Saturday Morning Update

Greetings fellow Earthlings 

Just a quick post and update for today since SGU, V, and the others are all in their off-season repeats.  I'm excited.

I've finally got things going again on the book project.  Finished editing another chapter yesterday and started the next this morning.  I'm doing what I call "polish editing", which is re-reading the book, correcting the grammar issues I spot, adjusting the plot here and there where necessary so that things flow better (and mesh better with what I plotted for book 2) and then taking the comments of the few who've read the book so far and deciding which of those I'm making use of in terms of further grammar errors and clarifications in the storytelling.  I'm about half way done with this edit of the book.  I think after I hit my new last page I'll finally be ready to show this to some professionals.

On a vaguely related note:

I read a very interesting blog excerpt on Pat's Fantasy Hotlist this morning by Carrie Vaughn, author of the Kitty Norville series.  She talks about reader expectations, and the sometimes unpopular  plot decisions authors have to make.  I highly recommend it for both authors and readers alike.  It's the June 19th entry on Pat's blog.

And on a final note

I watched Mutant Chronicles last Thursday night.  It was horrible... Which, believe it or not, surprised me considering the talent involved (John Malcovitch, Thomas Jane, Ron Pearlman).  I suppose I shouldn't have expected so much from a movie about an alternate earth where an alien machine comes and starts turning people into what the Netflix movie description calls "necro mutants", but I had some hope that it would be at least vaguely entertaining and original.

I didn't get entertaining, but I got originality.  Unfortunately the two do not always go hand in hand.  It was a very original, very bad movie.

One of the most puzzling aspects of the film, in terms of world building, was its take on what steam power could do.  There were very clear scenes of men shoving coal into furnaces within VTOL capable vessels with Star Wars like particle based propulsion systems.  I was enormously bothered by this since there is no way a steam engine could produce enough power to drive a particle accelerator.  There was also talk of ships that were capable of making the manned trip to Mars, which did not wax with the steam driven technology either.  I know there is a genre out there called Steam-punk, and that in said genre (to which this movie clearly belongs) steam engines can do some pretty cool things, but the whole thing came across as stupid to me.  For the record, I don't outright hate Steam-punk.  Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series is also Steam-punk, and one of my most favorite series to date.  I think the key difference lies in that Mr. Pullman made his world believable and involving, whereas Mutant Chronicles was just haphazard crap.

That's all for today!  Be well all!