Katherine Nabity's Blog, page 185
July 12, 2015
#ROW80 ~ July 12th Check-In
Writing
Between rewriting and having an unmotivated week, I didn’t get much forward progress. Did finish some research. My goal for this week is going to be the same as last week’s:
Add 5K minimum reach 18K on the Abbott Project. (Edit: This goal is changing to effectively be 20K on the manuscript before we go to Colorado/Nebraska.)
Publishing
Ran Model Species promo yesterday. Downloads for all our promos have been pretty lack-luster lately. Martian Engineer’s got a few sales and page reads, so that’s cool. Probably won’t be planning any promos until we’re back from our trip.
Complicating Factors in July
A.k.a., what else do I have going on:
#24in48 Readathon is happening right now. I should be working, but instead I’m reading…
I dumped the second half of the Intro to Interactive class. July was looking just too busy. I’ll catch it in September.
EverQuest2’s new progression server opened in Beta this week. It ate time.
Our trip to Colorado later in the month will probably be extended to include our yearly Omaha trip. This is good. I don’t do well with interruptions of schedule and yet another trip in Sept/Oct was going to be that. It’s not a completely solid plan yet, but it’s likely.
Deal Me In, Week 28 ~ “The Bees”
Hosted by Jay @ Bibliophilopolis
“The Bees” by Dan Chaon
Card picked: Four of Clubs
From: Thrilling Tales, edited by Michael Chabon
Thoughts: Gene has a good life. His wife, Karen, is in nursing school and his little boy Frankie is about to enter kindergarten. But Gene has a dark past too. Over a decade ago, during the worst of his alcoholism, he abandoned a girlfriend and young son, just about Frankie’s age. Now sober, he’s tried to find them to make amends, but they’ve disappeared. Or maybe become part of the nightmares that he and Frankie have been having…
There an interesting premise here and some moments of genuine creepiness, but the ending came out of nowhere for me and didn’t feel very connected to the rest of the story. After stumbling on a review of it from a subsequent publication, I find I may have missed a subtlety.
About the Author: While a notable Nebraska-born author, I have no familiarity with Dan Chaon. He seems a “literary” sort, though Wikipedia tells me that he once wrote a fan letter to Ray Bradbury which became a regular correspondence for some time.
July 9, 2015
#24in48 July 2015
From the 24 in 48 FAQ:
Q: How does 24 in 48 work? Do I have to read 24 books in 48 hours?
A: 24 is for the number of hours, not the number of books! Over the course of 48 hours, you challenge yourself to read for 24 of those hours. This can mean reading 12 hours each day, 20 hours one day and 4 hours the next, or 24 hours straight. However the scheduling works best for you!
What will I be reading?
I’ll be finishing The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. I have about 50% left. I should read some of Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 7 edited by Ellen Datlow, but lately my brain has been resistant to skipping to short stories. I *will* be reading “The Bees” by Dan Chaon because it is this week’s Deal Me In story. Then maybe I’ll get to The Manitou by Graham Masterton or The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I’m a slow reader; I’m not going to get great quantities read in 24 hours.
I’m going to start at the “official start times of midnight Eastern Time, which is 9pm here in Tempe.
July 6, 2015
Summer Reading Update ~ Movie Edition
I’m appropriating Mondays for short reviews of my summer reads (I’m behind in reviewing all the books I’d like to review) and my weekly preview.
What I Read Last Week
Er… I *might* be in a little reading slump. Or maybe it’s “I just got back from vacation and I need a vacation” syndrome. But I haven’t finished anything lately. Or even made much progress.
What I have been doing is catching up on some movies I’ve missed.
Cake (2014) – Wow, I was sure that Jennifer Aniston had won more awards for her role in Cake. She plays a chronic pain sufferer who becomes obsessed with the suicide of a fellow support group member. As a person with pain problems, it’s a rough watch. Once again, I’m a little thankful that my pain has been a gradual process that I’ve been able to (mostly) adapt to and not sudden as the result of an accident, like the character’s.
