One of the funniest things happened the other day. While I sat in Starbucks, a person who frequents the same location approached me explaining that we had a mutual friend. I see this person there almost every day. He sits with a group that engages combative political discussions and other mindless prattle.
I abhor this crowd and always take the seat farthest from where they sit yelling and screaming at one another, pretending they understand the issue. In reality, they all repeat the words of the pundits they see on TV.
After the introduction, he said in rapid-fire sequence, “I’m writing a book. I don’t know how to use a computer very well; in fact, I stink at using computers. Our friend “name withheld” said you write books and use the computer all the time.”
My neck twisted into a tight spring-like coil as I sat motionless, wondering what he wanted.
He continued. “I have Open Office. Can you tell me how to use it?”
I thought for a second and said, “I use Microsoft Office. It has ribbon format that’s intuitive. All I do is sit there, look at the menus at the top, and figure it out. You can but a Home and Student version for about $120.00.”
All the time I’m thinking, if this person wanted to learn how to use a software program, he could stop engaging in the dialog with his entourage and go to the library to learn it. Why should I take my time from my activities when he could easily spend his time more wisely?
After a few minutes, he finally realized my skill set was in MS Office, and I couldn’t help him with Open Office.
Thankful he left to return to his argumentative circle, the tension left my neck. I resumed reading, thinking we’d have no other contact.
Unfortunately, the worst of all situations has arisen. Now when I enter the store he says, “Hi Rick.” He thinks we’re friends.
AAAARRRRGGGGHHH! The horror, oh the horror.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Friday, April 8, 2011
2011 Science Fiction Hall of Fame Inductees
The 2011 inductees to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame are Harlan Ellison, Vincent Di Fate, Moebius, and Gardner Dozois.
The induction ceremony will be held Saturday June 25, 2011 at the Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum in Seattle WA as part of the Science Fiction Awards Weekend, June 24-26, 2011, in conjunction with the Locus Awards and NW Media Arts writing workshops with Terry Bisson and Connie Willis. The museum will also feature exhibits on Battlestar Galactica and Avatar. Further information and tickets to the Science Fiction Awards Weekend are available on the Locus website.
Visit Locus Magazine
The induction ceremony will be held Saturday June 25, 2011 at the Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum in Seattle WA as part of the Science Fiction Awards Weekend, June 24-26, 2011, in conjunction with the Locus Awards and NW Media Arts writing workshops with Terry Bisson and Connie Willis. The museum will also feature exhibits on Battlestar Galactica and Avatar. Further information and tickets to the Science Fiction Awards Weekend are available on the Locus website.
Visit Locus Magazine
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Gene Roddenberry
For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.
Gene Roddenberry
Gene Roddenberry
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Creating Short Stories 04
Making the Short Story Soup
See Creating Short Stories!
A story needs to contain events, conflicts, and confrontations that involve the protagonist to keep the reader interested in reading on. It’s the writer’s job to create these bad things in the context of telling the story. For example, in The Puppet Masters, Robert Heinlein had space alien slugs take over human beings. Click here to view the unseemly event!
What kind of a person could think of such atrocities? Other than sadists and psychopaths, that would be writers. Think about all the gruesome things Stephen King did to his characters. In Carrie, a young female high school graduate destroys the graduating class with her telekinetic powers. In Needful Things, he turns the inhabitants of a New England town violently against each other.
What kind of monster are writers? What kind of evil minds do they have?
In reality, writers don’t hurt people. They only use complications, tragic events, tension, and conflict to pen stories that readers want to read.
In writing stories, additional depth comes from metaphor, simile, artistic license, and believability. All these fit into the actions, reactions, and the twists and turns embedded in the prose.
All of these events have a time and place in which they occur.
One masterful short story writer, O Henry wrote the following opening for his story, The Guilty Party.
“A red-haired, unshaven, untidy man sat in a rocking chair by a window. He had just lighted a pipe, and was puffing blue clouds with great satisfaction. He had removed his shoes and donned a pair of blue, faded carpet-slippers. With the morbid thirst of the confirmed daily news drinker, he awkwardly folded back the pages of an evening paper, eagerly gulping down the strong, black headlines, to be followed as a chaser by the milder details of the smaller type.
In an adjoining room a woman was cooking supper. Odors from strong bacon and boiling coffee contended against the cut-plug fumes from the vespertine pipe.
