Uncategorized – Page 118 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Favorite Overclocked Remixes

So, Drek and I were having a chat the other day online, and we started sharing favorite songs from this website called ocremix. It’s a really awesome site for free fan-made arrangements and remixes of video game music, and it’s really cool because so much of the music comes from REALLY old games–I mean, games that me and my friends grew up playing! In some ways, they have the same appeal to video gamers as soundtracks from movies and musicals have to other people–it can really bring you back to the game, bring back memories and good times…it’s just generally very awesome. And even if you haven’t played the game before, the music is still usually of such a good quality that it’s fun to listen anyways. I mean, most of the music I listen to on OCR is not from games that I’ve actually played, but I still like it anyways.

So, without any delay, here is my top ten:

10: Bluelightning (Mega Man 3) by Disco Dan. I found this one just yesterday, and I’ve been listening to it ever since! I especially love the beat and the subtle yet awesome sound of the electronic organ!
9: The Dark World (Crystal Abyss Mix) (Final Fantasy III) by Ubik. This one is a little bit dark, but I like how the soft melody and the harp transposes over the electronic beats. It just seems to give this feeling of yearning for something. Also, I have some good memories of this, because I listened to it constantly during my first playthrough of FF Tactics.
8: Guile’s Mile Long…yeah (Super Street Fighter II Turbo) by Trenthian. (let me know if the link doesn’t work) I really like this one, because it seems to really give the sense of someone on a quest, and how that quest is such a struggle.
7: Clash at the Mountains (Zelda: Link’s Awakening) by Zircon. Zircon is just such an awesome remixer on the OCR website. He’s got a lot of good stuff. This one is just a way cool electronic interpretation of the classic Zelda theme! It really energizes me to just get up and do something!
6: JENOVA Celestial (Final Fantasy VII) by bLiNd. bLiNd is another really amazing remixer in the OCR community! I think that his techno is some of the best on the site. He contributed a lot to the recent Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream project, and this has got to be my favorite remix from that album (and I have copies of all four cds in my car). The JENOVA theme is one of the best pieces of music from Final Fantasy VII, and this is imo an excellent interpretation of it.
5: Before Time (Jurassic Park) by Daniel Baranowsky. I love the guitar on this one! Also, just how everything seems to be so well balanced. This is one of the first songs that I discovered on the OCR site, and I still really like it!
4: Thirty-Plus Mix (Tetris) by R3FORG3D. Man, this is some really hard techno! It zones you out from everything and just hits you over and over again like an electric surge to your brain! Just makes me want to move!
3: Dream of Zeal (Chrono Trigger) by bLiNd. The time circuits song from Chrono Trigger just took me to another world when I first heard it! I remember playing Chrono Trigger and getting to the part right before you go to the magical world in the sky, when you travel forwards in time to the ancient age, and the whole world is nothing but an icy wasteland. You think to yourself, “hey, what’s going on here?” and then you find this really strange looking ancient building, which opens up a conduit and takes you up above the clouds to the magical floating kingdom of Zeal, and you just think “whoa!” for, like, the next five minutes! And this song was definitely a big part of that! This is the best interpretation of time circuits that I found on the OCR site, and I definitely believe that it does it justice!
2: Flying Heaven (Super Street Fighter II Turbo) by Zircon. Another impressive one by Zircon! This has got to be one of the best martial arts-ish songs that I’ve heard, on or off of OCR! Man, it really makes me want to get up and do some jujitsu! And I really like the whole Eastern feel to it!
1: White Skies (club mix) (Final Fantasy X) by bLiNd. This one has got to be my favorite. I think that the defining characteristic of good techno is that it gets you really excited and calms you down at the same time. The result is music that zones you out and lets you focus intensely on the task that’s right in front of you–and if you don’t have anything in particular to do, it just makes you want to move and dance without caring about what’s going on around you. Awesome stuff! And this has got to be one of the best techno pieces on the OCR site. Man, good job! This is AWESOME!

I could put a LOT more up here, and I’m sure that if I thought on it a lot harder I’d say to myself “no, wait! Number 8 should be this remix, not this one!” or “what about this really cool one? I really like this one! Which number should it be?” But I hold by my choice for number one; that one has got to be my favorite piece on the OCR site, hands down. bLiNd just makes awesome music!

