4,000 words on Calamity of So Long A Life last night. Amazing what a week of crawling around inside the outline will do for one’s vision of a book. I’m still not sure about the pacing right now, but I’m going to move forward with it and deal with that problem later if it turns out to indeed be a problem.
For now, some WIP: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: 5:54 am Thu January 20 2011 | Comments(3) |
Your Thursday moment of zen.
Another fading blossom. © 2007, 2011, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 5:52 am Thu January 20 2011 | Comments(0) |
I’m still taking interview questions from readers: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] — Thanks to those who have posted already. Will probably answer them tomorrow or over the weekend and post next Monday. This is fun.
A reader reacts to Green — Definitely not with the liking of the book. My favorite bit: Green is a bog-standard fantasy with pretensions to be more. I have achieved mediocrity!
A Hungarian commentary on Trial of Flowers
A reader reacts to my collection Dogs In the Moonlight — Not so much with the liking of the book.
A reader reacts to my Sunspin short “A Long Walk Home”
A partial review of Love and Rockets — Including some commentary on my short story, “The Women Who Ate Stone Squid”, a pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Joanna Russ. Because, yes, I could.
Wind and Mr. Ug — Quite a sweet video with a mathematical inclination. (Via willyumtx.)
A Bracing Look at the Unseen Universe — Centauri Dreams on dark energy. Interesting read.
Alabama Governor Insults All Seven or So Non-Christian Alabamans — The snark, she burns us. (Thanks to lt260.)
Rush Limbaugh Rips Fox News Panel For ‘Slobbering’ Over Obama Speech, Panel Responds (VIDEO) — Limbaugh’s comments as quoted in this piece pretty much capture everything that’s so very wrong with conservative America. Personally, I don’t want to live in a society where having a smart, articulate, oratorical leader is a bad thing. C.f. Sarah Palin.
George Lucas Destroyed Modernity — Conservative commentator Daniel Larison compares Star Trek and Star Wars in discussing a rather odd thesis advanced by Michael Lind. Science fiction meets politics.
?otD: How cold does it have to be before you say ‘enough already’?
1/20/2011
Writing time yesterday: 2.0 hours (4,000 words on Calamity of So Long a Life, Sunspin book one)
Body movement: n/a (still too damned cold to walk from hotel to gym)
Hours slept: 7.25 hours (interrupted)
Weight: n/a (no scale here)
Currently reading: Dancing With Bears by Michael Swanwick
Posted: 5:49 am Thu January 20 2011 | Comments(1) |
It is freaky cold outside this morning. 3 degrees F when I woke up. I declined to walk to the gym, and so very unusually for me, skipped my morning exercise. Instead I slept a bit longer.
Got the Sunspin outline whipped into shape last night, but realized I didn’t want to send it to my agent yet, because I’d like to finish working on the opening section of the first book and include that with the outline. Hopefully I can make significant progress this evening after Day Jobbery.
I like traveling, but at the moment, I wish I was home. Of course, at the moment I wish a lot of things were different than they are. Life is the triumph of optimism over experience.
Posted: 5:42 am Wed January 19 2011 | Comments(2) |
Your Wednesday moment of zen.
The secret heart of flowers. © 2007, 2011, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 5:34 am Wed January 19 2011 | Comments(0) |
I’m still taking interview questions from readers: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]
A reader reacts to The Specific Gravity of Grief — I never realized how prophetic that book would be.
Fantasy Literature reviews, among other things, my Sunspin short, “A Long Walk Home”
A Czech blog discusses my book Trial of Flowers — In Czech. Still, cool.
The Guaranteed Results Writing Advice You’ve Been Waiting For — Yep, magic bullet, right here. (Ganked from Steve Buchheit.)
Stoked: 1897 —Shorpy with the boiler room of the U.S.S. Massachusetts. This is about as steampunk as it gets.
Gay slur in lyrics disqualifies Dire Straits hit from Canadian radio play — Umm… (Via Scrivener’s Error.)
Debunking common myths about health-care reform — Your Liberal Media actually manages to notice a few of the persistent GOP lies about HCR.
