Ack! New stories!

I have been so neglectful recently. There are three stories in the pipeline right now, part of the Meigi arc, which contains one of my favorite lines of all time (and you won’t get to see that line until next week). It started out as a riff on The Black Hole (anyone remember that movie?) and kinda evolved from there. Unfortunately, episode four isn’t finished, so you’ll be lurching to some other storyline as soon as Appliance Dreams rolls off the assembly line.

The series was supposed to emerge as horror as the crew on this vast, huge ship, each person easily separable from another, comes to understand that the AI on board might not be entirely sane– or singular.

But the first two episodes are straightforward fun, even if they do provide some set-up: Water out of Fish is about our almost all-’taur crew finding the biggest damned starship Earth ever lost stranded in space, and Molecules in a Vacuum, as the skeleton crew assigned to awaken this monstrous ship and fly it to where it can easily be studied starts to figure out that living on such a huge beast must have been hard on its crew.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

There's a brain on my desk!

Mike Huckabee: John McCain is your Lord and Savior!

( Whoa: An explanation for the dogwhistle. )

The Republicans dictate lineup change at NBC

( Olbermann cut out of election coverage )

Palin's gaffe on the campaign trail.

( Says Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were costing taxpayers too much )

The Parable of the Naked David Broder

( And if that image doesn't make you want to pour bleach into your eyes... )

Churches urged to risk their tax-exempt status

( And then urged not to. Confused yet? )

A fascinating look at life in a post-Islamic state

( Watching 'Friends' in Gaza )

Time and space to think

I have decided that taking a walk without anything to distract me is a bad idea. This afternoon I took a constitutional to a grocery store about a mile from the office. I had to get my refill of protein bars and such for my weekly workouts, and there are only two stores that carry the chocolate mint flavor that I’m partial to. I took my wallet and my phone, but left behind my e-book reader (thank the gods for that) and my iPod.

With nothing to entertain myself but myself, I let my mind wander on the current story I’m writing, a little story set in 1991 deep in the Amazon basin near the Brazil/Peru border, where a team of college graduates is studying canopy entomology several miles upriver from an outpost run by the Brazilian environmental agency (named IBAMA, no really, look it up) doing oilfield development assessment. There’s a catboy loose in the outpost, a rickety construct of four wooden buildings and a T-shaped pier sticking out into the oily-slow Ulicaya tributery, and nobody’s quite sure what he’s doing there. Our hero, Will, is a shy gay man of about 22 who’s full of conflict about being gay, about AIDS (1991 was deep into the worst of the crisis), about being closeted, and worst of all, about being attracted to Nisy, who knows damn well that Will is attracted to him and is trying to do everything he can to get Will’s attention.

Thinking about Nisy and Will’s status in 1991, I came to the realization that the 1990s were horrific years for the Bastet. The brutal African tribal and resource wars of the 1990s would have just devastated the last of the Bastet Indigenous Tribes, and the conflicts over African HIV and AIDS, especially the bizarre and dehumanizing rumors, would have made Bastet– with their immunity to AIDS– targets for all sorts of exploitation, much of it sexual, but some of it gruesome and inhumane.

All sorts of stories spewed out of this line of thought, not all of them nasty. I have a place now for Jake & Jinme’s grandson. It started out as, “Jake Lysander Hull, Bastet Secret Agent,” (you know, kindof a Good Hitler movie, but with catboys) but it morphed into something more mundane and and acceptable with Jake as a field agent for the UN Bastet African Tribe Rescue Program, and all sorts of brief, shallow meditations on refugee status and so forth and so on.  Other stories just kinda popped out, about what Bastet do with body modifications, and if there are any pro or anti-ear modifications, and an angry Bastet who, in the mid-70s, had his ears cut off for daring to date a human girl and how he deals with that, and so forth.  I even had an insight into childhood myths like “If a Bastet’s eyes ever shine on you it’ll make you gay.”

How can that be bad?  Well, I have to ask: When am I actually going to find the time to research and write all this?  Oy!

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

Why am I not surprised?

( No surprise here! )

Rayne Dancer, finished (forever)

I finished Mlyn Hurn's Rayne Dancer, which I had mentioned reading a few weeks ago. Man, what a dud. First, do you remember the ridiculous uproar when Cassie Edwards lifted an entire passage on the natural history of the blackfooted ferret for her romance novel from a book, passage by passage, and put it into the mouth of her "primitive" hero? Hurn's done more or less the same thing; there's an entire disposition on the history and origin of the white tiger. While cuddling in bed after sex, Sean asks Rayne where her pet white tiger (no, really!) comes from and Rayne says

No white tigers in the wild were found after the 1950's in fact, and the wild species, which is really just a sub-species of the Bengal tiger, only survived in captivity due to inbreeding and crossbreeding programs. The white tigers, which survived until present times, are the result of the breeding programs using inbred and crossbred mixes of the Bengal and the Siberian tiger. An albino would have pink eyes, and there had been only one recorded instance of true albino tigers. In Cooch Behar, which we know as West Bengal, in India, two albino cubs were shot in 1922. The white tiger has pale blue eyes, a mottled grayish-pink nose and is white with the dark stripes that can vary from black to a chocolate brown color. White tigers are born only to parents who both carry the recessive gene for the white coloring.

Yeah, that's real post-sex conversation. Sounds like it came straight out of Wikipedia (the Wikipedia article is pretty close, even mentioning the Cooch Behar incident, but I suspect she got her pillow talk elsewhere, as the wording and tone aren't quite the same). Oh, but the rest of the book's just as bad.

In a scene in which our hero has been called away from Rayne's side to deal with some crises at his brother's farm nearby, our hero says of the third crisis of the day, "I think this goes beyond normal happenstance and things going wrong." What things? Oh, the phone line has been cut in two places-- but we're supposed to accept that the villain, an experienced international psychic man of mystery, would make such a mistake and that Sean, an experienced international psychic man of mystery himself, would not immediately jump to the conclusion that something very wrong is happening. Oh, and he's already met the villain, a man who wears expensive suits and drives an expensive car who visited Rayne yesterday with no apparent agenda and no explanation for his being there. Yet Sean's never actually shows real suspicion about him.

The scene where Sean proposes to Rayne was written by Victor Appleton, only without the punning skill. On the other hand, the villain was by John Norman, complete with pointless exposition.

Oh, Sean doesn't have a PDA, or a cell phone. Hurn tells us, "Using his computerized communication device, he had connected with the wireless remote to the Agency's database." Uh, yeah, it's called browsing the web with your iPhone, maybe using HTTPS. Amazing technology there, Sean.

Oh, and toward the end of the book, Sean and his boss have a conversation in which Sean basically says, "I have everything under control. No, I don't need to be tested. She couldn't possibly have suborned me. I'm going to marry her, she's the best fuck I've ever had." And the boss says, "Okay. As you know, Sean, you're the best field man, so I'll trust your opinion." And that's it. No follow up, no procedures, nothing.

Goddess, I think Kouryou-chan could see through this crap.