scbutler
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "scbutler" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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05:49 pm
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The Edge of Reason
A big shout out for Melinda Snodgrass's The Edge of Reason, which just came out yesterday from Tor. It's a great book with a great idea, an interesting take on the how and why of several thousand years of religion here on good old Earth, and a great story to boot. Melinda has an essay up on Scalzi's blog which provides a snapshot of why she wrote the book. Check it out.
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12:50 am
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Kamikaze Girls
Just watched an odd flick - Kamikaze Girls. Anyone ever seen it? Live action anime about biker girls and Lolita chic.
Anyone else seen it?
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12:16 am
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Battlestar
So, is it only me, or did anyone else think President Roslin's mother in the last episode looks like Barbara Bush?
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10:43 pm
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Reading Tomorrow
I've been so busy lately I forgot to post this news - I'll be reading for the Science Fiction Society of Northern NJ tomorrow night (May 10) at the Borders in the Garden State Plaza Mall in Paramus, NJ at 8:00 PM. Come one, come all. Meet me in Brooklyn and I'll even give you a ride.
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09:23 am
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Good Readings
Went to the NYRSF readings last night to hear Kelly Link and Jennifer Stevenson. They were both great. Kelly read an old story - The Cinderella Game - which is a wonderful telling of a pair of new step-siblings maybe learning to get along better. Jennifer read from "The Brass Bed", a hilarious take on possessed furniture and then entertained the crowd with anecdotes about her new passion - roller derby. Susan's leg was still hurting (she pulled a muscle in her calf last week), and I was tired out from riding the bike that afternoon, so we took a pass on the dinner afterward, but it was still a great evening.
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09:20 pm
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Sam-Who-Likes-Nothing
Since I am often referred to by friends and family alike as Sam-Who-Likes-Nothing, I thought I'd let everyone know that I really, really liked Michael Clayton. Great cast. Great story. Great flick.
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06:05 pm
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Uglies
About a hundred pages into Scott Westerfeld's book, Uglies, I'm thinking to myself, wow! This is really great. What a terrific idea and story. A wonderful world where folks are made supermodel beautiful on their 16th birthdays.
And it is a good book. But.
There's a gaping hole in the plot. (Spoiler alert!) The heroine is blackmailed into going off in search of the runaway uglies by the baddies in charge because they can't find the runaways' hideout on their own (even though the baddies know as much as she does and are physically superior to boot).
Then later it's revealed that the runaways let anyone who wants to return home. Hey? Wouldn't it have been easier for the baddies to get one of the returnees to show them the way to the hideout rather than hope that the heroine (who's never been there) can find the place on her own? I mean, come on, guys.
I do dislike it when a really good, well-written book has this kind of hole in it. In fact I dislike it more than I would in a crummy book. In a crummy book I wouldn't care. I'll probably read the sequels, if only to find out where Westerfeld takes the story. But I'll give a great big sigh when I do over how good the story might have been.
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09:58 pm
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Battlestar
So, I have to ask. Am I the only person who thinks Battlestar has jumped the shark?
Please, writers, do us all a favor and kill Gaius Baltar now.
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05:20 pm
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Tiptree Biography
Just finished reading Julie Phillips' biography of James Tiptree. Jr. What a sad, sad book. An entire life struggling to find some sort of happiness and, as far as I can tell, not really ever succeeding. She wrote some great stories, but I've always been someone who thinks life trumps art, not vice versa. More happy people are much better than more art.
An excellent book. I recommend it. Not so much for the SF elements, as for the depiction of a very, very interesting individual. My only quibble is that I would have liked more examination of Sheldon's assertion that her mother once tried to seduce her. It may have happened; it may not. One letter mentioning the incident is the only evidence given, and it's a damning enough assertion, by a frequently misleading subject, that I would have liked to see the question more thoroughly explored.
Anyone else read this book? I've had enough bios for a while - I'm going back to fiction.
