Teleidoscope

Sat, Feb 23, 2008

Twilight Rising

Posted at 9:48 pm MST to Creative Work

I have uploaded my unsold novel Twilight Rising and made it available from the Astral Trading website, all 17 chapters and 8 appendices.

It is intended for mature readers. I have posted warnings but the files are currently not locked.

This novel was originally written using Sprint, an editor sold by Borland in the 80s. The files were later imported into Ami Pro for OS/2. More recently, the Ami versions of the files were imported into KWord.

To generate the website, the KWord files were exported as XHTML, and the files have received some minimal tweaking, but the HTML source remains ugly and primitive. There may be some garbling due to the multiple generations of translation. Please let me know if you find any.

Note: the only substantial difference between the posted file versions and the version that was submitted to various publishers (unsuccessfully) is that the English translations have been removed from the poems at the chapter heads. 17 poem translations out of 100 is way more than fair use. Alternative translations of the various poems can be found here for those who are interested.

I also colored the maps.

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Movies & Music

Posted at 9:29 pm MST to Media

originally posted Feb 19, 2008

This weekend was the Boulder International Film Festival, so the Philharmonic concert was exploring relationships between classical music and the cinema.

Before the intermission, they played a violin concerto by Korngold, who was an influential composer of film scores in the 30s and 40s. He established some of the traditional relationships between movies and music that were later used by composers like John Williams.

The concert notes suggested that it isn't so much that Korngold's concert pieces sound like movie music, as that movie music sounds like Korngold.

Personally, I find that a lot of 20th century classical music sounds like movie music. The previous conductor at the Phil included a lot of 20th century pieces and I could always tell symphonies that were written after movies were invented. I don't know what it is that I'm hearing as the difference between the 20th Century symphonies and the older works. It may be something about the transitions between different thematic material within the piece.

The second half of the Phil concert was Prokofiev's Cantata of music he had written for Eisenstein's film Alexander Nevsky. I like choir music and the music was well performed, but the overall event was a little disappointing. They had a narrator and showed (silent) excerpts of the film between the seven sections of the Cantata, but it would have been better if they showed more of the film, and showed it while the music was being performed.

I went to the Circle Bar during intermission and did some meat-space lurking. It turns out, the drinks and hors d'oeuvres are free for donors. Instead of buying a chunk of banana bread and a bottle of water from the regular caterers, I had a comfortably small cup of 7-Up, a small piece of brownie, and a few savory little puff-pastry things. They had other sweet things, too, and crudites, but I'm not sure I'm willing to risk trying to swallow raw veggies in public. And given a choice between macaroons and artichoke-stuffed puffs I'll take artichokes every time.

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Bone Key

Posted at 9:29 pm MST to Media

originally poseted Feb 19, 2008

Last week when I was running errands, I stopped at Border's and picked up a bunch of books by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. I have only read one of the books so far because I have been spending most of my spare time in Elizabeth Bear's extensive livejournal archives, and in the Shadow Unit LiveJournals and forums.

The first Shadow Unit novella, "Breathe" by Emma Bull, is now available on their website. It's excellent.

The book, The Bone Key, by Sarah Monette, is also excellent. It is a collection of connected short stories somewhat in the mode of Lovecraft. The viewpoint character is a museum curator in the early 20th century, and Ms. Monette does an excellent job of getting inside the head of a New England geek. (I have a lot of experience being inside the head of a New England geek.)

The various supernatural hazards Booth encounters are subtly interconnected and nicely original, and the museum makes a wonderful setting for several of the adventures. As a former librarian, the description of spooky, dangerous library stacks where there are strange noises after dark and the lights are unreliable pushed a lot of my buttons.

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Burned Soup

Posted at 12:49 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Thursday evening I tried to make my family's usual soup for when you are feverish: just a couple of bullion cubes, water, and tiny acini de pepe noodles. I kept fading out, so I burned it. Twice.

I finally succeeded in making a batch by setting the stove timer every five minutes, so I wouldn't zone out for too long and burn the soup again. My microwave timer and some of the others, produce a single discreet 'ding' that can be missed unless you are right in the room. And there is really no place to sit down in my kitchen if you are, for example, feeling a bit dizzy. The stove timer is an obnoxious loud buzzer that keeps making noise until you go into the kitchen and do something about it.

Note to self: if the stove gets replaced with one that has a discreet timer, invest in an obnoxious timer as a backup.

From 10:30 Thursday evening to 10:30 this morning (Saturday) I spent all but about 3 hours flat in bed, not even ever propped up enough to read. But the total rest seems to have helped some.

I only had two tiny bouts of the cough from hell Friday. One was right before I finally got up for a while to try to eat something: Dinah Kitty was glaring at me because I was making the waterbed shake and she knows the rule is no coughing on the bed. I've coughed a couple of times since I got up today, but they weren't the cough from hell, just my normal, swallowing-muscles-not-cooperating coughs.

I had a fever again for a while yesterday afternoon (for some reason I've been feverish in afternoons more than mornings) and need to watch out for a recurrence today. But I'm very hopeful that if I don't get too tired out I will finally get over this crud.

I've lost about 5 pounds over the past few days, but that is mostly dehydration: body fat percentage is spiking. I need to sit up for a while and drink a lot of fluids while I let my back unkink from laying down too long.

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