It’s probably not hard to guess I’m a big fan of books. So it’s probably also not hard to guess that I would endorse this product/service:
https://vimeo.com/121404768
The guy seems a little eccentric–or perhaps sold on the idea of being eccentric, but good for him nonetheless. If he gets more people to read, more firepower to him!
Want to see what a shockwave looks like? Check out this article in Popular Mechanics! Pegs my “Coolness Meter” for the day.
My daughter has been pressuring me to read this book ever since she read it a few weeks ago, and I finally got a gap in my schedule. I figured it would be good; Brandon Sanderson continues to improve with age, and this is one of his more recent books. And he’s not one to “dumb down” his YA fiction, so I was not surprised that I enjoyed it.
“Steelheart” runs on the premise that some stellar anomaly(? we really aren’t told much about it) appeared in our sky, and soon thereafter people began developing superpowers. However, the use of these powers turned all these people into supervillains. There are no superheroes, and the world quickly fell under their tyranny.
Set in “Newcago”, the future Chicago run by an “epic” named Steelheart, David is a youth whose father was murdered by Steelheart ten years ago. David himself barely escaped the massacre, but he escaped with a secret–Steelheart can be hurt. Ever since then he has thought of nothing but revenge, and has compiled exhaustive research on epics, their weaknesses, and on Steelheart’s organization. He lacks only one thing to put his plans for revenge into action: support.
That support arrives in the form of The Reckoners, a band of ordinary humans who are able to stand up to the epics, and are determined to exterminate them all. David just has to find a way to join them and convince them his plan will work.
Sanderson has a gift for puzzles, and there are a lot of them in “Steelheart. ” He’s also one of the braver writers who will give you everything you need to figure it out for yourself. And I did figure out quite a few of the puzzles, sometimes several chapters ahead of the reveal. But for every one I got right, there were at least that many I didn’t. Sanderson has a knack for layering puzzles on top of his puzzles, and having the biggest reveals coming in the midst of the action when you don’t have time to stop and think through the ramifications of those reveals.
That only works, of course, if he can keep you suspensefully turning pages, which he does. He knows how to ratchet up the tension and keeping you glued to the book.
Steelheart was a fun read, and a good start to the series. I’ve been told by several people that the next book blows this one out of the water, so I look forward to testing that. I also think I’ll go back some day and read the book again, studying how Sanderson writes. His style is clear, concise (fans of the Stormlight Archive may find this surprising), and evocative. I need to take a close look at how he does it.
My daughter is an avid reader, but also a very social one. She loves to be able to discuss books she’s read afterward. Hence she’s constantly coming to me with recommendations: “You have to read this, Dad!” The trouble is, she has a lot more time to read than I do, and she’s a faster reader. I simply don’t have time to keep up with all of the books she gets excited about. So most of the time she eventually gives up.
Not so with “Steelheart,” a YA novel by Brandon Sanderson. She’s kept after me for weeks. “You’ve got to read it, Dad! It’s so goood!” Well, I finally gave in and borrowed her copy. And revenge is mine. At my pace it’s going to take at least a week to finish. But since she is completely dedicated to not spoiling anything, I intend to make the most of that time. I’m throwing my guesses out there as to what is going to happen.
It’s so fun to watch her face contort in an effort not to give anything away whenever I speculate aloud as to what Steelheart’s weakness might be (I had a guess before the prologue was over, and clues coming out as I go are suggesting I was pretty close to right), or why a character is acting a certain way, or why I think a particular event or detail is significant. I swear she’s going to explode before I finish this book. But I will give her credit. She’s not giving much away, even as she goes into paroxysms of anguish. About all I can tell is that my speculations are significant.
And that it’s fun to torment her. Mwah ha ha ha ha…..!
Any fan of William Gibson‘s “Bigend Trilogy” (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History) is no doubt aware of his character Hubertus Bigend and his love of soviet-era hardware. This particular footage of a Russian airplane museum would undoubtedly produce the need for a drool-towel. For the rest of us…well, it’s still cool.
Incidently, about forty minutes from my house is the Hill Aerospace Museum, which is devoted to American aerospace history, and is mostly indoors. And you can get a lot closer than this.
I recently reached the 60,000 words mark on my novel.
There’s something magical about the number 60,000. Besides being half of my goal of 120,000 words for a novel, it represents a mental/emotional milestone. It’s almost like tangible proof that my story has the legs to make it to full novel status. Usually 70K is the low end of the range for a novel-sized work, but as all of the novels I set out to write as novels (I accidentally wrote a fan-fic that achieved novel size, but I was just having fun writing serial fiction) have come in around 120,000 words, that’s what feels like a novel should be to me.
But it also implies a “safety zone”, I suppose. If I’ve made it to 60K words before having hit the climax then there’s a good chance my novel will indeed achieve novel status, and not just get stuck as a novella. Not that there’s anything wrong with novellas. I’m just still early enough in my writing career that perhaps I still need reassurance that I can craft a plotline that can carry a novel.
