Author: Ryan (Page 10 of 16)

Book Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

May 23, 2015 / Ryan / 1 Comment

There’s no shortage of post-apocalyptic stories out there, but it has been a while since I’ve seen one done this well. The taxonomy of post-apocalyptic fiction is worth its own blog post, but for our current purposes, it can be simplified down to two types: the loud, angry apocalypse, and the quiet, sad apocalypse. Station Eleven falls squarely into the latter camp. It doesn’t tread any new ground: the premise is that a highly contagious and lethal strain of the flu sweeps the world and causes the collapse of civilization in a matter of days, leaving behind isolated groups of survivors struggling to come to terms with their new world. But the strength of this novel is not in an original premise, but in its almost flawless execution.

The story is centered around the events of a night just before the end of the world, when famous actor Arthur Leander dies of a heart attack onstage while performing as King Lear. From this central event, the novel jumps forward and back in time. It looks ahead to decades after the apocalypse, following the Travelling Symphony, a caravan of musicians and actors with a motto borrowed from an old episode of Star Trek: “Survival is not sufficient”. They roam what use to be Michigan, trying to survive and putting on performances of Shakespeare and classical music. The novel also jumps back in time, providing glimpses of characters’ lives before the apocalypse. The decadence of Hollywood and jet-setting business people contrasting with the “simple” life of the survivors of the end of civilization.

In a less-skilled author’s hands, a novel with so many jumps between characters and times could become confusing or difficult to follow, but that’s not a problem here. This book is very well-written: it’s well above par compared to most genre writing, while avoiding purple prose. Mandel deftly handles the shifts in time, place, and point of view in such a way that they make perfect sense and all build upon each other, weaving together connections between them all. She also manages the impressive feat of making the pre-apocalypse scenes just as interesting, if not more so, than the post-apocalyptic ones.

Station Eleven is the sad, quiet type of post-apocalyptic novel, reflecting poignantly on all the things about modern life that we take for granted, and speculating about the values that people would try to keep alive after the end of the world. Yet for all that, it doesn’t wallow in sadness. The feeling that it evokes is more bittersweet than depressing, and there is a hopeful strain to it.

I highly recommend this novel, whether you are a fan of the post-apocalyptic genre, or just a fan of good writing. This is one of those novels I found myself savoring I approached the end because I didn’t want it to be over, and I’m looking forward to reading it again someday.

Book Review: Fool’s Assassin by Robin Hobb

May 5, 2015 / Ryan / 2 Comments

Of all the epic fantasy series I’ve read, Robin Hobb’s Farseer books are among my favorite, and that’s primarily because of the great job that Hobb does getting the reader inside the main character, FitzChivalry’s head (for better or worse). The previous books follow him from being a young boy struggling to survive court intrigue, to a trained assassin working for the king, to a battle-weary man seeking solitude after a life of trauma and loss. I was surprised to hear that Hobb was coming out with a new Fitz trilogy since his story was pretty clearly finished, but at the same time I was excited to spend some more time with Fitz and the other characters from past books.

Warning: It’s hard to discuss this book without spoiling anything. I’ll keep the spoilers mild but you have been warned.

Fool’s Assassin starts with Fitz in late middle age, enjoying a peaceful retirement with his wife Molly. The book moves slowly, but the writing was good enough to keep me turning the page as the reader is brought up to speed on some of Fitz’s past exploits and his current situation. Although they both had thought she was too old, Molly announces that she is pregnant. After a long section where Fitz believes Molly has become demented rather than pregnant (my first reminder of the downside of being inside Fitz’s head: he is all too often oblivious to major plot points when it is convenient for him to be so) she eventually does give birth to a tiny but healthy daughter, Bee. Everyone assumes Bee won’t live long because she is so small, but other than her small size she turns out to be healthy, capable, and smart. She’s just shy and a bit odd. When Molly dies suddenly, Fitz is left to raise Bee himself.

About halfway through the book, the point of view chapters start to alternate between Bee and Fitz, and much as I have enjoyed the previous Fitz books, I found myself dreading Fitz’s chapters and looking forward to Bee’s. Fitz has the habit of throwing himself long, elaborate pity parties in his head, and the reader gets to come along for the ride. There is some nice writing in here about dealing with loss of a spouse (Hobb writes poignant and bittersweet very well), and the challenges of parenting, but Fitz still tends to be a downer. And as this book progresses, his tendency to be wrong about everything just to add conflict to the plot got to be really annoying. Bee on the other hand is everyone’s favorite point of view character type: smarter than she seems, constantly underestimated by everyone around her, clever but flawed enough to be interesting, with hints of extraordinary abilities that even she does not fully understand. (Actually now that I think about it, she reminds me a lot of Bean in the Ender’s Game books.)

