Wise Blood

I recently read Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor.  I have mixed feelings about it.

The good:

O'Connor writes easy-to-read sentences that pack a punch.  She employs bizarre adjective/noun combinations, things like "rat-colored car" and "cat-faced baby" that create instant and striking visuals, what some might call Eyeball Kicks.  I like these things because they're different and weird and give the prose distinction.

The characters are creative to say the least.  No cardboard cutouts here.

O'Connor dips into the human psyche in a way few authors do.  She makes it seem real.  She arguably had a better handle on the dark side of humanity than today's popular horror authors do.

The book was riveting from beginning to end.



Okay, now the bad:

The characters are all horrible people.  They're lunatics and psychos and criminals.  There's no one for the reader to empathize with.

There's not really a plot.  It's all just "people doing things."  I know this is typical for literary fiction, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

There's not a satisfying conclusion.  Again, typical for lit-fic, but I still don't like it.



Conclusion: This is one of those books that I'm glad to have read but won't be reading again.  I'm a native southerner, but the South of this book isn't the South I know at all.  It's familiar in color but alien in texture.  Of course, I don't hang out with criminals and psychopaths, so there you go.  Either way, O'Connor's talent is obvious, and she is rightfully lauded.

First draft is done

The first draft of book 4 of Wheel of Fire is complete.  Word count is just over 78,000.

As I've said before, I add material during revision, so expect the final product to exceed 100,000 words.

Anyway, I'm glad it's done.

Next on the agenda is some author chores.  I have no idea when I'll get to the second draft.

Tension, apprehension, and dissension

I was curious about something.  I have a print copy of Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man.  That book is famous, in part, for its use of weird typography.  I wanted to know if the digital copy had faithfully reproduced those quirks or not.

The answer is "yes and no."  Some of the quirks were scanned and cut-and-pasted into the digital file as images rather than text.  They have non-white backgrounds setting them apart from the rest of the page.  So they're there, but they're obviously not typed, and it makes the book look, in my opinion, a little clunky.  This is what it looks like in the Kindle previewer:

 And this is what the print version looks like in the preview:

Another example:

The print version:

Also, at least one of the instances was goofed.  Consider this selection from the Kindle previewer:

The "S.O.S." part is accurately reproduced.  The "SNOW" is copied and pasted from the print version.  But the "Blessings!" part is wrong.  It's correctly in bold type, but it's not the correct font.  In the print version, it looks like this:

So what conclusions can we draw from all this?  I don't know, other than "use standard type."  Yeah, these quirks are fun and all, but this is the digital age, and reproducing that stuff in an ebook file is going to present some challenges.  I suspect the digital version of The Demolished Man used the cut-and-paste method so that the words would actually render across a wide array of devices.  Not everyone has the same fonts installed, you know.  Images are universal.  But they're still images, not text, and they look out of place.

And, of course, the person doing the file conversion might miss something, as was the case with "Blessings!"  Or maybe it was intentional; maybe that person figured the unusual font was more trouble than it was worth and edited it accordingly.  I hope that's not the case--Bester was a subtle writer, and even seemingly insignificant things were meant to have underlying meanings--but you never know.

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting comparison.

If you like science fiction, you should definitely read The Demolished Man.  It's a police procedural with telepathy.  It was the inspiration for the Psi-Cops in the tv show Babylon 5.  The character of Mr. Bester in that show was named after the author of the book.  And the story's got a neat jingle:

"Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun."

Progress report

Man, I am so close to the end of this draft I can taste it.  My progress has crawled, though, because I'm trying to get it right, which means I'm trying to make everything mesh with what's coming in later books, so it's kind of a tightrope act.  But I'm getting there.  I'm getting there.

Word count is over 71,000.

Once this draft is done, I'll need to redo the outlines for the remaining books, so it'll be a while before I start the second draft of book 4.  But I feel like I'm over the hump as far as the series goes.  If it ends up being seven books like I think it will, then I'm past the halfway point.

I don't really need a war hammer

But I'm tempted.  This one looks pretty awesome.  Amazon offers so much cool stuff.

My problem is that I would want to destroy things with it, and I don't have a lot of stuff that needs destroying.

Probably best to resist temptation in this instance.

One small step for man

Fifty years ago, man set foot on the moon for the first time.  Years from now, when the United States of America has ceased to exist, we will still be remembered by historians as the first nation, as Robert Howard might put it, to tread the virgin soil of Luna beneath our booted feet.

I was born in the 1970s, so I obviously missed out on these early space milestones.  My biggest "space" experience as a child was watching the Challenger explode on live television.  But in recent years, I've come to appreciate just how unlikely the whole moon landing was and therefore how impressive and fantastic it is that we pulled it off.  It really was a marvelous achievement.

Neil Armstrong has sadly passed on, but Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins are still with us, and I hope they have a wonderful day full of fond reminiscences and celebrations on this day, the fiftieth anniversary of their mission's triumphant climax.  They deserve it.

One out of two ain't bad

Laptop just updated.  It was a Dell update, not Windows.  Lately, these Dell updates have been failing for whatever reason.  This time, though, one out of two updates successfully installed.  It feels like a victory.

In other news, I've finished outlining the remainder of book 4, so I can resume writing again.  I intend to push hard to the end and finish within a few days.  After that, I've got some author-related chores to do, including outlining the rest of the books in the series.  Once those chores are done, I'll start the second draft of book 4.