Cracked Seams and Rear View Mirrors

Many words are forthcoming...including a post about the double-edge sword that is getting free books because you review books for a site that actually gets a fair share of traffic (thank you, Un:Bound), and a most-likely lengthy, rambling and irate post about depression and frustration and how even though there may be a dozen or more things in your life that are wonderful and cause for getting down on your knees kissing the ground and thanking whatever believe makes it all happen, there's always one ridiculous crappy thing that overshadows it all and makes you miserable, mean, and apt to scream, yell, or throw your hands in the air and simply give up.

Unfortunately, at the moment it's that one horrible thing that's keeping me from getting all these words out, so in the meantime I wanted to throw a metric ton of good vibes to Jonathan Coulton, whose music manages to find a small crack in the shell I habitually crawl into and hit me square in the gut.  I will never forget driving home with Jack shaking our heads and hands to "Code Monkey" in the car, with me laughing and crying at the same time because I was acutely aware of how the words really applied to my current situation, even as I was 100% focused on the fact that this was one of those "moments" you hear about parents having with their children, where the laughter stays in your head for days afterward and you can't recall it without all those feelings welling back up and making you look like a sentimental jackass as you sit at the keyboard, playing the song over and over again as you relish the memory of hands in the rearview mirror, and the shake of strawberry blond hair.

You can listen to Code Monkey and a lot of other great songs right here.

I included the picture of the tree becuase it looked neat.  It's actually a hotel room.  You can read about that here.

Book #10: Newton's Wake

Newton's Wake is the second offering I read from IO9's 20 Science Fiction Books That Will Change Your Life, following the very good Glasshouse by Charles Stross. It was a bit more of an unknown quantity for me: Stross was a writer I had come to enjoy from his bureaucratic Lovecraft adventures in The Atrocity Archives, as well as good word of mouth from other writers like John Scalzi and Neil Gaiman. MacLeod's mention on the I09 list was my first exposure to him and, unfortunately, based on Newton's Wake it may be my last.

At its core Newton's Wake is about the discovery of a inhabited planet of human refugees from something that has come to be known as the Hard Rapture - the artificial intelligences of Earth skyrocketed past their human progenitors and have left the planet. Most people stayed behind in the aftermath of the Rapture and made their luck and fortunes, dividing up into numerous clans. A small group, however, took off for the stars with a repository of thousands of backed-up souls, never to be heard from again. So when this planet is discovered holding the descendants of the space craft that left, it's news to the rest of the galaxy. So a mad dash is made by the main factions of the galaxy to "claim" the planet and the weird, alien artifacts that line the landscapes. Little does anyone know that the artifacts aren't what they seem, and they begin to build themselves into war machines with the express purpose of...uh, wait...I remember...

And that's the problem. There's so much information coming at you, and so many ideas that are creeping into the sides of the events that nothing ever really gets fleshed out into a coherent story. You can get the basic gist of events from Wikipedia, who manage to sum it up nicer than I ever could, although they don't even begin to get into all the additional storylines and ideas covered in the novel. MacLeod tries to paint a intriguing pictures of the main protagonist, Lucinda Carlyle, but at her heart she's basically a gangster working for her clan who "owns" something called the Skein - a series of wormholes that allows transportation between planets - so her motivations never really seem all that clear. MacLeod, Scottish, also tries to keep up the Scottish dialect for his main characters, but its application is spotty at best, and took away from being absorbed into the conversation.

I just went back and re-read I09's caption for Newton's Wake. It reads a lot more exciting that the novel, sadly, turned out to be. I still have 3 more novels from the list waiting to be read, and to be fair, there are a couple of incredible novels listed. Time will tell.

*If anyone else has read Newton's Wake and has a different opinion of it, I'd love to hear it - thanks!

Book #9: Legend

RULE #17: Omit Needless Words
- The Elements of Style, Strunk & White

I remember in college having Strunk & White's Elements of Style pounded into my head daily, with the all-powerful RULE #17 touted above all else. This is a crime that many writers (yours truly included) fall into, but when it comes to genre writing, particularly fantasy, the transgressions seem to pile up, one atop the other. How many times have I had to read a sentence that contained 2 nouns (usually "sword" and "head" or some variation thereof) and approximately 37.6 adjectives?

Too many, I tell you. There's a fine line between description and "padding" and when that padding's noticeable, it's a deadly eyesore that can kill the flow and pacing of an otherwise good story.