One of the first stories I ever wrote

I was looking around in some of the old files that I have, and I came across this old piece. It’s one of the first stories that I ever wrote–probably the first piece of creative fiction that I wrote outside of school. I remember writing this! It was back in 5th grade, so that would make me about ten years old! I wrote it on the family computer–an old 386 that died during y2k (well, not really, but we had to use a fix to get around it, and then we forgot how to use the fix and my Dad gave it away. Gave it away!!! What I wouldn’t give to still have that computer!!!!!). I wrote it back when I was reading books on African wildlife and the Goodals, and my goal was to become a naturalist someday. A lot of that comes out if you read between the lines here. Of course, I had already decided that I would be a fiction writer, but that would be a part-time thing–I’d still need a day job.

I think the real significant thing about this story was that it was the first one that I did independent of school. I was really fortunate in that my elementary school had a strong creative writing program, so I’d already “written” a dozen or so books already–mostly stories that were about 500 to 1,000 words long, with pictures that I drew. This one was about 3,500 words long, and when I finally finished it, I felt really tired and really proud of myself! I don’t remember how long it took, but it took several weeks, and possibly even months. This story marked the starting point in my life of writing creative fiction on my own. After this, I went on to write about five more hyena stories, then I started a science fiction piece based off of one of my imaginary universes, and then, after maybe a couple of other projects, I started my first attempt at a novel in the 8th grade. Ever since then, I’ve always had this writing bug. Even when I was on my mission I had it, and at one point even scribbled a few chapters for an allegorical story based on Lehi’s dream.

So, you could say that this Hyena story was a milestone for me. It’s not something I’d try to publish now, but I do think it offers a wonderful view into what I was thinking and writing back then as a budding creative writer. Enjoy!

A couple of awesome Quark meetings

So, this week we had not one but two Quark writing group meetings. And they both were really good! There was a surprisingly good turnout at each one, and I think that everyone went away with some good feedback for their stories. Plus, some of the newer guys are getting motivated to write stuff of their own, so we’re really having some success!

The general feedback I got from several of the members was that we needed to either split the group or meet more often. I added in my own idea into that, which was to lower the number of stories we look at. Drek says that the ideal size for the writing group is about six. I think that we can still do good with ten or twelve people, but we’ve got to add more time for the stories–which means that we only look at four stories instead of six.

And actually, during both of these meetings, four seemed just about right for what we were doing. A half hour for each story seems like enough for everyone to say everything they wanted to but short enough to keep up focused and on task. Or, rather, to keep me focused and on task, because I’m probably the biggest tangent starter in the group!

Tuesday’s meeting was interesting because, to my knowledge, everyone there was either a freshman or new to the group this semester. And we had about ten people, and an excellent meeting! Word has been getting out about us.

Also, I think that the group is doing really well because we all seem to be doing a good job taking criticism. There was this one story this week that I really had a lot of criticism for, and I was a little bit worried about hurting the author’s feelings, but she really wanted to hear it and really ate it up, then thanked me later. There were a couple of other stories today where people had a LOT of criticism, on a lot of different things in the story, but I think that the authors came away with a much better idea of what they were doing. Hillary in particular said afterwards that the writing meeting today really helped to point her in the right direction with one problem she didn’t know how to fix, which was how to have an obnoxious narrator at certain parts and third person limited POV at others.

And really, I think the key thing for the meetings themselves it the quality of the discussion. It’s better to give criticism that will be helpful and useful than it is to hold back for fear of possibly hurting someone’s feelings. Of course, you need to be careful in the delivery of that criticism, but if you’re talking about the story itself and not the writer personally, I don’t think there really should ever be an issue. And really, the serious writers are going to WANT criticism, so the key is to make it worth their time. That’s what’s going to really keep this club alive and powerful–useful criticism.

Still, I wonder if we could raise our ability to critically read fiction. Maybe if we did like the book club, and had the bookstore discount certain books like Strunk and White’s Elements of Style or Orson Scott Card’s Character and Plot, then encouraged everyone to read them (and yes, I know that OSC is the “nemesis” of the writing group, but he does have some very good and useful things to say about writing). Maybe we should team up with the English department and get some faculty to share with us a short discussion on fiction and how to read it critically. Maybe we should get Brandon Sanderson to come and speak at one of our meetings. I don’t know. I’ll see what I can do!

