Observations & Commentary

Carnufex Carolinenis, a recent find, which proves that the internet can give you good things as well as bad.

I'm entering the fourth week of what I'm calling the fine tooth comb edit of the second draft of my novel Strike Dog.  I forgot to say that last week I edited a total of 10,841 words.  This week however I've only managed to edit 7,812, with a total of 802 words added to the running total, which now stands at 100,379.  In some ways this is disappointingly slow progress, but given the amount of work I had to do to get a new first chapter, and the work needed to kick chapter four into shape it's probably not too bad.  Chapter four was especially troublesome because it was pretty rough with far too much telling in the form of info dumps.  So I've sent the revised version of this chapter off to my Alpha reader for comment and feedback.

I've also had updates from both of my second round Beta readers.  Slow progress being made due to various family commitments.  Still I must thank both David Barrow and Alix McFarlane for their time and effort.  I've already had some useful feedback from both of them, and hope to see their finished pieces in due course.  In the meantime it's not like I haven't got another couple of novels to polish up.

Sometimes I despair at what I see and hear on the internet, and to quote Carl Sagan,

"We aren't living in a world where people are becoming more stupid or irrational, people have always made stupid choices and behaved irrationally; it's the human condition."

And I also try to remember Sturgeons Law that 90% of anything is rubbish, and that's the nature of the world that we live in.  So people complaining about things is really par for the course, and differences of opinion will therefore arise as a matter of course.

Beside sometime we get good things.  In my case the Carnufex Carolinenis, which was lucky find as I describe an off world creature as a cross between a Komodo dragon and a crocodile, which I think pretty much describes this dinosaur.  It also gives me a solid naming convention one of my characters can use to name the alien creature.  Truly serendipitous.

I'll leave you all with a quote that I find quite thought provoking.  Machiavelli once said, "Unlike some people, I feel under no obligation to pretend that only one set of beliefs are true, and that any others beliefs are mistaken; or that I know better than people themselves what is right for them to believe.  The point is precisely for all people to decide for themselves."