Category: Uncategorized (Page 3 of 4)

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.

A month or so ago, I posted about my new plan to leverage my enjoyment of video games to encourage myself to exercise and write more often, and I said that I would check in here to assess how the plan has been working. I’m happy to report that it works pretty well! It does a good job of moderating my gaming habit and encouraging me to do the more productive things that I want to do. I have joined the local YMCA with Erin, so I have more exercise options than before, which is helping to motivate me to exercise. Also, there’s the fact that I can listen to an audiobook while doing cardio, which is good motivation. I have found that I more often do the exercise than the writing, so as of today I have decided to tweak the formula slightly. Before, I would earn 2/3rds credit for fiction writing if I did not exercise that day, and full credit if I also exercised. This basically implies that doing exercise AND writing is the expected level of effort, and realistically I often don’t have time for both. So from today onward, I have changed it so that I now earn full credit for fiction writing without any exercise on the same day. If I do also exercise, then I earn 4/3rds credit for the writing time, plus the 15 minute exercise bonus. So, doing both on the same day earns extra credit because it is above and beyond the expected level of effort.

I have also decided that there needs to be some motivation for consistency. For fiction writing in particular, it is easier to do, and the resulting writing seems to be better, if I build and keep some momentum. So, I have added a reward that works as follows:

Consistency reward = 5 minutes *(# of days with more than 15 minutes of fiction writing in the last 4 days – # of days without fiction writing in the last 4 days)

This should motivate me to do at least 15 minutes every day in order to build up the consistency reward. I may need to tune how generous this reward is, or up the minimum from 15 to 30 minutes but I’ll give it a try and see how it goes.

I have also found that I needed to set some other rules. First, instead of cutting myself off if I run out of minutes during a gaming session, I have been allowing myself to go into gaming debt. So If I have 45 minutes of gaming saved up, I’m allowed to game for longer than 45 minutes that day. The catch is, I am then not allowed to game again until I have a positive balance. So, a couple weeks ago I had a rare evening at home by myself and ended up going into massive gaming debt. I played a game for several hours and it was great. But then the flip side of that was that it took me the better part of two weeks to recover from that.

The other tweak that I made was that I gave myself a couple days off last weekend because we were travelling to a friend’s wedding out east and there was no time to exercise or write. So, I reserve the right to waive the “didn’t do anything” penalty for extenuating circumstances. I was actually not going to cut myself any slack, but Erin convinced me to do so. I will generally try to avoid this, but it’s an option for when things get really crazy. To formalize this rule, I’ve decided to allow two free days per month. These will carry over from month to month if I don’t use them.

So, all in all, the system seems to be working! I’ll see how the tweaks described above work out and may make some more adjustments in another month.

Hi, my name is Ryan and I’m addicted to video games. No, I’m not wasting away in an internet cafe, failing to feed or wash myself. But the addictive behaviors are there and they can be scary. Almost every day I tell myself that I should do something positive with any free time I have. Write, read, exercise, etc. And then, almost every day, when I actually find myself with free time I manage to convince myself that it’s ok to just play a game instead. Oh, it has been a busy few days at work. Oh, you’re almost done with that level in the game, might as well just finish it and then we’ll call it quits on gaming for a while. And once I start playing a game, being interrupted, or not being able to spend enough time in the game makes me cranky. I’ll even get cranky if I’m anticipating playing but I have to do other things instead.

I could just stop. Delete my Steam account, throw away my game disks, and replace the XBox with a regular DVD player. Never touch games again. The problem is, I don’t really want to do that. Gaming and the culture surrounding it are a pretty integral part of who I am. And the gaming industry is maturing along with my generation: yeah there’s all sorts of stupid and offensive crap out there in the world of gaming, but there are also some genuinely excellent games that are pushing the boundaries of interactive storytelling. Just as reading a novel can be a wonderful, enriching experience, despite technically being a waste of time that could be “better spent” on something “productive,” there are games that have the same sort of impact, whether through great characters and story, great gameplay that fires the imagination, excellent aesthetics, or some combination.

