Friday Five: What's New?

[Delilah Rehm]

1. We will be naming game 3 soon. Thinking of names is hard! Especially when people keep telling you your ideas sound like porn names! Yes... My favorite contender for DoP was Buried Thunder until... Yeah. Right.

2. I finally saw the first three episodes of Dexter season 3 and am not-so-patiently awaiting the next disk from Netflix. It's a long wait. The show is so good, I'm tempted to run out to Blockbuster and pick up the next disk. Very tempted.

3. I just remembered I was almost finished with a long lumen short story back in March. Why haven't I finished that??? I didn't get much writing done this summer but I'm back on the bandwagon churning away at my novel, Vampire Planet. The first draft is 2/3 done and I've gone back to work on the second draft which is about 1/6 done. I planned to finish by the end of this year and I'm still reaching for that mark.

4. FenCon, a science fiction and fantasy convention in Dallas, is next weekend and I'm stoked to go! I love hanging out with other like minded friends and talking about the things we all enjoy. I meet new friends every year. If you're there, hunt me down and say "Hi!" I'll be wearing a Depths of Peril t-shirt on Saturday. Also, you can ask around. Somebody will know me. One of these years I'll make it to PAX, but even then I think FenCon will be my favorite convention. I've had such amazing times there!

5. Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett is a wonderful book! I loved the whole series. It's also the last best thing I've read. Whenever someone shows off their stylish new gizmo, I always think to myself, "What would Mistress Weatherwax say about that?" Her and I run along the same vein- utility over fashion. Somebody remind me about that after I'm rich and famous and buy a corvette. K?

[Delilah Rehm]

Hey guys, feel free to throw up a Friday 5 of your own, just for fun.

1. I read Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett and I liked it, but not as much as Wee Free Men which I loved!

2. I told my 7 year old she couldn't only eat a tomato for dinner. Next time I turn around she's eating spoon fulls of butter.

3. I'm making good progress on Vampire Planet (about 1/6 of the way through the second draft).

4. Anyone want to guess what will be the next best thing for sci-fi on tv? I seriously miss Firefly and Battlestar Gallactica. I love me some Joss, but let's face it - Dollhouse will never be as good as Firefly. I'm trying to fill in the gap with Dexter season 3 but Netflix WON'T SEND THE SECOND DISK! *grumble, grumble* And this is where you say, "Hey! Why are you watching so much tv? Go play some games!"

5. Is anybody else watching The Guild (on the internet) with Felicia Day? I'm really enjoying season 3 (with Wil W.!!!). Sometimes my 7 year old and I will sing Do You Want to Date My Avatar together. As I was watching General Hospital while eating lunch today (yeah, blame Buffy. She's the one who got me into soaps. I don't watch all the time, but sometimes...) Anyway, I about choked when I saw VORK on the show! Hilarious.

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by Delilah Rehm

2. I told my 7 year old she couldn't only eat a tomato for dinner. Next time I turn around she's eating spoons full of butter.

This was about a week after she told me I was no longer allowed to make her food that wasn't good for her.

[Delilah Rehm]

1. I'm between chapters and thought, "Hey, why don't I procrastinate by writing a Friday 5?"

2. I'm worried about some balancing issues with my book, but I really love it. :-) I wonder... do books need to be balanced to be good? I guess I'll have to wait for my writing group to tell me.

3. Sometimes I feel like my main character is my evil twin, like looking into a mirror universe where she is so much like me but in an opposite vein. It's spooky.

4. Steven keeps showing me level maps for Din's Curse and they look awesome. Better than Depths and Kivi.

5. Ummm... How come it's always hard to think of a number 5?

I'm glad it's Friday. There's something nice about not having pressure to work on writing or cleaning or errands. I like when I have lots of free time just to do whatever I feel like. It won't actually be that way this weekend. I have several get togethers and my daughter has a scouting event.

Weekends are my reading time. I'm untrustworthy to stop reading a book if I really like it and I'm in the middle of it. I will put everything else aside and do nothing but read!

What's up with you guys?

[scragar]

Would you please explain no 2? What's unbalanced in the book?

[Delilah Rehm]

In the current draft, no one dies (after the opening) until page 85, then 6 people die in one chapter. I wonder if I should've killed off a few people all along the way, or at least spread it out (they don't all die in the same scene) with the first 3 earlier and then the second 3 at page 85.

Of course, after this people are going to die pretty regularly for awhile, so maybe it works.

See how easy it is to get caught up in the details??? Geez. I just need to get on with the writing and trust myself. Sometimes I wonder how anyone ever finishes a book!

[Mivo]

Hmm, are those main characters that are dying so suddenly in such large numbers? George R. R. Martin has the tendency to kill most of his main characters, and I actually found that a tad tedious after a while. As a reader, I sort of get attached to some characters, and while it's fine if one or two of them bite the dust, I get uneasy if the whole "people landscape" changes drastically, especially if it happens frequently.

On the flipside, it was unusual enough to make me remember his writings, and his stuff is quite successful. So, it may be a good thing!

[Delilah Rehm]

I haven't actually read George R. R. Martin yet. Whenever I come across his books, it's always number two or three in a series and I don't like starting series out of order!

I totally get what you're saying about killing off characters you like. In my younger days I was angry at Stephen King for killing the little boy in Cujo (oh I cried so much!), but I forgave him when he saved the little boy in Tommy Knockers.

The first three deaths are from a memory. There are a few mainstay characters in my book who will live to see the end, but most of the characters' lives are uncertain. I wonder how high the body count will be by the end (I haven't written the last third of the first draft yet).

[Delilah Rehm]

A full moon rose above trees while at an outdoor school event. I track down my daughter and plan to grab her, and where to run and hide when the werewolves attack. Yes, this is how my mind works.

Luckily, we got out of there before anything happened. Though I can still see a mental image of kids running screaming as large, furry beasts loped into the clearing. Way more kids were attending than parents.

[Mivo]

Martin's style actually takes some getting used to. He tries a little too hard to be a Tolkien, but doesn't do quite as well, so most of the novels get very, verrry slow at various stages, and you get this tempting urge to read vertically. Nevertheless, he is a talented author, his world is of epic scale, seamless world design, but he doesn't "do" characters as well as, say, Robin Hobb, whose character detail I adore. Plus, he likes to murder his main characters, except a tiny handful of them. (Which, admittedly, in turn grow even more on you -- the survivors of the ink-stained massacre!)

I'm just one of those readers who get attached to some characters, and they become sort of family, so when a new book of a series comes out, it's like a reunion meeting on an emotional level. Terry Goodkind's series is a good example here. I started reading it in 1994 or 1995, and while the story got worse and more obscure with every new installment, I faithfully kept buying all the books, because I wanted to know how the lives of the main characters continued. (And in retrospect, I wish I had just stopped after the first three books.)

Your project sounds intriguing! Actually, I love your short stories, too, so this is something to look forward to.