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Insomnia!

I’m coming off of two bad nights of sleep in a row, and for no particular reason. Every once in a while insomnia sneaks up from behind and clobbers me for a night or two. Bam!

Apart from the lack of sleep it was a wonderful weekend. We had a great time at the family reunion and ate all sorts of delicious food in between various games. Sunday I got to take a long bike ride with my sweetie, and our garden is producing all sorts of great veggies (although we over planted zucchini).

I’ve been flipping through various role-playing-game manuals because I’ve been feeling the itch to start running something again, so long as it’s streamlined. I’m tried of having to feel like I’m studying for a test to run a game. I’m really, really tempted by Barbarians of Lemuria, but I have so much great support material already on hand for various flavors of D&D that I’ll probably go that route. At this point I’m contemplating a mash-up of Crypts & Things, Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea, and Castles & Crusades. There are things I love about each of them, and they’re closely enough related I think I can make it all work together.

With summer winding down my kids have only about a week of freedom left, and today I must drive into town with my son to pick up his books for the semester. I’m also revisiting one of the Paizo Pathfinder short stories I’ve written as a kind of “sneak peek” of the second novel, because I’ve decided the third act is too slow.

If I get some good sleep tonight I’ll try to put my thoughts about outlining into some kind of coherent order…

Links to Astound and Amaze PLUS Captain Pike!

Last night I had a running dream that I had been an extra on Firefly. Apparently I’d been  a crewman named Ryre who mostly stayed in the background, but had a few sentences in one episode. Of course there WERE no crew  extras on Firefly, and I suppose I knew that at some level, even while dreaming, because I had to get out the e-mails between me and Joss Whedon’s production assistant to show my suspicious friends to prove I had been on the show. Sigh. Turns out it was all a dream. That ending always sucks, doesn’t it?

I’ve got some interesting observations on the craft of writing, but I also have some good links today, so I’ll talk about writing later. Now, some neat places to visit.

 

Oranges, Smoranges

I love oranges. Hands-down, an orange is my favorite fruit. The problem is that for the last twenty years or so I’ve rarely been able to find a good one. I used to eat them all the time when I was a child — just regular grocery store oranges that were sweet but had a hint of tartness. Something changed, though, and for years now every time I try to buy a grocery store orange it’s tasteless and chewy, or dry and chewy, or juicy but bland. Faced with such oranges, my children didn’t even understand why I wanted to eat one.

I was beginning to think that my tastes had simply changed (I used to love some pretty godawful breakfast cereals and candy, after all) until I had an orange in Hawaii and, oddly enough, a really good one in a hospital cafeteria.  I then knew that good oranges hadn’t been a figment of my imagination and the challenge was to find how to get ahold of the good ones.

Anyway, a few months back I finally discovered a brand named Earthbound Farms Organic that consistently gives me the taste I desire. It costs a dollar more a bag for them than the other oranges carried by the local grocers, but they’re completely worth it. I may sound like an infomercial, but the product pleases me mightily, and I will continue to give them my money so long as their oranges taste so very, very fine.

To celebrate, here’s a wonderful song about oranges.

Oh, in case anyone’s curious, my new writing project is really catching fire. Very happy with the fireworks that are happening now with Hearthstones.

 

Link Day

I need to hit the ground running today, so I’m going to hook you up with some nifty and eclectic links.

First, a post from my talented writer friend Alex Bledsoe that ought to be of interest to any fan of heroic fantasy fiction. This one’s all about a more and more dated term: “Heroine.” Drop by and take a look.

Then there’s a pretty neat essay on what pretty much amounts to a thieve’s guild of ancient Baghdad and the peculiar tools they used to work their crimes, including a tortoise!

Have you heard about the new concept super fast train that could get you from New York to LA in under an hour? We have the technology now to make it work! Check it out, here.

Lastly, I ran across some really excellent writing advice from another writer friend, Harry Connolly. All you writers out there ought to drop by and give it a read — it’s good stuff.

 

Weekend Trek

It was a busy weekend. The family drove to St. Louis Friday night so I could wake up Saturday morning and fly to Minnesota to hear my son’s performance at a music composition camp, then fly back with him to St. Louis and drive home. My son’s composition was brilliant (and so too were those of many of his fellow camp members).

I had a lot of down time, but I also had a lot of really bad sleep. I’m still pretty exhausted, actually. I did have a few observations, though.

