Philae: I'm Back

I'm posting this today, because it's exciting news.  As an SF fan this is the sort of stuff I live for.  Mankind's exploration of space.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33126885

There are some who believe that without humans the exploration of space will not interest the general public, and that may well be true, in that I'm not necessarily representative of the general populace.  But you know what this excites me; at the heart in mouth level of excitement.  It's certainly the best bit of news I've heard all week, and I just wanted to share my excitement with my readers.

Waiting for the cute xkcd cartoon from Randall Munroe now.

BSFA, SFF & ICSF Mini-Convention

Last Saturday my partner suggest that we attended Mini-Convention, which was a one day event run by The British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation, and the Imperial College Science Fiction Society.  The attraction for Susan being the chance to hear Brian Aldiss speak.  We'd seen him at LonCon 3 the world SF convention, but missed any of the panels he was on, and given that he's not getting any younger (none of us are) it seemed like an opportunity we should take.

He gave a set of rather charming answers to his interviewer's interesting questions.  A genuine grand old man of SF.  One thing I learned and liked was the fact that he keeps journals that he draws in.  He has a shed load of them it seems, and we got to see some of his collages later on.  It made me feel good about my own book of doodles, and my other blogging where I show off the models I make of things I'm thinking about.  In particular my recent attempts to make models of the combat armour suits that appear in my first three novels.

We also got to hear Pat Cadigan talk, and as a result of listening to her we're buying a collection with her short stories in, which only goes to to show that authors talking about their work gets people interested in reading their works.  Besides seeing the two authors talk there were other discussions too, and while Mini-Convention was very low key (they asked people not to mention it on social media during the day) it was an enjoyable day out that mostly avoided the Hugo controversy, which quite frankly I've had enough of.

We also got and have finished watching season one of 12 Monkeys, and I'm impressed.  It's a very clever, retelling of the Terry Gilliam movie, because while the story still has all those elements of the original the style no longer treats them as a nightmare that comes over as totally bat shit crazy insane.  Also, Barbara Sukowa is stunningly good as the slightly obsessed to the point of being crazy doctor, especially so when playing the younger version of herself.  I can recommend the series if you've not yet seen it.

Also this week we finally caught up with Man of Steel and Kingsman: The Secret Service.

Starting with Superman first; the Man of Steel manages to reinvigorate the franchise, assuming that one doesn't mind the violence, which is the antithesis of the much loved versions starring Christopher Reeve.  I would say that the fight scenes in Metropolis were on reflection a tad over long, but the whole ruins things worked for me, because it very much reminded me of the Alan Moore Miracleman fight – two god like beings slugging it out while mere mortals try not to be noticed.

However, it was Kingsman: The Secret Service that really impressed me.  More violence than you could shake a big stick at, but it had a sensibility that just lifted it up beyond it's source material: James Bond, which is referenced within Kingsman.  There are a couple of scenes between Colin Firth and Samuel L. Jackson that set up and deliver a punchline that was quite frankly breathtaking.  I've just read that the director is working on a sequel, which is most unlike him, but he says if he can write a good script it will go ahead.

With regards to my writing this week I've been distracted, dismayed and distressed by a number of events throughout the week, which due to a wide range of other factors have rather derailed my progress.  Still, I managed to finish another chapter, but I feel I really must do better.  Words written 851, edited 1,760, running total 100,349.

Bright hope in darkness.  Managed to deconstruct my seven book series arc, and plan out everything I want to do.  I can add side stories and diversions to the series core, but I now have a much better handle on the themes, and overall structure of the series arc from the beginning, through to the middle and how it ends (five pages of penciled notes in the notebook I keep).  So that's it for another week, see you all on the bounce.

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."

Tanith Lee

Tanith Lee died last weekend after a long illness, which I understand was cancer.  I was shocked by her passing.  I had the pleasure of having a meal with her many years ago, and she was an interesting woman, quirky, and just a little bit strange.  Like most creative authors I guess.

Very much a sad memento mori.

This week I've been struggling with a chapter in Strike Dog trying to knock it into shape.  Up my game and all that jazz.  The chapter has not been co-operating with me.  So it's still not finished.  It's also been another of those weeks where some days have negative numbers, and checking my diary I see that I wrote 1,402 new words and this brings the running total up to 100,282 words, which makes it the longest draft I've written so far.

Other than we've been on a Superman jag.  Watched the first two Richard Donner movies with Christopher Reeve, which are really lightweight rom-coms when you boil the stories down to their basics.  They've not dated well either, but Margot Kidder was impressive, because she looked like a normal woman.  It's not what we've become accustomed to when watching Hollywood movies today, where the women are so beautiful it's hard to credit how good looking they are.  We're now watching Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, which while it has also dated still manages to be rather charming.

The Dresden Files: Storm Front

I'm running two days late this week in posting something on my blog.  I've been ensconced in my writing.  Well maybe not exactly ensconced, as it hasn't been totally comfortable, but there's the satisfaction of finishing something that I found hard to do; and for once being relatively happy with what I've written.  So I finished the first draft of the new chapter one of Strike Dog, having managed to write 1,146 words yesterday afternoon.  When added to my running total for the week this makes 3,382 words written in total.