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10:37 am
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Walt Disney - The Triumph of the American Imagination
Recently I finished Neil Gabler's excellent bio of Walt Disney. The man's triumph really was pretty spectacular, especially as his real successes were in creating his fantasies in the real world. The first was his desire to raise cartooning to the level of art, which he did with Snow White (at least according to the critics of the time). The second was his wish to elevate the grungy American amusement park to the level of small town American dream, which he did with Disneyland. As with his feature length animations, he did it despite everyone telling him he was a fool.
I'm not much of a Disney fan these days, (outside of Pixar I don't think there's anything the company does that I like - saints preserve us from the Disney Channel!), but what the man accomplished is really something. In some ways I think he opened the door for fantasy as much as Tolkien.
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10:29 pm
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Comic Con
A belated NY Comic Con report - was in CT over the weekend hiking over hill and dale to see large beaver pond. No beavers though. Have to go in the evening to see them.
Anyway, Comic Con was a lot of fun. I did the geek thing and wandered around all day Saturday gawking at the booths. Went briefly to a Robotech panel, but they were just talking about collectibles, so I left. Did no other panels, because the con didn't seem to list who was on them. (My panel going is usully determind by who's particpating rather than the topic. Entertaining panelists can enliven boring panels, but the opposite is never true.)
As it turned out, Daniel Dos Santos was unable to work on the cover illustration for the last Stoneways novel as the space he was allotted at the Tor booth was too small. Cover art is usually done on a large, 3 1/2 by 2 1/2 foot canvas - Daniel had room for something maybe half that size. How he did an entire portrait in an hour and a half with the crowd pressing in on him and the Ubisoft people announcing raffle prizes via bullhorn ten feet away, I'll never know. I'd have impaled the gaming people with my palette knife. But his exhibition was fantastic.
Almost as good was a woman demonstrating proper horror movie scream technique. I think I'm still shivering.
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08:53 am
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Kicking ass in Kindle
Reiffen's Choice is currently the number 1 SF book in Kindle, number 46 in the whole thing. It does help when the price is $0.00.
I'm number two in fantasy epics. How I manage to be SF, but Jim Butcher isn't, is beyond me.
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06:01 pm
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More free books
It would seem that Amazon is paying close attention to Tor's new website and free books. Reiffen's Choice just went on sale for $0.00 at Amazon in its Kindle edition. Of course, you have to have a Kindle before you can buy...
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11:40 am
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Rio Hondo 2008
Here's the cast of characters for Rio Hondo this year. A stellar list (present company excepted). Have I said how much I'm looking forward to this? The format is for everyone to bring a work of 17,000 words or less, and we'll have a week of critting, and hiking in the New Mexico mountains, and gourmet dining. Though, if there's any gourmet-ing involved the night I'm cooking, it will be due to the talents of Cat Valente, who has been kind enough to take me on as slave and pot-walloper. Can cakes be baked at 9.000 feet?
Taos in May? Could anything be better? Maybe we'll even get snow!
Jay Lake
Carrie Vaughn
Ian Tregillis
Kristin Livdahl
Allen DeNiro
Melinda Snodgrass
Cathrynne Valente
Sam (S.C.) Butler
Daniel Abraham
Maureen McHugh
Walter Jon Williams
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10:21 am
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NY Comic Con
Anyone going to NY Comic Con this weekend? If you are, drop by the Tor booth on Saturday. Nothing's on the program, but my fantastic cover artist, Daniel Dos Santos, will be doing a demonstration off and on during the day. He'll be working on the art for my upcoming book, The Magicians' Daughter - I haven't even seen it yet!
There might even be dragons.
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12:31 pm
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What I've written
Okay, okay, I'll join this meme too.
Lost in the Woods: First novel coming of age drek that's as bad as it sounds.
Prairie Bitch: In which the eponymous heroine of the title leads a band of barnstorming western ballplayers on a tour of the Colorado plains and in the process helps the local Native American tribe defeat the cavalry, and marries a man who actually killed the empire, before fleeing to Mexico. All writers who love baseball have to write baseball books - it's a disease. At least I got mine out early. Hey, it got me my first agent.
