So this week I was reading The Poppy War, by R.F. Kuang, which I would characterize as Big Trouble in Little China meets Harry Potter meets Mulan, although insofar as I have never actually seen Mulan (any version) I’m kind of just guessing on that last one*.
So the other week I was noodling around the YouTube app on the Apple TV and came across a video entitled “Why Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan Has the Best Space Battle Ever!“; and so of course I had to watch it*. You, too, can watch it here:
So as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t plan my books out in advance, except for that one time, and that one time the book didn’t come out anything like how I planned it. This tends to end up working out well for me, but it also means that, sometimes, I end up going in a direction that doesn’t work out. In the case of Dragon Stones, that entailed the wholesale excision of a character’s point of view scenes*; but in the case of the book I’m currently working on, Blue Roses, I’ve decided that the direction it was going with three of the main characters (four if you count the squirrel**) just wasn’t working out, and so I’ve axed the last 20,000 words or so, pruning the story back to where it branched in the direction that proved unproductive***. Because sometimes you’ve gotta be ruthless.
Well maybe not completely different, as I do post about music now and then, but kinda different … So I recently somehow became aware* that one of my favorite songs, “Space Song” by Beach House, had been used in the recent miniseries of Stephen King’s The Stand, apparently in a scene involving abandoned cars on a bridge or something. I don’t know for sure because said miniseries is only available on Paramount+, apparently, and I have no plans to subscribe to another streaming service, certainly not just to see one scene in yet another miniseries** based on a book I read some thirty-odd years ago. Instead, I went looking to see if I could find a clip of the scene on YouTube. I could not. But I did find a ton of other “Space Song” videos, including this very interesting one, by a cellist who performed all the parts herself and put them together into a Hollywood Squares-style video. Check it out:
Continue reading “And Now For Something Completely Different: Hello, Cello!”So this week, the Gods of Randomness told me to reach into my giant collection of rejection letters and pull something out of the section labeled “I”. Well, okay, they originally told me to pull something out of the section labeled “P”, but all the good stuff in the “P” section has already been done already. Could it be I’m running out of rejection letters?! Nah, there just weren’t that many magazines whose name started with “P”.
Continue reading “Random Rejection: Indigenous Fiction, “Leech Field””So this week I was reading Theory of Bastards, by Audrey Schulman, AKA Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Bonobo Sex But Were Afraid To Ask.
So this week I thought I would find something in the pile of my elementary school stuff that my folks have shipped out over the years, and I came up with a something which, at first glance, I thought might contain some kind of spooky story about ghosts or woodland spirits, but after actually flipping through it, I would have to call it a (very) early precursor to one of the ridiculous adventures that one might see over at the animals’ blog. That something is my five-page illustrated epic novella, “The Tree”.
So this week, in addition to the usual sorts of spam, I got one that reads like a sort of mail-order bride ad. Wait, are mail-order bride ads still a thing?* Would it be an international dating site ad now? Well anyway, whatever it is, it’s quite obviously fake, and spam.
So recently we watched Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the (very) distant sequel to some movie from the 1980s. Maybe you’ve heard of it.
So this week, and probably for a few weeks more (the entire thing being just north of 1,200 pages), I was reading Green Earth, by Kim Stanley Robinson:
Viscosity 