Enter David Gemmell and Legend, his debut novel from 1984.

Legend is classified as "heroic fantasy" - the story of Druss the Legend, a master warrior whose exploits have becomes the stories told around campfires and inns, to children and to soldiers. When a barbarian tribe called the Nadir threaten to overtake the Drenai empire Druss, now in his sixties and looking for an end to his legend, takes up his ax one more time to hold Dros Delnoch, the final fortress and last barrier between Ulric, King of the Nadir, and the Drenai empire. It's a story of an epic battle, of warrior kings and farmer soldiers, magical powers human emotions, and as great as the story (the first in a series of books focusing on the world, but a stand-alone novel in its own right) is, it's similar to dozens of novels and film's you've probably read or seen over the years.

So why do I love Legend so much, and recommend it so highly?

All the credit goes to Gemmell, who manages to write the unholy $#@! (insert your favorite curse word here) out of this story. This is a Lord of the Rings, Helm's Deep sized battle, with a large cast of characters, taking place over weeks, and he wraps it all up in 340 pages. Not a sentence is spared on anything but propelling the story forward, fleshing out character motivations, intrigues, and elements that launch Legend from merely being "another fantasy book" into a master example of how the form can remain fresh and exciting. It presents the sides of the war in such a way that even as you root for the underdogs, knowing there's no possible way they can win, you understand and can see the motivations and the perspective from the encroaching enemies as well, as Gemmell if nothing else is very clear that good and evil is entirely dependent on which side you're on, and that empires rising and falling is a natural as the revolutions of a wheel.

If you're looking for huge fights, great characters, morals and motivations that aren't cookie cut out for you, and want to just experience some great writing to boot, David Gemmell in general and Legend in particular is a great place to get a fix.

The Good Friday Random Music Mix

It's one of those days:  I can't leave the office until the current project I'm revising is complete.  This is the music that's keeping me from running through the halls with a fire extinguisher:

1. Nirvana - "Sifting"
2. Weezer - "Susanne"
3. Van Morrison - "Come Running"
4. Oliver Nelson - "Stolen Moments"
5. Cult of Luna - "Further"
6. Communic - "Payment of Existence"
7. Eels - "Going Fetal"
8. Pearl Jam - "World Wide Suicide"
9. Otis Redding - "Mr. Pitiful"
10. Grip, Inc. - "Human?"
11. Public Enemy - "How You Sell Soul (Time is God Refrain)"
12. The Hidden Hand - "Lightning Hill"
13. Living Colour - "Lost Halo"
14. Brutal Truth - "Regression-Progression"
15. Beck - "Profanity Prayers"
16. The Hold Steady - "Multitudes of Casualties"
17. Spoon - "The Ghost of You Lingers"
18. Death Angel - "Seemingly Endless Time"
19. Anathema - "One Last Goodbye"

All in all a pretty random mix, one that carried me to 11:30 AM.  I thought I was really grooving on the beautiful "Stolen Moments" and was thinking of just switching to an all-jazz playlist, but then Brutal Truth blazed up some early American grindcore and I was hooked again. 

Don't have the capabilities or the time currently to include any .mp3s of the songs listed, but if I had to make a recommendation for a little known band listed above, do yourself a favor and check out any of the last couple of Anathema albums - they're one of my personal favorite bands, and the above track is taken from their latest, Hindsight, an album of acoustic interpretations of their songs, many of which were acoustic to begin with...

To check out some of Hindsight, visit the site by clicking on the album cover.

Dallas: Model Interlude

I'm back from Dallas, sitting in my sweats and Elvis Costello t-shirt working from home.  The trip was basically two days of sitting in traffic in a pathetic little PT Cruiser that was a color blue not seen in nature, sitting in class learning about stuff like logic lines and sherman calculators (my joke about when we might expect the Wayback Machine was met with quizzical looks), and generally thinking about getting home.

Of course, being home means a massive amount of work catch-up to do, as well as spending more time with family for Easter, so polishing up the post about my experience with the models may come a little late, as will the remaining Pot Luck reviews.

In the meantime, here a picture of the building I worked at.  There was literally nothing else even remotely interesting to take a picture of while in Dallas.  Make of that what you will.

On a positve Dallas note, I just finished the first 5 (of 6) issues of the new Umbrella Academy volume, subtitled "Dallas" which is just as fantastic as the first volume, "Apocalypse Suite" was.