Mark’s Comments (group member since Apr 14, 2020)

Mark’s comments from the San Antonio Public Library group.

Cris wrote: "*laughs* I would agree it could qualify as a classic Star Wars novels. Heir to the Empire and its sequels are the best-written Star Wars novels I've ever read. They have a lot of the same elements that I enjoyed about the original movies."

Gods, I hate it so far. I want to slap Thrawn and scream "Anthropology doesn't even work like that, much less Xenoanthropology!"

For a few years (thinking on it, more than 10 years... gah), I've made a point to try to fit classics of genres into my reading. Next up: The Thrawn Trilogy, which might stretch the definition of "classics" for some, but I am assured it is terribly important to other old fart Star Wars fans.

IMO, Game of Thrones (despite its ending) showed that if you want to REALLY do a novel justice, you're looking at a season of television, not a movie. You can cover the basic plot of a novel in a movie, but making the fans happy involves the space and time afforded by a series. Imagine the folks who would have been happy with Lord of the Rings if they'd had an episode or two of Tom Bombadil, and LOTR has a fairly straightforward plot, with really only two or three threads or so at a time.

So, yesterday I got word that Wild Sign, by Patricia Briggs, was available for me through Libby, and I checked it out and read on the porch while the weather was nice. I'd put it on hold before it was even released, and it got me thinking about books one buys as they come out... the ones you anticipate, and want to get as soon as you can.

The first ones I remember doing this with was David and Leigh Eddings' Elenium series. Following their Belgariad (which I was given, already finished, by my older brother), I was eager to explore this new world with them, and it's still a sentimental favorite (that I feel weird about, knowing what I know about the Eddings and their history). I've mostly done this with Steven Brust's Dragaera novels (though I've yet to get the most recent, Baron of Magister Valley), and I did it with Marie Brennan's Memoirs of Lady Trent (even reading it with a friend who lived in Oakland).

What are some of your day-of purchase titles, series, and authors?

My main romance is more paranormal romance... I tend to pick up every Mercedes Thompson book (about a coyote shapeshifter who hangs around werewolves) as it comes out, and read it in a sitting.

My best book is an old friend... First Man in Rome. Even 30 years old, and having read it five or more times, it is an excellent book... though, with today's climate, it felt like reading prophecy as it unfolded.

First Man in Rome is the first in Colleen McCullough's "Masters of Rome" series. It begins with the career of Gaius Marius, and covers the Jugurthine War in North Africa and his campaigns against the Germans... his first through sixth consulship, culminating with the unsuccessful coup by Saturninus.

For me, I find that the more importance religion has to the plot, the less I am likely to be interested in the book. Religious beliefs can be an interesting lever on a character, and I've read some exceptions, but I've seldom encountered books about the character's religious experiences to be less interesting... they either become simple moral dilemmas or bog down in legalism.

I don't have a specific challenge in mind, but I do want to continue reading. I'd slacked off the last few years and, even if I'm only reading on my lunch breaks, it's some good calisthenics.

Finally finished First Man in Rome, and moved on to The Grass Crown.

Since my genre of choice tends to be fantasy (especially those that verge on being westerns, but with elves and dragons), nature writing is always a big part of how I think of things... establishing a feeling of the place, the broad expanse of things, and how the characters and more human locations fit into things... it's the kind of thing that leads me to write gazeteers for three years before I finish the novella loosely set in that area.

However, Walden makes me think of a similar book, that similarly relied, IMO, on nature and place, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. As Pirsig, his son, and his friends travel, he ruminates on nature. The miles and miles of miles and miles for which Montana is so well known lend themselves to his expansive consideration of life and how we approach things; how the map can tell you the best routes for a motorcycle trip by showing you routes that connect nothing special to nothing in particular, with a faster route between them. How the mountains impact people and the lives they live near them. I've read the book several times, and the sense of space of the Northern Plains always hits me.

Finally finished "Trail of Lightning" that I began back in June. It wasn't bad, but I don't know if I'll go for the sequel; I felt I was too much in the dark about things.

Still plugging away at First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough. This must be my fourth or fifth time reading it, and I still enjoy it.

