Well I've now got my shiny new blog/website up and running. I haven't officially changed sites yet, but it's going well enough to allow people to surf on over for a test drive. Stop by and let me know what you think. The url (for now) is www.sandrewswann.com/blog.
Warning: Cognitive dissonance ahead.
I am working hard on the new site, pulling over the Blogger entries as needed. The main time-sink in getting the thing ready is pulling over the old home-page. I didn’t realize how much content was sitting there, all of which I’m trying to integrate into the new Wordpress site. There’re at least two pages (a home page and an excerpt page) for each book, and several complicated interrelationships that require me to touch every page and iron out the links. Upside: it will help me maintain a consistent look for the whole mass of data. Downside: the whole headache of changing the URLs for an established pair of sites. That’s a mess any way you cut it. I will probably have to keep the old pages up indefinitely just to house redirects to the new site.Along with the new site, and a new look, I will also be changing the blog’s name. There are a number of reasons for it. The site’s no longer going to be “just a blog.” It will house all the professional data you’d expect on a web-savvy author site— data on books, bibliographies, contact info for me, my agent, my publishers, upcoming appearances, books and so on, sample chapters and such, and anything else that might come up in the future. (podcasting, book trailers, who knows?) Secondly, “Off the Pink” is a very particular reference that only applies to a particular series from one of my personas, and I need a more general name that’s still reflective of my work and all my writerly personas. The name I’m pondering at the moment is “Genrewonk.” It still might change before my new web presence goes live, but I am sort of attached to it.Here’s a sneak peek at the new site. It’s still unfinished, but I’ll start posting links to it when I think it’s reached the level of a “public beta.”
I just saw Iron Man and, IMO it is probably one of the best superhero adaptations made since Superman. It could have gone so very, very, wrong. We have a prolonged origin story, the driven hero with personal demons, the avuncular villian we see coming a mile away, a political subtext about weapons proliferation combined with the obligatory scenes of the hero making things go boom. . . Just think of what a mess this would be if Michael Bay was involved.First of all, while we get the inevitable superhero origin, Iron Man handles it as an integral part of the story. The origin and development of the suit is an integral part of the movie's plot, the inciting incident of Iron Man's creation is also the inciting incident of the story that is resolved with the climax. (Superman was slightly different in this respect, as it was structured like a biopic rather than an action movie.) The superhero genre has many examples of origins clumsily shoehorned into some other story, Daredevil being the most egregious example I can think of.Second, while Tony Stark could have been played as a self-righteous emo supertwit, we get Robert Downey Jr. playing a nuanced and very credible performance. He is a reckless, self-involved playboy who has a near literal change of heart after a period of (PG-13) torture and imprisonment, but his change in attitude is believable. We clearly see that this guy is the same reckless, self-involved genius he was before. Just he's now going to fix the problem.Third, the politics. Dicey thing, especially in an action/superhero move, to tackle things like weapons proliferation (Case in point, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace). When the main character starts blowing things up, he can lose some credibility on those points. Iron Man actually is smart enough to take a pragmatic view. Tony Stark is not against weapons, just weapons in the wrong people's hands. He is quite content to deploy flame throwers, missiles and any other ordinance at the bad guys. Agree or disagree, it is perfectly consistent with his character. Especially when he takes the idea of non-proliferation to the logical extreme, he's the only one who gets the suit.Combine that with the fact the writers could pull off wry humor without losing respect for the characters, they treated the material seriously but not so much to give off any weird übergeek vibes, and while they stepped in the occasional cliché, they didn't track it all over the carpet.All in all, this movie is made of win.
At least according to our latest asshat, none other than Stephen King. I’ve never thought of him as having a big mouth, but apparently it is just large enough to hold a foot. Quoth King:
I don't want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that. It's, it's not as bright. So, that's my little commercial for that.
If I seem to be blogging a bit less, it isn't because I've stopped playing with my blog. I have finally decided to take the plunge and get my own web host. The good news is that Wordpress imports from Blogger pretty damn slick, and with a few judicious configuration changed to the permalink format, and a little SQL scripting to change the domain for my extensive self-linkage, and about 90% of my blog ports over without an issue. The main hurdle to going live is porting over all the content from my home page over at sff.net which sort of evolved over the past decade or so and therefore doesn't have the most intuitive layout (and certainly wasn't designed with a package like Wordpress in mind.)Changing domains will be something of a pain, but since both this blog and the sff.net site are free for me, there's no reason for me not to keep redirects up indefinitely.I will keep you all updated.
