Looking for Joy

How does the time get away?  It was Wednesday when I posted last, and now it's Sunday. I posted about Under the Ember Star being published.  I did some promoting for it on facebook and sent some emails, but not that much.  I haven’t had a lot of energy.  Lana is starting to feel the full effects of the radiation and is not eating well.  Her saliva gland on the tumor side is no longer producing saliva and everything tastes bad to her, and her throat is so dry it often hurts her to swallow.  I think yesterday she ate a bite of scrambled egg, a little rice, and some Italian Ices.  She is drinking a lot of milk, and they gave her some prescriptions to help with the saliva issue.  So far they have not helped much, but maybe it will take time to build.

In other health news, my blood tests came back with my cholesterol at 210 and my triglycerides at 496.  I am now on my second prescription medicine, this one for triglycerides. I was already on high blood pressure medicine.  I knew it was coming but didn’t really want to end up on two. Anyway, pretty minor compared to Lana’s issues.

But enough of the less joyful stuff.  I’m gonna try to find a good book and loose myself in it.  There are worlds of adventure and joy out there, and if I can’t find much inside myself at the moment, maybe I can take some in second hand.  Maybe I’ll read Under the Ember Star again. It’s been a while, and the days when I was writing it were quite full of joy. 

Here’s a little excerpt from the end of chapter 2 and the start of chapter 3, which is called “Smoking Blasters.”  To set the stage, Ginn had a rough night and wakes up to find that a veiled stranger has broken in and wants to talk to her. But there are others looking for the stranger to, and they are ready to kill to get him. Ginn hears a sound in her home that she shouldn’t hear.  And…action:

“Who’d you bring with you right now?” she demanded suddenly.

“No one. I mean, they did not come into town.”

Ginn surged to her feet, the apple dropped and forgotten, the kaftee spilling to the desk. She filled her free hand with her second blaster. Her visitor recoiled, hands going up toward its veiled face.

“Then you were followed,” she snarled.

From below, in the abandoned factory, a door shished open. From the street outside came a sound like a sheet of paper tearing—a pulse weapon powering up.

Ginn hurled herself forward, one arm sweeping her robed companion with her to the floor.

The wall at her back exploded.

Shrapnel sleeted. Echoes hammered.

A burning flake of metal furrowed Ginn’s left shoulder. She heard the sudden grunt of the being beneath her but couldn’t tell if or how bad it had been hurt. Dust and ash roiled and the already dim Kelmerian sun did little to cut it.

Lurching into a crouch, Ginn hacked up some of the swirling grit, tried to draw shallow breathes to keep the rest out of her lungs. The light-lenses provided a quick catalog of what was left of her apartment. It wasn’t pretty. Her roof sagged, smoldering. Half of it was gone. The remaining walls bulged outward. She wasn’t living here anymore.

The floor beneath Ginn creaked, as if about to collapse. Her enemies weren’t waiting on that. From below in the abandoned factory, running footsteps sounded. They’d expect her to try and escape that way—if she lived. But the stairs down would not belong to her anymore. Her options were narrowing.

“Follow or die,” Ginn growled toward her strange visitor.
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Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Wildside Press Gramlich Page

 

Hello, “Under the Ember Star”

I was setting up an Amazon Author Page for Amazon.France today when a book cover popped up that I hadn’t seen before. I looked a little more closely, and it was the cover for Under the Ember Star, which is finally in print through both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The publication date says March 29, 2012, but I checked as recently as last week and it wasn’t yet up. I think March is when it was submitted.

This one comes from Wildside Press, through Borgo Press as the purchasing imprint, and it’s listed as Wildside Double #25. Yes, you heard right. It’s a double book, in the tradition of the old Ace doubles so many of us remember fondly. There are two books printed back to back, each with its own cover. My cover is below, and I think it’s one of the best I’ve had yet. 

The second book is by Mark E. Burgess and is called The Battle for Eden: The Human/Knacker War, Book 3. Military SF probably best describes it. The three books of the Human/Knacker war are only loosely tied together by the concept of the Knacker invasion of Earth’s space territories. I’ve read all three and each stands alone just fine without the reader needing to know anything about the other two. I read “Battle for Eden” when it was first suggested as the flip side for my work, and it’s full of action and adventure, and quite a lot of intelligent thought.