I suppose there’s also the reassurance that the story will still hold my interest that long. I mean, if even I don’t find a story interesting enough to want to keep going there must be something wrong with it. Force of habit can carry me quite a ways (like 40K-60K words!), but there comes a point when I have to admit that I’m just not enjoying writing that story. I hit that point with my last novel. Fortunately I was able to change things and make it work the second try. But this novel has been fun to write (mostly) all the way so far. And lately it’s been so much fun that I’ve had no trouble at all turning out 2K days, which is really good for me.
So yes, I’m perhaps halfway into my latest novel, I’m having fun writing it, and I’m pleased with how it’s turning out. It’s probably my best work thus far, though I suppose that may not be saying much. But the work continues apace, and I hope to be finished by July.
From Popular Science:
A new project out of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, shows that cats are capable of liking music, they just think yours sucks. A pair of psychologists and a composer have combined sounds that cats like—such as the tempos of purring and suckling and the sliding wails of alley-dwellers—into three soothing songs for felines.
In a study published in Applied Animal Behavioral Science, the team tested the effectiveness of their feline melodies on a group of 47 domestic cats. The cats were totally not impressed when they heard Gabriel Fauré’s Elegie and Bach’s Air on a G String (human music, yuck), but when the cat-tailored songs came on, the cats rubbed the speakers with their faces. In cat language, that’s pretty much like shouting for an encore.
You can listen to samples of the cat songs here. They’re weird and kind of unsettling.
This is just another area where we have to hand it to the selfless scientists searching for knowledge for knowledge sake and not motivated by the almighty dollar. I think. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were grant money in this somewhere. And I suppose there might be enough people out there willing to spare no expense for their “fur children” who might buy albums of cat music.
The samples given, though, are interesting. I may try playing some for my cats sometime and see how they respond. On the other hand, perhaps the key to keeping cats off my keyboard might be Faure or Bach. If that’s the case, thank you, science!
Nuclear fusion has been a tantalizing piece of science fiction dangling just out of reach for some time. I remember in SimCity the fusion reactor being the ultimate goal in energy production. I remember the Tokamek reactors in Outpost. And of course there was the brief excitement over cold fusion back in the 1990’s until it was proven incorrect.
Lockheed Martin thinks it’s possible to have commercial fusion power within twenty years.
All I can say is, “Bring it.”
I think I made a major step forward in my development as a writer this weekend. I’m starting to ask how I can be more mean to my characters. I just had to disguise it as, “how can I up the stakes here?”
My latest novel is progressing nicely, but it occurred to me that the side-quest I sent of my characters off to accomplish wasn’t really anything exciting. Yes, it’s important to the resolution, but…well, it’s boring. Once I reached that conclusion this weekend I asked myself what I could do to spice things up. It didn’t take long before I devised some nastiness for that character. And that one change ratchets up the tension for the whole cast.
As I’ve discussed previously, my planning vs. “pantsing” pendulum is still swinging. I’ve tried writing without an outline and I found my books were too simplistic. I tried writing a detailed outline, and I found it too restrictive and boring. My pendulum swung back the other direction, and I’m finding I’m missing obvious options for ratcheting up the tension. So the next experiment is to just not plan too far ahead, but spend more time thinking of the immediate plotline and what could make things more interesting.
My daughter caught me chuckling evilly to myself as I decided that poor Antahn is about to get in over his head. The coddled nobleman and his two cooper guides are about to find a squad of soldiers in the way of their objective with time running out. I don’t know how they’re going to get out of this one yet, but it’ll be fun to find out.
While I do pay attention to pop culture, I still manage to be late to the party much of the time. Lately I’ve become aware of Ed Sheeran. The name meant nothing to me over a year ago when his “I See Fire” was used in the credits for “The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug“. Then all of a sudden his name was everywhere this year and I finally checked out a couple of videos on YouTube. One was “Thinking Out Loud“, which is a rather intimate, endearing love ballad, with an interesting video depicting a couple taking advantage of what appears to be an abandoned hotel ballroom for a private dance together.
Then I happened to notice the “making of the video” video and checked it out. It turns out Ed Sheeran wanted to dance the male part himself in the video, so he worked his butt off to make it happen. And while his partner is fantastic and does the bulk of the work, he holds his own quite well, I think. Both of them act pretty well, and the choreography is charming. I was impressed.
Not long ago, in listening to a Peter Hollens cover of the old folksong, “The Parting Glass” I discovered that Ed Sheeran had supposedly cut his own version of the same song. This suggested that he might not be your typical pop star with no sense of history. And just the other day I listened to his song “Small Bump“, which turned out to be a love song to his unborn child, with an emotional ending that I won’t give away. He is not at all what I would expect from someone considered “hot” in music circles today.
Today YouTube presented me with a video of him recording the old folk song “Wayfaring Stranger” in one take using a looper. Interesting. Perhaps not my most favorite rendition, but not bad. I shall have to keep an eye on this young man.
UPDATE: Okay, I ran across this video. Someone’s got a really quirky sense of humor. Rupert Grint for the win!