But I also think it’s important that we do some things informally as well–such as having social activities outside of writing meetings. I hear that that’s what really got the writing group solidified in the beginning, and you can still see that in the strong friendships between the oldtimers (as well as the HUGE number of them who got married thru Quark!) . I’m encouraging people to hold different writing parties for the month of November, where we can just hang out, write, have word count races, talk about our frustrations and the good times, etc. I’m going to try to host one or two up here at the FLSR, but it’s a pretty noisy place so I don’t know if I can find the space. But hopefully, it will work.

So, things are going VERY well–and I think that most of it has more to do with what everyone else has done and is still doing than anything I’ve done of myself. I’m just providing the framework–the dates, deadlines, the space, and the reminders–but YOU guys are making it come to life! Thanks to all of you!

OLL

Another awesome writing meeting!

So, we had a writing meeting last Tuesday! There were quite a few people there! Gamila, Jakeson, Danke, Travis, Drek, Kaci, Ben (his board name is the same as his real name, believe it or not!), Tom, and Patrick (I think that’s it, but I’m not sure. If I forgot your name, please forgive me!), so altogether there were about ten people! We definitely filled up the small library room, and the discussion was very lively!

We had some excellent stories, and I don’t think there were any stories that were boring or turned everyone off. One story was a little bit edgy, but not unacceptable, and it didn’t cause any schisms or anything. In fact, some of the more conservative members of the group complimented me personally afterwards for how I handled the situation. Quark has been shaken up by some trouble stirrers in the past (you’re welcome for the compliment, Joel), and I’ve been a little bit worried about how to handle controversies in the group on my watch. I’ve been chatting up with Aneeka and Reigheena, two former Quark writing vp’s, on this subject, and I think people from all the different perspectives appreciated how this situation was handled. And really, I did like the story that was submitted. Even though it was edgy for a squeaky clean BYU club, it wasn’t unacceptable at all, and I thought it added to the story rather than weakening it.

A lot of people liked how the meetings went, and found the feedback to be helpful but one of the old timers contacted me on g-chat a couple days later with some possible areas that we need to improve. The areas he suggested had more to do with us as a group than me as a leader, though I’ve definitely got a role to play. Basically, we need to learn some better etiquette, both as writers and as critiquers. His suggestions have spawned off a thread on the Quark forums, so I’ll refer all you quarkies to that for the full discussion on this topic, but I’ll briefly summarize it here. Basically, we need to remember three things:

1) Try to avoid tangents (like anime and star trek)

2) If you’re the writer, don’t argue with the feedback you receive

3) Try to adhere to a sense of order in the way we give feedback: let people with comments on page one go first, on page two second, etc.

To that, I’d add a very helpful fourth guideline that Jakeson suggested:

4) If you’re submitting an excerpt from the novel, give a short synopsis at the beginning of the piece, so we know whether the excerpt is from the beginning, middle, or end, and can give relevant criticism.

Gamila also suggested to me on g-chat that writers should also describe what part of the writing process they’re in; whether this is a rough draft, one of the first revisions, or whether the author is trying to polish up a final draft. That sounds like a good idea to me, though I haven’t yet brought it up with the others. I plan on doing that soon.

There have been some suggestions that we break up the group, since it’s becoming so large. In general, though, I think it’s best to wait that out. I had the idea while g-chatting with Drek of splitting the group into a fantasy section and a sci fi section, where we’d meet every Saturday at the same time and place and alternate between the sections. Under this idea, people would still be free to come to every meeting, but we’d lower the submissions-per-meeting to about four and get someone to moderate the fantasy section (since I already have way too much free time as it is).

Of course, this depends on how many people we retain. I think we should keep things as they are for now, then wait and see how many people are still coming regularly in November and December.

It was a good meeting this week, but I was surprised because it really did leave me exhausted. The closest parallel I can think of is when you’re a missionary and you come out of an intense-but-disorganized lesson with an excited investigator who loves to talk. It left me exhausted like that. It was a good meeting, and I hope that in the future we’ll learn to build off of each other and find our “groove.”

This show made me retch

Alright, this isn’t necessarily related to anything I’m writing, or anything science fiction / fantasy, or even writing in general, but it got such a strong reaction out of me that I had to blog about it, and this seemed like an appropriate place.

There is this excellent radio show each week on NPR called This American Life, where the main writer, Ira Glass, collects unusual stories from people around the country and puts them together in a fun and interesting way. The show also publishes a fully syndicated podcast. Usually the show has a theme of some kind. This week’s theme was “it never dies.” That should have been a warning to me.

