This I Believe

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If you see a bank robber take your three-days-from-retirement partner hostage, he may order you to stand back.

If you see a squad of soldiers aiming their weapons at a newly-discovered ally, you can tell them to stand down.

If you win the high noon quick-draw shootout with the evil sheriff, you can stand over his corpse.

If you have to give a valedictorian speech, you can stand on a podium.

If your friend has been falsely accused of leaking state secrets to the super-terrorists, you can stand behind her.

However, if you’ve decided you no longer want to sit in that chair, you do not have to stand up. You can just stand. No direction needed.

That is all.

Randomness for 1/13

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1) “That’s why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child.” Quality parenting advice from Amy Chua. More from NPR. And NMA TV in Taiwan offers one of their video parodies.

2) An alternate ending for RETURN OF THE JEDI: Video. At least we could have avoided the Ewok party at the end. via Tor.com

3) I’ve seen a couple of reviews that deserved this treatment. Video. via James Nicoll

4) Should you work for free? A flowchart.

5) The cost of torrented books, with numbers. The problem is, you can never get people to believe that what they’re doing is causing harm in a way that matters, because they refuse to see themselves as bad people. They just can’t imagine themselves that way.

6) Top ten fonts for book designers.

7) What is it about social media that makes people write these ridiculous articles?

A brief interlude from work

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My wife and son have just left me here alone while he gets an eye check up. Wish we had vision insurance, but what can you do? The boy can’t see.

I just finished listening to Nancy Pearl on our local NPR affiliate, KUOW. She recommended Jo Walton’s new novel along with Gail Carriger’s SOULLESS. I sent them an email mentioning Cherie Priest’s BONESHAKER, but Nancy Pearl brought up her name before they had a chance to read it on air.

They didn’t mention my books.

Which disappointed my wife, but I didn’t expect it. I don’t think the Twenty Palaces books are quite up her alley, to steal a cliche. Too dark, I think. Even if she had read them (and as a fan of hers, I wrote a personal note for the folks at Del Rey to send with her review copy–I even have a Nancy Pearl Action Figure but it’s an older, less flashy version) I’m not sure I would have passed her Rule of 50. Which is fine; no writer should expect that their book be loved by every reader everywhere. In fact, god forbid.

Anyway, the fam is out and Warren Olney has been turned off (I like his show, but his voice has a quality that’s hard to ignore) so I can dig in to the copy edit of Circle of Enemies. I lost the whole day yesterday dealing with my blown knee, but I’m less than 60 pages from the end, and I’d like to finish tonight.

Then, finally, I’ll be able to write a post or two about some of the things that have come up lately, like putting a direction behind the word “stand” and on the need to figure theft of your product when setting price points.

Back to it.

Something we all knew

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It’s surprisingly painful to other parts of the body to be laid up with a bad knee.

Things you can do with a camera

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Also, do you recognize the name Bragi Schut? No? Well, he’s the screenwriter who wrote SEASON OF THE WITCH, the new Nic Cage movie currently getting 5% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. Unfortunately for Mr. Schut, his name is on the movie, but much of what’s up there is someone else’s… stuff.

FYI: The spec script for SEASON OF THE WITCH won the 2003 Nicholl Fellowship, which is THE big wannabe screenwriter competition. The winner gets $30K to write a new script, plus a whole slew of Hollywood meetings. The problem is that once the script gets a lot of interest, it also gets a whole lot of people who want to change it, and those people aren’t going to defer to the original writer’s expertise. He’s just the dude that wrote it, after all.

Rumor is that this is pretty much what happened to DRAGONHEART. The writer teamed up with a director to put together a story idea. The writer wrote it. Producers loved it, some being reduced to tears when reading it.

Suddenly, it becomes this “big” project, much too big to be entrusted to the people who created it in the first place. The producer passes it off to a director who Doesn’t Get It, the whole thing is miscast, the dragon is introduced with a “Heeere’s Johnny!” bit of dialog, and they tried to make a pivotal scene “funny” by having starving villagers trip over a whole herd of pigs.

It’s one of the reasons I’m glad I write novels now. The people asking me to change this or that are good with story. From what I’ve heard, the whole third act of SEASON… is stuff the producers demanded.

Development kills.

There’s one more shooting day left for the Twenty Palaces book trailer. I’ll post pictures if I can.

Also, my son has gone back to his stop-motion animations. (Yay!)

Randomness for 1/12

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1) Commissioner Gordon is a Jerk.

2) What’s it like living in Playboy Mansion? Apparently, the answer is: rigidly schduled.

3) Drill Close to Reaching 14-Million-Year-Old Antarctic Lake.

4) Hoping for a big time Hollywood deal? Hah!

5) Muslims protect Christians.

6) Don’t buy your comics from this asshole.

7) “Inland tsunami” sweeps away cars in Toowoomba, Australia. Video part one. Video part two.

Well, that’s unfortunate

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And for “unfortunate” read “awful.”

Last night I was having a snowball fight with my son when my knee twinged. I didn’t slip, didn’t fall, didn’t twist anything. I wasn’t turning when it happened. I just stepped and that was it.

Now I can’t bend my knee or move it side to side. I mean, it’s been painful and tender, but never this bad.

So I’m laid up with enough ice to crack the hull of the Titanic and I can’t really see myself doing groceries today.

It’ll give me time for the rest of my copy edit, though.

Five things make a post

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1- It’s snowing. This isn’t going to be one of those big storms that hit other parts of the country, but it’s still pretty. (Added later: coming down harder now)

2- I’m a little behind where I want to be on the copy edit, but I’m well ahead of where I need to be to return it to my publisher on time. The rush is mostly about productivity (without letting quality suffer).

3- No one needs to find a backlog of Glenn Beck shows on the AZ killer’s TIVO to speak out against the rhetoric of violence in modern American cultural/political discussion. Personally, I’m sick of it and yes, at the moment this is a tactic that conservatives are using. I wish the heads of the G.O.P. would speak out against it the way McCain [tried to, badly, when Obama was accused of being an “Arab” by a woman who almost certainly meant “Muslim”] during the last presidential campaign.

4- As a not-so-side issue, I’m also sick of the way we as a culture denigrate our government. Most every candidate runs as an outsider determined to change the way things are done. Obama certainly did. I’d rather see us have a clearer view of our public servants; no, they’re not always great. They are often quite good, though, and doing their best to serve the constituents who voted for them.

5- Watched SHARPE’S RIFLES yesterday. A pretty good movie, but those Chosen Men sure did reload quickly when the camera was on other people. My wife leaves for work in an hour and my son is still sleeping. Hopefully I’ll be able to squeeze in IRON MAN 2.

Obligatory copy editing post

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Boy is this humbling!

Why is that paragraph at the bottom of the page instead of where it belongs?

How many times can I cram the word “look” into a sentence? You’d be surprised!

Apparently, there’s some rule for using “anymore” and “any more.” Who knew?

Honestly, I should just repost my last copy editing post. It’s the same stuff (except that I’m more prepared to deal with it now).

I finally got that WP child theme working

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And now I’m going offline to work on the copy edit of Circle of Enemies. I don’t bring my laptop with me, but damn, if it wasn’t for my struggles with the child theme I’d have started an hour ago.