Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 209

Kindle Revisited

I've blogged a couple of times before about my Kindle, including reviewing how much I liked it. Now, nine months into my ownership, I've discovered a few drawbacks I hadn't considered or discovered back then. I still love my Kindle and it's awesome to be able to take more than 150 books everywhere I want, but there are a couple of issues.

The big one is something I discovered just in the last week or so. I'm reading a research book at the moment and fervently wishing I'd bought hard copy in...

Christmas As It Never Was?

I've been listening to Christmas music the past couple of weeks. I prefer the classics sung by the classic artists--you know like Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, Dean Martin, Doris Day, etc--but there are a few newer performers, too. Josh Groban's O Holy Night is awesome and I downloaded Darius Rucker's Candy Cane Christmas when iTunes had it available for free and it's totally wonderful. It's a new song, but done with the heart and soul of the old classics.

The thing that I find interesting is...

Dear Hollywood

I read a news item a few weeks ago that the movie studios want to delay the releases of their new movies to Netflix, Red Box, and other rental outfits because they aren't selling enough new movies to consumers. This is my response.

Dear Hollywood Executives,

The problem with people purchasing movies isn't that we can rent them the day they're released. In my considered opinion, the reason you aren't selling more movies to consumers is that there are so few of them that are worth watching more...

Short Stories

I'd never written a short story before being asked to contribute to The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2. Okay, I did have a short story writing class in college, but a 10-page story is very different from a 25 to 50 page story. Also, I'd written a novella, but again, the word count requirements were hugely different, and writing different lengths of story take different writing muscles. At least IMO.

So I was asked to write a story for Vampire 2 and I said yes. And thought, OMG, how do I...

World Building Part Deux

I'd been focusing my world building efforts on the heroines and their people, but I realized this morning that I also needed to focus on the bad guys. They're part of a different society and I knew nothing about them beyond some nebulous idea of evil. (In our opinion, of course. The bad guys have a completely different perspective on their actions.)

One of the things that surprised me a little bit was how learning about my villains helped me learn about the good guys. But maybe it shouldn't ...

Review: Star Trek (The Latest Movie)

This weekend I watched the latest Star Trek movie starring Chris Pine as James T. Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock. This movie is a prequel to the original television series and was released in May 2009, so I'll try to avoid spoilers.

The movie opens with an attack that didn't make sense to me at first, not until I realized it was a kind of prologue. The movie really gets started when Jim Kirk gets into a fight with some Star Fleet personnel in a bar. Captain Pike stops it and convinces Kir...

Monty Python Meets Star Trek

I don't usually post videos, but this one is too good not to share. It covers a lot of my geekiness with both Star Trek and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. If you look at related the related videos, you'll see another one that's a mash-up of Star Trek and The A-Team. That one's pretty good, too, but the Python one is my fav.

Building a New World

I've learned a few things in the past couple of weeks about world building. I've done it for futuristic, including a proposal that I put aside and never pursued very hard, and I find this comfortable to do. Maybe because I can look around and extrapolate what I think the future will be. Or at least one possible version of it. The proposal that's sitting on my hard drive had some pretty interesting world events, including a water shortage among other things. That, unfortunately, I can see...

Holiday Hangover

Not the drinking kind. :-)

Four days off from the Evil Day Job (EDJ) meant too much time on the laptop for me. My eyes hurt, my neck and shoulders hurt, my back hurts, and even my butt hurts. I'm not excited to return to the EDJ, but on the other hand, at least there I can't spend all my time in one position.

I know, it's bad for me. I should be moving around more when I'm at home, but I start working on something and I don't want to move. Which is where the shoulders, neck, back, and butt...

The Great Holiday Movie Struggle

One of my family's traditions is to watch movies at Thanksgiving and Christmas. You'd think this would be a simple thing to do, but you'd be wrong. Finding a movie we can agree on is a struggle and my holidays are just my parents and me.

We start out with one big strike--my folks don't enjoy action/adventure movies and these happen to be my favorite. I don't like "heartwarming" stories about animals, particularly if there's a chance the animal will die or suffer some other hardship. These...