The book continues on, with other new (and often highly annoying) characters introduced to add conflict, but unfortunately the plot does almost nothing, and that ends up being my biggest criticism. This is not a finished book, this is the first act of a book that has been split into three pieces so it can be released as a trilogy. There’s a lot of filler here and not much plot, and what plot there is has some pretty significant holes in it that I won’t go into to avoid major spoilers. The writing was still good enough that I found myself staying up late turning pages, but in the end all this book gives is the inciting event for the real story. I’ll be reading the sequels, but if I had known how unsatisfying this one would be I would have waited for all three books to be out first.

Game Review: Dragon Age Inquisition

March 29, 2015 / Ryan / 0 Comments

I got an Xbox One for Christmas, and the first game that I played on it was Dragon Age: Inquisition. The game has been winning all sorts of awards, and so I figured I might as well have my first Xbox One gaming experience be as epic as possible. So did it live up to the hype?

dragonageinquisition_exploringthehinterlands

The environments in this game are gorgeous.

Yes! Mostly. Inquisition blends the character-driven games that Bioware is now famous for (see: Mass Effect and the earlier Dragon Age games) with a much more open world (no doubt because of the great success of Skyrim). In some ways this was great: Inquisition allows you to explore many huge environments and get lost on side quests to your heart’s content, and unlike Skyrim there is much more variety in the different areas. You can explore desert wastelands, lush forests, rain-drenched rocky coasts, along with the more traditional “mountainous temperate European-like” landscapes like in Skyrim. And of course, these all look gorgeous on the Xbox One. The game generally looks great. My main complaint about the graphics are the characters. It seems as though the game designers got so excited about the ability to have specular reflections rendered in real time, that they made everything shiny, including people. The result: everyone looks like they are wet, and wearing extremely shiny lip gloss. Also, anything that is actually supposed to be shiny ends up looking like it is covered in sequins, especially if it’s in the background and slightly out of focus. But, after playing for a while I stopped noticing these graphical quirks, and for the most part the game looks awesome.

The downside of having all of these huge and beautiful environments to explore is that it tends to dilute the actual storyline of the game. By far the best thing about previous Bioware games were the character arcs of the various interesting party members that can join you in your adventures. There are some good character arcs in Inquisition too, but they sometimes felt less coherent and meaningful than in previous games. I should note, however, that as usual Bioware does a nice job with the diversity of its characters. There are strong women and people of color, and a variety of sexual orientations. In fact, one of my favorite subplots had no climactic battle or world-changing choices. Instead, you help your gay team-mate confront his disapproving father. These sorts of character-driven moments are often much better and more memorable than yet another battle with a dragon or a wizard. It helps that the writing and voice acting in Inquisition are among the best I’ve seen in a video game.

These characters are the best part of the game.

Unfortunately, despite the interesting cast of characters, I found the main plot of the game to be pretty weak. This is likely because it was stretched so thin as I spent my time wandering around the open world doing other things and then occasionally checking back in to the plot once I ran out of other things to do. By the time I decided to finish the game, my character and team members were strong enough that the final battle was laughably easy, and because it had been many many hours since I last checked in with the plot, I didn’t really care that much about it. It didn’t help that the main bad guy is a very cliche and one-dimensional villain. The ending was so anti-climactic that I was sure there was going to be some shocking twist, but nope. That was that. For such a huge game, the ending felt small and unimportant.

All that said, as I think back to the major events in the game’s main story and subplots, I realize that they are full of some great scenes. There’s a very fun sequence where you have to infiltrate a royal ball and stop (or aid) an assassination attempt. You get to defend a town from an advancing army, explore ancient ruins in search of long-forgotten power, disrupt an illegal mining operation, stop an evil mage from distorting time to save his son, and of course you get to fight some dragons (hunting down all the dragons is much more exciting and challenging than the actual final boss battle).

Basically, my review boils down to this: Dragon Age: Inquisition is a great game, but it is trying to do too many things. If I were to play it again, I would resist my completionist urges and focus entirely on the main story and the sub-plots for my party members. I think doing that would make them much more enjoyable by essentially cutting out the filler and focusing on the good stuff. The alternative way to play is to basically ignore the stories and just run around doing whatever you want like in Skyrim. Learn to craft armor and weapons, find treasure in every nook and cranny, do every fetch quest for every villager in need of help. This will let you see more of the game, but will rob the plot of its immediacy.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Bioware does next. The fad seems to be to make games have ever-more open worlds, but I really hope Bioware decides to buck that trend and turn all the effort that they put into making Inquisition so open, and instead direct that at crafting a great story with meaningful choices and interesting characters. Too much freedom makes it impossible to tell a good story, and for me the story is what makes Bioware games great.

Book Review: The Mirror Empire

January 12, 2015 / Ryan / 0 Comments

I really wanted to like this one. I first encountered Kameron Hurley’s writing in her truly excellent piece “We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle, and Slaves Narrative“, which won a Hugo award last year. When I heard that she had a new epic fantasy series coming out, I was excited to read some fantasy that dares to break out of the mold of western European clones and Tolkien imitators. On this count, Mirror Empire does not disappoint.

