My View

Got an email from Eric Reynolds saying that Mary Ellen Martin and myself are in Locus Online for our book signing in Boise this month. Coolness. I wonder if that is a first for Locus and Boise?

Anyway, Mary Ellen was at a book signing in Reno this week, so go read her blog and see what fun she had with fellow Hadley Rille authors.

I ran across this blog today and thought I would share it, in case everyone thought I was a one-sided Linux zealot. Well, I am, but still, I enjoy a second opinion now and then. Especially from a whiny Mac zealot.

This blog comes along at a time when most people equate Ubuntu with being the Linux. Enjoy!

Tobias Buckell’s SF universe is fast becoming one of my favorite Space Opera places to hang out in.  I finally picked up and read his first novel - Crystal Rain last year and quickly fell in love with Buckell’s Caribbean flavored universe.  This week I finished the second book set in the same universe as Crystal Rain - Ragamuffin.  Some of the characters from Crystal Rain are back in action in Ragamuffin and Buckell introduces us to a few new characters as well.  While Crystal Rain was confined to a single planet in the universe, Ragamuffin opens the worm hole door to reveal many more of the 48 worlds in his universe.

Ragamuffin definitely has more of a Space Opera feel to it as we move through worm holes in starships to eventually arrive back at Nanagada, the isolated world featured in Crystal Rain.  It was good to hook up with John and Pepper again and see how Nanagada had changed since the events in Crystal Rain.  I also enjoyed the new lead character of Nashara and her band of Raga freedom fighters.  Buckell is a master at plotting and the story moves quickly and has plenty of action.  But the real draw for me is Buckell’s carefully created universe that makes me enjoy his books and savor them for their unique details.

This August comes Sly Mongoose, the third book set in this universe, and I can’t wait to get it.

The boys from England are calling it quits and ending a four year stint as the most popular Linux related podcast on the internet. LUG Radio will air its final show next month.  If you have never heard these geeks talk Linux, you are missing out.  But be forewarned, their language is not for the kids.

They are not leaving because of a fall out, they all remain best buds.  They are simply going out while still on top.  Hats off, LUG Radio, you will be missed!

I’ve done a post about my sales numbers from having my SF novel on Amazon’s Kindle for the past four months, over on Starstrikers.ning.com. Go and check it out if you think you can quit your day job by selling your own POD novel.

My novel Starstrikers is being reworked or refreshed, and I decided to let everyone know about the progress of the book, by creating a Plurk account for the book. If you know what Twitter is, Plurk is a newer, hipper version that actually works. Twitter is bogged down in popularity, until they get that fixed, I’ll be on Plurk.

Anyway, in case you are into that whole mini-blogging deal, here is the URL to the Starstrikers Plurk. I welcome everyone.

http://www.plurk.com/user/Starstrikers

I guess I’m pretty well read for a college drop out.  I have read 23 out of 100.  I don’t agree with some of the books on this list and there is a confusion on that whole Chronicles of Narnia thing.  There should probably be only one book per author to save space for others. The list leans a bit too far to the Christian faith for my tastes.  But if you live in the USA you are expected to be aware of Christian mythos.  I have read parts of a few of these books, but did not mark them as I have never made it through to the end, so left them in italics.

Look at the list and

1. bold those you have read.

2. Italicize those you intend to
   read

3. Underline the books you LOVE

4. Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force
   books upon them.

5. Mark in Red the books you will NEVER read. (I added this one)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - better viewed than read, but yanno
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I’ve been busy lately adding chapter header quotes and cleaning up the chapter text for the Starstrikers refresh. There are three new chapters in this version of the novel and the fourteen chapters of the last version are now separated out to 32 chapters. Each chapter now has a quote by a character either in the story or someone from later in the time line commenting about the events in the story from a historical perspective. This was a reader suggestion and I have to say, a really good one. Thank you Nate!

So there are plenty of new things in this version. I still have not ruled out including a preview of Starforgers. I think it will go in, as I want to garner some interest in a second novel. I am also toying with including a map of the known GC universe. I just love maps, but I’m not sure a map is particularly useful in this novel. It has been suggested that I include some of the artwork now up at Starstrikers.ning.com, but I think I will forgo that option.

… the low resolution cover art for Hadley Rille Book’s upcoming anthology, Return to Luna!  It looks fantastic, even in low resolution and in all likelihood, just a protype.  I can’t wait to read this baby when it comes out.  Especially if I am so lucky as to find myself in the TOC.

I have a story about an android who happens to be named Thirty-seven, on Scribd. At the time of this screen shot, the story had 37 views. I think that’s cool. Will I find any other number interesting in regards to this story, like say 74? Nope. The story is called “Rock Collection”, check it out, it’s only 1000 words.