robert.admin – Page 167 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

March 8, 2015

Lord Foul’s Bane (Review)

wasn’t into Fantasy too much in the 70’s when this originally came out. Oh, I read the Ring stuff and loved Watership Down (a fantasy epic in its own right). But I’d never read Donaldson. Since then, I did read his The Real Story series and loved it. It had a gritty realism and unconventional storytelling that I found appealing. A bookhead friend from work suggested this one day while we were having our Lonely Literary Club chat so I took a look into it. In a nutshell, Lord Foul’s Bane is a stand-alone novel, yet also part of the […]

March 8, 2015

Atlas of the Moon (Review)

he what, you ask? Well, there’s my astronomy interest, bleeding over. Picked this up from the lending library at the Central Florida Astronomical Society (just how many clubs am I a member of?). While mostly the book is made up of plates showing beautifully clear drawings of a section of the Moon (including a side description of all the craters located there), what I really found most interesting were the descriptions of the Moon. Where it might have come from (at least back in 2004 – everything changes so fast). How it orbits. While this section isn’t all that long, […]

March 5, 2015

The Game’s Afoot (DOG EAR)

riting is all about the worlds we create. Even if it’s contemporary, even if it’s fantasy, we need a background for our actions to take place in (or, rather, where our heroes can be heroic at). When writing Fire and Bronze back in the pre-internet days, I spent a lot of time in the public library, looking at old maps, trying to get my head around the layout and atmosphere of what had been the city of Carthage. How high was Brysa hill, the rise on which the city was centered? What was the harbor like? What did the surrounding […]

March 1, 2015

Northwest Passage (Review)

kay, so I picked this one up at the Forbidden Planet shop (right next to the Strand Bookstore) on my New York trip. I’m not a big graphic novel fan – loved the original 300 and was reading The Spirit way back in the day. I’ll admit that there is a certain depth (dimensionally different from superb writing, but still there) that pictures can add to a story. So, here in Northwest Passage, we open with an Indian getting run down by a mob of Europeans on a ridge overlooking an English wilderness fort, where within, the one-time wilderness explorer […]

March 1, 2015

My old buddies (3/1/2015)

ent to Dark Skies (a.k.a. Wet Skies) Saturday, the annual event that got itself pretty much rained out (even when it wasn’t raining, the sky was boilerplate). It was a real disappointment – none of the scopes were out, I couldn’t find an astronomer to geek with, and about all we got to do was go into a half-dome (canvas) planetarium and watch the pseudo-sky. I rather liked it still – I’m getting better with my constellations and picked Venus off the simulated horizon (heck, I’d looked at it enough over the last few months). Anyway, we looked at all […]

February 26, 2015

Tough Choices (DOG EAR)

ust watched The Wild Bunch at the insistence of my friend Greg. Great flick, and the more I thought about it today, the more I liked it. So why am I talking about movies in a writing blog? Well, for story, in this case. The story has a number of interesting points, one of which I’m very interested by. So, this band of aging outlaws in a changing early twentieth-century West are trying to pull off a last heist, something to set them up for life. They end up stealing rifles from a US Government shipment, getting clean away with […]

February 25, 2015

OpsLog – LM&O – 2/25/2015

ell, it wasn’t as bad as our last club session, but it could have gone better. We had two long trains detail in the same tunnel, and being the tall lanky guy (not running a train at the time) I got to go under and dig them all out. Nothing like a long day in a rolling stock mine. Outside of that, I did get to run – always a good thing. It’s gotta be a pretty bad session to ruin it for me. My engines were purring when I took the inaugural run of the Harris Glen Local up […]

February 22, 2015

Some Remarks (Review)

really like Neal Stephenson. I loved Snow Crash and appreciated Quicksilver (haven’t gotten the guts to follow up with the next two massive books). So when I saw a copy of Some Remarks in a used book store, I had to get it. This is a collection of a number of his articles and interviews, not all of them (some of them he looked back and and decided to leave them buried). But I did like most of it. I’ll admit that his raving about the time period he covered in Quicksilver eventually befuddled me so badly I had to […]

February 21, 2015

OpsLog – P&WV – 2/21/2015

he situation: We’ve got one extra (engine 64) waiting in Rook Yard. Another train is inbound, also an extra, engine 2128. Even though 64 has clearance through the yard, I’ve already dropped the Rook station signal on him. Now to give the order to my station operator (Bruce, who is so good at his job today that he’s the operator for a half-dozen stations). Simple really. Of course, I need to spell all stations and trains to the operator over the phone, to make sure there are no misunderstandings. And here we go. “To Crew and Engineer extra sixty-four six […]

February 20, 2015

New peeper (2/20/2015)

ot the new Orion 120ST scope the other day. Decided after a glum start of the day at work that I’d had enough. Came home and worked out assembling the scope with JB. The instructions were a little crazy (hey, if you are going to name something, show a picture, puleeze!). But otherwise, it wasn’t too hard. We had it together soon enough. My sister pointed out that there was an event tonight, a moment when the moon, Venus and Mars would all be lined up in a tight cluster. Set up the tripod while it was still light, then […]