Mirror Empire is set in a world populated by mostly matriarchal societies, where most soldiers and religious leaders are women, and men are prized for their beauty and/or dancing skill. Marriage is not limited to one man and one woman, but can involve many adults of various genders. In one of the societies, there are three pronouns, in another society, there are five.

Gender roles aren’t the only place where Mirror Empire deviates significantly from your typical Tolkien imitators. Much of the world is an inhospitable forest, populated by carnivorous plants. Fortresses and temples are living structures, grown and sculpted by magic users (we’ll get back to the magic in a moment). The Dhai culture which lives in the forests are pacifists: they aren’t even allowed to touch another person without asking permission first, and they eat only plants, except when a loved one dies, in which case that person’s organs are cooked and served in a ceremonial feast.

In this world, instead of horses, people ride giant dogs or giant bears, except calling the creatures “dogs” or “bears” is a somewhat misleading shorthand. When they are described in detail it becomes clear that they are something more bizarre altogether. Instead of using pigeons or ravens to carry messages, “sparrows” are used, but again the common English word does not convey how bizarre the “sparrows” in Mirror Empire are.

The magic in Mirror Empire is based on the orbits of several moons. As a certain moon rises higher in the sky, those people who can channel that moon’s power are capable of doing magic. One of the moons gives control over air. Another, control over plants. The story is set during a time when the moon Oma is ascendant. The other moons rise and fall on decade-long timescales, but Oma rises only every few centuries. Oma gives all sorts of strange powers, mostly driven by the power of blood, but it also has the strange side effect that it opens portals to parallel dimensions and that’s where things get interesting.

As Oma rises, it is revealed that strangers in a parallel world, very similar to the main world where the story is set, are invading. For each person in the main world, their clone exists in the mirror world. To cross from one world to the other, your clone in that other world must be dead. A couple of key things are different in the parallel world. First, the Dhai are not pacifists, they are a deadly and powerful empire. And second, the parallel world is doomed. So the warlike Dhai in that world would very much like to come take over the main world of the story. To do that, they have to start killing people, so more can cross over. Plot ensues.

It’s a fascinating world, and an interesting premise. Unfortunately, the storytelling doesn’t live up to the ambitious worldbuilding. From the beginning, I struggled to keep the many characters straight. There are numerous point of view characters, and a multitude of additional minor characters. Even when I did know who the characters in a given scene were, I rarely understood their motivations. At one point a character dramatically kills herself but I still have no idea why. Later, another character holds an innocent little girl hostage, and then kills her and shows zero remorse. Not understanding character goals is a death-blow to just about any fiction, and particularly when they point of view character is of the anti-hero type. Unless you are really really deep inside their head and have a deep understanding of what they are doing and why the anti-hero will just come across as a confusing jerk.

I should make it clear that I don’t mind books with large casts of characters who have complex motivations. Among my favorite books of all time are Shogun and the Game of Thrones series, both of which have lots of characters and complicated political intrigue and conflicting motives. Why did I have an easier time following Game of Thrones than Mirror Empire? Part of it is that Game of Thrones has it easy. It’s set in a familiar western European fantasy setting. The names are all very similar to typical English names. I think author skill also plays a big role here. George R.R. Martin uses a lot of different tricks to help readers keep track of who’s who. His books are full of sigils and heraldry and titles nicknames for a very good reason: they are shorthand for the characters. You may not remember who Gregor Clegane and Oberyn Martell are, but when you introduce them as “The Mountain that Rides” with the three Clegane dogs on a field of yellow, and “The Viper” with the Sun and Spear of House Martell of Dorne, all of a sudden the reader has a lot more to go on. Likewise, Martin uses heraldry to immediately make the motives and allegiance of even anonymous soldiers more clear. If the point of view character is a Stark and they run into a bunch of soldiers with Lannister lions on their uniforms, you know there is going to be trouble. Mirror Empire lacked a lot of these clues, and combined with the less familiar world, I think that played a big role in my confusion.

I hoped at the beginning of Mirror Empire that things would get more clear as I read on, but although some things are explained, I spent much of the book confused. It was like missing the first few weeks of math class and then trying to catch up. Even as I caught up, the story built on previous details and events that I only partially understood, so that comprehension was always just out of reach. By the end I was reading, not because I was invested in the events of the story, but because I wanted to be done.

So, bottom line, I’m conflicted about Mirror Empire. There is so much about it that I love. It’s not a Tolkien knock-off! It is set in a bizarre and interesting world. It plays lots of fun games with gender roles. Carnivorous forests! Evil invaders with an actual motive beyond just “spreading darkness”. I want to see more of this level of creativity in fantasy! I just wish that, in this case, the execution matched the ambition. It’s pretty clear from the ending that there will be more books in this series. Hurley is a relatively new author, so I am hopeful that with more experience, her future books won’t suffer from the problems that made Mirror Empire fall short of its very lofty goals.