The point is, I don’t want to stop gaming. I would be missing out on a part of popular culture that I very much enjoy. I just need to control it so I can achieve other goals in life that I’ve had for years but have not made much progress on. In particular, writing and exercising regularly. So I have come up with a plan to use my gaming addiction for good rather than evil.

I have set up a Google spreadsheet where I will log my time doing productive things and the time I spend gaming. I have worked out formulas that will reward me with gaming time for doing productive things. Addiction is fundamentally tied to your brain perceiving a certain activity as rewarding and therefore seeking that activity out in an endless loop. Gaming is precision engineered to trigger the reward centers in your brain for performing various tasks in the game. That’s a big part of why it is so fun, and why it can be addictive. My plan shifts the activity that triggers the reward to be outside of the game: I do something good in the real world, and my reward is to earn gaming time.

Here are the formulas that I am using, in case you’re curious.

If I have exercised that day, I earn 15 minutes of gaming, plus gaming time equal to time spent working on fiction, plus two-thirds of my time spent writing here on the blog.

If I have not exercised that day, I earn gaming time equal to two-thirds of the time spent working on fiction, plus half of my time spent blogging.

If I do no exercise or writing on a given day, I lose 15 minutes of gaming time.

You can see that the way I have it set up, I am rewarded more for doing the more difficult type of writing (fiction writing). Also, exercising is rewarded by itself, but is much more rewarding when combined with writing, boosting the amount of reward from the writing. And if I’m a lazy bum and don’t do any writing or exercise, I don’t just fail to earn more gaming time. I actually lose some.

We will see how well this system works. I did a trial run of it before our big Japan trip, but it quickly went off the rails because I didn’t enforce my own rules. That’s the main problem with any system of convincing myself to do productive things: at the end of the day, I’m the one holding myself accountable, and the addictive tendencies make me very good at convincing myself to bend the rules.  This comic from Hyperbole and a Half sums up this dilemma perfectly:

That’s part of my reason for posting about it on here. The more people know about my scheme to trick myself into being productive, the more guilty I’ll feel if I don’t follow through. I do solemnly swear that I will post an update about how this plan is going in about a month. Until then, here’s hoping this works… Now, to go record the time spent writing this blog on the spreadsheet!

Another week, another Game of Thrones recap and review! Spoilers ahoy!

This week we started off with Tommen’s coronation which quickly became a very tense scene between Cersei and Margery. Most interesting was Cersei’s admission that Joffrey was a monster and Margery’s very careful navigation of that minefield. The scene ends with Margery reminding viewers that Cersei is set to marry her brother Loras, making Cersei Margery’s mother in law and sister in law. Not quite incest I guess, but certainly weird.

Across the narrow sea, Danaerys is struggling to decide what to do next, especially given the news that Joffrey is dead. Daario has apparently captured some ships, enough to sail about 10,000 soliders across the sea to assault King’s landing, but Jorah points out that, since that’s barely enough to take King’s Landing, that certainly isn’t going to be enough to take a whole continent. He also informs Dany that those cities she liberated? They’ve devolved into chaos after she created massive power vaccuums by killing the masters and freeing the slaves. Surprise!

In the books, Dany’s story line dealing with trying to actually rule the cities that she has captured gets to be a bit slow and boring, but I am hoping that this might actually translate well to the screen, and at least the intrigue will be a nice change from the now-repetitive slave-freeing scenes.

We get a short scene with Arya and the Hound, with Arya going through her To Do To Murder list and ending with… The Hound. Later, we check back in with them and get to see Arya practicing with her sword and looking generally awesome. The Hound interrupts her and makes fun of her “poncing about,” and then goes a step too far and insults Syrio Forel. He challenges Arya to stab him and show what she has learned, but apparently she didn’t remember the part that Syrios must have taught her about how, when fighting with a slim blade like needle, you don’t stab a dude right in the middle of his breastplate. Because then he laughs at you and backhands you to the ground. The whole point of Syrio’s epic death scene was that even with a wooden blade, he was deadly because he knew how to aim for the weak points in a knight’s armor. I guess Arya will remember that now?

