![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wow. I been kinda busy, and haven't gotten to too many of these recently, have I?
Work has been busy the past two months, but we're just about back up to full staff, which is a tremendous relief. Not exactly out of the woods, but definitely out of the thicket, and the trees hereabouts are starting to get spaced out a bit further, with occasional bits of actual daylight sneaking through the small interstices of the canopy. (Wow, I can really beat on a metaphor until it bleeds.) We're in full summer swing now, and it's been hot. And rainy. My son is learning words left and right. Kind of freaky how I can come home from work, and he'll have a new word to show off. But really, it's fantastic.
Writing: A story scrawled halfway, sorta-kinda. Not exactly the worst, roughest draft of anything I've ever done. But, you know, kinda close. One story revised. So many stories currently banging on the inside of my brain-pan right now, that I need to start letting them out before they do some permanent damage. I know I need to wrap up some of these other revisions too, but I have to get a few more of the new ideas out onto paper, before they storm off in a huff.
Oh yeah, last month, my story "Sucker Kiss" came out in the GSHW Anthology: Dark Territories.
Submissions: One story out the door this month.
Conventions: (New category) Went to my first SF convention in....16 years? Readercon. Still jazzed up from it. Quite a good time there, and I intend to go back, as often as I can manage/afford. Met cool people. Had cool conversations. Heard lots of interesting panels. Laughed hysterically at the bad prose contest.
Editing: No editorial duties this month.
Reading: One book read this month.
Dust, by Elizabeth Bear: This is the first SF novel of hers that I've read. Quite a far future SF novel, where the technology extrapolation borders on the magical. I think when you get out that far from modern day technology, its nigh impossible to not approach that limit. I'm not certain if I'd classify this as a Space Opera, though it contains many of the tropes: swords, armor, "princesses" knights. Even angels, and basilisks. Yet the author has managed to give us these tropes, much more in the fantasy vein than stock science fiction, in a way that you feel you can understand. Over time, the generation ship, that has had some kind of catastrophe, and is now stranded in space, is no longer fully functional. And the society, which it seems was never meant to be a full fledged permanent society, has also degraded with the environment, even as it has continued to evolve forward. Which was something quite interesting, to see a society simultaneously falling back to older social forms, and drifting forward into new evolutions of structure, of society, of gender, even physical form. In fact, one of the main characters is a woman who was an angel, with engineered wings. Beyond all the trappings, the neat tech, the interesting situation, the multi-leveled intrigue between factions of both people, and beings that are beyond human, what holds the story together is the characters. Rein and Perceval. These are people who are each in their way broken at the start of the novel, and frankly, I'm not sure their lot improves over its length, except perhaps for finding each other. But somehow, that struggle feels right, all the more interesting because its both personal, and by the end of the novel, a struggle for society itself. Some bits left me a bit disappointed: I wasn't particularly fond of the unblades, and I couldn't quite understand why Perceval seemed to be the only knight errant character, and more to the point, the only such character with wings. This seemed to get muddied further with the whole Angel/system concept, and never really came around for me. But these were, in the end, rather minor problems in an otherwise enjoyable book.
Work has been busy the past two months, but we're just about back up to full staff, which is a tremendous relief. Not exactly out of the woods, but definitely out of the thicket, and the trees hereabouts are starting to get spaced out a bit further, with occasional bits of actual daylight sneaking through the small interstices of the canopy. (Wow, I can really beat on a metaphor until it bleeds.) We're in full summer swing now, and it's been hot. And rainy. My son is learning words left and right. Kind of freaky how I can come home from work, and he'll have a new word to show off. But really, it's fantastic.
Writing: A story scrawled halfway, sorta-kinda. Not exactly the worst, roughest draft of anything I've ever done. But, you know, kinda close. One story revised. So many stories currently banging on the inside of my brain-pan right now, that I need to start letting them out before they do some permanent damage. I know I need to wrap up some of these other revisions too, but I have to get a few more of the new ideas out onto paper, before they storm off in a huff.
Oh yeah, last month, my story "Sucker Kiss" came out in the GSHW Anthology: Dark Territories.
Submissions: One story out the door this month.
Conventions: (New category) Went to my first SF convention in....16 years? Readercon. Still jazzed up from it. Quite a good time there, and I intend to go back, as often as I can manage/afford. Met cool people. Had cool conversations. Heard lots of interesting panels. Laughed hysterically at the bad prose contest.
Editing: No editorial duties this month.
Reading: One book read this month.
Dust, by Elizabeth Bear: This is the first SF novel of hers that I've read. Quite a far future SF novel, where the technology extrapolation borders on the magical. I think when you get out that far from modern day technology, its nigh impossible to not approach that limit. I'm not certain if I'd classify this as a Space Opera, though it contains many of the tropes: swords, armor, "princesses" knights. Even angels, and basilisks. Yet the author has managed to give us these tropes, much more in the fantasy vein than stock science fiction, in a way that you feel you can understand. Over time, the generation ship, that has had some kind of catastrophe, and is now stranded in space, is no longer fully functional. And the society, which it seems was never meant to be a full fledged permanent society, has also degraded with the environment, even as it has continued to evolve forward. Which was something quite interesting, to see a society simultaneously falling back to older social forms, and drifting forward into new evolutions of structure, of society, of gender, even physical form. In fact, one of the main characters is a woman who was an angel, with engineered wings. Beyond all the trappings, the neat tech, the interesting situation, the multi-leveled intrigue between factions of both people, and beings that are beyond human, what holds the story together is the characters. Rein and Perceval. These are people who are each in their way broken at the start of the novel, and frankly, I'm not sure their lot improves over its length, except perhaps for finding each other. But somehow, that struggle feels right, all the more interesting because its both personal, and by the end of the novel, a struggle for society itself. Some bits left me a bit disappointed: I wasn't particularly fond of the unblades, and I couldn't quite understand why Perceval seemed to be the only knight errant character, and more to the point, the only such character with wings. This seemed to get muddied further with the whole Angel/system concept, and never really came around for me. But these were, in the end, rather minor problems in an otherwise enjoyable book.