Review: Iain Banks Matter
After two long weeks of reading in fits and starts, I have finally finished Iain M. Banks’ latest SF novel, The Culture Novel Matter. And although it was unquestionably an excellent space opera novel with all the glorious wordplay, unbelievably vast and imaginative settings, and inevitable tightening of the plot screws that are the hallmarks [...]
A writing post-mortem
Yesterday, I posted a very silly bit of Dr. Who fanfic to my livejournal. It was quite literally the first thing out of my head. I was putting daughter Kouryou-chan to bed, and she was whining that she hadn’t had time to read. I explained to her that we’d used up the time playing board [...]
Storyboarding A Novel with Post-It Notes
Storyboarding Princess Jera
I’ve recently begun experimenting with storyboarding my longer works the way Elmore Leonard does. He uses 3×5 cards, but I figure that with my crabbed handwriting and tragically bad organization, 1×1.5 post-it notes is going to work just fine.
The story to my left is the rubble of Princess Jera, a novel told [...]
Getting caught up.
For folks posting to Pendorwright: I would like to apologize if you’ve made a comment in the past six weeks or so and not heard from me in response. The mail setup for Pendorwright was broken, and I barely noticed, and when I did two weeks ago, I didn’t have time to get it fixed [...]
Iain Banks, Matter (the beginning)
I’ve been reading Iain Banks’s Matter, and I have to say that while I’m only on chapter 4, Banks’s new book is edging dangerously close to being a book easy to put down and never pick up again. Chapter 4 features one of the longest infodumps I have yet to read in a Banks [...]