We get a couple of scenes with Cersei chatting up two of the judges in Tyrion’s upcoming trial. With Tywin, they discuss the schedule and necessity of the upcoming marriages with the Tyrells, and there is a lot of emphasis on the vast sums of money that the Lannisters owe the Iron Bank of Braavos. I get the feeling this is going to play a more prominent role in the show than it did in the books, likely because the show is less constrained in terms of which points of view it can show. Unfortunately, this looks like it is going to give us our first glimpse of Braavos way before Arya makes her way there. Cersei and Tywin make a show of how they can’t possibly talk about the upcoming trial, but then Cersei talks about the trial and leaves.

With Oberyn, we’re reminded that: Hey, Cersei has a daughter too, and she’s been in Dorne with Oberyn’s family for quite a while now. Cersei makes a big show of how much she misses her daughter, which is in character: for all her faults, Cersei does love her children. But this also can be read as a ploy to get Oberyn’s sympathy for the loss of her son in the upcoming trial. Of course, in this scene we’re also reminded that the Lannisters murdered Oberyn’s sister. For some reason he still seems to be upset about that…

As expected, the scenes in this episode between Pd and Brienne are great. This show does odd couples really well, and Pod is hilarious as he fails at all the practical skills like riding or cooking that he never had to learn while serving as a butler squire for Tyrion. But of course, once he reveals that he also saved Tyrion’s life by killing one of the Kingsguard who gave Tyrion his famous scar, Brienne warms up to him.

Sansa and Petyr have arrived at the Eyrie, blowing past the brief stay at the Petyr’s birthplace in the Fingers that is in the books. We promptly see that, yes, Lysa is still nuts and her son Robin is still rather too attached to mother. Oddly, the show decided to have Littlefinger call Sansa his niece rather than his daughter. I’m not sure if there’s any significance to that change.

But let’s talk for a moment about a very significant change: Lysa’s confession. In the books, the truth that Lysa murdered her husband Jon Arryn under orders from Littlefinger is the bombshell revelation that is the climax of the final chapter. Because really, it’s a huge revelation. Littlefinger is behind everything that has happened so far. That one murder set off the whole chain of events leading to Ned being chosen as hand, being killed, triggering the war of the Five Kings, etc. And of course, in the books, Littlefinger rids himself of Lysa after marrying her, now that her part in all this is played out.

In this episode of the show, they instead made the baffling decision to drop this huge bombshell of a plot point into a brief conversation between Lysa and Petyr. This is a textbook example of “As you know, Bob” exposition, something that is a writing 101-level no-no. You never ever ever have two characters tell each other something that they both already know, just to inform the reader. Why? Because it comes across as really fake! Because why would they be telling each other something they both know? And for heaven’s sake, don’t use this to deliver information that has mind-blowing consequences for the plot! For some reason, HBO took what is the climax of the third book, the best book in the series, and awkwardly shoved it into the middle of a mediocre episode in a poorly-written scene that was mostly an excuse to remind us how crazy Lysa is? I’m just… really disappointed in this change. The book scene had so much impact, but instead we get this, where new viewers barely even register what they’ve just been told. I just don’t know what the writers were thinking.

Speaking of which… we wrap up the episode at Craster’s keep. Bran, Jojen, Meera, and Hodor are locked up in a shed, and Vargo Hoat Locke spots them but doesn’t tell Jon. Instead he tells the knight’s watch guys to avoid that shed because it has a bunch of dogs in it. Jon announces that they will wait until night and then attack.

This conveniently allows some time for Jojen to have some weird visions, telling Bran that he must keep heading north at any cost and find a giant weirdwood tree so he can meet the three-eyed raven. And then Karl and his thugs burst in and decide to chain up Meera and threaten to rape her. Because it’s not possible to be a strong female character on this show without being threatened with rape. Remember when we first were introduced to Meera, and she was a badass, confident and skilled with a bow and a sword? How she was the fighter, who protected her brother instead of vice versa? Well, now she is the obligatory damsel in distress in this scene. Sigh. Anyway, Jojen manages to creep Karl out with talk of his visions long enough for the knight’s watch to attack and force Karl et al to run off to fight them.

