Blog – Page 83 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

September 24, 2015

Doornail (DOG EAR)

o advice here, nothing about prose and pacing and prattle. Just a little slice-of-life (and why one should always back up their current masterwork). Got home from the train club two weeks back. Had been thinking of an argument my character Mergenstein was having with High Padre Ricken (it’s a long story) (220+ pages so far). I wasn’t happy about how it was currently going – I’d written myself into a box canyon with dull sides. No good. Had to back up, toss out a couple of paragraphs, and accelerate a different way. It took me something like 15 minutes […]

September 27, 2015

Learned Optimism (Review)

mentioned in Dog Ear how I wasn’t going to review this. I then decided, what the hey, a book’s a book, right? This kinda came to light in a recent rough patch in the relationship (like YOU don’t have them). I mentioned that I have problems with a depression (and how to tell if your’s are extreme – they certainly feel extreme, don’t they?). So the book was pushed on me. I swallowed it like I would caster oil. Ugh. Just dry medical studies, cases proving the good doctor’s point, and little inter-psychology battles he faced. At first I didn’t […]

October 1, 2015

Keys (DOG EAR)

e’ve all seen it. The writer of the 40’s rattling on his typewriter, clickityclickityclick – ding! Zip! Over and over and then, rrrrrrriiiip! Onto the stack, another page ratchetted in, and away! Right? That image of the hard-paced typewriter jockey only holds amongst those who never used one. The entire illogical setup of our QWERT keyboards is because the keys jam if you go too fast. And then, ever fumble, every typo, every mistake, you have to go into full stop and white-out or white-ribbon your fix in. Years back, when stunning break-out authors were making their way onto the […]

October 4, 2015

Flashman (Review)

‘ve mentioned the Flashman series elsewhere, but I wanted to read the initial book over again (I’m about to loan it out to a literary friend and want to make sure I can talk about it correctly). Anyway, what the hell is this thing, anyway? Harry Flashman is a character from the old novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a windy old moralistic piece. The villain, the bully Flashman, really gave the work its shine (what a name, so classic!). And Fraser, the author, picks up Harry’s life from the moment he’s tossed out of school (recounting in his diary that he […]

October 4, 2015

ShowLog – Deland – 10/3/2015

ow much fun can a train show be when it starts with you sitting in your car in an empty fairgrounds in the pre-dawn dark, feeling a kidney stone grinding through your guts and hoping ferchristsakes that that pain pill is going to kick in and theburning agony will end? Well, quite a lot of fun, it seems. Set up had solid attendance – lots of membership showed up and the layout went up nice and easy. We had eighteen feet of new scenery, mostly forested but with some scratch built structures (some even showing up the day of the […]

October 6, 2015

The Wise Man’s Fear (Review)

ou can use it as a doorjamb. Or to block the wheel of your car while jacking it up. If you drop it off a three story building, you’d kill someone with it. It’s 1200 pages long. And it’s the latest of the KingKiller Chronicle. Day two. Bring it on! Once more we follow the adventures of young Kvothe, as narrated by old (well, middle-aged, but under the gloom of fate) Kvothe. For those who didn’t read my review of The Name of the Wind, it’s the story of an exceptional lad who is a consummate jack-of-all-trades. Possessing skills in […]

October 8, 2015

Organized (DOG EAR)

ave you taken a recent glance into my Library of Alexander, where I keep track of what I’ve read and what I think about it? 195 titles so far. The first one was written back in December of 2010 and, in the last year or so, I began to push for one review a week. So that’s a lot of reviews. The problem is that it was fine to originally just post them one at a time as they came in, right at the top. And me, I could find stuff easy, but I don’t think too many people can […]

October 10, 2015

Reflections on my Kidney Stone

ne thing I reflected on as I woke up after the best sleep I’ve had in a week-and-change; I’m very grateful I live on the cutting edge of now. Yes, we have problems in this world, but also wondrous things, too. As Owen Wilson said in “Midnight in Paris”, when asked why he wouldn’t wish to stay in the magical 1920’s Paris he’s discovered, replied “Novocaine”. For me, I’m still thinking of that horrible 4mm kidney stone I carried for nine days. Drinking lots of water never moved it a bit. When we finally got flowmax in me, we managed […]

October 11, 2015

After London; or, Wild England (Review)

o back we go into the past (to a book written in the 1880’s) about a future (say, 2100 or so), another one of these casually fun penny-dreadfuls, back from when science fiction was trying to figure where we were going with steam and chrome and a whole lot of Victorian virtue. The author, Mr. Jefferies, begins by describing the plants and animals and how they are coming back. Fields are vanishing. Roads are slowly being erased. In the silos, the grain rots are is devoured by plagues of rats. Everything is unwinding. Finally, we are given various hints as […]

October 15, 2015

Write and Wrong (DOG EAR)

can just imagine this guy typing away, hammering out a story for a radio program. He’s got an idea, it’s pretty sharp, it’s got a nice angle. All he needs is a hook. He thinks of something clever, clatters it out, looks over the roller, squinting through his cigarette smoke at what he’s knocked out. Three simple sentences. Yeah, a good start. Reads fine. Without looking back, he continues his story. But something that reads fine might not sound fine. For it was that third sentence which, listening while doing a work-place audit some fifty years later, gave me pause. […]