Stuff Happens — Paul Krugman on the socialist plot that is public sewer systems.
David Frum Reacts To Hannity’s Palin Interview: “She Should Stop Talking Now” — I don’t know whether to laugh or weep.
?otD: Did you ever ride an elephant?
1/19/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.75 hours (further revisions to the Sunspin outline)
Body movement: n/a (3 degrees F outside, did not want to walk from hotel to gym)
Hours slept: 6.75 hours (interrupted)
Weight: n/a (no scale here)
Currently reading: Dancing With Bears by Michael Swanwick
Posted: 5:24 am Wed January 19 2011 | Comments(0) |
Yesterday on the plane I finished reading Salamanca by Dean Francis Alfar. I was utterly charmed by this book, which won the Grand Prize in the 2005 Palanca Awards, a signal literary honor in the Philippines. I suppose the best way to describe the book is as Filipino magic realism. Salamanca holds obvious kinship to Latin American fabulism, but it stems from a different tradition.
It’s a short novel, told in several sections, about the life of a fabulist writer named Gaudencio Rivera in the post World War II era. The book wanders in time and space between an isolated rural village, Manila, and various locales in the United States. The story manages not to fall into the cliched writing-about-writer traps, largely because of the intersection between lyrical style and the underlying examination of the soul of a dissolute man.
Salamanca wasn’t written for an American audience. I know enough about Filipino history and culture to understand at least some of the nuances of the setting and background action, but certainly I missed far more than I caught. I really enjoyed this aspect of the book, fiction serving almost incidentally as a window into another society.
I have no idea how available Alfar’s book is here in the United States, but it’s worth some trouble to pick up if you can. I have one or two other pieces by him that I’ll be reading as time permits. In the meantime, here’s a link to Alfar’s short story, “L’Aquilone du Estrellas (The Kite of Stars)“.
Posted: 6:27 am Tue January 18 2011 | Comments(2) |
Flew to Omaha yesterday. I expect to be able to keep writing momentum on this trip.
Over the past two days I have spent 5.0 hours editing the Sunspin outline, largely based on feedback from mcurry. He did an excellent job of flagging key issues, as well as reinforcing some of the problems I’d identified on my own. The ending needed some serious help, and I think I’ve sorted out what and how.
In other writing news, one of the acceptances from last week was the short story “The Blade of His Plow”, for the DAW anthology Human For a Day, edited by Jennifer Brozek. The other was “Brown-Bottle Nostrum” to 10Flash Quarterly. Plus a reprint sale to the same market.
Also, I had so much fun with the recent Paul London interview [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] that I will take questions in this comment thread to assemble into an interview in the next week or two. So ask me about writing, cancer, parenting, life, myself, whatever.
Another week here in the country of the corn…
Posted: 5:59 am Tue January 18 2011 | Comments(2) |
Your Tuesday moment of zen.
Rain in the garden. © 2007, 2011, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 5:41 am Tue January 18 2011 | Comments(0) |
Caligula’s tomb found after police arrest man trying to smuggle statue — (Snurched from the always interesting Pharyngula.)
Second Home: 1943 — Shorpy with an interior shot of a working caboose and some explanatory text.
How much carbon… — In case you were wondering about the CO2 value of your banana. Or a whole lot of other things.
New Type Of Entanglement Allows “Teleportation in Time”, Say Physicists — Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.
The shooting in Arizona? An isolated incident! — Oh, and by the way, all those other threats were isolated too. Reminds me of when I was in college and there was a string of fraternity-related burglaries of test material from departmental offices. The head of the Interfraternity Council must have used the words “isolated incident” in several dozen press statements my freshman year.
?otD: What’s the weirdest fruit or vegetable you’ve ever eaten?
1/18/2011
Writing time yesterday: 2.5 hours (further revisions to the Sunspin outline)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.25 hours (interrupted)
Weight: n/a (forgot)
Currently reading: Between books
Posted: 5:39 am Tue January 18 2011 | Comments(0) |