random thoughts...
So CHamp Car is dead. Could there be anything better for the unified IRL than to have:
- Paul Tracy get into it with someone at Homestead, including a little fisticuffs? Kanaan or Dixon would be "best", publicity-wise...
- Graham Rahal and Marco Andretti in a serious dogfight all race long
- Danica and Helio shooting it out for the win.
- a Michigan International Speedway 500-miler in Late July, with a major sponsorship package
Raymond E. Feist does it again. Into A Dark Realm totally blew me away. There are something like five or six plot threads going at all times, with less than that number of character groupings. Valko's thread is the most awesome. I can sell a protagonist who is, by most standards, quite insane just fine. That's easy to imagine. I can sell the idea that a city is defended by beams of concentrated light and steel swords at the same time, because while it doesn't make sense from our perspective, it's not too difficult to imagine that it could have happened in another world/universe/whatever. However, the idea I have always heard laughed at as impossible to imagine is "evil as a concious choice" and stuff. Trust me, Feist can sell you on it. Valko's thread? AMAZING writing. Not necessarily as a technical exercise (because I'd almost certainly fail those standards), but in the sense of he makes one of the concepts most widely ridiculed in my literary circle not only imaginable, but vividly plausible.
Good luck to Sarah Fisher on her new Indy team. She'll need it with the recent merger. However, she's got enough talent for the car. May her team find enough talent for the driver.
Thanks to kuroichi, who has been mowing through the backlog of chapters, and swears that once he's through the initial experience, he'll go through and make critical notes. I eagerly await his results, because there's a lot of "untested" material there.