Outside was one of those crowded streets of the east side, in which, as twilight falls, Satan sets up his recruiting office. A mighty host of children danced and ran and played in the street. Some in rags, some in clean white and beribboned, some wild and restless as young hawks, some gentle-faced and shrinking, some shrieking rude and sinful words, some listening, awed, but soon, grown familiar, to embrace--here were the children playing in the corridors of the House of Sin. Above the playground forever hovered a great bird. The bird was known to humorists as the stork. But the people of Chrystie street were better ornithologists. They called it a vulture.”
The next two lines take the story directly into the action and dialog.
A little girl of twelve came up timidly to the man reading and resting by the window, and said:
"Papa, won't you play a game of checkers with me if you aren't too tired?"
This portion of the series will continue next week.
See Creating Short Stories!
A story needs to contain events, conflicts, and confrontations that involve the protagonist to keep the reader interested in reading on. It’s the writer’s job to create these bad things in the context of telling the story. For example, in The Puppet Masters, Robert Heinlein had space alien slugs take over human beings. Click here to view the unseemly event!
What kind of a person could think of such atrocities? Other than sadists and psychopaths, that would be writers. Think about all the gruesome things Stephen King did to his characters. In Carrie, a young female high school graduate destroys the graduating class with her telekinetic powers. In Needful Things, he turns the inhabitants of a New England town violently against each other.
What kind of monster are writers? What kind of evil minds do they have?
In reality, writers don’t hurt people. They only use complications, tragic events, tension, and conflict to pen stories that readers want to read.
In writing stories, additional depth comes from metaphor, simile, artistic license, and believability. All these fit into the actions, reactions, and the twists and turns embedded in the prose.
All of these events have a time and place in which they occur.
One masterful short story writer, O Henry wrote the following opening for his story, The Guilty Party.
“A red-haired, unshaven, untidy man sat in a rocking chair by a window. He had just lighted a pipe, and was puffing blue clouds with great satisfaction. He had removed his shoes and donned a pair of blue, faded carpet-slippers. With the morbid thirst of the confirmed daily news drinker, he awkwardly folded back the pages of an evening paper, eagerly gulping down the strong, black headlines, to be followed as a chaser by the milder details of the smaller type.
In an adjoining room a woman was cooking supper. Odors from strong bacon and boiling coffee contended against the cut-plug fumes from the vespertine pipe.
Outside was one of those crowded streets of the east side, in which, as twilight falls, Satan sets up his recruiting office. A mighty host of children danced and ran and played in the street. Some in rags, some in clean white and beribboned, some wild and restless as young hawks, some gentle-faced and shrinking, some shrieking rude and sinful words, some listening, awed, but soon, grown familiar, to embrace--here were the children playing in the corridors of the House of Sin. Above the playground forever hovered a great bird. The bird was known to humorists as the stork. But the people of Chrystie street were better ornithologists. They called it a vulture.”
The next two lines take the story directly into the action and dialog.
A little girl of twelve came up timidly to the man reading and resting by the window, and said:
"Papa, won't you play a game of checkers with me if you aren't too tired?"
This portion of the series will continue next week.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
New York Times Best Seller List
Combined Print & E-Book Fiction Weeks
on List 1 LIVE WIRE, by Harlan Coben. (Penguin Group.) Myron Bolitar’s search for a missing rock star leads to questions about his own missing brother.
2 WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, by Sara Gruen. (Algonquin.) After his parents die in a car accident, a young veterinary student — and an elephant — save a Depression-era circus.
3 THE LINCOLN LAWYER, by Michael Connelly. (Little, Brown.) Routinely doing business from his Lincoln Town Cars, the bottom-feeding attorney Mickey Haller is asked to defend the scion of a wealthy family who might not be guilty of a murderous crime.
4 SING YOU HOME, by Jodi Picoult. (Simon & Schuster.) Picoult takes on the issue of gay rights in this novel about a music therapist who desperately wants a child.
5 TOYS, by James Patterson and Neil McMahon. (Little, Brown.) Hays Baker, a top operative for the Agency of Change and a national hero, suddenly finds himself a hunted fugitive who must fight to save humans from extinction.
Visit the NY Times
on List 1 LIVE WIRE, by Harlan Coben. (Penguin Group.) Myron Bolitar’s search for a missing rock star leads to questions about his own missing brother.
2 WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, by Sara Gruen. (Algonquin.) After his parents die in a car accident, a young veterinary student — and an elephant — save a Depression-era circus.
3 THE LINCOLN LAWYER, by Michael Connelly. (Little, Brown.) Routinely doing business from his Lincoln Town Cars, the bottom-feeding attorney Mickey Haller is asked to defend the scion of a wealthy family who might not be guilty of a murderous crime.
4 SING YOU HOME, by Jodi Picoult. (Simon & Schuster.) Picoult takes on the issue of gay rights in this novel about a music therapist who desperately wants a child.
