I did warn you that I might not be able to add to this until Christmas. If my work schedule develops as the bosses seem to think it will, then, yeah, that'll be the case.
On a positive note, I was able to finish and submit the holiday short story I was working on, and I was also able to submit another story to another contest. The best thing about those was that there was no entry fee!
Surprise! Had an eight-hour day on Sunday and Monday. I have time to do this!
On the reading front, I'm still enjoying Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I'm now about half way through Book VI, Song of Susannah. This book gives us a surprise character: Stephen King! King includes himself as a younger man, encountering his own creations. The meeting is a bit traumatic, as you may imagine, not only for King, but for Roland and Eddie Dean as well.
King does not portray himself in a particularly favorable light...which is good. I think he honestly tries to imagine how his younger self would have reacted to such a situation.
I want to bring up one point...well, at least one. Might develop into more. This volume, plus the one prior (Wolves of the Calla) explores the idea of characters in fiction actually existing in their own worlds...that each world may be completely real to the characters even though they are "created" by a writer. He introduced the idea of multiple worlds, with death as one of the doorways between them, in The Gunslinger. The idea of "leakage" between Earth and Midworld continues throughout the series, but is seldom seen as more than a sidelight.
This concept was explored pretty thoroughly, and differently, in Robert Heinlein's The Number of the Beast and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. I must include that many of the characters and settings for those two books are introduced in his Time Enough for Love. These do not constitute a series, exactly. Except that TCWWTW ends in a sort of cliff hanger that nevertheless serves as an adequate ending, yet is wrapped up in the following book, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, which was Heinlein's final novel...except that he had four books published after his death, though one was with Spider Robinson collaborating by finishing an unfinished work...which I have not yet read. Another of those four is a resurrected novel Heinlein wrote much earlier in his life...in fact, his first novel. The other two books published post mortem are non-fiction.
Whew! Sorry about that tangent. I'm a big Heinlein fan. To continue the tangent (unapologetically), for those that are not familiar with Heinlein's name or work, I here offer a quote from the back jacket of his novel, Job: A Comedy of Justice.
"Following World War II Robert Heinlein emerged as not only America's premier writer of speculative fiction, but the greatest writer of such fiction in the world. He remains today as a sort of trademark for all that is finest in American imaginative fiction." ---Stephen King
All right, back to the original subject.
Obviously, there is much more to those excellent science fiction novels than just that theme. There are interesting characters (including some from Heinlein's earlier works), romance, war, mystery, and sex. But if you want to explore this particular idea, reading those novels will give you a real look at some of the possibilities. Like, seeing a character literally erased from a scene.
More about King's work, my reading, and who knows what else next time.
Be well, be kind to each other, and READ!
On a positive note, I was able to finish and submit the holiday short story I was working on, and I was also able to submit another story to another contest. The best thing about those was that there was no entry fee!
Surprise! Had an eight-hour day on Sunday and Monday. I have time to do this!
On the reading front, I'm still enjoying Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I'm now about half way through Book VI, Song of Susannah. This book gives us a surprise character: Stephen King! King includes himself as a younger man, encountering his own creations. The meeting is a bit traumatic, as you may imagine, not only for King, but for Roland and Eddie Dean as well.
King does not portray himself in a particularly favorable light...which is good. I think he honestly tries to imagine how his younger self would have reacted to such a situation.
I want to bring up one point...well, at least one. Might develop into more. This volume, plus the one prior (Wolves of the Calla) explores the idea of characters in fiction actually existing in their own worlds...that each world may be completely real to the characters even though they are "created" by a writer. He introduced the idea of multiple worlds, with death as one of the doorways between them, in The Gunslinger. The idea of "leakage" between Earth and Midworld continues throughout the series, but is seldom seen as more than a sidelight.
This concept was explored pretty thoroughly, and differently, in Robert Heinlein's The Number of the Beast and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. I must include that many of the characters and settings for those two books are introduced in his Time Enough for Love. These do not constitute a series, exactly. Except that TCWWTW ends in a sort of cliff hanger that nevertheless serves as an adequate ending, yet is wrapped up in the following book, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, which was Heinlein's final novel...except that he had four books published after his death, though one was with Spider Robinson collaborating by finishing an unfinished work...which I have not yet read. Another of those four is a resurrected novel Heinlein wrote much earlier in his life...in fact, his first novel. The other two books published post mortem are non-fiction.
Whew! Sorry about that tangent. I'm a big Heinlein fan. To continue the tangent (unapologetically), for those that are not familiar with Heinlein's name or work, I here offer a quote from the back jacket of his novel, Job: A Comedy of Justice.
"Following World War II Robert Heinlein emerged as not only America's premier writer of speculative fiction, but the greatest writer of such fiction in the world. He remains today as a sort of trademark for all that is finest in American imaginative fiction." ---Stephen King
All right, back to the original subject.
Obviously, there is much more to those excellent science fiction novels than just that theme. There are interesting characters (including some from Heinlein's earlier works), romance, war, mystery, and sex. But if you want to explore this particular idea, reading those novels will give you a real look at some of the possibilities. Like, seeing a character literally erased from a scene.
More about King's work, my reading, and who knows what else next time.
Be well, be kind to each other, and READ!
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