So I'm pleased to have gotten this done.  It has been difficult for me, because I still have my head in the re-writes of Bad Dog, where I'm in a holding pattern while my new Beta readers do their stuff.  My plans for the long late May Bank Holiday weekend is do some model making, and read some books.

Talking about reading I've have finished Storm Front (Book 1 of The Dresden files) by Jim Butcher, and thoroughly enjoyed it.  Given that it's urban fantasy, which is usually not my thing, this says a lot about the writing and story telling.  It's definitely a story that makes one want to keep turning the pages to find out what happens next, and I like his writing style, it's easy to read.  The main character is interesting, and there are a lot of promises of other stuff going on in the background that makes me want to read more.  Next time we're in town and can drop into Forbidden Planet we'll pick up the next book in the series.

I've also read Andromeda's Fall by William C. Dietz, which is a novel I've had sitting around on my to be read pile for quite some time.  Probably over a year in fact.  It was bought on one of our visits to Forbidden Planet when we were looking for novels with a female protagonist.  My partner read it, and then it got put in a pile to be read and forgotten about.  I enjoyed it, and it certainly rollicked along, but I have to wonder at some assumptions American authors have about the nobility and class.  Still it was nice to see the French Foreign Legion in action in space!  Again I shall also be looking out for the sequel in due course.

I've also just started reading Max Tegmark's book Our Mathematical Universe.  This is a big hardback that basically expands upon the ideas found in his articles on cosmology written for magazines like the New Scientist.  This book allows Dr. Tegmark to lay out his ideas on the nature of reality, and expand upon the idea that we live in a Platonic multiverse.  It's written in a simple to understand and straightforward manner, for what is rather mind blowing stuff.

Anyway, that's all I have time for this week.

Writing Plan

Click to embiggen.

Another week has flown by here, and I again find myself pondering the imponderable question of where does all my time go?  I can tell you what I've been doing, but everything seems to take longer than it should to get it done.

In this case I've been researching stuff about far away places for a new opening chapter to my novel Strike Dog.

This came about because I decided that the prologue of Strike Dog would work better as the epilogue for Bad Dog, which is titled Omake.  One thing leads to another and the result is I now have plans to go back and tweak Bad Dog again by adding some details to one chapter to punch it up a little more.

On top of all that I was reading Chuck Wendig's blog where he posted a plan for a novel.  This drove me to distraction, and I just had to go away and work through his list here.

This what I came up with.

ACT 1 

Hook

1. Hey look there’s a problem.

 

ACT 2 

Plot Turn 1

2. I’m going to go and fix the problem. Try Fail Cycle

3. OMG I’ve made it worse.

4. Somebody else is making the problem worse.

Pinch 1

ACT 3 

Mid-Point

5. Wait, I think I’ve got this.Try Fail Cycle 

6. Bugger, bugger, bugger. Try Fail Cycle 

7. It’s not just worse, it’s now a different problem. Try Fail Cycle 

8. Even more buggeration ensues.Try Fail Cycle 

9. Everything is so complicated.

 

ACT 4
Pinch 2 

10. All is lost. Try Fail Cycle 

11. Wait, is that a light at the end of the tunnel? Try Fail Cycle 

12. It is, but it’s not what you think it is. 

Plot Turn 2 

13. Wait I have an idea.

 

ACT 5

Resolution

14. Problem solved, but not in the way you thought it would be. 

So looking back at my diary I find I've only managed to write 2,130 words this week, but boy-oh-boy it has felt like an intense weeks worth of writing.

Coming Home

Looking back across my diary it's fairly obvious I really didn't do an awful lot of writing last week; checking I see it amounts to 623 words, which comes from having written a couple of blogs, and doing some minor revisions to Bad Dog.  

It rather looks like I didn't get out of bed.  

But it should be said I've been working on a couple of short story ideas using secondary character's from Strike Dog.  I've even seen a way through the block I had with my other novel The Bureau, which only goes to show that there's a lot of thinking involved when writing.

The minor revisions I made to Bad Dog resulted from a conversation I had with my partner over Peter Watts Firefall; the omnibus edition of Blindsight and Echopraxia that I reviewed here.

Susan found Blindsight's lead protagonist rather off putting, for various reasons that I won't go into here, but enjoyed reading Echopraxia.  She especially thought the zombies were an interesting idea, and scarily plausible.  We then had a rather intense discussion about both books, with me being rather more forgiving about some of the the foibles my partner saw in Peter's writing.

However, I learnt a lot from reflecting on the discussion.

And as I said it provoked me to go back and add a couple of things to Bad Dog.  

Mostly to clarify the point that my novel is not a time-travel story per se – it just looks like one, because I chose to tell the story in a linear fashion.  The alternative would be to write it as a multiple stream of consciousness novel, which is realistically a non-starter – even if I was brilliant enough to be able to pull it off, which I'm not.  

The pitch line would be a cross between Finnegans Wake and Dhalgren, neither of which I've been able to finish reading (this says more about me as a reader & writer than it does about either of the books), and I would imagine that the story would have a very limited appeal, and be a hard novel to sell.

