This putting Book One online for free thing works out really well for me, since I started reading the series with Book Two aka Bloodlines. And since I have yet to start Book Four (of Nine), I won't have to rewind through seven books to catch the beginning of the whole thing. It's even available as an audiobook! Downloading that right now...
Free offer expires May 13, 2008 (the day the last book of the series comes out).
The Friday Five is something that started as the Friday Fifteen over on my other blog. I just happened to have five things today that I feel are worth posting.
1. Mark Terry talks about Book Advances, which basically says what John Scalzi had already told me (and many others) via his blog: Writers (fiction writers) don't make Money (with a capital M) unless they get lucky. And I've already accepted that fact. But I do find that it's nice to occasionally check in with Reality.
3. Jeff VanDermeer recommends The Art of Subtext by Charles Baxter. I actually already had it on my Amazon Wishlist, but I went ahead and changed the priority to Highest. For $9.60 I should probably just order it, but I'm going to see if I can get my next Amazon gift card from MyPoints before I do that.
1. Count the number of characters in an average, mid-paragraph line (BTW, this all assumes a monospaced font. If you're using a proportional font, the number of characters can vary immensely, throwing off the numbers and word count). 2. Divide by six. This is the number of words per line. 3. Count the number of lines on a page. (This includes any # for blank lines.) 4. Multiply #2 by #3 to get the number of words per page. 5. Multiply by the number of full pages (plus any fractional pages), to get the total number of words. 6. Round the number to the nearest hundred. Authors tend to round up; editors round down. This is the number you put on the front page of the manuscript.
I've got 21,000 words. There's a lot of white space in the manuscript.
5. Lynn Viehl has a new Novel Crash Test Dummies writing manual. While Lynn writes what I believe are mostly paranormal romance books, she has published 38 books in the past 8 years, so she's definitely doing something right. Most of her advice seems like it can be applied to writing in general, and the innuendo keeps things interesting.
That does explain why the commercials have been seen on more than one channel. And yes, you can see the TV in at least one of the YouTube videos. I applaud LG for their creativity, but really, how many people are going to buy this TV who otherwise would not have? And how many people are going to be so upset at the hoax that they don't buy the TV or any other LG products?
How is it that the only information I can find on this is actually on the show's website? That just doesn't seem normal.
I mean, part of me is saying it's a fairly transparent experiment with "non-marketing." I.e., seeing how many people will watch the (alleged) mini-series without promoting outside of 30 second ads (on ABC, I think). The web site doesn't even say what channel it's on, so I was tempted to think that it might be a web-only thing, but the address definitely ends in ".tv". Of course, with the apparent active obfuscation of evidence of the existence of the show, it could be that the .tv is just another red herring, and perhaps it really is going to be a web-only show.
The other part (I guess you'd call it a half, then) of me thinks that David Nutter has had enough of "normal" TV shows after launching Millennium, Roswell, Dark Angel, Smallville, Without a Trace, Supernatural, and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I guess we'll just have to do as he says in the clearly staged interview on the site and "watch closely."
Yes, I've now written more than 30,000 words... too bad it's spread across three different projects. This time, the 10,000th word was something just as interesting as she or date. For Hear the Grass Grow, the 10,000th word is: note.
And, I'm only 207 words behind my goal average of 500 per day. So, I've only fallen an average of 17 words per day since the first time I reached the 10,000 word milestone on 2/15 (exactly 2 months ago - and March was a pretty weak month for my writing; the counts for February and April look a lot better).
I first noticed that Anathem was up on Amazon.com a while ago (recommended because they do actually make some good recommendations). For some reason, I decided to look for a plot summary today since one hasn't been posted on Amazon yet. I first found this post on Nerd World with the standard back cover narrative I found quoted on several sites (and will now quote here):
Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians—sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable "saecular" world that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides that only these cloistered scholars have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his cohorts are summoned forth without warning into the Unknown.
Then I came across this post on But enough about you from which I will also quote:
He's writing a science fiction novel unrelated to Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle. It's set on another planet and has aliens and so on. It's really about Platonic mathematics, but he needed the aliens and space opera-ish elements to spice it up a little bit, just like the pirates kept people engaged in the Baroque books.
So, pretty much it sounds AWEsome. After reading the first quote, I was worried because it sounded a little too much like something along the lines of The Baroque Cycle. Not that I don't like the Baroque Cycle, but being half way through The Confusion, I don't know if I could handle another 928 page book (according to Amazon) in the same vein. Perhaps Neal couldn't either.
Sometimes, when I'm running home from basketball (which often seems to be in the rain), I imagine that I'm one of those young, down-on-his-luck basketball players from a Young Adult novel that I read in middle school.
Too bad I didn't know about this book when I was in middle school. This one was also under the Science Fiction category, keyword basketball, so I'm sure it's pretty awesome.
Despite watching basketball, playing basketball, working in the garden, and working 11 hours today, I have managed 1000+ words in two of the last four days, and got to 116 today.
Daily average (since 2/18/08): 288
Hear the Grass Grow is now up to 7,697, which means I'm only about 6,000 words away from dropping it to work on something else.