As the whole Cassie Edwards story pointed out, it is hard to be a plagiarist these days. Anyone with just a little suspicion can use the internet to correctly attribute just about anything, so it is a stupid, stupid, thing to do. The kind of thing you really only expect from people who never had the proper academic grounding, or a good English teacher flunking them for appropriating someone's words. . .Then again, if your English teacher was James Twitchell, I expect that flunking his students for plagiarism was not all that high on his priority list. Seems he's owned up to plagiarizing sections of his book for Simon & Schuster, Shopping for God. (via GalleyCat)In his own words (we hope):
It's my responsibility to make sure that the words and ideas are my own and, if not, that they are properly credited. In many cases, I have not done this. [...] I have used the words of others and not properly attributed them. I am always in a hurry to get past descriptions to make my points, a hurry that has now rightly resulted in much shame and embarrassment. I have cheated by using pieces of descriptions written by others.
Mixed bag today. This one is from the Smart Bitches, and is entitled the "Engineers Guide to Cats."
My existential title crisis is over!And and the winner is: *drumroll*Lilly's SongNow we just need to decide if it's "A Wolfbreed Novel" or "A Novel of the Wolfbreed"
ADDENDUM: Charlie Stross gets in on the act.God do I love Scalzi's posts sometimes. Before I get into details, I should point out the origin of this meme in the actions of one asshat extrordinaire, Deborah MacGillivray who engaged in gaming the Amazon.com review system, mobilizing internet stormtroopers to vote down and report negative reviews as abuse and, in the height of insanity, precipitated a pile-on victimizing a single poor reviewer who complained about her tactics, to the tune of collecting personal information, making threats and generally behaving like a stalker a few pages short of a copy of Catcher in the Rye. Punchline? The reviewer so abused had dared to post a three-star review.Scalzi's response to this insanity seemed highly appropriate and psychologically healthy. He posted a selection of his own one-star reviews, and provided the following challenge:
[...] [T]o other authors with blogs, LiveJournals and etc: Post your one-star (or otherwise negative) Amazon reviews, if you have them, and you probably do. Oh, go on. Own your one-star reviews, man. And then, you know. Get past them. If you’re lucky, some of them might actually be fun to read.
It's a mystery with any real conclusions. It moves from accusations of one group to accusations of another. The conclusion of the book is not supported by any facts in the story. It was merely conclusions that could have been taken any number of ways.The authors writing left something to be desired. The use of big words added nothing to the story and did nothing but slow me down. It was as if the author was trying to show off his intelligence.The use of profanity was unnecessary. The use of profanity by characters added nothing to the character development. There was no point to having it in the book.Finally the book has very little to do with dragons. The first dragon dies in the prologue and the only other dragon in the story adds nothing to the story line. The title of the book is misleading.
It's sad to be excited about a book beacause of all the good reviews here on Amazon, and then to find it is filled with racial stereotypes. I suppose this book is fine for people of European descent, but people of color like myself might be put off by the use racial slurs like "Japs" and "wetbacks" which are used by the main character. Am I supposed to like this character? The dipiction of black people also left me saddened. This book wasn't written in the 50's, was it? And here I thought he was going to be using the concept of the moreau as a critique of rasicism as opposed to more of the same old, same old.
This book is not a new concept. Stephen King and Dean Koontz have written about telekinesis and evil organizations attempting to control and experiment upon those with telekinesis before. It's not a crime not to start out with an original concept: authors do it all the time. But what Krane failed to do was to provide an original slant and original characters. I couldn't look at any of the characters and think of someone they reminded me of or that one of them might be someone I'd like to meet. They weren't believable. Especially not Chuck. What teenager talks like that? He was full of annoying anachronisms.
This is one of the worst books I've ever read. Very difficult for the reader to keep track of the twenty-odd characters in "The Game." The characterizations are poor and no reason is given for the reader to care about these people. The plot is so tenuous and obscure that it is an effort to maintain interest. By the time you find out what has been happening and why - you just don't give a d---. This writer knows very little about writing - at least in this genre - and I will not read anything else he writes. Save your time and money. If I could have rated it lower than one star, I would have.
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