other site and saw that it only four and a half months until my birthday. First I was like "cool, it's almost my birthday," then I was like "Shit I just wasted an entire fucking year!"

I'm stuck in a rut and I feel like well meaning people have let me sink deeper. I feel like part of it is my fault, but I'm getting less sure of myself as the days go by.
-X

I shouldn't be wasting time right now

I really shouldn't be wasting time right now.

I just paid a bill. I don't have many of those, but it did make me look at my finances. I really haven't been thinking about any of this crap for a while. Just kind of living the dream, writing a novel, reading, watching movies.

But this week the weather has been all nice, like winter is over or something. That means that all the fucking crap I had to do last year I'll have to do again. Yeah, I'm talking about yard work. I'm not a fan, particularly when people don't ask me nicely. So I have to get out of this house this summer.

I remembered something on my loan deferment about March. For some reason the six month deferment ends in March. I'm going to call them and make sure what date I have to list on it to extend it. Anyway it says that I have to make at least six attempts to find full-time employment (that's important, unemployment deferment for student loans is based on lack of full-time employment. My mother pointed out that she doesn't work full-time by their definition.) and that I can count only four, and one of them could be construed as a college application, not employment.

So off to my job boards I go.

Now this is sad, I looked at a job that requires twenty hours a week and will only pay $150 plus housing and I'm going to apply for it. I'm getting pretty desperate. I know, you are thinking "about time" aren't you? Need I point out that you cannot live on that much a week? I think they feed me some, but I worked at a place that paid some people that much and did not feed them.

So I already am committed to three more applications to send out, and wait there is more! I need to finish my novel by the end of the month and prepare for Script Frenzy. I haven't even written today yet, which is why I shouldn't be writing this.

If I do find some time, or just want to procrastinate, I'll write a review of Shutter Island. If I don't, just go see it.
-X

Reread

So, I'm one of those crazy people who reread books. Not just when the next one comes out so that I can remember what's going on, I do it all the time. Sometimes I don't finish them on reread number three hundred, but I still try. The other day I started rereading Dragons of Autumn Twilight, mostly because I needed to practice scriptwriting for Screnzy and I thought the easiest way to practice was to use a already created story and "adapt" it. I put that in quotes because that part I did was almost word for word from the book. Maybe three pages in and about ten minutes into the movie.

Anyway, I shouldn't be doing this. I have several books to read, such as Dune and Dracula. Instead I'm reading a book I know almost by heart, and no, rereading isn't any faster than the first time. Usually, it's slower because I stop more often to ponder other ways for events to happen. If you're familiar with Dragonlance you know that it is long running series and even the tiniest alteration in the early books could completely screw up the later ones. Which wouldn't necessarily be bad. The series gets seriously fucked up after awhile.

What could I do instead of rereading these? I could apply for the three jobs I discovered, search for more jobs, or watch more stuff on Hulu, which would maybe end up with me writing a more interesting entry.

I am planning on seeing Daybreakers soon and reviewing it then. Ta-ta for now.
-X

Lazy Day

Today has been a very lazy day. I woke up. Messed around on my laptop. Showered and ate. Restocked on soda. Ate some more. Getting a bed sore now. I miss having roommates around. Someone always has something interesting to do. If all else failed we would just start watching old movies. Suppose I can peruse the job listings. I wish I had a desk.

I read Fool Moon yesterday front to back. It almost seemed like a waste of money until I remembered that seeing a movie in theaters is the same and I don't get to keep it afterward. Good book though.
-X