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I finished Michael Stackpole’s Age of Discovery series about a month ago.  Predictably enough it got lost in the shuffle.  I’ve started to edit my novel (le sigh!) so I haven’t had much time to skim my notes.

I’ve been fairly liberal in my mentions and praise of Mr. Stackpole of the last few months.  His series on writing. “The Secrets” has been interesting, helpful, and inspiring.  I felt a near obligation to read a few of his books since I was tossing his name around so cavalierly without having read anything of his since the Rogue Squadron Star Wars series a decade ago.

I do not have much of a review prepared and I’m working off of memories that are already starting to fade.  Age of Discovery is trilogy.  (A Secret Atlas, Cartomancy, A New World)  The series was entertaining by most reasonable measures, but for whatever reason I did not find them as compelling as others I have read in the last few months.  As the last books on the list, I may have suffered from book fatigue, or perhaps I’ve grown out of his writing, or maybe I’ve simply moved away from fantasy in my interests.  I still read George RR Martin and await his next book eagerly, so I haven’t left it completely behind, but in this series the spark of magic held less of an interest for me than in the past.

I found many of the characters a bit too ‘in the know’.  Their indecisiveness and hesitation when faced with titanic revelations came across as overly quick and flippant.  They managed to adjust themselves to the consequences of the world within a chapter or two.  I admit there were long stretches of the book that were pretty fascinating, but the catharsis of seeing the character’s resolve their struggles was just too quick for tastes.

I’d be remiss if I gave a bad review.  They do not deserve that, per se, certainly not for me.  Age of Discovery is nothing if not a creative adventure.  Had the books been shorter I’d call it an amusing jaunt, but at 600 pages each in my edition they started to become a slog.  Again, 1800 pages does tend to bring on a bit of fatigue.

Unfortunately I don’t have any books new books on the horizon for a bit.  Editing is my highest priority.  I do, however, have an upcoming review of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom on the list.  I’ll probably manage to get that down later in the week.

A bit of blog spam today.

50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Writing Skills

Call me nit-picky, but part being an effective writer is cutting out the wasted words. ’50 Free Resources for Better Writing’, ’50 Free Writing Resources’, ‘Improve Your Writing: 50 Free Resources’…

I’m nearly the completion of my novel. I’ve got a last few chapters to finish up before I have a rough draft done. From there the long editing road starts, but the ‘hard work’ is done, at least, that’s what I tell myself. (I don’t think anyone considers editing easy.) Lately I’ve been emailing chapters here and there to friends to look over. Gmail has taken the opportunity to flood me with advertizements tailored to me: mostly self-publishing houses and vanity presses.

The tag lines are always so appealing: “Get published now!’, ‘Have you book read by a professional editor without the agent’, ‘Become an author’. As I get closer to needing to find a publisher or an agent these ‘services’ seem so great, but, aside from largely being scams, they also defeat the purpose. Anyone can write something. I’ve written hundreds, thousands, millions of words. Very few of them are worth being published, worth being given to the world, worth asking people to pay money for. I’m not a paid blogger because my random semi-frequent musings aren’t up to that level of quality and most of my stories aren’t either. A few are, I hope anyone, and I intend to prove it by getting them published in an editing medium. I want them to complete against all the other author’s out there, in my genre, and be of a higher quality. It is that competition that validates my writing as being worth being read and what makes publishing both so hard and so worthy a goal.

Vanity presses are a shortcut and a dangerous one at that. Publishing is a business built around selling books. Vanity publishers are built around reading fees and editing contracts. They have no stake in selling the book, so they don’t. They play on the best intentions of a eager author and leave them something that is by and large unsellable, unmarketable, and disappointing.

http://www.aeonix.com/vanity.htm: an article on why they’re scams

http://everything2.com/node/606645: another one with a short list of vanity presses.

http://www.sfwa.org/BEWARE/vanitypublishers.html: another great list with resources for researching publishers.

http://selfpublishing.suite101.com/article.cfm/avoiding_selfpublishing_scams: Avoiding publishing scams

Hope these help! Wish me luck in getting published!

These have probably been around for ages, but I just found them.

Medieval Demographics

Medieval Demographics Calculator

Sometimes, you just want to know how many furriers the average medieval big city had. (Answer: 160 for a population of 40,000.)

Does anyone know of any similar ‘culture’ demographic calculators? These things are pretty invaluable for setting up worlds that make sense.

Enjoy!

Read and enjoy!

First: the Link.

Second: What is it?

It’s an open call for ‘hint fiction’ submissions.  They define hint fiction as stories of 25 words or less that suggest a larger story.  It’s a pretty cool writing game and starting August 1st (ending August 31th) they are taking up to three submissions via email for an anthology scheduled for next year.  The caveat, you can only send two submissions unless you link to the their submission guide.