Out in the world of popular culture, they say that Science Fiction is strange, weird (which I actually take as a compliment), disconnected from real life, pathetic, escapist, and just plain a waste of time. These snobs should take a good look at the rest of society. Compared to the people who were on this week’s episode of This American Life, the sci fi geeks are living life to the fullest.

The first story was about a guy who was picked on in high school and went back to his high school reunion to try and confront the bullies. It’s not the first time that This American Life has done this kind of a story (though strangely it is the first time when the story has nothing to do with America or American culture), but this one surprised me because usually I can sympathize with the victim to some degree. After all, I got made fun of quite a bit in elementary, middle, and high school. But this guy started off his story by bragging that he was a bestselling writer and that he makes more money than the people who used to bully him. He then keeps repeating over and over this one incident where the alleged bully threw him into a pond.

Ok, first of all, I find it hard to sympathize with someone who brags about how much money he makes. If someone is a jerk, I’m going to see them first and foremost as a jerk, and I despise jerks. Second, GET A FREAKING LIFE DUDE!!! So, you were thrown into a pond twenty years ago. And? Get over it! Life is tough! Move on! I understand that it was a bad experience, and you were victimized and all that…but what’s the freaking point of holding a grudge for that one single event for twenty years? IF YOU @#$@#! HATED HIGH SCHOOL SO MUCH, STOP LIVING IN IT!!

He meets up with the two bullies at his high school reunion. The first guy remembers the event completely differently, but in a very believable (though false) way. The bully no longer sees the guy as inferior or anything, and in fact regards him as an old friend. That might be weird, but it’s hard for me to hate the guy. Is this guy really an evil “bully,” or a regular human being who hurt someone’s feelings once?

The second “bully,” though, hits the nail straight on the head. He remembers exactly what he did and why he did it: the guy was being an ass and he threw him in the pond for it. Honestly, at about this point, I wanted to do the same thing, because the “victim” was STILL being an ass, in so many ways! The alleged bully then continued: “it seemed that so and so always wanted to be the popular kid, and because he tried so hard to be one, he just wasn’t.”

EXACTLY. You don’t have to have been the popular kid to still have your life stuck in high school. And that’s where the geeks and nerds differ from everyone else. When they were getting picked on and shunned by all the popular kids, they renounced the clicks and in-crowds and formed one of their own. They all got together and did their own nerdy things, like playing computer games, watching sci fi / fantasy movies, doodling dragons and spaceships, and reading and writing sci fi / fantasy stories WITHOUT CARING WHAT THE POPULAR CROWD THOUGHT. And because of this, it’s easier for geeks and nerds to grow out of high school and get on with their lives. Thank freaking goodness I was a nerd in high school!

This rejection of the popular culture by the geeks and nerds, many of whom would become avid devotees of science fiction and fantasy, seems to have played a big role in keeping the genres as good as they are. Postmodernism has taken the hero out of fiction and screwed it up in dozens of different ways. The literary elite tells us what is “good” fiction and “bad” fiction by arbitrary standards carefully calculated to create an in-crowd where they are the ones in charge. They preach their values and fashion metaphors and symbols that keep you from thinking honestly and independently of things–in the name of “open mindedness.” Mainstream fiction and popular culture believes these lies and changes with them. Science Fiction and Fantasy, however, has gotten away relatively unscathed. There are still heroes in sci fi and fantasy! There are still good stories! It’s still fun and enjoyable to read! It still makes you question and think about the world! Hooray for the geeks and the nerds!

I stopped listening through the first story on the podcast after about two minutes. But the next day, when I had nothing else good in my mp3 player, I turned it on again. Boy, if I thought the first story was bad, I was completely blown away by the second on!

It was an episode from some sort of podcast/radio show that a guy wrote that was all about…his ex girlfriend. It was ridiculous! He had an “ex-girlfriend sighting” segment, where people would talk about whether or not they saw her somewhere, a segment where he and a bunch of his friends got together and talked about how physically beautiful this girl was, a segment where he encouraged people to walk up to her and tell her how much she was missing, and all kinds of other stuff like that!

HOLY COW. If I were this girl, I would have gotten a restraining order on this guy and thrown every possible law against him! If that’s not stalking, I don’t know what is! It was just CREEPY and GROSS.