Under the Ember Star is the book I wrote last summer, and I’m very proud of it. I’d call it a mixture of Space Opera and Sword & Planet adventure.  If you want to look for literary forebears, well, I gave special acknowledgments to Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore in the book.  If you think of Sword of Rhiannon and the Northwest Smith stories, you’d be hitting close to the feel I was going for in the story.

I’d say “Ember Star” is the same kind of action-oriented adventure story I’ve tried to tell most of my life, but in one way I really tried to stretch myself with this book. For the first time in any of my longer works, the main character is female. She’s also carrying a little more baggage than my typical hero, but that doesn’t stop her from kicking ass. I’m happy with how she turned out.

Here’s the Blurb for Under the Ember Star:  “Ginn Hollis was fourteen when her father's mysterious death left her alone on the planet Kelmer. She's grown up since then. Kelmer is a harsh world, an old world: its people are ancient, its civilization long fallen and dimly dreaming under a brown dwarf sun the natives call the Ember Star. But now, long dormant forces are beginning to stir on Kelmer, forces that could destroy the planet forever...or bring it back to life. One being stands at the center of the turmoil. His origins are veiled, his destiny is unclear. Everyone wants a piece of him. Only Ginn Hollis can protect him from both sides--if she can save herself first.... Another grand science-fantasy adventure by a riveting storyteller.”

You know, I like the sound of that. I hope you do to.

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Do You Think I’m Obsessed with Books?

I’ve mentioned the video game Skyrim here several times. I’m still playing it a fair amount and enjoying it. Recently, however, a certain ‘behavior’ of mine has come to the forefront in the game. I’m talking about book collecting.

Skyrim is part of a series of games called the Elder Scrolls games, and there are a lot of books in the game. Reading some books gives you perks, leading to improvements in archery or defense or so on, and others teach you magic skills. Many are just there.  Some of these talk about historical incidents. Others are biographies or personal journals. I don’t know how many there are total but I’ve seen over 100 so far.  I find it pretty cool.

And now to the subject of this post.  Many of you know that I’ve got lots and lots of books at home. I’ve reviewed thousands at Goodreads. I’ve got many hundreds more in my TBR piles.  I collect books and keep records of what books I read.  I seek out all the books in certain series that I enjoy.  And now I have become a book collector in Skyrim.

Skyrim allows you to ‘buy’ houses in various cities and I have four such properties now. Each of these properties has actual bookshelves that you can activate and store books on.  I set up a computer file the other night and began systematically collecting the books of Skyrim and putting them into the bookshelves in my various properties.  Many of the books come in series and I’m keeping the series together on the same shelf as I get them. All books have a “value” that is attached to them too, and, interestingly, I’m finding in many series there is one volume that is worth more than the others.  Just like in real life. Now, if only Skyrim had a Goodreads subsite I could access.

So what do you think? Am I certifiable?  Am I a true bibliophile?  Or would the term be bibliomaniac?  While I wait for your answers, I’ll leave you with some pics of real life books in my real life house.

Harmland Brand Chili

In honor of my newest collection, "Harmland," I'm gonna cook up a batch of Harmland Chili today. If you're in the Abita Springs area drop by and we'll have a heaping bowl with some dark beer. I’m thinking Turbo Dog is just about right with this kind of chili. And you won’t need any hot sauce.  Maybe I’ll whip up a batch of cornbread to go along with it. It’s great for sopping up the juices.

 Here’s a little excerpt from the story, “The Finest Cut,” which inspired today’s chili recipe.

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Sheriff Dan Cortland stood looking down at the excavated grave. A coffin lay within, its lid thrown back. The coroner, Garrison Moeller, knelt in the dirt beside the grave, peering into the casket, which had been hand built out of thick cypress planks and seemed far too well constructed to house a couple of murder victims.