During the battle, Locke shows up and abducts Bran, but in a move everyone saw coming, but everyone was cheering for anyway, Bran wargs into Hodor, busts free from his shackles, and then crunches Locke’s neck. (Someone elsewhere online pointed out that ironically, this means that Bran, who was crippled by Jaime, end up killing the man who crippled Jaime).

After escaping, Bran wants to go meet up with Jon, but Jojen tells him that they must go north instead because of Reasons (what he can’t say is that they have to go north because otherwise it would break the plot beyond repairing). So Bran and friends head off into the woods while the battle wraps up.

Jon of course has to have a confrontation with evil Karl, who is evil. They have a dramatic fight, and Karl lasts improbably long considering he’s using knives against a guy with a hand-and-a-half sword. Jon is on the ground, about to be stabbed, when one of Craster’s wives stabs Karl. Karl tries to go after her, but then Jon stabs him through the back of the head, with the blade emerging from his mouth in a gratuitously nasty shot. Now, I’m no expert in weaponry or human anatomy, but I do know that skulls are pretty hard, and the way Jon slowly pushed his sword through Karl’s head seemed more consistent with a sword going through a watermelon than through a bunch of bone. Also, I’m no expert on swords, but it seems to me if you wanted to dispatch a guy kneeling on the ground with no helmet on, you would slice, not stab, his head. This would certainly have fulfilled HBO’s blood and gore quota (which they had to amp up because there was miraculously no way even HBO could come up with of having nudity in this episode) and make a lot more sense.

We also get a brief and completely predictable scene showing… Rast? I think that was his name, fleeing the battle only to be killed by Ghost. Apparently Summer was set free as well but he is nowhere to be found. Ghost reunites with John, and everyone is happy, and impressed at how much the CGI for the wolves has improved.

So that wraps up the completely original Craster’s keep storyline. And  now it is clear that this little arc was purely filler, designed to add some action and give Jon and Bran something to do in the middle part of this season. For all the excitement, nothing actually happens: Bran and friends are still headed north. Jon and his friends (at least, the ones who are named characters and not bad guys) are all alive, and have to go back to the wall to face the wildlings and the upcoming elections for new Lord Commander. Craster’s wives are free now, but they don’t factor into the plot at all after this. So yeah, filler.

I guess I’m actually ok with some filler, and I suspect we may be seeing more of this as the show tries to drag its heels a bit and give Martin time to write more books. But at the same time, I wish they would pad things out by drawing from the books. There’s plenty in them that could be adapted for the screen and not feel as fake as the completely made-up Craster’s keep arc. I think I read somewhere that the third book is roughly long as the full Lord of the Rings trilogy! Let’s see some more of that in the show!

Whenever I finish a book, the next step is deciding what to read next. I’m never short on options, but recently I have been noticing just how many of the books jostling for the next spot on my “to read” list are parts of series. So I thought it would be interesting to actually compile a list of the series that I am currently in the midst of reading. For all of these, I have read at least one book in the series but not all of them (books I have read are in bold), either because the series is not all published (unpublished book titles are in italics), or because I haven’t had time, or because I am not interested in continuing (series name crossed out). I’ve tried to include only novels here, though some of the more massive series (Vorkosigan Saga, Dragonriders of Pern, Dune) are pretty complicated and have sub-series, novellas, collections of short stories, etc.

On the one hand, series are great: if you like a book, there’s more like it! But on the other hand… I would not mind some more standalone fiction. Also, there is always the dreaded series bloat. Game of Thrones certainly suffers from this, and I haven’t even dared delve into the ultimate bloated series, the Wheel of Time, whose author did not even live long enough to finish it. Given that the second massive book in the Stormlight Archive series just debuted at #1 on the NYT bestseller list, and that that series is starting off with a plan for at least 10 books, I’m not holding my breath for the end of multi-book series any time soon. I am, however, going to avoid starting any new series until I’ve made at least some progress on the ones below.