And then, a friend of his called up and said “dude, get a life! It’s over! There are hundreds of other girls in the city–go after them! Let it rest!”

To which the creep responded “you don’t know what true love is.”

WHAT???

I know what true love is! It’s in the Ender’s Game series, where Andrew Wiggins stays with Novinha even though she lashes out at him for the problems that she’s unable to deal with in her own life! It’s in hundreds of other places in sci fi / fantasy as well! Maybe, if this guy would just leave his miserable can’t-get-over-the-breakup-with-her life and escape into a good story, he could learn a thing or two about “true love.” And they say that people who like sci fi / fantasy are escapists who don’t know anything about the real world! Honestly, sometimes the only way to keep your sanity is to escape the “real world” for a little while! You can carry it to extremes, of course, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t do you good!

Holy cow!

Listening to This American Life is, among other things, one of the ways that I keep in touch with “mainstream” culture (whatever that is). And it’s an awesome show–I would highly recommend it. But quite frequently, I see stuff in these stories of people’s lives that makes me think “holy cow, why are they so bothered by that? Why are they letting that ruin their lives?” And I don’t want to be snobby about this, but sometimes I’m really glad that I left the popular crowd for geekdom when I was in high school. Listening to this last show is one of those times.

If you’ve read this rant through it’s entirety, I congratulate you. And please, if this post ends up getting linked to and flamed by tons and tons of fans of This American Life, just like my criticism of Firefly was flamed by dozens of Firefly fans, please realize that this is just a rant, and it probably contains a ton of inaccuracies and exaggerations.

Awesome Quark writing meeting!

We had another writing meeting this Saturday, and it went really well! We had quite a few new people! I was pleasantly surprised! I knew we would have a few newcomers, since we got a few submissions from some new people, but I didn’t realize that people would come and bring friends! It was great. Hopefully, many of them will stay with us!

Two of the new people are really into illustration as well as writing. One guy (I think his name was Travis but I’m really horrible with names) told us that he uses autocad to draw out spaceships and dragons for his stories. Pretty cool! It reminds me that the Quark writing vp is also supposed to be involved with the art section, which has pretty much been dead or dormant for the past year or two. I’m not that much into illustrating, so I’ll have to talk with the rest of the Quark leadership to figure out what to do about that. Hopefully, with the right person over it, we could do really well! We’ll see.

We had more submissions than we could handle this time, so I had to put off Evan’s and Ben’s stuff for the next meeting, as well as my own chapter from my story. I wasn’t expecting that, so I wasn’t sure how to handle it. If I put off someone else’s stuff so that I could get some feedback, I was worried that would seem a little self serving, so I decided to just wait for the second chapter to get critiqued. However, I think from now on it’s going to be whatever chapter I’m working on plus the first five stories to come in.

Jakeson and Gamila both submitted stuff that they’ve been working on for a while, and I think they got some good feedback. They’re both agreeable to the new rule that you can only submit the same thing twice. I hope it helps them to move forward on their projects rather than endlessly rehashing the same chapters. That’s the goal of the new rule.

A couple of the new people who submitted didn’t show up. They later told me that they got mixed up about the time, and apologized for missing the meeting. It was fine, we finished a little early, so all was good. One of the stories seemed a little bit risque to me–not so explicit that we couldn’t look at it, but it had a few sexual references that seemed a little awkward. He ended up missing the meeting, but I read his piece. It had some really interesting ideas to it, such as a giant hunter who ends up getting captured by a female giant who doesn’t want to kill him. The sexual tension was hilarious and I liked it. It was just a few references he gave to some scenes in the local tavern that I didn’t like very much. Not just for the sexual innuendos, but because they didn’t seem to help the story at all, BYU standards or not. Of course, that’s all the more reason to discuss it. Maybe we’ll be able to look at it at the next meeting.

What with Joel and this new guy, it looks like we might have a little bit of controversy down the road. And, actually, I’m kind of looking forward to it. I like controversy–otherwise, I wouldn’t be a Poli Sci major. I just hope we can handle it in a way that everyone takes something positive and useful from it. It would be a shame if people ended up getting turned off to the club over it. But I think we’re perfectly capable of expressing ourselves and having an enlightening discussion on the edgier topics.