Here it is again. Hint Fiction Submission Guidelines!

I don’t have my submissions prepared yet, but I’ve got a few ideas rolling around.  Good fun!

Io9 published (about a month ago, what can I say, I’m working on a backlog), an article on the novels that originated their own science fiction sub genres.  A few are obvious ones (Neuromancer and Cyberpunk, Frankenstein and Gothic Science Fiction.)   Others are a bit more obscure, at least as far as my experience.

As expected the comments are filled with suggestions on alternate books to fill the various categories.  Interesting stuff!

Worth reading is the link to the ‘cranky essay’ looking further in cyberpunk.  (Relinked here.)

Why Authors Have Websites or How I Grew To Love The Web

I happen to be rather lucky.  I’m trying to be an author and I’m already alright at web design.  (This web page is not exactly my best work, but it’ll be getting tweaked soon.)

Websites really are a necessary resource these days.  Authors in particular need a medium to communicate new projects to their audiance.  For authors that stay within certain genres maybe it’s less vital, but any author that has books in a few different sections of the bookstore needs some way of pointing their audiance where to work.

In the case of George RR Martin and Michael Stackpole (the two author’s whose sites I visit the most consistantly) they always have some note on what their doing, what conventions their going to, writing samples, outside projects etc etc.  As a fan it’s fun and informative and kinda cool.  For the author’s it’s building up a brand, just like every other product and service.

Alice and Kev is a story told through still images from The Sims 3.  It’s one of the coolest and most engrossing reads to come out of videos games…possibly ever.  (Also part of the reason I decided to pick that game up!)

I’m a bit behind on my articles.  I finished the Graveyard book five or six days ago, but only got it out as an article two days ago.  I started reading The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon, almost immediately after and I finished it two days ago.  I’m currently reading a book on interstellar propulsion technologies.  I’ll probably finish that in a few days and won’t get an article out for weeks.  Oh, and I also read a book about terraforming.  I have no idea when I’ll finally write about that one.

The cover is gorgeous.  It’s probably the most aethesthetically interesting and appropriate cover I’ve ever seen.  Michael Chabon is an established author so they seem to have given him the royal treatment.

Admittedly, I have no read any of his previous works.  I picked this one up predominately on the fact that it won the 2007 Nebula Award for  Best Novel.

It’s a truly strange book.

Set in an alternate timeline where only the Bomb stopped Germany and Israel collapsed, the Jewish diaspora is given a temporary home in Sitka, Alaska.  Forty years later the territory is set to revert to Alaskan control.  Meyer Landsman, a Sitka cop, has a crime on his hands and a world crumbling around him.

That’s the short synopsis, but it leaves a lot in the air.  It’s around 600 pages, my copy, and half of them are Yiddish.  That’s an exageration, but enough of the the names,the places and, most frustratingly, the words are in Yiddish that reading the thing requires either a working knowledge of that language, enough dedication to look them up, or enough flexibility to simply fly over them and hope the meaning becomes obvious.

As a science fiction story and an alternate timeline one at that, there is the expectation that I’ll be tossed into a world where things are somewhat confusing.  That’s just part of what science fiction is about.  Skimming over the Amazon reviews, a lot of the readers are people that have followed Michael Chabon, instead of science fiction, and they haven’t much cared for what they’ve found.  They consider the book and jumbled mess and have pretty much left it at that.

I wouldn’t consider that a particular fair appraisal.  The book does get confusing, but it’s not because of the alternate timeline aspects or Jewish culture or even the base plot.  The book is confusing because it’s written in what I can only describe as the most peculiar style I’ve come across in a modern book.  Third person present tense writing just happens to be somewhat obscure.  ’Meyer Landsmen looks across the room and sees Beronshtyn.’  For the first two hundred pages that tense and tone alone kept me thoroughly offguard.

I finished the book and as I got deeper I managed to absorb the writing.  It’s an odd style, but it works.  In some places it seems terribly awkward.  You have the intimacy of the first person tense, but with too many names being thrown around.

Further along the plot seems to take larger and larger leeps.  By the end, I admit that, not very much of it seemed plausible.  It kept along a nice, though slow, pace for most of the book, but the last third hung by a few tenuous strings until it ended with something of a thud.  I wouldn’t say I disliked the book, but I would hardly call it fulfilling.  It was like the first book in a trilogy ending cliffhanging that’s too final and too uninspiring.  By the end I was pretty much tired with the characters.  They’d gone through their change at snail’s past and what they really needed was a long nap.

From this book and from the reviews I’ve read Mr. Chabon seems to be a very talented writer and rather adventurous as far as his style and topics.  This particular novel might have fallen a bit flat, bit I’ll have to keep an eye out for another book of his.