Big Hero 6 (2014) – I enjoyed this more than most of the superhero movies I’ve seen lately. It has a lot of heart and humor and looks great.
The Babadook (2014) – I don’t know how much notice this movie has gotten outside of the horror community. It’s an Australian production, low-budget (as most horror movies are, relatively), but not low on quality film-making. The story is more than the usual monster and/or evil child tropes, opting for a much different angle. Great sound sound design.
Interstellar (2014) – This movie annoyed me. I was hoping that I could get around the dystopian beginning and enjoy some space travel, but no. Why are there no TVs and MRIs left on Earth, but we can manage a space colony orbiting Saturn? Why, while blight is destroying all crops, are we not turning to other food sources? (Cyanobacteria souffle, anyone?) Why do we assume that it would be easier to make another planet habitable rather than work with the one we have? This was not the movie for me.
What I’m Reading This Week
#24in48 is this weekend! I’m excited. Even if I am in a slump. I’m going to work on The Thirteenth Tale this week and on more horror short stories.
July 5, 2015
#ROW80 ~ Round 3 Goals
I’m going to do a few things differently this round after looking back at round two.
First, eighty days is actually way too long for me to plan anything out. I don’t do well with that chunk of time. I’m going to try weekly goals with an eye toward where I want to be at the end of the round.
Second, I’m skipping Wednesday check-ins. My “work week” starts on Monday; by Wednesday, the ball’s barely rolling and the check-in feels like an unnecessary detour in the flow of things. I’ll still pop around to other ROW80 blogs, but I won’t have a post myself.
Goals
Writing
I plan on continuing with One Ahead (the Abbott Project) during this round. I reached the 10K on it in June before our trip to San Diego. It’s going pretty well, but I decided I needed to start the story differently. I’ve spent the last couple of days writing a new first chapter and I’ll need to meld the third chapter with what was the first chapter. I’d like to get that sorted out and add another at another 15K before our trip to Colorado later in the month. It should be a novella length work. My pie-in-the-sky goal is to have it ready for publication by October.
Goal for today: I set a goal earlier in the week for +3K by end-of-day today. I’m 600 away.
Goal for this week: +5K minimum. (I want my total to be 18,000 by eod Friday.)
Publishing
Model Species promotion is set for next weekend.
Despite the latest Amazon kerfuffle, we’ve added The Martian Engineer’s Notebook series to KDP Select. We need to plan for a promo when it’s possible.
Complicating Factors in July
A.k.a., what else do I have going on:
#24in48 Readathon is this coming weekend! I haven’t done a good super intense readathon in a while and I’m really looking forward to it. Obviously, I want to get my 5K in before then.
The second half of Intro to Interactive Python programming. Also starts next weekend.
EverQuest2’s new progression servers. Let’s be honest. This is going to take some of my time.
Trip to Aurora, CO late in the month.
ROW80, Round 3 begins on Monday, July 6th!
July 4, 2015
Deal Me In, Week 27 ~ “The Tale of Gray Dick”
Hosted by Jay @ Bibliophilopolis
“The Tale of Gray Dick” by Stephen King
Card picked: Ten of Clubs
From: Thrilling Tales, edited by Michael Chabon
Thoughts: So, I spent last Saturday playing ultimate frisbee. If you’re not familiar with the sport, it’s played with a 175gm plastic disc which is thrown in several different ways in hopes of your receiver catching it. Surprisingly, this week’s Thrilling Tale has a disc throwing connection, kinda-sorta.
The Tale of Gray Dick is an illustrative legend within this short story. Gray Dick is an outlaw. After he murders the father of Lady Oriza, she invites him to dinner. To assure him that no foul play is intended, she offers to have dinner with him alone, naked, and to stay at her end of the table. Since she’s a rather good looking woman, Gray Dick agrees. He’s arrogant enough to not consider sharpened tableware as a possible weapon. Lady Oriza beheads him by throwing a bladed plate.