We decided to start a short story contest for the club: the word limit is 1,000, and the requirement is that the phrase “because I’m awesome” has to appear somewhere in the story. The reading club will be doing the judging (hopefully that’ll help to connect us a little more with the rest of Quark), and the deadline is October 6th. We got the idea from something Jakeson said at the Sept 11th meeting: we were talking about this one scene in John’s story (he’s one of the new guys) where this huntsman bursts in through the window and kills a couple of the bad guys, and Jakeson said that the huntsman should say something like “because I’m awesome,” or something like that. I forget, but it was pretty funny. So, I figured it would be good to do that for our first flash fiction contest. Something light and funny.

Everyone seems to say that Saturdays work better than Tuesdays, so it looks like we’re going to have more of those meetings. However, the day after I scheduled a meeting for October 6th, I realized that that’s the weekend of General conference! So, now the next meeting is rescheduled for Tuesday the 2nd.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin

I just today finished this wonderful piece of science fiction. Ursula Leguin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction classic and an excellent piece of writing. Although it’s pace was much slower than what I’m used to, I enjoyed it very much.

It tells the story of a man named Genly Ai, who is an envoy from the Ekumen, a sort of confederation of planets, to an independent world known as Winter. His mission is to convince the people of this world to join the Ekumen in alliance. Because the Ekumen doesn’t want to make mistakes in reaching out to new worlds, he was sent alone and unarmed, the first man from another world to visit this planet.

He finds a very strange race of human beings on this planet. Apparently, several thousand years ago, the planet was used as a sort of laboratory where experiments were performed on human sexuality. The result was a colony of people who are neither male nor female, but instead have a periodic sexual cycle, where for one or two days every lunar month, they come into “kemmer” and develop working sexual organs–sometimes male, sometimes female. After the outside worlds lost interest in the experiment, they left the colony to itself, and over thousands of years of isolation it developed into its own complex civilization.

The planet Winter is in a deep ice age, and everything in the Gethanian’s culture (that’s the name of the people of this world) revolves around both their peculiar reproductive biology and the severe weather in which they live. Their cities are designed for winters that drop dozens of feet of snow, and their culture is very hospitable and welcoming of strangers. The people are generally very passive; they never drive their vehicles faster than 10 or 15 miles per hour, people live in the same villages and towns where they were born without really caring much for the outside world, and scientific innovation progresses at a very slow pace. There are, however, two major countries on this world, and as Genly Ai starts his mission, the leaders of these countries are preparing for war.

It is a tale of a strange, exotic world, with a very deep mystical and religious structure, and many interesting ramifications from the unique biology of its people. It is also a tale of political intrigue and xenophobia. The plot is not all that complicated, but there are a couple of interesting twists. However, towards the beginning, Genly visits a hermitic sect of religious sages who have the ability to foretell the future, and learns how the story will basically end, so you really don’t have to do a lot of guessing.

That ends up to be a good thing, though, because it keeps you from thinking too much about the plot so that you’re free to focus on the beautiful way that LeGuin tells the story. Her descriptions are wonderful, and paint a very beautiful picture of the world and its culture. The focus of the book is not so much on the alien technology, or the history of the Ekumen or Winter, or even on Genly as a character, but on the culture of the Gethenians and how Genly interacts with them. In the end, he comes to feel closer to the alien culture than his own.

The concept of the Gethenian sexual cycle is fascinating, though I don’t necessarily agree with all of LeGuin’s conclusions. The way she describes it, it’s not obscene at all; in fact, she does a remarkably excellent job discussing sexuality in her work. Other pieces of Science Fiction tend to use sex and sexuality as a way to thrill or entertain the reader (or, failing that, the writer), and usually it ends up being puerile and shallow. But LeGuin approaches it entirely from a cultural perspective, to answer “what would a culture of people with this peculiar biological cycle look and feel like?” I found it mostly believable, though I disagreed with the idea that without a constant libido, mankind would not be very aggressive or innovative. However, that didn’t really take away much from reading her book.

I’d rate this book an eight out of ten. I loved the journeys that Genly went on, especially towards the end when he and one of the aliens traveled together across the frozen waste to escape to safety. The descriptions were wonderful and beautiful, and I could feel like I was making the journey myself. There isn’t a lot of action in this story, but it makes up for it in depth and in the very thorough conceptualization of this wonderfully alien culture.

Cool writing music

Ocremix came out with a new album. This time, it’s based on the soundtrack for Final Fantasy VII. Like all of their music, it’s completely free.