1. The security personnel at the Minneapolis airport were some of the best humored I have ever dealt with. Two thumbs up for them for being professional, courteous, and good spirited. The bonhomie actually seemed to permeate the entire staff. (And here’s a mildly curious aside — as my son and I were lining up for the security check I passed a gentleman getting in line to check his bags, and danged if I didn’t do a double-take. He wasn’t some guy who vaguely resembled Al Franken… he was Senator Al Franken. I suppose that it’s not at all remarkable that Al Franken should ride planes, or that he should be in Minneapolis, seeing as how he’s a senator from Minnesota, so perhaps it’s not actually that interesting an aside…)

Of Blackhearts, Laptops, and Turkeys

First, a link I thought a lot of my visitors might find of interest. My friend Nathan Long, vastly underappreciated master of sword-and-sorcery adventure, penned a really neat look at the underdog in sword-and-sorcery over at his own site. If you haven’t already, you should swing by and take a look. Here’s the link.

Nathan’s written some fabulous s&s stuff, but if you’re not a reader of Warhammer novels you probably haven’t heard of him. Whatever you might think of tie-in work, you must realize that with so much of it out there some is head and shoulders above the others. And some towers not just above its peers, but stands with the truly great giants of sword-and-sorcery. (Yes, I think that highly of Nathan’s stuff.) Nathan’s Long Blackhearts books (along with C.L. Werner’s Brunner stories, some of William King’s Gotrek & Felix novels, and more work by Long) should really be widely read and praised by any lovers of adventure fantasy.

Man At Work

All morning I’ve been transferring files from my Asus laptop to my brand new MacBook Pro.

The old one isn’t dead and had served me well except for the partly broken hinge and the annoying way that lightly brushing against the touch pad sets the cursor jumping around. The main reason I updated was so that my son, now in high school, would have a computer he could primarily call his own. More and more often I was having to loan it out to him to work on school projects or, this summer, to work on the music composition program Finale.

I wasn’t actually planning on a Mac. I’d sold off several hundred dollars worth of old books and games and the like in preparation for picking up a new PC. Then I became a little overwhelmed with reviews of various PC laptops — perhaps you know the routine. One site would say great things about a particular model, another wouldn’t, and, not being a regular browser of PC computer reviews I always wondered if the review site was legit, or secretly a commercial for one of the brands.

On top of that, after I’d get my list of laptops  I was most interested  in together, I’d discover the local stores didn’t have those models. Meanwhile, my wife was using her MacBook Pro, as she’s been doing for some years now, and as she was doing on another Mac for years prior. And suddenly it dawned on me that maybe the extra money would be worth the sense that A. I would be getting something good B. It would last for a very long time.

So here I am.

 

 

Jones Adventures on the 4th of July

It’s been a relaxing weekend here at Jones central. On Thursday afternoon we saddled up the horses and rode around the pasture for a while. Some family friends came by and the thought was we might pull out Martian Rails, but the weather was so nice we just remained outside after the pitch-in dinner.

We could see some fairground fireworks going off over the hill, and the new neighbors, atop said hill, seemed to have sunk a chunk of change into fireworks themselves, because some pretty big stuff was launched into the sky. Our own fireworks display was much more subdued, although our old friend Bruce brought some pretty cool ones.

Some of the most delightful moments came when something went slightly awry. For instance, I discovered I’d purchased a box of cardboard tanks a few years back, and we set them rolling on the drive way. Anyone who has lit up those tanks knows they generally don’t roll very far, which was true for most of these. One, though, worked exactly as must have been intended by the designer, except for the sudden ninety degree turn. Not only did it zoom ten feet at a pretty good clip, when it launched its fireworks it wasn’t a bright fizzle, but a projectile that went halfway to one of the cars!

Landstalker

For the last week or so my son’s been playing an old Sega adventure game called Landstalker, aided by my wife. I bought it for my wife years ago when she couldn’t find anything to satisfy her Zelda fix (anyone who plays the Zelda-style adventure games knows that there are long gaps between releases of new games). I think it might have been a used game when I picked it up for her, because when I looked it up the other day on the interwebs I discovered it was more than a quarter century old!

I’ve since made two deductions. First, it’s pretty neat that an older style game can still prove completely entertaining and immersive to someone from the new generation. Second, when did I get so old that a game I saw played as an adult is now 25 years old?

 

A Prayer for Heroes

I sat down the other evening with my wife and son for my second viewing of The 13th Warrior. I hadn’t seen it for a long while, and I discovered I enjoyed it just as much or more than I had the first time.

I was surprised to learn that it had only a 33% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes and that it hadn’t done at all well in the cinema. It’s a very fine story of heroic adventure with comrades-in-arms, with some honest-to-goodness chills, thrills, and mystery. At least that’s my opinion. It’s one of the better heroic movies filmed in the last quarter century. God knows I’d rather watch it a few more times than, say, Conan the Destroyer. Apparently I’m out of step with the consensus. I flipped through the various negative reviews and shook my head at the comments and lack of appreciation. As an adventure story it does so many things right that many movies do wrong… but that’s not what makes it great. For all the in-your-face violence, much of what happens is understated, including character development and the themes of heroism.