This week: Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott

Last week: Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest

Next week: Starfish by Peter Watts

At this point, I have all of them except Spirit Gate and Starfish saved to my hard drive in PDF format.

This week, Tor has kindly provided us with links to last week's book - The Disunited States of America by Harry Turtledove - as well as this week's book and two pieces of artwork related to the Wheel of Time. One is a big image of the snake-and-wheel. The other is the full, uninterrupted cover art for The Dragon Reborn. Very pretty. The Wheel of Time covers have always been wrap-around, but the back matter gets in the way sometimes. I've just noticed some new things about the art-work. I knew the three ta'verenm, Ba'alzamon, and the Aiel were prominentl featured, but I'd never before noticed the three Defenders of the Stone in the background looking really, really overwhelmed. I'd be overwhelmed, too, if hundreds of Aiel suddenly appeared inside an assumedly inpenetrable fortification. They look very 1550 with their conquistador helmets and breastplates worn over doublets. They're all armed with rapiers and main gauche.

The book is Reiffen's Choice by S.C. Butler. Next week, they'll be sending us Suns of Suns by Karl Schroeder. Interestingly, they've hinted that they might make Mistborn available again.

This is just too interesting to ignore. I think I even have a useful idea to explore. Please pardon the internal rhyme.

http://www.nss.org/news/releases/pr20080229.html

RETURN TO LUNA -- STORY GUIDELINES
Please read entire guidelines before submitting to ensure your story fits the requirements!

REQUIREMENTS:
* Previously unpublished stories only -- no reprints.
* No simultaneous submissions (that is, don't send your story to us and to other publishers at the same time).
* Multiple submissions are okay (you may send us more than one story).
* Set entirely on the Moon.
* Realistic stories showing very possible futures.
* No gratuitous sex or excess violence or anything beyond mild language (these stories will be read by space enthusiasts of all ages).
* Science Fiction (no fantasy, horror or other genres).
* No aliens or faster than light travel.

LENGTH: 2000 to 6000 words.

ENTRY FEE: None.

PRIZES: All winning stories will be published in the anthology RETURN TO LUNA with a potential readership of thousands; the book will be submitted to well-known science fiction editors to consider each of the stories for inclusion in their "best of the year" anthologies, and the book will be sent out for review. All winning authors will be eligible for royalties and will receive free membership to the NATIONAL SPACE SOCIETY for one year. GRAND PRIZE WINNER will also have a review of his or her winning short story featured in NSS's magazine AD ASTRA, and on the NSS and Hadley Rille Books websites.

ELECTRONIC SUBMISSIONS ONLY: Send as an attachment to an email message with subject line "NSS CONTEST" to subs [at] hadleyrillebooks [dot] com. Microsoft Word .doc file is preferred, or .rtf is okay (please contact us if you need to make arrangements for another format). Please virus scan your document before sending. Story will be stripped of author name and assigned a number before forwarded to the jurors. You will receive a confirmation email back from us. (If you do not receive a confirmation email then that means we did not receive your story.)

FORMAT: We prefer the standard manuscript format as shown here: http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html, except that we prefer single-spaced rather than double-spaced. Please don't do any fancy formatting such as right-justifying, etc. -- leave that to us. Please don't hit Enter (or Return) at the end of each line. Let your word processor wrap the text.

SUBMISSION PERIOD: From now through June 15, 2008.

SOME IDEAS:
* How have we set about establishing a lunar base, and then a colony?
* What are living conditions like?
* What is the lunar wilderness like? What kind of exploring to settlers do?
* What are the buildings like and how do people get around the lunar surface?
* What kinds of transportation do they use to travel to and from the Moon?
* What kind of society lives there? What are the challenges to human social structures?
* Are lunar colonies self-sufficient or do they depend on Earth?
* What kind of industries exist and how do the colonists make use of lunar resources?
* Does the colony resemble Las Vegas or is it more like a science outpost?
* Will there be settlements on the far side -- a radio telescope array, perhaps?
* Is the colony located near one of the poles where miners extract ice from the permanently shadowed areas?
* Why have we established a colony on the Moon?

This week, the nice people at Tor sent us Jane Lindskold's Through Wolf's Eyes

I haven't yet looked closely at the two wallpapers. The one appears to be cover art for a mid-fifties edition of The Green Hills of Earth by Robert Heinlein. It looks cool in a very retro-future sort of way. I can't guess from the art what moment they're trying to capture, but the general theme is spacemen with spearguns, complete with scuba tanks, as if space is like the deep ocean, but with less pressure. It's also amusing. One of them has his weapon pointed at another's head, but the guy on the business end of the speargun is looking someplace else entirely and seems not the least bit worried.

Next week, we get The Disunited States of America by Harry Turtledove.

So, just a recap

Lord of the Isles by David Drake
Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell
Farthing by Jo Walton
The Outstretched Shadow, book one of Mercedes Lackey & James Mallory's Obsidian Trilogy
Robert Charles Wilson's Spin
John Scalzi's Old Man's War
Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn.