The arrangement for the JENOVA theme has got to be one of the best takes on this excellent piece of Nobuo Uematsu’s work that I’ve seen yet. Soft, but still retaining the tension of the original, with an excellent techno beat. Just right for zoning out the outside world when you’re trying to write.

Here’s the link to the album’s website: Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream.

Awesome Quark Meeting!

So, we had the first meeting of the Quark writing group yesterday, and it went very well! I was a little bit nervous, since I’m definitely a newcomer to this club (I only joined up with it last winter, whereas most of the core members have been around for four or five years!) and not so sure how to lead things. It went very well, though! I think that just about everyone got some really good feedback, and it didn’t seem that anyone’s feelings were hurt, so that’s good!

Gamila and Jakeson were there, now as a married couple (yeah, the writing group’s marriage statistics are so high they’d make most BYU bishops jealous!), Drek, Dragonswriter and Asyr (who I don’t remember meeting last year, so it was good to meet them), and a new guy named John, who heard about the club through Joel (who showed up a little later). He’s an engineering major, so it looks like he’ll know something about physics and how realistic/unrealistic are the elements of sci fi technology in any given piece. I learned from Jakeson not to mention Ceasar in any of the meetings, but on the flipside if any of us need to know anything about the Roman empire, we have a resident expert. I think that we’ve also got quite a few experts on midieval weaponry, judging from the feedback I got last year from my story The Clearest Vision.

I thought that Drek’s piece in particular was very good. It was the first of three parts in a short story he’s writing for a contest deadline this month. Maybe some of the old timers have read it before. It starts out with a backcountry vet and his goth assistant who get a very strange visitor. The visitor drops off a humanoid/canine creature the size of a man, and asks him to operate on it. It’s got this real sense of mystery and some wonderful tension in it. At one point, the strange creature manipulates the vet’s emotions and makes him feel this intense fear. It was pretty cool to read. I’m looking forward to the rest of the story!

Joel also is a part of Inscape now, and he said they’re looking for submissions. They’re not a paying market, but it sounds like a great way to start getting published! I think I’m going to send out my short story The Clearest Vision to them, since it didn’t win anything in the AML short story contest and I don’t see it having much of a broader appeal beyond the realm of Mormon society (although I could try sending it to some Christian publishers, so long as I can find some that don’t outright reject the doctrine of the pre-existence. Muslim publications, maybe? Dunno. I’ll try with the Mormons first and see how it goes).

The feedback I’ve gotten from the boards is that there are several members of the group who can only do Saturday mornings, so it looks like that’s what we’re going to be doing. I’m thinking about alternating between Tuesdays and Saturdays, since that seems to be what we’ve done in the past. I’ll schedule it tonight and send up the email.

We do need new members, so if anyone out there would like to join us or knows someone who would, send me an email! I’ve put up several fliers around campus, and I’ve gotten a couple of emails with some interested people. We’ll see how it goes.

So, things are going well, and I hope that they only get better!

Writing and the Sabbath

Today was my first Sunday in a new ward, and we had a really good Elder’s quorum lesson on keeping the Sabbath day holy. This is an area of living the gospel that I really need to improve on, and I need to both stop doing things that aren’t appropriate for the Sabbath and start doing things that are.

My question is this: in your opinion, is it breaking the Sabbath to work on a particular story that you’re writing?

It’s not as spiritual as reading the scriptures or doing service, but it’s not as worldly as watching TV or playing Halo. It is an activity that requires creative thought, and I suppose that it does have the potential to draw you closer to the savior if you can see gospel principles in action in the story you’re telling. On the other hand, it can really distract if the story is full of bloodshed and craziness.

I’m pretty liberal when it comes to Sabbath day worship, but I think I’ve been a little too loose in the past, and now I need to set up some personal guidelines to help preserve the spirit of the day. That’s why I’d appreciate the feedback.

I know that everyone is going to have different ways of living this commandment, and that’s perfectly fine. What helps one person to keep the Sabbath holy may or may not help another person, and what distracts from one person may or may not distract from another (for example, I think I need to stop browsing my blog subscriptions on Sunday!)

What I really need is some way of thinking about it. I really don’t know on what terms to consider this; why exactly it would or would not be considered a Sunday appropriate activity. That’s why I’d like to hear your thoughts.