 Moeller climbed heavily to his feet, then stripped off the pair of surgical gloves that made his thick hands and wrists look like grub worms underneath the latex. He gestured toward the med techs nearby. “You can move ‘em now. Straight to Longleaf Hospital.”

 “Something strange about the bodies,” Cortland said.

 Moeller snorted. “You mean besides the cut marks on the bones and the fact that sixty percent of their flesh has been removed?”

 “Yeah, besides that.”

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Remember: Harmland Chili: For when you absolutely have to kill the main ingredient yourself.

Get the Recipe Here. (Sort of: If you read between the lines.)  

Editors and Lawyers

Big revelation time.  About a decade ago I made a writing mistake.  I know, I know, tremendously hard to believe.  Me, the great and wonderful ooze, made a mistake.  But it happened and I had repressed the horror of it until just yesterday when I finished reading Young Thongor by Lin Carter.  The mistake was this.  In writing a piece for REHupa, the Robert E. Howard apa, I misspelled Thongor as “ThongAr.” Although it passed unnoticed by the vast majority of that august organization’s members, one member (at the time) caught my mistake and gave me a sound thrashing via private email. I was certainly glad it was private so that my shame was not broadcast to the world.  I wish I still had that email.  The upshot was that he had always considered me a fine critic and thought I showed great promise, but that it was simply an embarrassment to make such an egregious error.  I had the feeling he lost a lot of respect for me that day.  Of course, he was right. It would have been easy to check the spelling since I had half a dozen Thongor books on my shelf.  I figured I’d gotten lazy. I also got a pretty good laugh out of it, though.

Cut to today. I’m editing a bunch of stuff for some friends of mine and have stumbled upon a number of such mistakes, mistakes that could have easily been corrected with another moment’s thought and some checking. I’ve realized, though, that the vast majority of these errors are not really careless or lazy mistakes. They’re unconscious mistakes. The writers are making them because their minds have not been trained to think like editors. Editors are like the lawyers of the writing world. And often they get about the same number of jokes told about them.  What do you call 10,000 editors on the bottom of the sea?  A good start!

And now, I’ve become one of them, an “Editor.”  Next thing you know, I’ll be running for public office and declaring that Novels should be counted as people.

And every time I get a little frustrated at some of the mistakes I’m finding in the editing work I’m doing, I just keep saying to myself…ThongOr, ThongOr, ThongOr.

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Plans Begin to Form

Slowly these days, writing plans are returning to me. I hope I'll be able to bring some of them to fruition before school starts again. I came up with a character I find interesting named Layne Gabriel and I've decided to try a series of stories about him. These will be westerns and the stories are likely to run in the 5,000 word range, although I'm not absolutely sure. I'll publish them at .99 cents on Kindle and see if there is any good response.  If so, I'll try my hand at a few more and then perhaps put all of them together as a collection.

The first story will be called "To Live by the Gun," and is about a third done. The 2nd story is called "Die by the Gun" and is maybe a quarter done. The third story is merely a gleam in my eye but is probably going to be called "Gunfighter Messiah."  I want to have all three done before I publish the first, because at the end of "book" 1, I plan to run the first couple paragraphs of "book" 2 as a teaser, and the same with 3.  Then I'll offer the first one via Kindle select, and offer it for five days free through their program. That way, if someone downloads the first free and likes it, the other two will already be available for them to get.

Each title will carry a subtitle and number.  Since Layne Gabriel is from a place called Colt Creek, I'm probably going to call the series "Colt Creek Westerns," or perhaps "Layne Gabriel Westerns."  Any collection later would likely be called "The Man from Colt Creek."

I haven't decided absolutely on the pseudonym idea yet but I may do it because I think it would be kind of fun and a good experiment to try.  If it doesn't work, I could always reissue the books under my own name, although I won't make any secret of the author's identity and the copyright will be indicated as mine.  If I use a pseudonym, it is likely to be Tyler Boone.

Anyway, this should occupy me for a couple of months. If I could write a little faster I might be dangerous.  Well, probably not.  I've got a couple of other stories I have to work on for other publications as well.

