Between Stars -- On Stars

Cinemetrics

This is a fascinating information visualization project. Wordle is a visualization of text, the homunculus is a visualization of the brain, and maps can be recreated and proportioned according to a number of factors, but I've never seen anyone do this with cinema before. As the creator points out, it is a time-based medium, and the additional dimension means that few people have tried to tackle a purely data-based representation.

This makes me wonder: how could you visualize music, another time-based art? I'm sure someone has done it...

Finally got around to watching the 2010 Alice in Wonderland, and the last third was... a disappointment. There are at least five people who could have turned out to be the Jabberwocky, some less logically than others, but all heartbreaking. When I saw Absalom going into his cocoon, I was sure we had a winner.

But no... the Jabberwocky was just an anonymous ugly dragon. Alice was just the generic dragonslayer. I'm not saying we should have some fluffy ending where she's taming the Jabberwocky instead of killing it, or something similarly vanilla, but a little more nuance. Or coherence. I got all these brief glimpses of genius, but they didn't GO anywhere.... argh.

Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment
James Patterson

Continuing with my YA reading... I got 54 pages into this book before I started skimming.

The pros:

Max, the Maximum of the title, is actually a girl. And it's not a big deal, just slipped in detail by detail.

The cons:

"Yes, you, standing there leafing through these pages. Do not put this book down. I'm dead serious--your life could depend on it."
"Chapter 2: I jolted upright in bed, gasping, my hand over my heart."
"Wincing, I pushed downward with all my strength, then pulled my wings up, then pushed downward again."
""He was my son!... You killed your own brother!"
I think this might have been a lot stronger if the book had started in the cages, at the School. I'm thinking of Colfer's The Supernaturalist here, and how starting at the orphanage put the entire book in perspective. But The Angel Experiment starts after they've escaped and are hiding out, and while they talk about how horrible the School is, it's not real to the reader.

I might recommend this book to very young readers, or maybe I'd just tell them to read Animorphs instead.

I've had the Scrivener for Windows beta for a few months now, and this past month I really started using it. I've always been one of those bare-bones people who prefers to use Word instead of any fancy writing software. That still holds true for shorts, but I've turned back to one of my novel projects, and its scope exceeds the organizational capacity of Word.

Scrivener's true value became apparent once I started importing all my research files and images. Normally I feel guilty using multiple files for research; I label one "Geology" and then stuff several books worth of information into it. That's probably an artefact of the floppy disk days--I started writing when 720 KB was the limit of my data mobility. That baseline 11 KB of an empty Word file always makes me feel wasteful. So I'll use one file, and then have to index it by memory to remember which files holds the notes I need. Image files, of course, will be stand-alones, which means to look at more than one I'll need an entire stack of them on my Taskbar. Awkward.

But with Scrivener, I just import everything into the Research Files section, in as many subdivisions as I want. And with the navigational pane, it's easy to see and access what I have. While setting up the project, I discovered my research was more comprehensive than my memory told me. That's always my biggest "writer's block"--I decide I haven't done enough research, and then the project sits idle for months. But with all the research in front of me, I have enough to push forward and fill in the gaps later.

Since July 2010, my progress bar looked like this:

Kings Ascending
17,455 / 85,000 words (20.5%)

Now, June 2011, it looks like this:

Kings Ascending
19,338 / 85,000 words (22.7%)

Hey, it's progress, right?

Shiver
Maggie Stiefvater

I haven't read any YA in a while. (I finally got a public library card this week, and man, why did I wait so long? I forgot how amazing public libraries are.) But I seem to remember that even when I was in that target age range, I had trouble not with the complexity of abstract ideas but the language in which they were expressed. In other words, if you explain things simply enough, YA readers can grasp more hard science than adults might think. Writing for YA, you might minimize your linguistic contortions, but you don't shortchange your ideas.

That, I think, was my biggest disappointment with Shiver--I felt like the book shortchanged itself in its ideas. The introductory scene is bizarre and frightening, and the design of the book, from jacket copy (the cold. the heat. the shiver.) to the temperature measurement under each chapter, sets you up for something really overwhelming, some deep revelation about the nature of cold and heat and winter and wolves. Heck, I would even take a clumsy reference to global warming.

But Shiver stays at the surface level of the idea--the werewolves are human when warm, wolves when cold--and never goes deeper. The mystery of Grace--the main character who gets infected but never changes--is also resolved at this surface level.

There are many good things about this book--the character relationships are minimally but poetically expressed. Here the depth of the characters achieves what the concepts didn't--their faults and paradoxes are unwrapped like fragile things, gently and lovingly--in a way that rings true but is expressed very simply. And YA readers will enjoy the development of the romance from distant-yearning to love-against-all-odds.

So I guess I'm saying it's a good book but it could have been much more. It coulda been a contender.

I've exhausted my list of markets that accept novelettes/novellas, so instead I'm putting up Diviner (16k, dark fantasy with geology and renewable energy) on my WIP website. It's under the Free Fiction page.

I'm considering queuing this up as a YA novel... if I start the story earlier, the main character will be younger and just entering this particular world. Another interesting thing is that ( spoiler )

While entering another datapoint into my submission sheet, I discovered a curious thing: for three years running now I've submitted to WotF's 2nd Quarter, and 2nd Quarter only. Apparently I have an internal timetable that reminds me every March that WotF is the biggest and best game out there.

I haven't been to Baen's Bar in a few days, and now I come back and discover it's ugly. I am seriously disliking the new interface, mostly because it no longer has sidebars. The Bar used to be partitioned into three little windows, with the root listings to the left and the biggest window for viewing the post you'd selected. You didn't have to keep backing up and refreshing to get to different posts.

I got so used to convenience of Baen's sidebars that I spent only a day on OWW, because the interface annoyed me. Now both interfaces annoy me.

Whatever. I'll get used to the new set-up. Because I am a creature of habit, I hate new interfaces reflexively. But still, this time I think they've really lost something.

ETA: Five minutes later, I'm already getting used to it. Maybe not so much that I'm a creature of habit as that I'm leery of the unknown. Now that I've wandered around a bit, it's not so new and scary.

Somewhere, I read a blog post about how unrealistic was the trope of characters throwing up while under mental stress. The writer pointed out that people rarely do that in real life, or rather, it's a very specific reaction to stress. People don't stress-puke generically.

I would like to post the link for some of my college freshmen, but now I can't find it. Does the description ring a bell for anyone?

I'm currently building a website through Wordpress that will bring all my multiple personalities together in one space. I haven't started to design the visuals; I'm just working on importing content right now. I've already discovered several annoying things about the interface.
 

 

( The weirdest one... )

In case you didn't realize: I love this. I love wrangling with HTML and building an intricate structure tag by tag, a giant interlocking system of code.