Random stuff
Jan. 28th, 2008 07:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6Stupid State of the Union, making TV suck tonight. Of all the things Bush is to blame for, this is the worst. Well, okay, maybe not the worst, but it's annoying me right now.
Anyway, some stuff... lets see, we had Stargate over the weekend, but it was a total filler ep.
And in a bit of Canadiana of interest to probably nobody except me... I must have not been paying attention to the news, because I only just recently noticed that Space, Canada's science fiction cable channel, is now owned by CTV, when it used to be affiliated with CityTV. Apparently CTV bought out all the CHUM (which includes City) stations, cable and otherwise. So that's why Terminator was somehow playing on both CTV and Space. Except, apparently they have to sell off many of their local CityTV stations (due to laws of station ownership), so Toronto's CityTV and Space will, eventually, presumably, be completely separate (wonder if they'll still use the same building for production space?). And that'll just be odd, I'm so used to taking for granted something on City will also eventually be on space (or vice versa). But it does mean Space will be airing LOST too so if I want to rewatch and look for connections it'll be easier.
Writing cycle's over, ahead of schedule because, yay, I finished another story. It was a much older one. I actually thought I finished it earlier but when I went back to do some editing I remembered that I didn't. I had decided in broad strokes where to finish it, but the nitty gritty wasn't actually written, and there were many details that needed to be worked out. So I worked on that most of the time, and managed to get it finished. It'll be a pain to edit though, even more than normal. Right now it stands at a little over 17,000 words. There are about 4 majorly 'present' SF ideas winding their way through the whole thing, all of which not only have to be consistent with themselves throughout the story, but also with each other, not to mention all the little other ideas. There are 4 different versions of one character (albeit one mentioned only briefly in passing), and a couple of others. And still need to do the hard work of describing things, tightening up the flow of the language, and in general making it not suck. So although it's 'finished', it's far from finished. I call it 'finished' only because as it stands now it tells a complete story from beginning to end in terms of plot narrative, with no major points to be decided (there is one minor point I'm not satisfied with that might need a better explanation than I gave it, but it's not worth counting). Since I did that, I could claim my 'word count bonus' (I knock 1,000 words off my quota for the cycle if I actually finish a story), and am done for this time around.
And from my writing to someone else's, Book Foo!
Finished: The Depths of Time, by Roger MacBride Allen
Started: Superluminal by Vonda McIntyre
Thoughts on DoT behind the cut, conceptual spoilers and other stuff behind the cut. In short, I didn't care much for it.
The concept at the back of the book was quite appealing - space travel which occurs through 'timeshaft wormholes' that send ships backwards in time, and a chronological patrol that vigorously ensures no future information reaches the past (the passengers are in cryosleep and out of touch with the rest of the world so they travel hundreds of years in space, then back in time, and arrive at their destination weeks after they left), and a member of that patrol who is forced to shut down a major timeshaft wormhole permanently during an attack apparently designed to do just that - get information into the past. Sounds cool so far.
Except that's about the first couple chapters of the book, and the rest of the book is about the troubled terraforming of a planet, with very little to do with the whole time travel system and completely unmentioned by the back of the book. Only the captain himself carries over. Sure, that initial plot crops up again towards the end of the book (and judging by that end, it's part of a series, but I have no interest in following it up), but I felt bait and switched, expecting one kind of story, and getting a much less interesting one.
Beyond that, the characters were more than a little flat and unmemorable, and the author didn't really succeed in getting across the nature of timeshaft travel very well, and how exactly shipping worked under that theory - it might also have helped if there was some evidence that temporal information leakage had actually caused some problem in the past.
On the plus side, I got it for only 50c, so I suppose I shouldn't really complain too much. It wasn't horrible, but it didn't live up to its promise and was thoroughly forgettable.
Anyway, some stuff... lets see, we had Stargate over the weekend, but it was a total filler ep.
And in a bit of Canadiana of interest to probably nobody except me... I must have not been paying attention to the news, because I only just recently noticed that Space, Canada's science fiction cable channel, is now owned by CTV, when it used to be affiliated with CityTV. Apparently CTV bought out all the CHUM (which includes City) stations, cable and otherwise. So that's why Terminator was somehow playing on both CTV and Space. Except, apparently they have to sell off many of their local CityTV stations (due to laws of station ownership), so Toronto's CityTV and Space will, eventually, presumably, be completely separate (wonder if they'll still use the same building for production space?). And that'll just be odd, I'm so used to taking for granted something on City will also eventually be on space (or vice versa). But it does mean Space will be airing LOST too so if I want to rewatch and look for connections it'll be easier.
Writing cycle's over, ahead of schedule because, yay, I finished another story. It was a much older one. I actually thought I finished it earlier but when I went back to do some editing I remembered that I didn't. I had decided in broad strokes where to finish it, but the nitty gritty wasn't actually written, and there were many details that needed to be worked out. So I worked on that most of the time, and managed to get it finished. It'll be a pain to edit though, even more than normal. Right now it stands at a little over 17,000 words. There are about 4 majorly 'present' SF ideas winding their way through the whole thing, all of which not only have to be consistent with themselves throughout the story, but also with each other, not to mention all the little other ideas. There are 4 different versions of one character (albeit one mentioned only briefly in passing), and a couple of others. And still need to do the hard work of describing things, tightening up the flow of the language, and in general making it not suck. So although it's 'finished', it's far from finished. I call it 'finished' only because as it stands now it tells a complete story from beginning to end in terms of plot narrative, with no major points to be decided (there is one minor point I'm not satisfied with that might need a better explanation than I gave it, but it's not worth counting). Since I did that, I could claim my 'word count bonus' (I knock 1,000 words off my quota for the cycle if I actually finish a story), and am done for this time around.
And from my writing to someone else's, Book Foo!
Finished: The Depths of Time, by Roger MacBride Allen
Started: Superluminal by Vonda McIntyre
Thoughts on DoT behind the cut, conceptual spoilers and other stuff behind the cut. In short, I didn't care much for it.
The concept at the back of the book was quite appealing - space travel which occurs through 'timeshaft wormholes' that send ships backwards in time, and a chronological patrol that vigorously ensures no future information reaches the past (the passengers are in cryosleep and out of touch with the rest of the world so they travel hundreds of years in space, then back in time, and arrive at their destination weeks after they left), and a member of that patrol who is forced to shut down a major timeshaft wormhole permanently during an attack apparently designed to do just that - get information into the past. Sounds cool so far.
Except that's about the first couple chapters of the book, and the rest of the book is about the troubled terraforming of a planet, with very little to do with the whole time travel system and completely unmentioned by the back of the book. Only the captain himself carries over. Sure, that initial plot crops up again towards the end of the book (and judging by that end, it's part of a series, but I have no interest in following it up), but I felt bait and switched, expecting one kind of story, and getting a much less interesting one.
Beyond that, the characters were more than a little flat and unmemorable, and the author didn't really succeed in getting across the nature of timeshaft travel very well, and how exactly shipping worked under that theory - it might also have helped if there was some evidence that temporal information leakage had actually caused some problem in the past.
On the plus side, I got it for only 50c, so I suppose I shouldn't really complain too much. It wasn't horrible, but it didn't live up to its promise and was thoroughly forgettable.