Native Daddy: Idi Amin becomes president of the US with Nixon the power behind the throne. This lost me my first agent.
The New Testimony: The second part of the Nixoniad. This time Nixon helps lead the Hasidim out of bondage from the Kennedy clan. On Mars. Written in biblical chapter and verse. The co-author and I tried to bring back the lost art of pamphleteering by selling offset copies in Central Park for a dollar apiece. I learned the important marketing lesson of not trying to sell crazy left-wing satire when you look like a Young Republican. Which is why I still have plenty of copies left.
Superhero/Superstar: A rock and roll sf book that opens at the 25th anniversary of Woodstock. Boy was I wrong. I thought everyone would attend in RVs. Got me my second agent, though.
The Movie Mice: Ratatouille, except with mice instead of rats, and they make a movie instead of cook. This was written more than 25 years ago. It's also the only thing from my first stint as a writer that's probably salvageable. I really didn't write very well then at all.
Beecher's Children: In which I bite off far more than I can chew, a serious novel about abortion. I did not have the chops to write a 200k word book (I barely made it to a 120k) about one of the more pressing issues of the day.
Long hiatus spent working for a living and having a family. I can't do two things at once, let alone three.
More Than Once Upon a Time: A novella set in the world of the Stoneways. Never try to restart a writing career with a novella. I have it posted on my website www.valingstoneways.com, but I warn anyone who wants to read it, it has a huge spoiler for the third novel.
The Fishman Affair: In which I fictionalize my experiences working on the Salomon Brothers' bond trading desk at a time when my boss nearly pulled a criminal Bear Stearns. Never try to portray Wall Street types positively (even if it's only some of them). The publishing world thinks you're writing fantasy.
So I did.
Reiffen's Choice: Success! Why didn't I do this from the start? Because I had to work my way up to it, that's why. Fantasy is hard.
Queen Ferris: My favorite so far of the Stoneways trilogy. Our protags are old enough now for the romantic entanglements to break out.
The Magicians' Daughter: Just handed in to my editor a couple months ago. If the first book is about how Reiffen finds magic, and the second is about what he does with it, the third is about what the magic does to him.
More to come? I hope.
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08:37 am
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Free Books
Hey, everyone! If you haven't already, go on over to Tor's website. If you sign up for the newsletter you'll get the opportunity to download free books. The current offering is Harry Turtledove's The Disunited States of America. Next week's is:
Reiffen's Choice!
By me.
As Mikey's friends once said, "Try it. You'll like it."
What have you got to lose? It's free.
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09:39 am
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Ideas and Emotion
A comment on Lyda Morehouse's latest post over at SFNovelists started me thinking. The comment was that the difference between fantasy and science fiction is that fantasy stories are generally about Heroes and Quests, whereas science fiction is about Ideas. A few folks questioned this as being more than a little dismissive of fantasy (which it is), but I think there's a kernel of truth there too. The problem is, the statement conflates bad fantasy with good science fiction. Not all fantasy is about Heroes and Quests by any means, nor is all sf about Ideas.
I like both science fiction and fantasy, but I read them for very different reasons. I'd put the difference this way: good science fiction explores ideas; good fantasy explores emotion.
Anyone else out there like to take a stab at explaining the difference? Or is there one?
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08:41 am
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Why I love New York
Because while driving along North Conduit Avenue yesterday in Queens we saw about fifty Sikhs playing tennis in what looked like cricket outfits (about 8 to a court).
Last year it was Islamic moms playing basketball with their kids. Fully covered, of course.
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10:00 am
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Battlestar
Still a year behind, but we finally got disc one of season three from Netflix. I thought the two-part Exodus episodes were the best since the original mini-series. I do like action in my space opera. Was that cool or what when they launched the raptors out of the burning ship?
But my favorite is what they've done to poor Colonel Tigh. I wish I'd thought to be that cruel to my characters.
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