Rapid Fire Reviews: Interstellar, Catching Fire, The Postman, Dangerous Women,The Book Thief

November 30, 2014 / Ryan / 0 Comments

I’ve been super busy so I have fallen behind on reviewing things here, but I have still been consuming lots of media, so here are some rapid fire reviews.

The Book Thief

This is a well-written story about a girl living in World War 2 era Germany. The plot builds a little too slowly for my taste, but the characters are great, and the writing is excellent, with lots of vivid, often surreal imagery. I listened to the audiobook and the reader was very good. Note: this is a book set during WWII, narrated by Death. So yeah, it’s gonna be sad.

Dangerous Women

This is a collection of short stories and novellas edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardener Dozois, with contributions from tons of big names in the fantasy, sci-fi, horror, and noir/mystery genres. I actually haven’t finished it, but I’m about 3/4 of the way through and I can comment on what I’ve listened to so far. As with all anthologies, the stories are a bit hit or miss. In theory, the uniting theme is the title of the anthology “Dangerous Women”, but the various stories interpret this differently. Be warned, these are not all feminist stories about strong female characters, though there are plenty of those. A few standouts so far are: Megan Lindholm (aka Robin Hobb)’s story “Neighbors”, about an older woman grappling with alzheimers was powerful and sad. The genre elements of the story gave it a satisfying ending, but in a way it felt like cheating because in real life someone in the protagonist’s situation doesn’t have that option. Brandon Sanderson’s “Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell” was a very nice story, and in this shorter form, his signature worldbuilding skills are even more impressive than in his novels, in my opinion. The story is set in a pretty traditional medieval fantasy setting, but the way Sanderson builds that setting so deftly, while weaving in the uniqueness that drives the story, is just really impressive. “Bombshells” was my first taste of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series, which I’ve been meaning to check out for a while. Despite having a massive spoiler in it, this story was a good, fun introduction to some characters in the series, and very strongly reminded me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As for the bad, I didn’t much like “My Heart is Either Broken” by Megan Abbott, and I found “I know how to pick ’em” by Lawrence Block to be downright awful. Not the writing, mind you: it was well-written, but the story itself is just disturbing and gross and I wish I had not read it.

The Postman

This is a classic post-apocalyptic book, and I am glad I finally got around to reading it. I’m in the midst of playing Wastelend 2, a post-apocalyptic computer game, and the long-awaited sequel to Wasteland, which came out in 1988. Wasteland inspired the Fallout series of games, and it is pretty clear that The Postman was one of the inspirations for Wasteland. Anyway, The Postman was a rare example of a post-apocalyptic novel that is somewhat optimistic. The premise is that the main character finds an old mail-carrier’s uniform, and survives by telling people he has come from the Restored United States. Except his lie starts to have a life of its own. Much like The Stand, another classic post-apocalyptic novel, this one is at its best in the beginning and then starts to lose its magic toward the end. In particular (spoilers coming up) I found it annoying that, after spending the book showing that people working together and helping each other is far better than the “survival of the fittest” mentality of the bad guys, the climax of the novel involved the good guys recruiting someone who was big and strong enough to fight the evil general. It would have been more fitting with the theme of the novel if, say, they had outsmarted the survivalists, or incited a revolt, or something. Also, this book seems to think that it is feminist, but it never quite gets there. There are women who do courageous things at the end, but even as the main character praises them, he can’t help but call them crazy. Also, the man character is constantly sleeping with naive young women 10 years or more younger than him. But criticisms aside, this was still an enjoyable post-apocalyptic novel with a rare positive spin on things.

Mockingjay Part 1: Catching Fire

I am annoyed at the trend in Hollywood of splitting up movies into multiple parts to make more money. But unlike in some cases (like the travesty that are the Hobbit movies) the Hunger Games movies are consistently really good and Catching Fire was no exception. It doesn’t feel bloated at all (unlike the Hobbit movies), the acting is good, and as far as I can tell it is pretty faithful to the book (though it’s been a while since I read the series). I suspect that Part 2 may actually be better than the book, since my main memory of the book is a series of increasingly crazy action scenes that I suspect will be better on screen than on the page. Anyway, This series of movies continues to be surprisingly good, even despite the obvious money grab of splitting the third book into two movies. Also? Actual competent and strong female characters! Plural! Not even dressed in implausible “sexy” costumes!

Interstellar

This movie was great, and emotionally draining. Without giving too much away, I would describe Interstellar as basically a combination of 2001, Contact, and Moon, which if you know me, you know is high praise. For a movie about interstellar travel, the science is surprisingly good, though not so fanatically obsessed with staying realistic as to hurt the story. Great demonstrations of the effects of general relativity and simulating gravity in a rotating spacecraft. Not so great understanding of tidal forces or planetary remote sensing. There are a few times when the characters give somewhat ham-handed speeches but mostly the writing and acting are very good. I can definitely see this being excellent at an IMAX theater.