And so begins the Sisters of Oriza, a group of women who band together to quilt, cook, gossip, and throw the plate. They are a part of Stephen King’s Dark Tower world, which I know absolutely nothing about. This story touches on Margaret Eisenhart, an outcast from her native people, who can throw the plate, but also rightly fears the need.
About the Author: I’ve read Stephen King here and there, but I haven’t delved into his Dark Tower series. Probably because I like King best when he’s working on a smaller canvas. With “The Tale of Gray Dick,” I didn’t worry about references I didn’t understand. I just went with it.
Other: Not surprisingly, the University of New Hampshire’s women’s ultimate team is known as Sister of Oriza. Considering the fairly geeky nature of ultimate, I would have been disappointed if a team hadn’t claimed that name.
If you’ve gotten this far, you may have googled ultimate frisbee videos and thought, “Jeeze, Katherine does *that*?” No, not really. The video below is from our local recreational league, from six years ago. My team in white is near the end, but these are the people I play with and against all the time. It’s a little slower and a little messier than most ultimate you might find online.
(In fact, at 29:05 you can see me in strippy socks and a hat. I dump the disc to Dave Abdoo who throws a perfect forehand to me in the end zone. Glory! Of course, I get scored on the very next point…)
July 1, 2015
Deal Me In Lunar Extra ~ “When it Ends, He Catches Her”
Hosted by Jay @ Bibliophilopolis
This is a Lunar Extra edition! I’ve picked a card on each full moon and read the corresponding dark fiction story written by a female author.
“When it Ends, He Catches Her” by Eugie Foster
Card picked: A deuce, and deuces are WILD!
From: Available online on Daily Science Fiction
Thoughts: Eugie Foster is one of my favorite spec-fic short story authors. Her writing is beautiful and she often approached stories from a fable/fairy tale angle, which I’m a sucker for. “When it Ends, He Catches Her” is a story outside of that purview, but blends the arts, in this case ballet, with a dystopian zombie-filled future. Not my thing, but it’s a small dose and well done. Aisa, once a prima ballerina, dances when she can with no audience and only to the music in her head until her partner Balege returns and changes her world.
About the Author: Eugie Foster was one of the first people I knew on the internet. That sounds odd, but it was a long time ago, on LiveJournal, and the internet was a smaller place. I loved seeing her stories get published because she was so good. Eugie died in 2014 at age 42 after a year of being treated for cancer. Each story of hers that I haven’t yet read will only be new once. I’m at a loss on how to properly savor each one.
June 29, 2015
Summer Reading, June 29th ~ The Victorian Internet
I’m appropriating Mondays for short reviews of my summer reads (I’m behind in reviewing all the books I’d like to review) and my weekly preview.
What I Read Last Week
The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage
For centuries people communicated across distances only as quickly as the fastest ship or horse could travel. Generations of innovators tried and failed to develop speedier messaging devices. But in the mid-1800s, a few extraordinary pioneers at last succeeded. Their invention–the electric telegraph–shrank the world more quickly than ever before.
A colorful tale of scientific discovery and technological cunning, The Victorian Internet tells the story of the telegraph’s creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it. By 1865 telegraph cables spanned continents and oceans, revolutionizing the ways countries dealt with one another. The telegraph gave rise to creative business practices and new forms of crime. Romances blossomed over the wires. Secret codes were devised by some users, and cracked by others. The benefits of the network were relentlessly hyped by its advocates and dismissed by its skeptics. And attitudes toward everything from news gathering to war had to be completely rethought.
The telegraph unleashed the greatest revolution in communications since the development of the printing press. Its saga offers many parallels to that of the Internet in our own time–and is a fascinating episode in the history of technology. (via Goodreads)
Oof. This is only my second book of summer! But it was a good one. The perfect lounging-in-the-cool-breezes of San Diego read.
