April 2008

Late to the party

Posted on by Patrick

…again.

A friend of mine told me about Car­nivàle when it was orig­i­nal­ly on TV. I don’t get HBO, though, and I was­n’t inter­est­ed in get­ting hooked on episod­ic TV either (which worked out well, aside from a slight Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca addiction).

But the first sea­son was on sale at Wal*Mart the oth­er month, for like $20, so I said “What the hey” and bought it. Tonight I put the first disc in the player.

It’s pret­ty fan­tas­tic; the first episode was well laid out, with a self-con­tained sto­ry and the promise of more to come.

It seems to be a sto­ry of the war between good and evil, in 1934, dur­ing the Dust Bowl years. It’s well-act­ed, well-writ­ten, and the pro­duc­tion val­ues are unim­peach­able. Ronald D. Moore, who pro­duced this series (or at least the episode I watched) went on to “re-imag­ine” Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca, my addic­tion to which I’ve already mentioned.

This series promis­es to be inter­est­ing. Hope­ful­ly I can find the sec­ond (and, I believe, final) sea­son some­where too.

Very early sneak peek

Posted on by Patrick

From Cin­der, still very much in ear­ly 1st draft (this is from the sec­ond scene, and it was only writ­ten about an hour ago):

Out­side, vast ener­gies swirled, send­ing translu­cent stream­ers of pale light shiv­er­ing over the crys­tal of the great win­dow. Through them, she could see stars, shiv­er­ing and sparkling through the bow-wake of the shield­ing. One red star, at the win­dow’s cen­ter, showed a broad disc, even at this dis­tance. Sol, then. She watched it, bring­ing up fil­ters in the crys­tal win­dow to exam­ine it with­out squint­ing or leak­ing more brine from her eyes.

After a dozen min­utes or so she saw a tiny shad­ow right at Sol’s center.

“Is that Earth?” she said, touch­ing the shadow.

»Yes, the ship sent on her pri­vate chan­nel. »Please, I must concentrate.

She nod­ded. The ship was far too polite to ignore her, or to out­right tell her to shut up.

The shad­ow swelled: a dot, a disc, a plan­et. A rocky black sphere, large enough to blot out the sun, and still they approached. She almost asked the ship why they approached in shad­ow, but real­ized that would tax the envi­ron­ment sys­tems less.

“She” is Lady Schrone, who is new to a human body (hence the bit about brine).

I real­ly want this sto­ry to work; I find the idea inter­est­ing, and I’m try­ing to devel­op enough points of view and sto­ry­lines to go the dis­tance. Let me know what you think.

Writing update

Posted on by Patrick

I’m try­ing to work on a cou­ple of projects, with some suc­cess. I’ve got a new site set up for a project I’m call­ing Cin­der, and some­day, maybe I’ll fill it up with con­tent. Right now I’ve got a cloud of ideas, but I want­ed to get the design right. Ok, I want­ed to play in Pho­to­shop and/or the GIMP.

I’m also work­ing on a longish short sto­ry (9000 words, right now, but it may expand or con­tract; first drafts, you know) set in Ukraine, titled “Between Heav­en and Earth”. It may be one of the dark­est things I’ve ever writ­ten, and I think it may get dark­er before it’s done.

And I’ve still got my zom­bies vs. pirates sto­ry on the go, and I also want to work on my nano win­ner from a cou­ple years ago.

Well, back at ‘er.