Bunch o' random stuff
So, according to the results of this poll, I'm going to start watching Legend of the Seeker (yes, I know right now the poll is a tie, but it wasn't when I decided). I've got the first couple of episodes and I'll probably watch at least one of them tonight to see if I like it.
I've been reading! Last week I finished Brasyl by Ian McDonald, which I got because it topped a lot of people's "Best of" lists. And it's a good book, really.
It's basically about three main characters who live in different time periods in Brazil: the 1700s, 2006, and 203something (I don't have the book on me to check the exact years). As you read further you discover that these different time periods also exist in different parallel universes from each other (this doesn't give much more away than what is on the back cover).
I found the story interesting, and there turns out to be a twist near the end explaining why there are all of these parallel universes, which I liked because it was a bit different. I can't really say the same for the characters. Most of them annoyed me, but that's a personal issue and I'm not going to say it was a bad book because of that. I'm not sure what it was, but in some ways the book seemed both too long and too short when it came to character arcs. Like some chapters would just drag on and on, with the characters doing fairly boring things, and then the story would leap entire life-changing months and give some quick exposition to catch the reader up. I can't say it was a pacing problem, exactly, because the book moved along at a fairly good clip--the writing style is a little odd and it took me awhile to get used to it, but once that happened the story flowed pretty quickly. I guess I'm just not sure why the author chose to focus on certain aspects of the characters' adventures over others, when I thought maybe the stuff that got glossed over was more interesting than the stuff that didn't.
So the characters weren't life-changing and they were a little annoying (particularly the 2006 woman), but that wasn't a deal-breaker. The story was enough to keep me in the book even when the characters were chafing, which is unusual for me (this is actually a compliment to the author). I think what helped was the clever little connections between universes and time periods that the author included: symbols appearing in more than one time period, a TV show commissioned in 2006 that had become a massively popular soap in 203whatever, patterns that kept repeating in different universes. All of these things were clues to the end, of course, but I had fun just spotting them.
One technical note: my copy of the book seemed sloppily printed and poorly edited. I'm not talking about grammar "mistakes" that were actually part of the writing style, but things like mixed up names (calling a character by the name of another character who wasn't even in the scene), stray quotation marks (seriously, with the quotation marks it was like someone had sprinkled them all over the pages and left them where they fell, regardless if they were anywhere near dialogue or any kind of phrase that might need quotation marks or even another quotation mark to pair up with. Yes, the quotation mark issue was that bad), weird spacing issues with words and paragraphs. It bugged me a lot because these where clearly printing/editing mistakes as opposed to stylistic ones, and the whole thing should have been more professional than that.
Right now I'm reading two books: Duma Key by Stephen King and Anathema by Neal Stephenson. I'm also planning to see if the library has Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood because I need some female authors up in here.
Started going through PC last night for editing...I was about ready to cry after reading through the first chapter because it's just so. Very. Bad. But from the second chapter on I was like, "Oh, this is okay." I mean, it's not perfect, but it's not horribly embarrassing, either. But the first chapter is the most important chapter, and it sucks, and I don't know what to do about it.
I guess it's time for some extensive rewriting.
I've been reading! Last week I finished Brasyl by Ian McDonald, which I got because it topped a lot of people's "Best of" lists. And it's a good book, really.
It's basically about three main characters who live in different time periods in Brazil: the 1700s, 2006, and 203something (I don't have the book on me to check the exact years). As you read further you discover that these different time periods also exist in different parallel universes from each other (this doesn't give much more away than what is on the back cover).
I found the story interesting, and there turns out to be a twist near the end explaining why there are all of these parallel universes, which I liked because it was a bit different. I can't really say the same for the characters. Most of them annoyed me, but that's a personal issue and I'm not going to say it was a bad book because of that. I'm not sure what it was, but in some ways the book seemed both too long and too short when it came to character arcs. Like some chapters would just drag on and on, with the characters doing fairly boring things, and then the story would leap entire life-changing months and give some quick exposition to catch the reader up. I can't say it was a pacing problem, exactly, because the book moved along at a fairly good clip--the writing style is a little odd and it took me awhile to get used to it, but once that happened the story flowed pretty quickly. I guess I'm just not sure why the author chose to focus on certain aspects of the characters' adventures over others, when I thought maybe the stuff that got glossed over was more interesting than the stuff that didn't.
So the characters weren't life-changing and they were a little annoying (particularly the 2006 woman), but that wasn't a deal-breaker. The story was enough to keep me in the book even when the characters were chafing, which is unusual for me (this is actually a compliment to the author). I think what helped was the clever little connections between universes and time periods that the author included: symbols appearing in more than one time period, a TV show commissioned in 2006 that had become a massively popular soap in 203whatever, patterns that kept repeating in different universes. All of these things were clues to the end, of course, but I had fun just spotting them.
One technical note: my copy of the book seemed sloppily printed and poorly edited. I'm not talking about grammar "mistakes" that were actually part of the writing style, but things like mixed up names (calling a character by the name of another character who wasn't even in the scene), stray quotation marks (seriously, with the quotation marks it was like someone had sprinkled them all over the pages and left them where they fell, regardless if they were anywhere near dialogue or any kind of phrase that might need quotation marks or even another quotation mark to pair up with. Yes, the quotation mark issue was that bad), weird spacing issues with words and paragraphs. It bugged me a lot because these where clearly printing/editing mistakes as opposed to stylistic ones, and the whole thing should have been more professional than that.
Right now I'm reading two books: Duma Key by Stephen King and Anathema by Neal Stephenson. I'm also planning to see if the library has Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood because I need some female authors up in here.
Started going through PC last night for editing...I was about ready to cry after reading through the first chapter because it's just so. Very. Bad. But from the second chapter on I was like, "Oh, this is okay." I mean, it's not perfect, but it's not horribly embarrassing, either. But the first chapter is the most important chapter, and it sucks, and I don't know what to do about it.
I guess it's time for some extensive rewriting.