5 TOYS, by James Patterson and Neil McMahon. (Little, Brown.) Hays Baker, a top operative for the Agency of Change and a national hero, suddenly finds himself a hunted fugitive who must fight to save humans from extinction.
Visit the NY Times
Monday, April 4, 2011
Why Sci-Fi? Author Robert Heinlein
Robert Heinlein born in Butler Missouri, (1907–1988), American science fiction writer, also referred to as the “Dean of Science Fiction Writers” was another major contributor to the science fiction genre entertained readers with 32 novels, 59 short stories. Further, four were turned into motion pictures, two into television series, and a radio series. Along with Arthur Clarke and Isaac Asimov, he was named one of the “Big Three of Science Fiction”
Several of his works made their way into other media forms: Destination Moon, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, Red Planet, The Puppet Masters, Starship Troopers, and Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles was a television series.
In one of Heinlein’s works, Friday, which is about an artificial person, equality is an underlying theme. This fits well with the apparent social themes of individual rights and self-reliance in his literature. Further, Heinlein contributed the neologisms grok and waldo, to the English language.
One of the more memorable films was The Puppet Masters, in which alien beings that appear as slugs invade Earth. The slimy creatures attach to people and control them. Secret agents, who can exchange body parts as if they were automobile parts, attempt to save the day and the planets from the alien takeover. Here’s a peek:
Video:
Heinlein’s also other notable works include Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, Starman Jones, Red Planet, and Glory Road.
Robert Heinlein Quotes: “I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
“Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.”
Several of his works made their way into other media forms: Destination Moon, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, Red Planet, The Puppet Masters, Starship Troopers, and Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles was a television series.
In one of Heinlein’s works, Friday, which is about an artificial person, equality is an underlying theme. This fits well with the apparent social themes of individual rights and self-reliance in his literature. Further, Heinlein contributed the neologisms grok and waldo, to the English language.
One of the more memorable films was The Puppet Masters, in which alien beings that appear as slugs invade Earth. The slimy creatures attach to people and control them. Secret agents, who can exchange body parts as if they were automobile parts, attempt to save the day and the planets from the alien takeover. Here’s a peek:
Video:
Heinlein’s also other notable works include Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, Starman Jones, Red Planet, and Glory Road.
Robert Heinlein Quotes: “I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
“Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.”
Friday, April 1, 2011
Digital Books Educate
Education Changing with Technology
As a firm believer in technological innovation, and how it benefits humankind, I like seeing this method of getting knowledge to the masses. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the global population could educate itself without leaving home?
Think of the benefits. It’s green because no one need drive to a brick and mortar building that must be built to accommodate students’ physical presence. This means no gas emissions and fewer pollutants. In addition, educators can have a global reach. In other words, no more excuses for ignorance.
An Inkling of the Future? Enhanced Ebooks and the College Textbook Market
By Yvette Chin, Editor, Digital Book World
Last week, interactive textbook app startup Inkling announced new partnerships with two of the major players in the higher education textbook industry. McGraw-Hill is set to release its top 100 undergraduate titles as well its medical school curriculum. Pearson Education is offering several business and health care titles, primarily through its Prentice Hall and Benjamin Cummings imprints. The Inkling iPad app offers interactivity, not just with the course material (well beyond standard textbook conversions to digital formats), but also among students engaged with the same text. At the same time, Inkling directly challenges traditional textbook pricing through an optional “by chapter” business model that might boost course adoption this fall.
Click here for the full article!
As a firm believer in technological innovation, and how it benefits humankind, I like seeing this method of getting knowledge to the masses. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the global population could educate itself without leaving home?
Think of the benefits. It’s green because no one need drive to a brick and mortar building that must be built to accommodate students’ physical presence. This means no gas emissions and fewer pollutants. In addition, educators can have a global reach. In other words, no more excuses for ignorance.
An Inkling of the Future? Enhanced Ebooks and the College Textbook Market
By Yvette Chin, Editor, Digital Book World
Last week, interactive textbook app startup Inkling announced new partnerships with two of the major players in the higher education textbook industry. McGraw-Hill is set to release its top 100 undergraduate titles as well its medical school curriculum. Pearson Education is offering several business and health care titles, primarily through its Prentice Hall and Benjamin Cummings imprints. The Inkling iPad app offers interactivity, not just with the course material (well beyond standard textbook conversions to digital formats), but also among students engaged with the same text. At the same time, Inkling directly challenges traditional textbook pricing through an optional “by chapter” business model that might boost course adoption this fall.
Click here for the full article!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)