The First Law Series by Joe Abercrombie

• The Blade Itself
• Before They are Hanged
• Last Argument of Kings

The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold

• Falling Free
• Shards of Honor
• Barrayar
• The Warrior’s Apprentice
• The Vor Game
• Cetaganda
• Ethan of Athos
• Brothers in Arms
• Mirror Dance
• Memory
• Komarr
• A Civil Campaign
• Diplomatic Immunity
• Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance
• Cryoburn

Chalion Series by Lois McMaster Bujold

• Curse of Chalion
• Paladin of Souls
• The Hallowed Hunt

Asian Saga by James Clavell

• Shogun
• Tai-Pan
• Gai-jin
• King Rat
• Noble House
• Whirlwind

The Saxon Stories by Bernard Cornwell

• The Last Kingdom
• The Pale Horseman
• The Lords of the North
• Sword Song
• The Burning Land
• Death of Kings
• The Pagan Lord
• The Empty Throne

The Magicians Series by Lev Grossman

• The Magicians
• The Magician King
• The Magician’s Land

Dune Series by Frank Herbert

• Dune
• Dune Messiah
• Children of Dune
• God Emperor of Dune
• Heretics of Dune
• Chapterhouse: Dune
• Plus many more by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson…

Silo Series by Hugh Howey

• Wool
• Shift
• Dust

  The Conqueror Series by Conn Iggulden

• Wolf of the Plains
• Lords of the Bow
• Bones of the Hills
• Empire of Silver
• Conqueror

The Dark Tower by Stephen King

• The Gunslinger
• The Drawing of the Three
• The Waste Lands
• Wizard and Glass
• Wolves of the Calla
• Song of Susannah
• The Dark Tower
• The Wind Through the Keyhole

Warchild Series by Karin Lowachee

• Warchild
• Burndive
• Cagebird

Thomas Cromwell series by Hilary Mantel

• Wolf Hall
• Bring up the Bodies
• The Mirror and the Light

A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin

• A Game of Thrones
• A Clash of Kings
• A Storm of Swords
• A Feast for Crows
• A Dance With Dragons
• The Winds of Winter
• A Dream of Spring

Dragonriders of Pern Series by Anne McCaffrey

• Dragonflight
• Dragonquest
• The White Dragon
• Dragonsong
• Dragonsinger
• Dragondrums
• Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern
• Nerilka’s Story
• Dragonsdawn
• Renegades of Pern
• All the Weyrs of Pern
• The Dolphins of Pern
• Red Star Rising
• The Masterharper of Pern
• The Skies of Pern
• Plus many more by McCaffrey’s son

Wildwood Chronicles by Colin Meloy

• Wildwood
• Under Wildwood
• Wildwood Imperium

Bas-Lag Series by China Mieville

• Perdido Street Station
• The Scar
• The Iron Council

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson

• The Final Empire
• The Well of Ascension
• The Hero of Ages
• The Alloy of Law

 Old Man’s War Series by John Scalzi

• Old Man’s War
• The Ghost Brigades
• The Last Colony
• Zoe’s Tale
• The Human Division

The Henry Family series by Herman Wouk

• Winds of War
• War and Remembrance

How much do you actually know about Genghis Khan? For example did you know his actual name was Temujin? Before reading Conn Iggulden’s “Genghis: Birth of an Empire” (a.k.a. Wolf of the Plains outside the US) pretty much everything I knew came from playing through the Age of Empires 2 Genghis Khan campaign, and even that was a hazy memory from high school. I can now safely say I know a lot more, and that’s one of the things I love about historical fiction. Not only do you get a great story, but you learn something too.

I listened to this as an audiobook, read by Stefan Rudnicki, and it was excellent. He was the reader for the audiobook version of Ender’s Game that I listened to last year, and at times it was jarring to hear the same narrator speaking with Temujin’s voice instead of Ender’s. But in a lot of ways hearing the book helped make it that much more engrossing. If nothing else, it helped with the pronunciation of things that I would have butchered if I read them myself. For example, the word “khan” is pronounced “han”. The traditional mongolian clothing called a “deel” is pronounced “dell”, and the character Eeluk (a main antagonist) is pronounced “eh-luke”.

Genghis: Birth of an Empire is the story of how the boy Temujin became the man Genghis Khan, and it’s quite a story. In the afterword, Iggulden says that much of what happens in the book is based on the best historical record of Temujin’s life, The Secret History of the Mongols. As with most historical novels there is some artistic license taken with events and names, but the main events are relatively accurate.