It feels kind of good to have plans, though.
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To Pseudonym or Not

I’ve been reading and listening to more advice for writers lately. One thing that keeps coming up is that readers can be put off if they enjoy one particular book by an author, and then read another book by that author that is dramatically different in genre.  The usual suggestions for dealing with problem are for authors to 1) brand themselves by focusing just on one genre until they breakout, or 2) establish pseudonyms for themselves when they work in different genres.

Since I simply find it impossible to confine myself to one genre in writing when I enjoy reading so many different kinds of books, I’ve begun to give thought to the pseudonym idea.  I’ve decided that I will certainly keep Charles Allen Gramlich for my heroic fantasy work, and will probably use just Charles Gramlich for any nonfiction.  But what about westerns and horror?  Or what if I decide to write something urban fantasy?

Yesterday I came up with an idea for a western work and put down some ideas. I was thinking along with it about possible pseudonyms.  The first one I came up with that I liked was “Matt Boone,” but then I realized there is the rather famous, “Pat Boone.”  I think those are just too close. I tried Matt Sage, but was concerned about the two four-letter words together. Some of you who’ve read my work know I like the name “Boone,” so I jotted down Boone Holland as a possible pseudonym, and then Wade Savage occurred to me in the middle of the night but is maybe too much. I kind of like Wade, though, so was thinking Wade Bonner.

So what do you folks think?

Matt Boone

Wade Bonner

Matt Sage

Wade Savage

Boone Holland

Or do all of these suck?

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Tales of a Youthful Brewmance

Here's what the brews themselves are saying about Charles Gramlich's memoir of his beer drinking days.
 

“I thought I could have been treated better,” says Bud Weiser.  “It hurts not to be loved.”

 

“Lies.  All lies,” says Coors.  “He drank a lot more of me than he lets on.  And he liked it.”

 

“Come back to Canada and we’ll Eff you up really good this time.”  --The Molson Brews.

 

“I don’t always like being drunk by humans,” says Dos Equis, “but when I do I prefer it to be by Charles Gramlich.”

 

“Only 99 cents, he’s charging for this.  Meshuggah!”  --He’Brew: The Chosen Beer.

Get your copy of "Days of Beer" today.  Before it goes stale. 

 Amazon

Barnes & Noble

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Writing Woes

I started a new story today, called “Witch of Ashes.”  It’s a sword and sorcery piece and I liked how the opening section came out.  I wanted to try and “speed” up my process and get the story down faster than I typically do.  It didn’t work. The second section came easy but after rereading it I realized it was more of a “Skyrim” adventure than a Gramlich original.  I had to rip pretty much all of it out.  I think I was able to save a couple of lines.

The problem for me when I “write fast” is that the first image that pops into my head is almost always one I’ve seen before.  And since I’ve been playing so much Skyrim the images that kept popping up were general variations on that theme.  To write fast you have to let the unconscious do most of the work, but when I turn the work fully over to the unconscious I get the commonplace instead of the unusual.  Conscious evaluation of images takes time and, it seems for me, there is no substitute. 

Anyway, here’s the opening to “Witch of Ashes.”

The northern wind was quiet for once. The polished surface of the tarn shown like a black shield beneath the ringed moon. To water’s edge came Krieg, on silent boots with a battle-axe of ebon steel in his fists. He lay flat for a moment, drank his fill, then rose to ghost along the shoreline. It was almost as if he had a purpose.

A shadow jutting into the lake from the shore resolved itself into the fire-ruined hulk of a dragon ship. Krieg paused. He knew what had happened. A great warrior had fallen in battle and been laid atop a bier on his finest warship. The trophies of his greatest victories were placed beside him.  Perhaps his woman was chained alive at his feet; perhaps she went willingly. Soaked with pitch, the ship had then been set adrift and aflame. It had burned to the water-line. The remnant had lodged itself here like a splinter in the flesh of the world.

 Krieg studied the hulk, studied the bleak shore upon which it lay. Someone else had been here before him. Even in the dark his keen gaze identified naked footprints in the soft loam. They were small and slender, such as those made by a woman. There was only one line of prints, coming from the burned ship to the shore.

Intrigued, Krieg turned to follow them.

