The Bog of Lost Scholars

31 December 2003

Post-RotK Thoughts

Filed under: Film and Media — Castiron @ 13:35

What struck me the most about seeing RotK was how detached I was through the whole thing. Perhaps it was because I’d read the spoilers and was watching for particular events; perhaps it was just that the film hardly drew me in at all. Oh, there were scenes that moved me, but even then I was watching in thought mode rather than feel mode.

Spoilers below….

My very favorite bit in the entire LotR book trilogy is at the battle of the Pelennor Fields, when Eomer looks out across the fields and sees the ships of the Corsairs of Umbar sailing up the river. For a moment he feels despair, knowing that these reinforcements will strengthen the enemy beyond any hope. But he rallies himself, and raises his sword in defiance. And as he does so, a banner unfurls on the lead ship, a black banner bearing a white tree and seven stars around it — the banner of the King of Gondor. And Eomer realizes that the ships bear friends, and he rejoices.

So I’m really annoyed that PJ didn’t do this scene in the movie.

But I did like the bit with running the sword along the spears. And the beacon lighting. And the whole Mount Doom scene.

30 December 2003

Melendy Madness

Filed under: The Castiron Reading Journal — Castiron @ 13:35

Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy family books — The Saturdays, The Four-Story Mistake, and And Then There Were Five have been favorites of mine since I was a kid. And they still hold up well to rereading; the four Melendy children are all interesting and believable kids, and their adventures are fun and sweet without being too twee. Enright writes fabulous description and comes up with so many perfect similes and metaphors to describe everyday objects.

(And being kids’ books, they’re short enough that I can read all three in one day!)

I also reread Spiderweb for Two, a fourth book about the Melendy kids that I didn’t discover until I was an adult. I don’t like it as much as the other three, probably because while I like Randy, I find Oliver the least interesting of the siblings, and Rush and Mona have gone away to school and therefore don’t appear much. Still, the mystery is fun, and the whole setup of clues is a really cute idea that I could see doing with a kid in real life.

29 December 2003

Dratted Dead Computer

Filed under: Random Ramblings — Castiron @ 12:46

Backups are your friend. And it helps to do them more often than once a month.

The laptop is now in the shop waiting for a diagnostic; it abruptly decided not to switch on anymore. I’m hoping that something’s gone wrong with the power management rather than the hard drive; that way, I can still at least get stuff back off the drive.

Meanwhile, I’m on hold with a few projects until I get it or its data back. The Book 2 revision wasn’t too badly hurt; after the first days of shock, I finally brought myself to look at the backup, and I’d backed it up later than I’d thought. So I have all the Chapter 2 revisions I’d done; I’ve only lost what I did with Chapter 3, and I think I can recreate most of it. (And I may still get that back later.) I did lose two sketches I’d made for the FM book, but I remember the topics, so I should be able to recreate them too; besides, those were just sketches and would’ve been revised later anyway.

The inventory project is suffering a bit more; the last backup on that is from the end of November. But again, the bits I’ve done since then should be easy to redo; it was mainly three bedroom closet shelves and two kitchen drawers, the latter containing the 30-ish dishcloths and 15 towels. No biggie.

The big headbanger is my PCFile data file. I could have sworn that I’ve made more recent backups of that thing. But no, all I can find is data files from July. I’ve started and finished a lot of projects since then, and while I can kind of recreate it, it won’t be as accurate as I like.

So I’m in data limbo until the repair folks get to look at the machine, which may not be before 2 January. Sigh. At least my desktop is still functioning.

26 December 2003

The Stories We Tell

Filed under: Publishing and Writing — Castiron @ 13:35

One meme going around LiveJournals/blogs lately is what stories you tend to tell.

I’m having trouble narrowing mine down to themes that aren’t so general that they’d describe *any* story. At the moment I have two major story worlds in various phases of incompletion, and the running theme of the vague story arc in both is “the end of one world and beginning of the next”. Which could describe almost any story that’s about a change.

But I do find a few recurring questions.

What is home, and how do you replace it if you’ve lost it? (Book 1 is mainly about an exile trying to make a new home, and in a sense Book 2 is partially about how she does it. Book 3 is about someone who considers two places home, and how he handles their conflicting demands. The barely-begun FM story deals with two people living in a society foreign to each of them. Several major characters in my fantasy world live as exiles, or migrants.)

What are the costs of promises/oaths/vows, both in the keeping and in the breaking? (I was writing on that theme long before I ever got married, let alone divorced. Big theme in Book 2, and I suspect this may be a minor theme of the ever-stalled Book 4. Lousy short story in my fantasy world is about this — sheesh, I got the seeds of that idea when I was ten.)

Who are we, really? “Who am I anyway; am I my resume….” (Hey, that’d make a great song…oops.) Are we our outer trappings, or is there something deeper, always there when the outer aspects change or vanish? (Book 1, Book 2, aspects of books 3 and 4, the FM story….)

25 December 2003

Still More Inventory

Filed under: Dejunking and Organizing — Castiron @ 13:35

Christmas, the American day of receiving stuff. What better day to think about how much I already have?

These days, most of the people I want to stay in touch with, I contact through email. So why do I have a large basket full of a hundred notecards? (On the bright side, while going through that pile, I found enough Christmas cards to do all my cards for this year.)

I also processed one bedroom shelf and threw out a bunch of expired medications. The usable medicines are now all in one bin instead of being divided between two, and there’s room on the shelf now.

In the kitchen, I tackled the two linen drawers. 30 dishcloths. Yes, I do change out the dishcloth every day, but still, I don’t need that many. Especially since I like to knit them on occasion as quickie projects. I suspect it’s time to downgrade some of these dishcloths to cleaning rags (and toss a few cleaning rags!)