Iggulden does a great job of including sensory details that bring the reader to the Mongolian steppes. Reading about Temujin and his brothers sucking blood from their horses’ neck as a substitute for a meal, or getting drunk on fermented mare’s milk made me very grateful for my diet that includes such delicacies as fruits and vegetables. And the details of their living conditions, even during the best of times when they can huddle under the furs in their yurts (aka “gers”) made me glad to have a warm house to live in.

The book has a slow pace, especially at first as it draws you into the world of Mongolia in the late 1100s, but I never found it boring. It is the confident pace of  a book that is the beginning of a long series, so it can take its time and lay the groundwork and introduce the characters who will be important later on. As the book progresses, and Temujin rises from exile and near-starvation to become a great leader, the pace picks up and time goes by much faster.

The ending of the book is no surprise. The American title “Genghis: Birth of an Empire” pretty much gives it away. So much of the suspense in the book comes from the reader wanting to know how Temujin will end up as Genghis, especially given how far he falls before he begins his rise. And I have to say, it is a pretty satisfying ending. It’s not an easy task to make Genghis Khan a sympathetic main character, but he had a brutal childhood and survived through so much adversity that it is hard not to root for him. That said, Iggulden does a good job of beginning to hint at the darker side of Temujin. In particular, when his wife is kidnapped by Tatars, Temujin’s revenge is… disturbing.

My only real complaint about the book is that Temujin is apparently superhuman when it comes to surviving injury, starvation, and cold. At one point, he is dragged behind a horse until he is basically one big abrasion, then left to rot and starve in a latrine. When he escapes the latrine, he spends the night hiding in an icy river. Between the hypothermia and the likelihood of rampant infection, I found that this sequence stretched credulity a bit. And there are multiple other instances where he takes serious wounds but then recovers in a matter of hours to days.

In the afterword, Iggulden somewhat addresses this, saying that The Secret History claims Genghis Khan had great strength of will and seemed to ignore heat and cold, as well as wounds. So I guess I see what Iggulden was doing, but still, strength of will doesn’t change the fact that you will probably die of hypothermia if you cower in an icy river all night…

I’ve said it before in my review of The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell, but Genghis: Birth of an Empire is another example of historical fiction that reads very much like epic fantasy. In particular, fans who like their fantasy dark and bloody will like this book. Mongolia in the 1100s is not a very pleasant place, and as you might imagine, the events that led to Genghis Khan’s rise to power aren’t usually very pretty. Unfortunately I don’t think it passes the Bechdel test: it’s very much a male-dominated story about a male-dominated culture. While it does a good job of showing the quiet strength that Temujin’s mother and wife have, especially given the hardships they face, all the main characters are male.

Still, if you are a fan of dark fantasy and/or history, I highly recommend Genghis: Birth of an Empire (Wolf of the Plains outside the US). It’s a gripping story about one of the most interesting people in history, and one that most people know almost nothing about. And it’s the beginning of a long series of novels, so if you enjoy it, there is plenty more to come. I am definitely looking forward to reading the next entry in the series.

I have a confession to make: I have never read comic books. They just never really appealed to me. I learned plenty about them through osmosis just by being a geeky type of person, especially once superhero movies became popular, but I never thought to myself “I should really try reading the X-men comics”.

But then I started hearing about “graphic novels”, and people whose taste in books I respect also talked about how great certain graphic novels were. I was still skeptical that “graphic novel” was a marketing term for comic books for people who want to distance themselves from the stereotypes about comic-readers, but I didn’t want to miss out on a potentially great form of storytelling.  So, this year I decided to give graphic novels a try and put a few that I had heard were good on my Christmas wish list.

And so I received my first-ever graphic novel, Saga: Volume 1, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. I started reading it over the holiday break, and finished it recently.

The story of Saga basically boils down to: two people from opposite sides of an interplanetary war fall in love and the book starts with their baby being born. They try to protect their child and flee from the warring factions and bounty hunters who are pursuing them.