I'm chuffed. It's a big, free library of author's I've never read and in many cases have never even encountered before. I have all of these in pdf, if anyone wants a book but didn't get them in time. My personal plan of attack goes like this:

Sanderson
Turtledove
Drake
everyone else as the mood strikes me

I figured out at least one or two levels of joke in this year's Thinkgeek shirt. Some of their other offerings are in questionable taste, but the labyrinthine chain lock, the Betamax to HD-DVD recorder, and the caffeinated breakfast cereal are all fun.

The shirt purports to be encrypted at some very high level, so I decided to try decoding it with ROT13 first. The plaintext actually makes sense, so either the joke is that the NSA encryption is just rot13, or the plaintext I decoded is actually a cipher within a cipher. Not sure which. But, as usual, the encoded thinkgeek shirt insults either the wearer, the reader, or both. In this case, the wearer:

BUJUNGNSBBYVNZ decrypts to
OHWHATAFOOLIAM

Fun.

I wanted, in light of recent comments I've made about self-publish artists, to put my money (so to speak) where my mouth is by supporting one of them and mentioning another who has caught my eye. Joseph Toscano of zhaymusic.com did the soundtrack for Waste's Edge. He's very good. Adonthell isn't the only game on which he's worked, nor is it the only multi-song composition he's made available. Most of his music is on his website in mp3 format. The only exception to this seems to be Adonthell itself - there were some attribution issues between JT and some third party, I think - so they are now only available with the game itself, in Ogg format. More on the other later.

Last time I updated, I said the end was in sight. It still is, but it doesn't seem to have gotten much closer, even after another 10 or 12 Kwords written. The trouble is that the core plot involves the protagonist coming to his own healing so that he can build himself a new family while he rescues what remains of the old family. He keeps getting, for lack of any better word, sojourned in various situations as he works, stumbles, and backtracks toward and from healing.

Malad finds itself confined to an inn for three nights. His way is barred by a magical barrier designed to keep inside those within who would find the streets outside unsafe. In the course of his confinement, he finds some of the tools needed to move forward and to restore his family. However, he finds the confinement chafing, for obvious reasons. His guides - an Elven linguist and anthropologist and a Dwarven priest and whitesmith - try to explain the barrier's purpose to him and so take him to a dedicated 'house of healing'. The side trip seems to have lengthened his stay in the inn. As a side note, I need to include something about someone paying for Malad's stay in the inn with a pair of silver coins.

We've released another alpha version. This one has terrain and much better collision detection. It may not sound like much, but it's more than we had before. Worldtest version 1 lacked terrain and the more finely grained collision detection found in Alpha2.

Personally, I would love to see music added to the alphas, even if it's just a looped track from Waste's Edge. We're already working on Alpha3, which is scheduled for September. If 3 involves characters and dialog, it will be the first alpha to which I contribute meaningfully.

http://adonthell.linuxgames.com/download/preview.shtml

New Tor ebook. Still working on dead tree books from Christmas. Have to beat stoolpigeon to the punch at least once

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/18/1459259

New content for old Settings? by andphi:
I know that some of the old settings (Ravenloft, Spelljammers, Dark Sun, Planescape) have been transitioned to other companies or have been quietly kept alive by their fans with knowledge bases and efforts at rules translations between old rulesets and 3.5. Will any of these old, orphaned settings being making a comeback in 4.0? (Planescape. Please, Planescape!) If not, are the 4.0 rules being written to make these on-going translation efforts easier?

WotC:
We appreciate the devoted fans who have continued to run campaigns in our older campaign settings. For a variety of reasons, we can't give every setting an equal amount of support, but we certainly expect to revisit older settings from time to time on D&D Insider. We constantly re-evaluate the role of older settings in our business plans and product schedules, and it's entirely possible that some of those settings may well stage a full-fledged return at some point in the future. For now, though, we're focusing on relaunching the Forgotten Realms campaign setting in August of 2008, with the Eberron campaign setting following in 2009. When we firm up any other plans, we'll certainly share those.

I found this again today. I must excerpt it. I saw it performed as a Humorous Interp piece several times in High School and occasionally remember bits of it for no particular reason.

How to Write Good

by Michael O'Donoghue

Lesson 2 - The Ending
All too often, the budding author finds that his tale has run its course and yet he sees no way to satisfactorily end it, or, in literary parlance, "wrap it up." Observe how easily I resolve this problem:

Suddenly, everyone was run over by a truck.
-the end-

If the story happens to be set in England, use the same ending, slightly modified:

Suddenly, everyone was run over by a lorry.
-the end-

If set in France:

Soudaincment, tout le monde etait ecrass par un camion.
-finis-

You'll be surprised at how many different settings and situations this ending applies to. For instance, if you were writing a story about ants, it would end "Suddenly, everyone was run over by a centipede." In fact, this is the only ending you ever need use.*

*Warning - if you are writing a story about trucks, do not have the trucks run over by a truck. Have the trucks run over by a mammoth truck.