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Harmland Goes Live:

Harmland is now available on Kindle and Nook. It’s been largely finished for a while. I had trouble with the cover and trouble deciding on the “about the book” blurb, which is very important. I still don’t particularly like what I’ve got but I can always change it later and I wanted to go ahead and get this up before it got any older. Or I did. 

Since adding more ‘eyes’ to the Harmland cover didn’t seem to help, I simplified it and used the subtitle of “dark tales.”  However, Amazon has changed their requirements and I had to make the cover much bigger than in the past, which seems to have hurt the resolution.  I’ve uploaded a new one but it seems to take several days for that to go through, so in the meantime it’s still wearing the original cover.  Hopefully it will still attract some human eyes.

I decided on $2.99 for the price.  There are nine stories and over 21,000 words.  Here’s the table of contents:

PART ONE. Whiskey, Guns, and Sin: Noir Stories

1. The Finest Cut…  

2. The Grey Inside… 

3. Whiskey, Guns, and Sin…

4. The Gift… 

 

PART TWO. Mouth Wet with Rain and Leaves: Hauntings

5. The Finding…

6. Mouth Wet with Rain and Leaves...

7. The Toad…

8. The Vivarium…

9. A Hiss of Angels

Some of you have read the original version of “Whiskey, Guns and Sin.”  This is an expanded version with a different ending.  The rest of these are brand new, including “The Vivarium,” which is my first foray into the Chtulhu Mythos world of H. P. Lovecraft.

If you want to have a look, here it is on Kindle

Here it is for Nook

New Magazine, Old Book

Some of you may be aware that White Cat Publications has announced a new magazine called Insatiable: The Magazine of Paranormal Desires. It'll be debuting in October but they are looking for submissions for the initial issue now and are paying excellent rates. Here's the link to the submission guidelines

While you're there, check out the other offerings that White Cat has.  This is a dynamic publishing organization, new and hungry.

I also got my royalty statement from Invisible College Press today, and am happy to note that the publication of Cold in the Light in ebook has given the work a new lease on life.  Cold in the Light was my first novel publication and I was, and am, immensely proud of it. It's currently discounted at Amazon at $2.84 for the ebook.  The link is here.

It's also available on Nook, at a little higher price,  here.

It's a good book.

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Two Very Different Movies

Last night I watched two movies: Gattica and Drive Angry. 

Gattica was a movie of ideas and message, a near future science fiction story with a very Brave New World feel.  The main character, Ethan Hawke, is born the old fashioned way in a world that is becoming increasingly focused on genetic engineering and eugenics. As a “non-valid,” the Hawke character is deemed fit for only manual or menial labor, but he dreams of more and ‘buys’ the identity of a “Valid.” 

Drive Angry was almost a live action cartoon. The main character, Nicholas Cage, escapes from hell to save his granddaughter from being used in a Satanic ritual to bring hell to earth.  There are fast cars, gratuitous nudity, and various numbers of explosions and gory deaths.  Cage teams up with a young woman who is driving a 440 Magnum Charger, and is pursued by “the Accountant,” who is the death character and who wants to return Cage to hell.

I liked both movies.  On the down side, Gattica was quite slow moving and made the future look very staid, boring, and respectable.  Maybe that will be true; I don’t know.  Drive Angry had some pretty ridiculous looking special effects during the climactic battle scene.  Generally, though, both movies met the goal of keeping me interested. 

Overall, I have to say I enjoyed Drive Angry a little more.  And one reason was the young female co-star.  Besides exhibiting the required level of attractiveness, she got the best lines in the movie and could conduct herself believably in a fight.  In fact, she voiced what has now become my current favorite tough “guy” line in the movies.  When the villain told her in his southern drawl that: “I’m going to kill you, and then desecrate your corpse.”  She responded with, “Well, between now and then, I’m gonna fuck you up.”

Now there’s a line I wish I’d written.

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John Carter: A Review

Ever since I read A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs I’ve had a love affair going with Sword and Planet fiction. There’s a reason why three out of the four novels I’ve written fall into that genre (The Talera series).  There’s a reason why I’ve spent hours upon hours of my time drawing maps and making up worlds for my own Sword and Planet concepts.  As I’ve said before, I consider the genre to be the purest reading fun one can have. 