The writing in Saga is pretty good, with a witty sense of humor, but as I suspected would be the case, the plot exists mostly to drive the story from visually interesting scene to visually interesting scene. This is not really a complaint though, because the art is really excellent. I had to force myself to read slowly and enjoy the artwork, because it’s the main attraction. Years of novel-reading made me want to speed through, so I ended up putting the book down at the chapter breaks to make it last longer.

The universe of Saga is a really interesting mash-up of sci-fi and fantasy. One of the main characters has insect wings, the other has ram’s horns. The winged people seem to be more technologically oriented while the horned people are more magically oriented. There are robot nobility who are basically humans but with televisions for heads, and there are ghosts, and tree-like rocketships, and giant war-tortoises, and freaky spider-human bounty hunters, and all sorts of other crazy things.

I guess my main complaint is that there is quite a bit of unnecessary nudity which seems to have been thrown in purely to demonstrate that this is not a comic for kids. It felt quite similar to the often-gratuitous nudity in HBO and other non-network shows, or in “mature” video games, serving little purpose other than to call attention to the fact that they can get away with things that more family-friendly networks can’t. The problem I have with this is that, believe it or not, I don’t tend to consume media by myself. In the case of Saga, I was reading it on the couch at my in-laws’ house. Suddenly flipping the page and coming across a sex scene, or topless spider-woman hybrid was…unexpected, and had the potential to become pretty embarrassing.

But that complaint aside, on the whole I enjoyed Saga. The main thing that I have noticed is that my brain keeps returning to some of the spectacular scenes in the book. One of my measures of a great novel is that I can’t stop thinking about it, even when I’m doing other things. Saga seems to have succeeded at doing something similar.

Graphic novels are a new form of media for me, so I don’t have anything to compare Saga directly to, but bottom line is: I enjoyed it, and even after finishing it I keep thinking about it, and I’m looking forward to reading(viewing?) the next volume.

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted here this month. Okay, not at all. The reason? A little thing called NaNoWriMo. I made the foolish choice to write 50,000 words this month, despite various other looming deadlines, and so most of my free time has involved writing.

It is actually going pretty well. I outlined about 2/3rds of my plot ahead of time, and reached the end of my outline a week or so ago. At that point I started to get stuck and panic, but I took a day off from writing and outlined the rest, and now I’m back on track. The result at the end of the month is still going to be a mess not fit for human consumption, but this year I think it’s good enough to be worth editing and polishing until I’m happy with it. I’m looking forward to being able to stop dumping words on the page and start fixing the thing up.

I’m also looking forward to having a little more time to post reviews here. I have a bunch of things to review, including:

• The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson
• Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm
• Ender’s Game (the movie)
• The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay
• The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell
• Shift by Hugh Howey

And probably some other things I have forgotten. Unfortunately, December tends to be a crazy month for me and this year is no different. There’s a conference coming up, plus ChemCam team meetings, plus holidays. So I’ll be traveling for basically the whole month. BUT, stay tuned! I have lots to post about here once I have time!

In my last post on patio building, I destroyed the small concrete step that was interfering with my grand plans. Now it’s time to prepare for the actual construction of the patio. The first thing I had to do was get rid of the concrete rubble where the step was and fill it in with something to make a surface level with the concrete slab.

The typical way to build a paver patio is to put down a thick gravel layer with packed sand on top of it, so I figured that’s what I should do for my busted-up step area. I used as much of my crushed concrete as possible: it seemed silly to remove all the concrete gravel that I had just made so that I could fill it back in with… more gravel. On top of the gravel base, I dumped several bags of “Paver base sand” from Home Depot. This is just sand with some gravel mixed in.

For a full-sized patio with this gravel+sand base, you rent a plate compactor to make the base as firm as possible, but it seemed a bit impractical to rent a massive machine that I would need multiple people to help with, just to compact a 4 foot by 8 foot area. So Instead I opted to get a hand tamper and just go to town. The hand tamper is just a square metal plate on a wooden handle, and you use it to pound the sand flat. It works, but it is surprisingly tiring. Here’s what my mostly-compacted area looked like:

You might notice the stylish plastic edging material in the foreground of this photo. This is what is used to keep the bricks in place on a normal patio, and I thought I would need it too. But as you’ll see it turns out this just got in the way of my edge blocks.