LESSON 10 - MORE WRITING HINTS
There are many more writing hints I could share with you, but suddenly I am run over by a truck.
-the end-

And now, the actual update. I've broken 70k. I know how the story will end (approximately), though not exactly who will be present in the final scene or in what condition. I also suspect the story will need another 15 or 20 k to finish, unless things come out rather tersely. There's no way to finish the story in the next ten thousand words, unless I end with "And suddenly, everyone was run over by a mountain troll."

I've also realized that when one includes fictional prophecies or oracular utterances in one's works, they become a kind of Chekhov's Gun. They must be either fulfilled or thwarted, lest the audience become distracted and begin to disbelieve.

Degrees posted a funny-snarky (I found it amusing) reply concerning spin-off story lines to my last journal entry. This comment got me thinking about the various tributary and distributary storylines which interact with the story I'm currently writing. I realized that there are quite a few of them of various lengths and depths.

There are a few reasons that I've sewn the seeds of these other plots into the novel. The first is that I think, as I might already have mentioned, that nearly every character worth naming has a story of his own, even if I never get around to telling it. The second reason is that I initially chose to tell the story of a relatively normal (other than the bit about being part bear) human from a strict first person perspective. As a result, no matter what sorts of interesting events impact the course of his life, I can't elaborate on them if he didn't observe them, so the story spawns side stories about aspects of the great jail break Malad couldn't believably narrate. Other things which are happening contemporaneous with the story might also merit side stories. If I do handle such events with spin-off short stories, I will mostly likely do so because long passages of characters bringing each other up to date might make for great interlace and intertextual structure, but they can also be quite tedious if the very act of telling or hearing the tale is not a learning experience in itself.

Finally, events as they have transpired to this point have raised in my mind the question: What becomes of his dead brother's ghosts? Answer: in the course of his march back to the beginning of time, the bladespectre with whom Malad briefly interacts during his sojourn in the City of Storms seeks out the two slain brothers in order to help them find peace. In this world, unless the project owner puts the kibosh on the idea, ghosts either move backwards through time once they find peace or leave the world entirely. Thus, the other book, if ever written, could be a sequel, a prequel, or both and neither.

What does this have to do with narrative structure? I'm still working on that. What does the plot graph of a life look like?

I finished tallying January's progress today: 7288 words. Compared to the original nearly larval frenzy of writing, it's not really all that impressive. I'm maybe two thirds of the way to my expected end. The official goal is 80000 words. I actually expect to need about 90k to tell the story in all its fullness.

The big change from December is that I'm planning more. I hope this balances out writing only half as much. I also hope that waiting so long to really go from intentionally rapid, structure-agnostic writing to intentionally slow, structure-aware writing will not come back to bite me in the butt. I already know I'll have to backfill - the first half is perilous short of description in some places - but I also find I've renamed the main character (sort of - actually added more names) and will have to have him tell his new bride his full name.

But, I finally have a clearer sense of the six brothers - just the act of completely naming them all helped - and how they interac with each other. And the story is drawing in elements from other stories (including the game that inspired all of this) and bringing forth the seeds of spin-off stories. But, I still have to finish this one before jumping off. If I stop and change horses now, my wife will have my head.

I made it to sixty thousand words. I'm three weeks late, and expect to take months to reach 80k, but I did it.

I sometimes wonder what to do when the /. community starts talking about science and religion. The prevailing (that is, mostly loudly espoused) opinion seems to be that those of us who believe are at best honest but deluded fools and at worst hypocritical, dangerous, predatory lunatics who are eager to discard contemporary civilization in favor of the Dark Ages. (Apparently, we're all militant fundamentalists.) Our belief systems are a variety of intellectual disease which should be held privately and not spoken publicly. We endanger our children's mental well-being by teaching them what we know to be true and hope to see beyond the river.

It becomes hard not to feel like I am under attack. I become angry and defensive. I think that must be hubris on my part, for it is not I whom they attack, nor even my faith, for their criticisms could take in all the Abrahamic faiths, but God and the idea of Him. I think it's hubris because I'm neither God nor anyone in a position to defend Him, nor am I my faith, nor even a good example of a person practicing my faith. Still, I get angry and keep reading.

I don't say anything as I no longer see the point. This also causes problems, because while not currently really an evangelical (I don't evangelize, therefore I'm not actually an Evangelical), I was raised as one and trained to speak up when the conversation turned to religion and faith. I thought about this the last time an science and religion article was posted - something to do with evolution and education - and remembered something Jesus said about casting your pearls before swine. This is also ironic for a once and future Evangelical, since we have Jesus Himself saying: "Sometimes you shouldn't even bother because it won't be worth it." But he said it, and that interpretation doesn't seem to be inconsistent with the rest of scripture, considering the towns Jesus left because no one was listening and His instructions to the disciples about doing likewise (To paraphrase: In every town, seek out a man of peace and stay with him. If you can't find such a man, knock the dust from your shoes and move on.), so it must be good advice at least some of the time.

That is the final dilemma: I don't like thinking about my fellow slashdotters as the swine wallowing in their mudhole. It's a sad thought, because as much as the other geeks here may sometimes confuse and infuriate me, I identify with them. That even some of them seem past reaching is a tragedy.

I don't know if there's a question here. It's just something I wanted to get off my chest.