The history of technology is a very cool niche and Tom Standage does a great job wearing both the history hat and the tech guy tie. I read The Turk at the end of 2013 and it shifted the way I look at the history of invention. The Victorian Internet isn’t quite as paradigm changing, but it was still enlightening. Standage provides us with a chain of invention leading from the optical telegraph system through the installation of the trans-Atlantic telegraph lines. The crux of the book is that telegraphy did for the world what the internet continues to do. The electric telegraph allowed for long distance communication to occur quickly, making the world seem to be a much smaller place. There are many other parallels as well. The abbreviations needed to keep messages short. The blind long-distance friendships that blossomed. The prophecies both optimistic (world peace) and dire (the death of the newspaper). I was also struck by how quickly the telegraph came and went, quickly transposed by the telephone within one generation. It makes me wonder how radically different the world will be at the far end of my life.
What I’m Reading This Week
For the first time in a year and a half, I’m behind on Deal Me In stories. I have “The Championship of Nowhere” by James Grady and Stephen King’s “The Tale of Gray Dick” for last week and this week. I’ve also been chipping away at The Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 7. *And* I just remember that there’s a full moon Wednesday! I pick a deuce and deuces are wild. My choice is “When it Ends, He Catches Her” by Eugie Foster.
June 22, 2015
Summer Reading, June 22nd
I’m appropriating Mondays for short reviews of my summer reads (I’m behind in reviewing all the books I’d like to review) and for my weekly preview.
What I Read Last Week
I spent time last week reading It’s What I Do by Lynsey Addario. It was an intriguing pick from the Estella Project, available from the online portion of the Tempe Public Library. I had a hold on it and, when it became available, I jumped on it. I shouldn’t have. Sometimes a book isn’t the right book for a particular moment and I think that’s the problem I had here. Maybe it’s because part of my life feels a little chaotic that I wasn’t interested in spending time in war zones. Or, maybe it’s due to the Abbott Project being set in the early 20th century and wanting to go deeper instead of finding reprieve in the 21st. I might come back to It’s What I Do in the future, but for now, it’s going back to the library.
What I’m Doing This Week
We’re heading to San Diego this week to visit Chris and play in an ultimate frisbee tournament. Eric and I are on our gender’s respective master’s teams (meaning players age 33+ for men and 30+ for women). Before then I’d like to get 2K written on the Abbott Project and code some semblance of a Pong game for my Python class.
Hopefully, I’ll still manage to get some reading done on The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage and maybe a few stories from Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 7.
June 21, 2015
#ROW80 ~Sunday Update, 6/21
Since I’m out of town when this round ends, I’m going to look back today on what I’ve done in the past 70-odd days.
Goals and Progress
(My writing progress isn’t where I’d like it to be, but it’s better than it has been.)
In Need of Luck
Added 18,829 words, but still have not finished it.
Outlined chapters, read review notes. Still don’t know how to pull off the ending.
Abbott Project
Finished reading River City Empire & On the River, Down Where They Found Willy Brown, started The Victorian Internet, which are all more or less research.
Started writing on newest version of this project. As of the moment of this writing, I’ve written 7505 words on it. I’d like to hit 10K before heading to San Diego on Wednesday.
Have spent (too much) time researching.
Daily Free Writing – Still not a habit.
PHYSICa – Didn’t get to the couple of scenes/epigraphs that might need my touch.
Publishing
(The jiggery-pokery end of publishing is where I’ve spent a lot of time, including a redesign of our webpages.)
Added new descriptions and tags to published works.
Sourced a list of reviewers who had left reviews for us, found that it probably wasn’t a very helpful list, and I realized that I’ve subsequently lost that list in one of the recent computer hiccups.
Fixed the multi-author problems at Smashwords.
Sourced new promo options.
Redesigned Entangled Continua and added excerpts.
Other Writing Related Reading
(Reading goals? Why do I set them? Reader gonna read.)
Read Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon. Given the discussion of the Sherlock Holmes canon from a storytelling point of, it was rather helpful.
Personal Growth
Started the next set of Python classes, but didn’t do the informatics project I planned.
ROW 80 is a blog hop!
Please, check out how other Round of Words participants are doing with their goals.