With the step area filled in, it was time to do some planning. For a cement slab base, the consensus on the internet seemed to be that you glue down the border with thick pavers and then choose a thinner type of paver for the middle area. The difference in height is to allow for a layer of sand on top of the slab: this is there to help seat the pavers firmly and to squeeze up between them, locking them into place. We decided to use Rumblestone pavers for the border and Domino pavers for the main area of the patio.

I spent a really long time playing around in GIMP (a free photoshop-like tool) to figure out exactly how many bricks of each type I would need. The goal was to (a) not buy too much, and (b) minimize the amount of brick-cutting. I ended up cheating a bit by allowing the edge bricks to hang over the edge of the slab slightly. This made it so that the only cutting I had to do was one row of the domino pavers along the wall of the house. There is also a light pole in one corner of the patio that required a simple cut.

With my plan in place, I calculated how much additional sand I would need, and then took yet another trip to Home Depot, where I ordered a whole lot of bricks and sand. When buying supplies for such a big project, you get to saunter up to the “contractors checkout” area as if you know what you’re doing. The guys there helped place the order but it turned out that they didn’t have all the bricks I needed in stock so it was going to be a few days before I could make much more progress.

Finally, the bricks and sand came in! The truck arrives with a forklift, so they can maneuver the pallets of supplies as close to the area you’re working as possible. Unfortunately tree branches prevented the forklift from getting much beyond the sidewalk…

To secure the border bricks, I had originally been planning to use normal construction adhesive that you apply with a caulk gun, but I found this weird stuff that comes in a can that claims to be equivalent to eight tubes of the normal stuff. It worked out to be cheaper so I figured I would give it a try.

I used a stiff-bristled brush to scrub the cement slab clean before applying the adhesive and sticking the border bricks down. It takes a while for the adhesive to set, and the edge of our concrete slab was slightly sloped to help with runoff, so I had to use other bricks to keep the edge bricks level while the adhesive hardened. Small pebbles placed between the edge bricks and the slab were also useful as shims to make the edge bricks sit level.

As you can see in the above picture, I used a variety of levels to make sure the edge bricks were level and in a nice straight line. You may also notice that I removed the wooden step from the deck. It was not in great shape anyway, and this again made the patio layout much simpler than it would be working around it.

it ended up being extremely difficult to make the border bricks for a perfect rectangle with straight sides at right angles to each other, even though I was working on an existing slab. I also found that the domino pavers seemed to be a tiny bit shorter than advertised, so when I laid them out there was a little bit of extra room. In the end this turned out not to be a problem (the sand between the pavers helps take up this extra space) but I agonized over it for a while. Finally, I just decided to glue down the edges as well as possible and deal with the consequences. I had to cut the very final brick of the edge to make it all fit, but in the end it looks fine.

The other cut i had to make for the edge was to deal with a small pipe that sticks out from the wall of the house. I was worried this would make things complicated but it was surprisingly easy to deal with. I just used a masonry blade on my circular saw to cut notches in the brick whose corner I had to remove, and then tapped it with a chisel to finish the job.

That’s all for this episode of patio-building. Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion!

Over the weekend we had some friends over to carve pumpkins. While others went a more traditional route, I decided I wanted to do a Mars rover-themed pumpkin. The trick was, making it recognizable and not too complicated. I ended up finding a nice silhouette of Curiosity that worked well as a template for a pumpkin, so I thought I would share it here:

It’s not super high-res, but then, pumpkin templates really shouldn’t be. I just printed this out in landscape mode, stretched to fill a full sheet of paper, and then attached the paper to my pumpkin with a few toothpicks. Our friends bought one of those cheap pumpkin carving kits, which included a little tool that looks like a cowboy’s spur. The idea is that the little spiked wheel punches through the paper and transfers the design to the pumpkin’s skin. You could also just use a needle or pin. (I tried a toothpick, but the point bent after the first few holes so it didn’t work very well). I left out some of the more intricate details of the silhouette to make carving easier.

Once I had the design transferred, it was pretty simple to just carve along the outline (though a skinny knife is helpful for some of the details. Here’s the finished product: