2 Things I Have to Say…

…to Davin Malasarn for his review of Tomorrow We Dance
on The Literary Lab…

… and to Neil Davis for his review of The Painted World Stories on Amazon.

Thank you and thank you!

Tyr’s Story

Once upon a time, there was a superhero named Goodit.

There was a bad guy. His name was Shadowman. Shadowman worked for his Queen, Youit.

“I was trying to fight him and put him in the oven and feed him to the sharks, but he was fighting too much,” Shadowman told Youit. “But he gets his power from a magic stone.”

Youit told Shadowman, “If you get that stone, you can have his power!”

“Yes,” said Shadowman, “But we can’t let Goodit find out we want his stone!”

“Uh oh,” said Goodit. He had great hearing! He heard the whole plan!

“I heard his voice saying ‘Uh oh!” said Shadowman. He had great hearing too!

The bad guys were actually good guys in costumes that made them look like bad guys. And evil. That’s all. And that’s the happy story.

WWII Is So Cliche

In honor of the anniversy of the attack on Pearl Harbor…..Here via here.

Let’s start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn’t look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn’t get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

I wouldn’t even mind the lack of originality if they weren’t so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we’re supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren’t that evil.

…Probably the worst part was the ending. The British/German story arc gets boring, so they tie it up quickly, have the villain kill himself (on Walpurgisnacht of all days, not exactly subtle) and then totally switch gears to a battle between the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific. Pretty much the same dichotomy – the Japanese kill, torture, perform medical experiments on prisoners, and frickin’ play football with the heads of murdered children, and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.

Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there’s no way to take the Japanese home islands because they’re invincible…and then they realize they totally can’t have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.

So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they’ve never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was “classified”. In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone’s ever seen before – drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn’t it?

…and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin’ unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you’re starting to wonder if any of the show’s writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.

I’m not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named “Enigma”, because the writers couldn’t spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means “Man of Steel” in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman “Man of Steel” and the Frenchman “de Gaulle”, whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).

So yeah. Stay away from the History Channel. Unlike most of the other networks, they don’t even try to make their stuff believable.

Google Opens A Bookstore

Google’s Bookstore

Previously thought to be called “Google Editions”, the “Google eBookstore” is live and offering hundreds of thousands of titles for purchase. As opposed to other e-book providers, Google’s e-books are entirely cloud-based.

“Google eBooks stores your library in the digital cloud,” writes the company, “so you can read all of your favorite books using just about any device with an Internet connection.”

For those of you worried about reading your books on the go or up in the air, where there might be no Internet connection, Google says that “once you open your book using our mobile reader apps, your book will sync to your device and you can continue reading it online or offline.”

As for accessing these books, Google supports a number of devices, from Android and iOS smartphones to any e-book reader that supports the Adobe e-book platform to any device with a Javascript-enabled browser. Along with reading e-books, there is a Google Books app for both Android and iOS devices, which not only let you read the books, but make e-book purchases on the go.

Oh, and here’s Google’s own promotional video:

Here’s the site: http://books.google.com/ebooks

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/11/28/information_overload_the_early_years/?page=full

Diagnosis of Writer’s Brain

“People with mental illness are very much like people without mental illness only more so.” — Mark Vonnegut

Mark Vonnegut (yes, Kurt Vonnegut’s
son) has an interesting article in The Journal of Mental Health about being diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Have you ever wondered if there is some connection between madness and art? The connection has been alleged for millennia, and I personally believe there is a link between whatever genetic quirk causes writer’s brain and other forms of mania, delusion and depression.

I hide my emotional state from most people I know. This includes those closest to me. I don’t lie, I just don’t talk about it. It wouldn’t really serve any point. I know I’m abnormal and I’m okay with that. Actually, I have nothing to complain about, although when I was younger it bothered me a great deal. Many of the things I have done–you’ll find some of them discussed in the author’s notes in Conmergence I always felt a little guilty, because I engaged in a lot of things that some people would call “selfless,” like working in a homeless shelter or in a war zone, but for selfish reasons, from this need to bring more balance to my life.

This also struck a chord:

During my recovery from my last episode a very wise friend told me that other people’s business was not my business. I felt insulted that he bothered to tell me such an obvious thing. He then said that what other people thought about me was not my business. Harder but still not earth shattering. He then went on to say that what I thought was not really my business either, which has kept me puzzled ever since. I have come to believe that I am at my best and that it is a beautiful world when my feelings are like the weather and that what I think is not my business.

This is the same approach I try to take, to observe my inner strangeness as if from the outside. And this is how writing helps, because I write it down, which sharpens my focus and enables me to view it more clearly.