Want to Read my Novel (draft)?

November 5, 2014 / Ryan / 2 Comments

It’s November, and for those of us with the inclination to write, that means one thing: National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)! Anyone who writes either has taken the plunge and is vomiting words into a mess of a first draft every night in an effort to reach 50,000 words by the end of the month, or else knows others who have taken on the challenge.

I’ve decided not to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. My September and October were rather stressful this year and so I’m trying to relax a bit before things get crazy again with conferences and holidays. Besides, I haven’t finished editing my novel from last year. Unfortunately, I seem to have lost my momentum on last year’s novel, and I think it’s time to set it aside and start something else. I cheated a bit last year and instead of starting on November 1 with a blank page, I was already 15,000 words or so into a draft. Now, after some editing to fill in gaps, the manuscript stands at about 83,000 words, and I have decided that, if I’m going to set it aside and start another project, the least I can do is share what I’ve got with anyone who is interested.

Now, before I post the link, a caveat, and some requests.

Caveat: This is a draft. It is rough around the edges (and in the middle, and pretty much everywhere…), and there are all sorts of problems with it that I should fix. If you get far enough you will find characters that disappear or appear out of nowhere, gaps in the plot, missing scenes and chapters, and notes to myself that I haven’t yet addressed. You’ll also notice that the chapters may be broken up strangely – this is a side effect of the program I use for writing. I spent approximately 3 seconds compiling all the individual chapter and scene documents into the final manuscript, and didn’t bother with fixing little details. You’re seeing a work in progress. I wouldn’t even call it a second draft, since my edits didn’t even make it through the novel once. It’s maybe a 1.5th draft.

Requests: I am done working on this novel for the time being, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in what you think. I would love to hear your general, big-picture comments. Namely, what do you observe in reading this that I need to work on when I try writing something new? (I have some things in mind, but I’d be curious to see if what I think matches with what you think) What (if anything) worked well? I’d also be interested to know if you think this novel is something that I should re-visit at some point and try to polish into a more final version, or if I should just learn what lessons I can from it and move on. Other general comments are also welcome. What I don’t want to hear about are little details like typos, bad grammar, or things that are so specific that they don’t really let me know how the writing is working as a whole.

With that said, here’s where you can download a PDF of the manuscript. If you’re on the fence, here’s a brief summary of what to expect: The novel is set in an alternate world, but the major events and characters are modeled closely on the Spanish conquest of the Incas. The main characters Rimaq and Saya are twin siblings who find themselves on opposing sides of the war: Rimaq as a translator for the invading conquerors, and Saya as a leader of the resistance. There is no magic or anything, but it is not set on Earth and the cultures depicted are not meant to be exact representations of the Inca or the Spanish although there are a lot of similarities.

Read as much or as little as you like/can stand, and let me know via email what you think. (And even though the manuscript is at a public link, please don’t share the manuscript widely without my permission.)

Some thoughts on turning 30

November 4, 2014 / Ryan / 3 Comments

I turned 30 the other day. At the time, I was swamped with work while also hosting my dad who was in town helping us to build a proper deck to replace the old rickety one that came with the house. People asked me how it felt to reach such a milestone and I replied, honestly, that I hadn’t had much time to process it. Now that it’s been a little while, I can tell you how it feels. It feels like an ending and a beginning.

Turning 30 is, in a way, a culmination of a long period of my life that I would describe as “preparation.” For most of my life, everything has been geared toward preparing me for a nebulous future that has gradually come into focus. The goals have been concrete and well-defined. Graduate from high school. Get into a good college. Graduate from college. Get into a good grad school. Finish grad school. Get a good post-doc. Finish the post-doc, get a permanent position. Through a combination of hard work and what seems, at times, to be miraculous luck, I have achieved each of these goals in turn, right on schedule. As of a month ago, I have a permanent position doing the sort of work that I have been preparing for for most of my life. It’s a strange feeling to look to my future and see no distinct marker of achievement. There will be no more graduations and diplomas. No more term-limited positions.It is comforting but also somewhat terrifying to think that the job I have now is basically the job I will have twenty years from now. My years and years of professional preparation are over, and now it’s time to do the work I have trained for.

In parallel to my professional preparation, of course, there is the personal “preparation” for adulthood. College taught independence, and a certain level of comfort with who I am. I met my wife as college was ending. We moved in together in grad school. We went on vacations together. We got a dog. We got engaged. We got married. We moved across the country. We bought a house. All the while, we were learning the million lessons that go into figuring out how to live life as an adult.

Like having a permanent job, owning a house has been a strange experience. When you move away to college, you go from a place that you call “home” to having no real permanent home. At first, the length of time spent living somewhere is very short, just one school year per dorm room. Then I moved to a rental house (interspersed with brief stays over the summer at various internships). In grad school I lived in a condo and after 5 years it was starting to feel like home, but at the same time, I always knew that it would not be permanent, that I would have to leave after I graduated. It was difficult to leave, but inevitable.

In Arizona we briefly lived in an apartment but then finally bought a house and settled in. And now, with a permanent job here, it looks likely that we will be living in this house for a long time. It’s finally safe to call a place “home” again, after years of withholding that term.

Turning 30 feels like an ending because it coincides with the end of this long stage of my life that has been preparation for living it. Now a new stage is beginning, called Being An Adult. It is bittersweet to reach this point. The hardest part for me is knowing that, going forward, I will never have more free time than I do right now. My job responsibilities continue to increase, and in all likelihood Erin and I will be starting a family in the next few years and what remains of our free time will be consumed by caring for kids. Of course these are all good things. On the work front it is great to feel that what I do is important, and that people depend upon me. On the personal front, I think having kids is going to be wonderful. But that doesn’t change the fact that it will fundamentally change my life.

It’s frustrating because even now, with the most free time that I am likely to ever have until I retire, I never get done what I want to do. I have achieved most of the goals that I have set for my career, and so the next major goal that I have set for myself is to write a book that gets published. And yet, when I have some free time, more often than not it’s spent on social media or playing video games rather than writing. I may be an adult, but a part of me still clings to childhood. I know that my days of having free time are numbered, and so I furtively play video games, allowing them to transport me back to a time when I had few responsibilities and all the time in the world. I really do enjoy gaming, but then I end up feeling guilty about it. Because if my days of having free time are numbered, then I should be spending that time productively, working on my writing, working toward my next Big Goal.

I have struggled with this conflict between the part of me that wants to make the most of my dwindling free time by relaxing with some games, and the part of me that wants to make the most of it by doing something productive, for years. It’s a conflict between who I am and who I want to be. Between present-me and future-me. Recently the conflict has intensified, and neither side is willing to budge. If I could give up on writing and give myself full permission to just relax and play some games or watch TV, I’d probably be happier. Likewise, if I could quit gaming and actually get some writing done, I would probably be happier. I keep clinging to the hope that I will somehow find a way to balance the two sides. My spreadsheet experiment is the closest I’ve been able to get to reaching that happy medium, but it completely fell apart in the last couple months when I got overwhelmed by work responsibilities. I will be re-starting it soon, but how long before something else comes along and consumes all my free time?

I guess that’s a big part of growing older: learning how best to use the time that we have. And figuring out what “best” even means in this context. I’m still working on that one, and I probably always will be. I expect that my answer will change over the years as I get the hang of this new experience called Being an Adult. It’s sad to see the end of my long “preparation” phase, and intimidating to contemplate where I go from here, but it’s also exciting. I somehow seem to have managed to do a pretty good job of “preparing” and I’m looking forward to seeing what the future holds.

September 13, 2014 / Ryan / 0 Comments

There are many benefits of investing in your newborn and adolescent’s education. For example, many adolescents are unable to pay for their education and, without any assistance, they are unlikely to get an education. If an adolescent who is supported by their parents invests in their education, it would likely lead to a higher salary, higher employment, higher earnings, and more freedom for their future. This would have a significant impact on their family’s economic circumstances and their own opportunity to buy or rent a home.

To learn more about investing in the future, visit websites like https://www.sofi.com/invest/.

Evaluate Risk

Are you buying an asset that has volatility? Are you taking a risk that the market is going to go up 10% in one day? Do you plan to have the student live on your property until the end of high school? These are all examples of taking a risk. A risk is a lack of certainty in your investment decision. The more uncertainty you have, the more you want to minimize risk.

The more you minimize risk, the more value your asset adds to your portfolio.

Don’t Overpay

Now that you know how to assess the riskiness of your investment, you need to pay attention to the risks of each investment you make. Your question is, “What is the right price for the price of the asset?”

Many investments have a fixed asset price. If the fixed asset price increases, the value of the asset also increases. If the fixed asset price decreases, the value of the asset decreases. For example, you are investing in a house that you are hoping to sell at the end of the house’s useful life. You need to pay close attention to the fixed asset price, since the higher the value, the higher the monthly payments to you and the greater the risk you are taking in buying the asset.

Generally speaking, you will want to pay attention to inflation because the interest on an asset, like a house, tends to increase more quickly than the inflation rate. It is important to assess how likely it is that you will have to pay interest on the property during the asset’s useful life. For example, if you are buying an asset that costs $400,000, are you more likely to have to pay interest to the bank when it is worth $650,000? If the asset is worth $650,000, the rate of interest that you will have to pay is more than 10% for the first six years of the asset’s useful life.

When buying an asset, try to find out if the inflation rate is higher or lower than the growth rate of your inflation-adjusted income. If the asset’s inflation-adjusted price is higher, you should pay closer attention to the costs and benefits of buying the asset.

Ten Book Challenge

August 31, 2014 / Ryan / 4 Comments

Ok, I can’t help myself. When I see a book meme, I have to do it. I saw this on Facebook, courtesy of Karen, and I thought it would be fun to do, mostly because I really enjoy recommending books!

Rules for the Ten Book Challenge: In your ~~status~~ blog, list ten books that have stayed with you in some way. They don’t have to be the “right” books or great works of literature. ~~Then tag ten friends and me so I can see your list.~~

Choosing just ten was really difficult, and I cheated by doing some lumping and listing multiple books by one author for a few of the items. I also should note that I’m trying to stick with the way the challenge was worded and choosing books that “stayed with me”. There are plenty of others that I enjoyed as much or more than some of these, but all of these got their hooks in my brain and really stayed there:

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien – I knew I liked fantasy before this, but the vast majority of fantasy is either imitating or responding to Lord of the Rings, so when I first read this in middle school it knocked my socks off. Middle Earth sucked me in and no other book series has managed such complete and perfect immersion: the result of Tolkien’s unparalleled worldbuilding, plus reading it at an age when I was still pretty uncritical and so I could get drawn in deep.
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien – This book is a collection of short stories about the Vietnam war, written by an author who lived through the war. It was assigned in my AP English class and is an extremely powerful book. I can still remember some of the vivid images in this book very clearly. It somehow manages to be incredibly sad but beautiful at the same time. Great writing. I need to read this again.
Cosmos, Contact, Pale Blue Dot, Demon Haunted World other books by Carl Sagan – These books came along just at the right time. Late in high school when I was interested in science, but before I was old enough to be cynical about Sagan’s purple prose, and before I had heard everything in these books. Sagan’s writing, his passion for knowledge, and importantly his ability to tie science in with history and philosophy and everything else about the human experience, made me want to become an astronomer. Nowadays I don’t read books like this because I don’t learn much from them, but at the time they were exactly what I needed. I learned a lot of science from these books but they also put into words what I had always felt about religion. Having someone so eloquently express why it’s possible to be a good person without a higher power had a huge influence on me. Sagan’s books inspired a whole generation of scientists and humanists, and much of what I see these days in non-fiction writing just paraphrases him.
Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson – I read these books at around the same time as the Sagan books. The whole summer after my senior year of high school was basically spent reading, and what I read that summer really set the course for my life. This trilogy is still the best sci-fi story about the colonization of Mars that I am aware of. It is amazingly well-researched, and stands up pretty well even decades later. The wonderful descriptions of what it would be like to be on the surface of Mars are a great part of this series, but even more interesting was the way that Robinson also examines the politics and social issues among the colonists and between the colonists and Earth. This is a truly epic series with fascinating (if sometimes melodramatic) characters, set on a Mars that felt very very real.
The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury -Where the Red Mars trilogy tries very hard to be realistic, Bradbury has no interest at all in being realistic and somehow that makes his stories even better. His writing style is unique and wonderful, and there’s a lot of wisdom mixed in among the beautiful prose. I read the Martian Chronicles once when I was way too young to understand it, but when I came back to it when I was old enough it was great. The bittersweet sadness that Bradbury evokes as humans come to live on a Mars among the crumbling crystalline cities of the long-gone Martians is really powerful.
The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Birthday of the World, etc. by Ursula K. LeGuin – I came across LeGuin’s books toward the end of high school and in early college, and they were a great contrast with the other stuff I was reading. Whereas a lot of golden-age sci-fi is about white men doing amazing things with physics and engineering, LeGuin did something new (to me, at least) with science fiction, speculating in the realm of social science and anthropology and using characters of color and women instead of Generic White Physicist. I guess some Generic White Physics types don’t like the idea of reading from the point of view of someone like them, but to me it made her books more interesting, and the focus on social sciences really opened my eyes to what was missing from the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. Given the choice nowadays, I’d much rather read something from LeGuin than anything from the “hard” sci-fi genre. When the gee-whiz factor wears off, you realize that a lot of hard sci-fi doesn’t have much else going for it, while LeGuin’s writing recognizes that there is much more to life than physics and engineering, an important lesson for someone like me!
Game of Thrones series by George R.R. Martin – If Lord of the Rings was just right for me when I read them in middle school, Game of Thrones was the right series at the right time in grad school. Reading these books was an eye-opening experience because they are a direct response to Lord of the Rings. The Dark Lord and flawless heroes in white are gone and replaced by a bunch of flawed characters trying to survive in a brutal world. Protagonists die, villains win, and magic is a distant memory when the series begins. Like Lord of the Rings, the worldbuilding for Game of Thrones is great and it sucked me in, but unlike Lord of the Rings, it’s the characters that keep me fascinated by Game of Thrones. This series has basically spawned a new genre of fantasy fiction, and rightly so.
Shogun by James Clavell – This book was the first time I really deliberately set out to read historical fiction, and then realized how much it has in common with the fantasy fiction that I already loved. It’s a thick tome that’s easy to get sucked into, with vivid worldbuilding and lots and lots of courtly intrigue: not all that different from Game of Thrones! But the great thing about historical fiction is that it is also based on real history! Shogun made me realize first that I was interested in historical fiction, and second, that I was interested in history. Not the boring kind taught in school, but the kind that is just the fascinating stories of people who lived long ago.
The Scar by China Mieville – A lot of the books on this list are here because they showed me something new, but none so much as The Scar. This book is also a response to classic fantasy like Lord of the Rings, but where Game of Thrones responded by focusing on morally gray characters but within an England-analog fantasy setting, Mieville’s response was basically “Fantasy can be so much more than medieval Europe. Here, let me show you what happens when you actually use your imagination.” And so he wrote Perdido Street Station, followed by The Scar. I much prefer The Scar, and it is delightfully weird. It’s set on a floating pirate city built from the lashed-together hulks of old ships. There are cactus people and criminals whose bodies have been mangled and merged with mechanical limbs powered by coal-burning engines. There is an island where the sand is made of corroded gears and mechanisms and the inhabitants are mosquito-people. There are people whose blood clots into stone, so before battle they cut themselves and bleed to form an armored carapace. And on top of all of that, Mieville’s writing is thick with obscure words that most people have never heard of or only learn so they can pass the SAT. His writing style does get to be a bit much in large doses, but I really enjoyed it.
Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon – I listened to this one on audiobook while I was in Pasadena for MSL operations. This is a collection of essays by the author about his life, and many of them really hit home for me. He uses his impressive writing talent to put into words a lot of feelings that were very familiar to me. Now, as the list above shows, I love reading books that take me to new places and make me think or experience new things, but sometimes the best writing shows you something very familiar and just describes it perfectly, or shines a new light on it, making connections that you didn’t know were there. That’s what this book did for me. Some of the essays were better than others, but overall this one definitely stuck with me and I want to read it again.

Write to done. Ok, so what’s “done”?

August 29, 2014 / Ryan / 2 Comments

I’ve read a lot of writing advice in my time. After all, it’s way easier to read advice about writing than to actually sit down and put words on the page. The advice ranges from vague generalities that help nobody, to pieces of advice that are so specific that again, they help nobody. But in between there is actually a lot of good advice out there. If I had to boil it down to a few short sentences, the good advice says:

Read a lot.

Write a lot.

Finish what you start.

I’ve got a good handle on the first one. I read every night before bed, and listen to audiobooks while doing brainless chores and working out. Plenty of people read more than me but I’m happy with the number of books I get through in a year.

I’m working on the second point. I have trouble letting the words just flow onto the page, which is why I do things like NaNoWriMo or bribe myself with rewards to get myself to spend the time writing. So, I’m making progress on this point.

The really tricky part is the last one: finish what you start. Also known as “Write to done.” a.k.a. “Finish your shit.” I’m struggling right now with this one. Specifically, I’m struggling with when to call a project “done” and move on to the next one. I’ve finished NaNoWriMo twice. But surely 50,000 words of verbal vomit don’t count as “done,” right? I’ve been slowly working my way through my last NaNoNovel, editing, patching up missing chapters, missing character and place names, and the like. The problem is, I’m only a third of the way through the dang novel, and I know once I finish this pass, I’ll need to go back and do another pass to flesh out descriptions and character development (my first drafts tend to be very dialog and plot heavy and weak on description and character’s thoughts). Meanwhile, the idea for another novel has come along and is nagging at the back of my mind to be written.

So the question I’m struggling with is: at what point do I decide that I’ve learned what I am going to learn from working on my current work in progress, and it’s time to take those lessons and apply them to a new project? Am I failing to “finish my shit” if I stop working on my current work in progress? Or is it “finished” if I’m starting to lose interest and doubt that it’s worth spending months continuing to edit it?

I don’t know. I think I need to step back and actually read the darn thing as it is, not stopping here and there to fix it, but sit and read it as if it were a book. I suspect that might rekindle some of my interest in it. Editing is so slow that it’s hard to keep the whole thing in mind and stay interested. I am also thinking it might be time to let a few people read at least some of it, so I can get outside opinions on whether it’s worth pursuing or not. I just finished editing Part 1 (approximately the first third), which was the part I wrote before NaNoWriMo. It also was the part that needed the most work. Oddly, now that I am in the NaNoWriMo chapters, the writing is actually better and there is less to fix. I think a lot of this is because (a) the beginning had to do a lot of setting up so that the rest of the story could progress, and (b) I planned out quite a bit of the NaNoWriting ahead of time, so I could write knowing what I was aiming at, and (c) writing so much for NaNo actually helped to counteract my tendency to skip over descriptions and monologue because, hey, those are easy ways to up the daily word count!

So here’s my plan: pause my editing for a while and just read the whole manuscript and see how I like it as a whole. Then, if I’m still unsure about continuing, let a few people read it and give me honest opinions about whether it’s time to start something new or if I have something worth polishing.