Heading to CES with Ender’s Game
I have read several Orson Scott Card books over the last year and for the most part I have enjoyed them all. I wouldn’t classify the first books I read by him as my favorite scifi or fantasy books ever, but they were unique and interesting.
So now, I’m going to start reading the series that has made Card the most famous. I’m kicking it off by listening to Ender’s Game: 20th anniversary edition. For me, I sometimes like to read scifi like some people drink wine. I like to let it age a bit before I partake. A good scifi book will be just as good twenty years after it was written (or more for that matter). So I’m starting with Ender’s Game which is twenty years old.
Now, it might have an unfair advantage as I believe it has been updated a couple of times over the last two decades, but I’m not particular about that really. This is just a general rule of thumb.
I Finished NaNoWrimo – I Won!
I finished the NaNoWriMo contest about 22 minutes ago, with only 20 minutes to spare. 
To win, you have to write 50,000 words or more between November1, and November 30th. I wrote 51,101!
Now,the book is not finished, but I have a hell of a start. I really enjoyed this entire process and the NaNoWriMo event, definitely helped me to get motivated enough to do this.
Now, I’m excited to ‘finish’ the actual book and get the turkey published. I have no doubts about my ability to do that, because I publish my writing every day. I’ll get the book out there in one form or another, and knowing myself, I’ll probably get it out there in several forms.
I’ll probably talk more about how I did it, using Dragon Naturally Speaking over at Maven Mapper’s Information later this week. Instead of writing all day to day, as many of you saw, I drove from 8 am until 10 PM from Peoria Illinois out of a snow storm, down to Gastonia North Carolina in the rain. I’m super tired, and heading to bed as soon as I put my computer gear away for the night.
If you tried your hand at NaNoWriMo whether you finished or not. Congratulations!
This was my second attempt, but the first year that I made it to 50,000 words. The first year I tried this I came in some where at 10,000 or 15,000 words. I barely remember right now.
Just Heard About Anathem by Neal Stephenson
I just heard about a new Neal Stephenson novel called Anathem. When I read the title I can’t help but think about Anthem by Ayn Rand, but based on the description, it doesn’t sound like it will have much to do with Anthem, but then again . . .
This one seems like a bit of a fantasy novel, and of course its long at 960 pages.
Anathem, the latest invention by the New York Times bestselling author of Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle, is a magnificent creation: a work of great scope, intelligence, and imagination that ushers readers into a recognizable—yet strangely inverted—world.
Fraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside "saecular" world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent’s walls. Three times during history’s darkest epochs violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community. Yet the avout have always managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe, becoming out of necessity even more austere and less dependent on technology and material things. And Erasmas has no fear of the outside—the Extramuros—for the last of the terrible times was long, long ago.
Now, in celebration of the week-long, once-in-a-decade rite of Apert, the fraas and suurs prepare to venture beyond the concent’s gates—at the same time opening them wide to welcome the curious "extras" in. During his first Apert as a fraa, Erasmas eagerly anticipates reconnecting with the landmarks and family he hasn’t seen since he was "collected." But before the week is out, both the existence he abandoned and the one he embraced will stand poised on the brink of cataclysmic change.
Powerful unforeseen forces jeopardize the peaceful stability of mathic life and the established ennui of the Extramuros—a threat that only an unsteady alliance of saecular and avout can oppose—as, one by one, Erasmas and his colleagues, teachers, and friends are summoned forth from the safety of the concent in hopes of warding off global disaster. Suddenly burdened with a staggering responsibility, Erasmas finds himself a major player in a drama that will determine the future of his world—as he sets out on an extraordinary odyssey that will carry him to the most dangerous, inhospitable corners of the planet . . . and beyond.
Robinson Crusoe ergo ‘Crusoe’ Comes to TV
I caught the promotion for the new TV show, ‘Crusoe’ which I believe is going to be on NBC. Growing up, I probably read Robinson Crusoe at least a half dozen times and so I have high hopes that the television show will do the book some justice.
As its a TV show, I doubt that it will completely follow the book to the letter, but will more likely be a serialized adaptation that keeps changing.
