End of Month Roundup

[temporus]

Summer is winding down, only three more weeks, and fall will be upon us.  I guess things are moving in that lazy summer's pace.  That includes my writing.  I hope that I can pick up momentum as we slide into fall.

Writing front:  One revision, though I'm not happy with it, and will need to do another pass.  I did wrest the word count under control, and I think I helped the pacing but I need to let it sit longer before I can really clean it up and make it presentable.  Started on a new story, but I've determined that I've got the wrong character as the main character, and I'm going to have to start it over.  I just really need to concentrate and let the character inform me what's most important.

One story, still out on submission.

Reading:  In a continuation of my summer "burst" I managed to get another three books read this month.

Lion's Blood, by Steven Barnes:  This was a difficult read.  Difficult in the way, I think, the author wants it to be difficult.  It's a convincing alternate history where Africans, not Europeans end up the conquering force of the world.  Whites are the slaves, and Blacks are the masters.  What makes it so convincing is that it eschews the fantastic, or sci-fi aspects of alternate history, and hinges merely on  a few key points different in the past.  History is rife with moments where things turned on such small happenstances, and Barnes seems to find just enough of them to shift the globe into a realistic alternative.  On a more personal level, one of the main characters, captured as a child and bound into slavery is a young lad from Ireland, land of my own ancestors.  It made following his horrors all the more poignant.  Though mere words can only convey the barest whispers of what that life might have been like for real slaves, even still there were moments I had to take a short break from the story.  Dense, luscious language, believable characters, and tense action, I look forward to the next novel in this setting, Zulu Heart.

Stardust, by Neil Gaiman: I purchased this novel some months ago, before I even realized it was being made into a movie.  However, in an earlier spate of book acquisitions, this one kind of got tucked into the middle of the pile, and somewhat overlooked.  Once the movie came out, I didn't have the time to read it before seeing it.  I had a good time with the movie.  Then I made a point to dig out the book and read it.  What a different work.  I don't consider that a bad thing, mind, because a book is not a movie, and a movie can never be a book.  So that there were differences, even rather substantive differences isn't a problem to me.  The book, however, feels simultaneously more adult than the movie was, and at the same time more of a fairy tale.  There's also something a bit more English about the novel than the movie.  If you are a fan of the movie, or of Gaiman, it's worth the read. 

Crystal Rain, by Tobias S. Buckell: I've been on a massive fantasy bender recently.  It was about time that I took on a little something different, and I'd heard enough good things about this book to give it a whirl.  What a nice jump back into science fiction.  A very interesting world, with a back story that hits you at just the right pace--no long boring info-dumps, yet always enough information so that  the story and action are credible.  It bookended the month interestingly, where both this novel, and Lion's Blood, had "Aztecs" as the opposing force.  As well, the heroes are of African descent in both works.  That is about where the similarities end. Nanagada feels like an island itself, a world stranded among the stars.  Though there has been a regression of technology, a sort of post cataclysmic (not apocalyptic) world, we see the mostly Caribbean descended culture in a phase of rebirth, when the feared enemy the Azteca are thrust upon the scene and life is no longer idyllic.  I enjoyed seeing the layers involved in the war, and characters who are not easily broken down into white hats and black hats.  Sure, there's no question in the end for whom a reader should be rooting, but there are no perfectly clean hands here.  The war takes its toll, and the resolution felt all the more real for it.