And so I was eager to see the first big-budget adaptation of ERB’s seminal novel.  Lana and I watched John Carter on pay-per-view last night.  Here’s my thoughts.

First, I want to be clear that I enjoyed the movie and consider it well worth the price I paid to see it.  I thought there were some very good things about it.  There were also some things that didn’t work as well, and a few things I didn’t understand.

Characters:  Generally, the characters worked.  Dejah Thoris was well cast.  She came off a bit too modern in her dialogue to me, but that is to be expected considering the book came out a 100 years ago.  I also liked the casting for John Carter himself, although I didn’t care for the attempts early in the movie to reframe him as a kind of anti-hero.  I see that as a nod to modern young audiences and I didn’t think it was necessary.  Tars Tarkas was a wonderful character for this movie, but was, perhaps, only about seventy percent the Tars Tarkas from the books. I also liked the Sola character and the loveable Woola!  Kantos Kan was well cast as well, but didn’t have enough to do in the movie.  They changed the basic way in which love develops between Carter and Dejah Thoris, and I thought the novel did a better job with that.  Still, I bought the love affair and thought it ended up being very touching.

Plot: A Princess of Mars was a very open ended adventure novel and I knew they’d have to change that for the movies.  They needed a more coherent plot. The one they chose, having the Therns as super science types who are manipulating the politics on Barsoom, was pretty thin, but there was ‘some’ justification for that in ERB’s Martian series. They could have done better at explaining why the Therns were doing what they were doing, though. I’m still not quite sure on the matter.  That said, I liked how the movie brought that plot around at the end to explain how John Carter returns to Mars.

Scenery:  Beautiful scenery.  I totally bought the world and both the ancient and modern cities.  I thought the flying ships were very well done, and the ‘wildlife,’ such as the White Apes and the Thoats were believable. This was a solid strength to the film.

Action:  The action was good and generally believable within the context of the story.  John Carter’s jumping skills didn’t always seem to be equivalent from one section of the movie to another, but I was OK with that. I would have liked to have seen more sword fights. John Carter is the best swordsman on two worlds after all. A little more “Errol Flynn” would have been good with me.

Missteps:  I was a little irritated early in the movie at how they changed up the character of Powel and how they came in contact with the Apache.  It seemed a little tacked on.  I also didn’t like the addition of a dead wife for Carter.  That was just far too cliché.  They made good use of the idea later in the story but it would have been better without that element.

All in all, though I wish it would have been better, I still liked it a heckuva lot and found it much more enjoyable than most of the movies I’ve watched lately.

OVER THE TOP

My critique group consists of folks with a wide range of reading tastes and writing styles.  We frequently have minor issues during critiques over what amounts to the literary versus genre debate.  One popped up the other day when several lines of one member’s story were deemed “melodramatic” by another member.  There were suggestions that the writer should “tone it down.”

This got me thinking on the subject.  And thinking on my part often leads to a blog post.  Here it is.

First, my general rule on writing literary versus genre fiction is that, if you’re writing literary fiction, “tone it down,” if you’re writing genre fiction, “turn it up.”  Of course, literary writers like Cormac McCarthy turn it way the hell up.  (Read Blood Meridian.)  Ray Bradbury, who recently died but who was accepted as a “literary” writer by the establishment, turned it up, at least in works like The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

A key, though, is that a work has to have coherence.  One reason Bradbury’s prose is accepted by the literary establishment is because it was so clearly a total package.  His prose was bright, surreal, powerfully dramatic, but it was also consistent throughout.  Such prose is a problem only if it is “mixed” in with more restrained language. 

Say I wrote for example: “Tom stared out his window at the drizzle that fell steadily from a gray sky.  He didn’t like the rain.  He’d never liked it.  It changed his mood for the worse.  It made him feel empty.  And when he was empty the depression tended to find him.  That depression was like moving into Satan’s apartment in the black bowels of hell, where the only light was the scarlet screaming of blood and sin.”

