Blog – Page 80 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

July 8, 2015

Kedgewater Deep (DOG EAR)

e’re still test-marketing this idea. In the original Tubitz and Mergenstein, the town of Tortuga-Two was buried in a sinkhole. Three streams flowed into it, waterfalling into an underground pool. Under the overhanging ledge of crust the buildings huddled. It was the perfect space pirate base. Of course, I can’t do that in the new one. Now, the story takes place firmly on a single planet where sailing ships skate across lava plains like iceboats. It’s a fun setting for a fun book. But that pirate town I spoke of – I changed it so it lies in a cave […]

July 12, 2015

Liftport (Review)

strongly believe in the premise of Liftport, the idea that we need a space elevator to cut out the random rocket foolishness (and even the Nasa-dogged shuttle program). We need a way to get up into Earth orbit, something cheap and unrisky and everyday. Liftport is essentially a PR piece put together by a wide range of authors. A few of them are scifi pieces, stories set around (and in the environment) of a working space elevator. Most of them are papers aimed and investors and the public, discussing all aspects of SEs, from implementation to cost to payoff to […]

July 16, 2015

The bond of reading (DOG EAR)

breakaway from my notes about my current writing effort, a little sidetrip into reading and the bonds readers share. My hair was getting long, really long, Doc Emmett Brown long. Really bad for jogging, and really, really bad for corporateland. Had to get it cut. Usually I’d go to a hair cutter franchise in College Park. Called one week and they couldn’t see me. Called the next, got an appointment for that Monday, drove over there. On the way, I got attacked by a white FUV driver having a massive road rage seizure – it was so bad I ducked […]

July 19, 2015

Down these strange streets (Review)

or a recent long vacation drive, I picked up a couple of books on disk for our run through the pineys of Georgia and the Carolinas. Down these strange streets is a collection of urban nightmare tales, interesting takes of old penny dreadfuls twisted in such a way that you aren’t sure what sort of story you are in until the last word. If there is a crime scene sprayed with blood, was it a frantic vampire, a methodical werewolf, a deranged psychopath, or something far stranger? And that’s the great thing that made this collection enjoyable – you never […]

July 22, 2015

OpsLog – LM&O – 7/22/2015

eash. Can it be a crazier session? I’m trying to run the panel. Out in the main room, two of my crews are bellowing at each other like a pair of velociraptors in heat (about the Battle of Midway, I think). Of of the locals is solving his switching puzzle the way a computer would do it (trying every possible combination) while the other has been abandoned by its velociraptor engineer. We lost a switch machine early (wait, no we didn’t, wait, yes we did). And sometime during all this nuttiness, I’m supposed to be dispatching. Got the local chip […]

July 23, 2015

Link finking (DOG EAR)

here are lots of things writing is not supposed to be. It’s supposed to be a booklined study looking over green fields, of coming down at nine-ish to sit in a high leather-backed chair with a cup of tea, of sorting through paper notes (glasses precariously perched at the tip of the nose) to remember just what point we were at. And then, pushing another sheet into the typewriter… Well, maybe not that typewriter bit – I originally started newsletter fiction on one of those monsters. Nostalgia doesn’t carry it. But still, there is the internal picture that writers visualize, […]

July 25, 2015

OpsLog – FEC – 7/25/2015

hen working a switching puzzle, there comes a tipping point when you go from moving cars this way and that (while holding your breath) to seeing the solution. I clearly remember that moment today while working the Rinker Plant in Eau Gallie. Now I’ve seen ever possible cheat on this, from people using the main as extended storage to people lifting a car from one track to another (sorry, Ken, but some people panic when they deadlock). I’ve done the job once before and the first time was a bit of a snarl. This time I had a better feel […]

July 26, 2015

The Tenth Planet (Review)

nother book from the dusty stacks, this a gem from 1973 from the wonderful wooden shelves of Maya’s Books & Music. This is an old scifi yard that has a taste of the late-hippy, anti-Vietnam-war, ecology and brash-Earthman-bad-kickback era. And it’s got about the most desperate opening chapters you’re likely to find. The last ship lifts off a doomed Earth, always a depressing topic. Global warming has taken place, with flooding and rains, rains and more rains (sounds a little like my current vacation). With all this going on, Captain Idris Hamilton has a lot on his mind, namely getting […]

July 30, 2015

The reader’s friend (DOG EAR)

he other night we were coming home from dinner, NPR on the car radio. It was the program Intelligence Squared U.S., where a topic is discussed under formal rules of debate. The “winners” are the team that move public opinion more their way based on surveys run before and after the discussion. So that night’s discussion was “Amazon is the reader’s friend”. I’m not crazy about self-publishing. I’ve mentioned this before, no secret. My own effort (Early ReTyrement, for sale at the bottom of this page (see how this works?)) was decent enough. I got the specific book I wanted, […]

August 2, 2015

Days of Infamy (Review)

eah, you read that right. Days. Plural. This one’s a Harry Turtledove epic, an alternate history tale of the attack on Pearl Harbor. And like everyone who’s ever played the old Avalon Hill game Victory in the Pacific, now we get a chance to see what happens when the Japanese go for a third attack run on Pearl. And, oh, they happen to have an invasion force this time. As one would expect from Turtledove, we have a number of different characters (becuase one character can’t carry the POV for an epic this size). We have an American artileryman (who […]