When Robinson Crusoe was first written, it was not a novel. It was a serialized article that was published in the equivalent of French newspapers or magazines. It was later pulled together as a collection of serialized stories to form an actual novel. Unlike modern novels, this collection of serialized articles did not have a great deal of form in total, lacking a discernable plot line together, but easily wrapping up short sub plots on a regular basis in the individual article.
This same style was utilized by Alexander Dumas with his works, the Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers and other series combined to later form popular novels.
So as I start to anticipate this serialized group of articles turned into a novel and then broken up into a serialized television show, I can’t help but wonder how many more times this popular story will be recycled to entertain people in the future, whether they are watching it on their cell phones, or via an SD card, or possibly participating in a live adventure in a virtual reality setting like Second Life.
Scottish Time Travel Caribbean Pirate Thriller
Its all about this super hot woman back in the 40′s. She’s a nurse during WWII from the UK. She marries an officer just before the war and after the war they get back together again after being separated for 6 years (as they are deployed to other areas of the world.)
They go on a re-honeymoon in Scotland where they were married. During the honeymoon, she ventures up into the mountains picking herbs for her collection and finds a henge at the top of the hill. She walks between some stones in the hinge and finds herself back in time 200 years earlier.
Now when she walked through the stones, she’s wearing this silky little dress, like a summer dress or something. When she suddenly shows up in t
he 1740′s, everyone thinks she’s a prostitute because she’s so ‘scantily clad’. She runs into her husbands ancestor of 200 years, that happens to be the spitting image of her husband. He tries to molest/rape her, which confuses the crap out of her, because at this point in the book, she hasn’t quite figured out that she’s actually 200 years in the past. (She kind of thinks that she stumbled across a movie that is being filmed or something.)
She is just about to be raped, when some guy hiding in the woods bashes her wood be rapist-in-law ancestor in the head and wisks her off to safety.
She is then asked to save a Scottish guy who has been stabbed in the shoulder with a saber. She manages to do this, despite the fact that people still think she’s a prostitute and after running through the woods a whole bunch, she has half of her bra exposed from rips and tears in her summer dress.
It turns out that the Scottish locals she has hooked up with were being hunted by British soldiers (dragoons, of which her rapist-in-law husband’s ancestor is the captain of the guard and a homosexual sadist to boot).
She ultimately is forced to marry the Scottish man, whom she saved from death in a weird complicated plot twist, and then proceeds to run crazy through Scotland and France trying to prevent the civil war led by Bonnie Prince Charlie back in the 1740′s and avert the potato famine in Scotland and a lot more. Of course in this hot novel, she manages to have very regular sex, in hot and unfathomable ways for the 1740′s in the middle of a civil war and things. As a former nurse she almost gets burned at the stake and finds another lady that had been transported back in time (a former druid from 1967). There’s lots of plot twists and mysteries and weird things happening all the time.
Right now, I’m going into the third book in the series, 20 years after the initial period in the book. She managed to get back to her own time and place pregnant with a child by the Scottish guy from 1740, trying to explain things to her husband in 1946 (some time has passed). They settled back into their own groove, move to America, she becomes a doctor and raises the baby to a hot young twenty something girl. Her present day husband croaks and she decides to take her hot daughter to Scotland and tell her the truth about her real father, where presumably they then both go back in time to track him down after he becomes a pirate of the Caribbean with lots of hot sex for both of them.
This book series does tend to go on for ever, and I’m sure there will probably be generations of hot female leads going back in time, where they are put into sexual situations with hot guys that do not have twenty first century sensibilities, talking watches or A.D.D.
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The Spin is Still Spinning
I have yet again run into a book that I just can’t seem to finish. Maybe I’m getting old, I never used to read books this slowly, especially audio books.
Yet, I find myself again caught up in a book that shouldn’t take too damn long, yet it has. What’s crazier is that I picked up the book, The Spin in order to take a quick break from a very long series that I need a break from.
Next time, I’ll jump into a magazine on garden decor maybe and give up on novels…
Well, then again, I am a story addict, so maybe that’s just not possible.
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