What I have been doing with my time is reading, as I've started to enjoy reading fiction again.  This is a bit of a relief, because if one wants to be a fiction writer it's kind of important to read fiction.

So I started off by finishing reading the other two books in Rachel Bach's Parodox trilogy, the first of which I mentioned here.  

The sequels rollicked along, the characters were likeable enough, and there were enough twists and turns to keep one interested.  I do think that the romance sub-plot had a tendency to derail the main plot, taking me out of the big picture, but Rachel seems to be on a mission to bring more romance to SF.  

My only slight criticism is that the ending was a bit schmaltzy, and while that's OK, in this case I asked myself was there a third option for ending the book? (I'm referring to the concept of having one of two obvious endings, and then trying to find a better third ending that surprises the reader).

After finishing and enjoying those two novels I started reading Coming Home.  

This is the latest novel in the Alex Benedict/Chase Kolpath series by Jack McDevitt, which I had been saving for the right time to read it.  Jack McDevitt is one of my favourite go to authors; as in I buy his novels in hardback, rather than waiting for the paperback to come out.  

I will say that his previous Priscilla Hutchins series novel Starhawk was a tad disappointing.  It was a nice enough tale of her early life, acting as a prequel to the series, but it really didn't add anything to the story arc of the previous six novels about the clouds that destroy technological civilizations.

So let me start by saying that the first Alex Benedict novel, A Talent for War, was a hugely influential novel for me.  

 It's one of those books that stands out in my life as as having blown me away, and it would be one of my choices to take with me for a desert island stay.  The sequels have all been told through the eyes of Alex Benedict's assistant Chase Kolpath, and this may be down to the fact that the lead character generally knows more than the reader, and to maintain the novels sense of suspense one has to write through the eyes of another character who doesn't know what's going on.  

The alternative I imagine would be a set of short stories.

In the book set prior to Coming Home, called Firebird, Alex Benedict discovers what's causing starships to disappear in space.  Mentioned because the plot of A Talent for War hinges on the starship with his Uncle disappearing.  

Therefore this book forms a sort of trilogy with these two other novels, and in some sense it ties up the series for the reader.  Whether this means the end of the Alex Benedict series I do not know.  Jack has just finished a sequel to Ancient Shores, which up to now was a stand alone novel, to be called Thunderbird.  This probably means I will have to go back and re-read Ancient Shores when the sequel comes out, because it's been nearly twenty years since that was written, and I can't remember the last time I read it.

So what am I saying here?

He's eighty years old, and still going strong as a writer, which is awesome; but he's eighty years old, and the number of novels he will write is time limited.  So I'm grateful that Coming Home didn't disappoint me like Starhawk did.  

For anyone who was undecided whether or not to read Coming Home, I would say that it hit all the right points for me; but it's a novel whose themes deal with loss and disappointment at the end of one's life, and therefore may not be everyone's cup of tea.  I still recommend reading it.

Then as a bit of light fun I read Larry Correia's Monster Hunter Nemesis, a series whose pitch line might be the NRA meets Cthulhu.

I'm not going to comment here about the furore around Larry, because enough has been written that the noise to signal ratio is such that it's pointless to add anything more.  I will say I like his Monster Hunter series.  They make me laugh, and I get most of the gun related jokes too, which probably helps.  

For me they're page turners that I find hard to put down, and Monster Hunter Nemesis certainly delivers.  It adds to the mythos, expands some plot points, but I have two things to say against it.  The first is that I feel that Agent Franks and Earl Harbinger really didn't need to have the fight to work out who was the better fighter - for me too much like fan service, because it added nothing to the plot; apart from some kick ass action of course, but that goes without saying, because this is Larry Correia we're talking about.  

Secondly Agent Franks was just being a jerk not to mention the meaning of the tattoo on Julie Shackleford nee Mrs Pitt's neck.  There said it.

Besides all the reading I've been watching a heap of stuff over the long Bank Holiday weekend.  

I will talk another time about Lucy and Interstellar, because I want to do a longish compare and contrast of my reactions to watching both.  What I want to mention now is Continuum, and ask why oh why is this not getting a full fourth season?  That's a rhetorical question just in case it wasn't obvious.  

Clearly it's not getting enough viewers, which makes me wonder are my tastes in TV SF so far off the norm that anything I like will be cancelled?  Another rhetorical question, because yes is the answer.

Continuum is a time travel series set in Vancouver that I did wonder whether or not it would be cancelled because of it's subject matter?  

The story concerns a cop from the future coming back into the past, and pursuing members of a future terrorist group called Liber8 (pronounced liberate).  What makes the story interesting that the more it went on, the greyer the main protagonist became.  

She starts as a staunch upholder of the law, which is run by corporations after the governments of the world collapsed, into a sympathizer of Liber8, who in turn have become understandable (or understandable as much as any group of fanatics can be whose modus operandi is killing people for the greater good).

It sometimes makes for quite uncomfortable viewing, which I think is a good thing, because it makes one question and think about what one is told is happening.  So really not that surprised it is getting a short fourth season before going the way of all the good shows that I like.

So that's it for another week.  Have a good one.