My wife finally got around to reading Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures – Christmas present, and one of the easier gift choices I’ve had to make, honestly – so now I’m reading it. I’m enjoying it, thus far; it’s going to be interesting to see where the movie version combined, changed, and generally played around with events. Which has to happen: a movie has a different narrative flow than a book.
And so, adieu to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Well, really the entire Narnia chronicles – but I think that C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the best of a good series, and at some point I need to watch the movie. Of course, I don’t need to tell any of you this already, do I? The Narnia series retains its significance, even today:
Well, for given values of ‘today.’
And so, adieu to Wylding Hall. Continue reading Book of the Week: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
…out of respect for a man who has since passed on*; but it is no longer an UNFINISHED, bad short story**. I’ve had the blessed thing stuck in the back of my head for two, three years: I was wondering if it would ever get completed. Now I’m going to forget about it for a day or two, do the necessary pass-through, and send it on its way.
That’s it. And, yes: I’m describing the literary equivalent of describing an itch that I’ve finally been able to scratch. And at that I’m probably being kind to myself; there are so many other, less couth, metaphors that would work in this context…
Moe Lane
*Larry Latham: he was the fellow who did the amazingly good Lovecraft is Missing webcomic, and he was taken from us far too soon.
**That turn of phrase shamelessly stolen from Stephen King’s It.
Takes longer than you’d think. Trying to balance finding new markets with submitting new things to markets that have already rejected something of yours is likewise a little tricky. You don’t want to give up on one particular market, but you don’t want to get into a cycle where you get your stories serially (heh) rejected by each of three or four publishers in turn. Also, you know, there are all those submissions guidelines that you have to read: I mention this because I suspect that a lot of people don’t read submissions guidelines, and they probably should.
Still, productive enough work, in its way. Not overly creative, but productive. Also emotionally fraught, but you need to scar tissue yourself about that sort of thing. Life ain’t fair, and neither is the publishing industry.
Not a sale, but the story made it past the first round. Which is encouraging! Lord knows you can feel stalled in this business, sometimes. Or more than sometimes… still, mustn’t grumble. I’ll know more at a later time – and, again, this isn’t a sale, just me making advancing along in the process.
Thanks, by the way, for all the encouragement that I’ve gotten in the past and will get in the future. It really does help. Anybody who does art will tell you that, too.
Is there something interactive online somewhere that can help with that*? – Not that I’m ever likely to need to convert from that alphabet into the Roman one, but it might be helpful if I ever need a block of text for a game, or something. …For that matter, is the Tengwar subject to copyright? I mean, obviously Tolkien created the various scripts and alphabets himself.
Moe Lane
*I did look, and I found some helpful tables, but I’m looking for something more interactive.
Oh, 2017. How much nicer you are to me than that last, horrid year was. From Hollywood Reporter:
After nabbing a spaceship’s worth of Oscar nominations for Arrival, Shawn Levy and his 21 Laps banner are jumping back into the elevated sci-fi drama genre.
Fox 2000 has preemptively picked up an untitled pitch that is based on Inconstant Moon, a short story written by Larry Niven, the author behind the sci-fi literary classic Ringworld.
Continue reading Arrival/Needful Things production team 21 Laps to do Larry Niven’s Inconstant Moon.
Now, you could order “The International Spy Film Guide 1945 – 1989” via Amazon, but if you get it directly from the website then it works out to about $200 American, which is about thirty bucks less. I don’t exactly want to own this, though*. I want my local library to own it. I now bitterly regret not spending the last ten years worming my way onto whatever advisory board handles said library’s acquisitions…
Via Ken Hite. Of course.
Moe Lane
*More accurately, I don’t have $200 to blow on something that will spend 95% of its life on my shelf, gathering dust.
I am fairly embarrassed that I somehow missed Ken Hite’s and Christina Rodriguez’s Goodnight Azathoth. Sloppy of me, really. Oh, well, my oversight was easily fixed.
I am starting to feel that the single most egregious thing that was done to me in college was to omit explaining just how entertaining Jane Austen was as a writer. I mean, sheesh, it turns out that Northanger Abbey is a meta-fiction parody that snarks out on the excesses of the genre fiction of the day… and written by somebody who was good at said genre, too. I would have happily read that. Shoot: if Jane Austen was around today I’d probably be signed up for her Patreon and her Twitter feed. She’d certainly be writing books in the genres that I read.
And so, adieu to Red Storm Rising. Heh. A Jane Austen technothriller. The mind reels…