The last line is way over the top from what came before, and I certainly consider it melodramatic.  However, there are several issues to be considered with that line. 1: While it’s over the top to me, not everyone would necessarily agree.  2: Even those who agree that the line is over the top are likely to remember it, and being remembered is generally a good thing.  You don’t sell books by writing material that isn’t memorable.  3: In a differently styled story, with a different kind of build up, that line would fit perfectly and wouldn’t be judged as over the top at all, at least not by the folks who read (and buy) that kind of fiction.  (Like me.)

Melodrama lies in the eyes of the reader.  Many readers prefer what I will call “restrained” prose to unrestrained prose.  Others do not, and there is little doubt that restrained prose sells less well than unrestrained.  Consider “Fifty Shades of Grey,” a very non-restrained work.  You should use the “look inside” feature at Amazon to read a few excerpts from that.  And it sold in the millions.  No one remembers or talks about “restrained” fiction.  

I think what writers have to do with their stories and prose is to seek a consistency across the entire piece.  If your language is generally heightened, then more pedestrian phrases will call unfortunate attention to themselves.  But if your prose is restrained, then heightened phrases will clearly stand out and likely evoke cries of “melodrama.”  

In other words, and seeking to be memorable at the risk of being called melodramatic, I’ll say: Set your prose mower wherever you like, high or low, but then leave it the same for the whole piece. 

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Updates

Lana's 2nd chemo treatment is tomorrow.  Her first seems to have worked wonders on the cancer site, which has shrunk dramatically.  The doctor told us today that he wanted to start radiation therapy in about 2 weeks and, hopefully, that will knock this thing out.  The radiation treatment will be a major pain in the ass, with her needing to go five days a week for treatment, for six weeks.  The treatments themselves will be short but it's a  little less than a 2 hour round trip for us.  But if that is going to do it then it's a tiny price to pay.

Skyrim: A Player's Perspective

A couple of summers ago I bought myself an X-Box.  A student of mine actually gave me my first game for it, called Doom.  I'd played earlier versions of Doom on other systems and loved it.  I played this one and loved it too.  I also played a Halo version that came with my game system, and tried a racing game.  Halo was OK, thought not up to Doom quality, and the racing game left me cold.  Then I discovered Red Dead Redemption, a western role-playing game, and I liked it as much as Doom.  It took me longer to finish it because it was much more complex, and I had long stretches where I didn't play at all.

Then Lana brought home Skyrim, which is a fantasy role-playing game.  Lana was a Dungeon Master for a Dungeons and Dragons game in Canada and was interested in perhaps playing Skyrim herself.  It's the same kind of set up in a video game.  We each set up characters and began to play the first day.  Lana didn't really like the fact that when things happen in the game you often get vibrations shooting through the handset.  She decided to watch me play a while and enjoyed that.  And I was hooked.  I've spent many hours playing already.

The game is incredibly complex, far more so than Red Dead Redemption.  There are many more weapons that can be used, and a huge world to explore.  You can take one of three basic routes, warrior, mage, or thief, although you end up combining all of them to some extent.  You also can have followers and own homes.  You can learn smithing and alchemy and magic.  The open endedness is extraordinary. By now I'm carrying a range of weapons that I enchanted myself, and many different kinds of potions to be used for specific tasks. I've fought many dragons, as well as mages, pirates, walking corpses, shades, bandits, and demigods, not to mention sabertooth cats, cave bears, wolves, and giant crabs and spiders. 

I have to say, this is the most engrossing video game I've ever played, although it doesn't have the moment to moment intensity of Doom.  In Doom you are always pretty much on the verge of being attacked.  There are peaceful moments in Skyrim.  I've found I really enjoy the Smithing aspects.  Maybe I was a frustrated blacksmith in another life.

And Lana is enjoying the game vicariously through me.  She watches when I end up going through some tough dungeon and she has saved my bacon many a time with her knowledge of the whole role-playing game concept.  She catches traps I miss, locates things I can't find, and in emergencies, goes online to find information that I can't discover on my own.  If I ever beat the game, which seems a long way off, it'll be a team effort.