(One of these days I must tackle the hall closet. It’s one of two areas in the house that I haven’t even started to inventory. The other is the utilities room, which I’m planning to ignore for a long time — hey, I already cleaned out the junk that the previous owners of the house left up there, including the old carpet that was full of lizard egg shells….)

This whole-house inventory is definitely a useful exercise. I’ve said before that it helps me realize how much I have; it’s also making me think just a little harder before I buy anything new. (Last week I visited a local store that sells fair-trade handcrafted items from Third World countries. I wanted to buy something, because fair-trade is something I want to support, but there really wasn’t anything I needed, and while there were many lovely decorative items, I don’t have a place to put them! So I ended up buying some tea; at least that’s going to get used.)

24 December 2003

Cat Vaccuumage

Filed under: Publishing and Writing — Castiron @ 13:35

My writing files are reorganized; yay! The bulk of it is the sketches I write on the backs of recycled office printouts; I had them sorted by book or story, but there’s enough of them that I needed to subdivide them further if I want any hope of finding a particular sketch without browsing (i.e. reading) the whole folder.

What’s interesting (to me, anyway) is that I’m subdividing the sketches for each book differently. Book 1 had few enough sketches that I didn’t need to subdivide it. Book 2′s pile is divided into sketches I used in the semi-final manuscript (useful mainly for later comparison purposes, though some of them have nifty lines that didn’t make the final version and might be reusable elsewhere) and sketches I haven’t used (offstage action, scenes from another participant’s POV, ideas that are now alternate universes). Book 3 sorted itself into cultural sketches, family sketches, and plot sketches. (My ex describes Book 3 as the Silmarillion of the Concordian universe; sadly, he’s got a point. The thing badly needs a storyline before it has any chance of publication.) For the progressively stalled Book 4, the sketches are grouped by viewpoint character or subgroup of viewpoint characters.

I’m not sure why each book wants to sort differently, or whether this has anything to do with two of them being finished or nearly so, one being in major need of revision, and one being seriously stalled. I’m wondering how future sketch piles are going to sort themselves.

23 December 2003

Random Pre-RotK Thoughts

Filed under: Film and Media — Castiron @ 13:35

I haven’t seen Return of the King yet; I’m going on the 24th.

Meanwhile, I’m thoroughly enjoying the extended edition of The Two Towers. While movie-Faramir is still definitely not book-Faramir, the added Boromir/Faramir scene and various snippets made movie-Faramir into a believable character in his own right, finally.

And rewatching the second disk of Fellowship, I still find the most terrifying scene to be when the piece of stair that Frodo and Aragorn had just been standing on collapses into the deep. Forget the Balrog or Ringwraiths; acrophobia beats them all.

(Things that make me wonder about myself: A few days ago an acquaintance died suddenly. I’m having the normal, expected, acceptable thoughts — “how awful! what a sad thing for her husband and son! oh my, she was younger than me; eek! mortality!” And the weird thought: “oh, dear, she never got to see RotK!“)

22 December 2003

Sugar-Free

Filed under: Food — Castiron @ 13:35

It’s a several-years tradition of mine to attempt to give up sugar from October 31 to December 21 (Samhain to Solstice, basically). It’s also a several-years tradition to fall off the wagon by mid-November and never get back on.

Which is why it’s boggling my mind that this year, I’ve actually done it. And it’s been surprisingly easy.

Sure, it helped that I did intentionally schedule two breaks from the sugar fast — Thanksgiving (cherry pie), and one day for celebrating the completion of the Press’s website (a mess of cookies). And yes, my definition of a sugary snack was occasionally flexible — by ingredients, my zucchini bread should really be considered zucchini cake.

But overall, other than the scheduled breaks, no cookies, no candy, none of the Swiss chocolate our director brought back from vacation, no sugar-filled crepes, nothing. And while I did miss it, I didn’t miss it that much, and after eating the cookies for the website celebration, I realized that the sugar high was more unpleasant than the cookies had been good.

Nonetheless, I’m still going to eat lots of chocolate today; I’ve got a stash I’ve been saving. But these weeks have made me think, perhaps I can cut way back on sugar over the long haul. (Personal history of mild hypoglycemia, and family history of Type II diabetes — I already know it’s not good for me.) Reserving sugary treats for special holidays, and going cold turkey the rest of the time, may very well work for me. I’ll have to give it a try.

19 December 2003

Royalty, Deity, Fictional History, and Detectives

Filed under: The Castiron Reading Journal — Castiron @ 15:57

Jan Terlouw, How to Become King a translation of Koning von Katoren. Stark, a boy born on the day the old King died without an heir, carries out various tasks in order to become king himself. Wonderful little book — if it’s that good in translation, either the translator is a minor translation deity or the original is utterly spectacular. The style reminds me of The Phantom Tollbooth.

The most hilarious piece of parody fanfiction I’ve read in a long time is Limyaael’s The Game of the Gods. Not only does she skewer the more obnoxious forms of Mary Sue characters in fanfic, she also creates an entertaining frame story using Tolkien’s Silmarillion characters — and the parody is so right. This is someone who knows her source material. (The only thing I’ve found to quibble with is the question of who actually created the Palantiri, and given that everything else seems spot-on, I’m willing to believe that Limyaael has read more of Tolkien’s notes than I have.)

You do have to be familiar with both Middle-Earth and fanfiction to really appreciate this story; my ex is a huge Tolkien fan but can’t get into the Mary Sues enough to get to where the frame story really kicks in. If you’re more interested in Tolkien parody than Mary Sue, read the first couple chapters to get an idea what’s going on, and then skip to the end of chapter 9.

16 December 2003

God Speaks on Intellectual Property

Filed under: Publishing and Writing — Castiron @ 13:25

That does give “life plus 75 years” a whole new meaning….

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