Started working on bell hook's "The Will to Change", about men and masculinity, and how patriarchy hurts men by insisting that they display no feelings and form few meaningful emotional connections with anyone but their significant others.

Been a few months since we managed this, so let's go again:

What are you reading this month?

I've got two; Colleen McCullough's First Man in Rome and Rebecca Roanhorse's Trail of Lightning.

First Man in Rome is a massive tome about the rise of Gaius Marius, a few years before the famous Gaius Julius Caesar was born (it was, in fact, Caesar's great-uncle who suggested a union between Gaius Marius's brother-in-law and his own niece, Aurelia, according to this). The series is long... several 600+ page books that got her an honorary doctorate. A good read, but a lot to work through.

Trail of Lightning is a bit easier. Post-apocalyptic fantasy, where most of the US is covered in the Big Water, and Mags, our heroine, is a monster-hunter on Dineh (Navajo) land. Roanhorse is married to a Navajo, and works a lot of their religion and stories into the story.

I've written a few short stories, up to a novella. One was solicited by a publisher but not used (they claim to have lost it; since they lost the first draft of my first book, I am not disbelieving this). One was published in an anthology. Two I self-published earlier this year.

All were role-playing game related. The unpublished/lost one was about someone whose extensive cybernetic implants caused extremely erratic behavior, leading to his death by police. That one was really fun to write, poking some fun at friends and the various parts of the game.

The anthology piece was about a werewolf whose friend invites him clubbing during the full moon (forgetting that his friend wasn't well suited to that). The werewolf gets in a fight, goes to the bathroom, gets arrested by the local "people who deal with the supernatural", then gets in a fight with one of them.

The self-published two were pseudo-westerns in a fantasy setting... the first was about a woman and a badly injured man fighting a bear-like monster, and the second about the same woman tracking down slavers are freeing a group of gnomes she'd befriended. Those took forever, partially because I wrote three books after starting the novella, starting the first one because I needed to develop the setting a little bit.

I've had a few ideas for novels that I've never gotten off the ground. "Are You There, Superman? It's Me, Margaret" was one. I also wanted to write a story about a valkyrie... sort of a YA urban fantasy romance.

The most developed novel idea was a Superman story where Kryptonians looked African-American, with "Calvin Clark" being raised by Jonathan and Martha Kent, being passed off as "the son of Martha's sister, who got in some trouble back East." Calvin would have been 30 years old at Superman's first appearance in 1939, so I researched a few towns in Kansas at that time, came up with an approximation of Smallville, located where I wanted Metropolis, etc. Calvin worked for the Metropolis Blade, the black daily in Metropolis, since he couldn't get hired at the Daily Planet in those days. He had a friendship with Jimmy Olsen, and a connection with Lois Lane that neither could really do anything about in public. Lex Luthor was a corrupt developer, but I never could figure out a real plot, and am not sure I'm the person to be writing a story about the difficulties of being black in the late 30s, so it somewhat stagnanted (though I have some great quotes from the book that I never got to use).

I am currently rereading "First Man in Rome", by Colleen McCullough. As she's writing about the late Roman Republic, she covers a lot of superstition. A major character, Lucius Corneilus Sulla, trusts often to luck, and worries about things that will change his luck. He even marries a girl, partially for her high station, but also because she gifted him a grass crown... a high military honor, under the right circumstances... and his luck immediately changed (partially because he started a lot of murdering).

What if the real luck wasn't some gift from Fortune, but the murders we committed along the way? ;-)

It was self-publishing, which is how it happened; I got permission from the IP holder to put out my stories (the established relationship for the gaming material helped).

The Memoirs of Lady Trent are a series I've made sure to get release day.

I am bad at plots. I can come up with scenarios, but my plots tend to get penciled in as "Hijinx ensue". That said, earlier this year I published a short story/novella double feature through DriveThruFiction, and I'm proud of that... partially because of how long it took me to write, and the weird side-trek I took.

So, in Library School, I took a genres class. Every week, read a book in a given genre and do a report on it. For Westerns, I chose an execrable serial western, part of those monthly series, called "Slocum and the Snake Pit Slavers". The series boasts two sex scenes per book, and they were horribly written. One of the main antagonists is a Mexican woman named "Tetas". It was so bad it made me angry at it.

I'd written a short story (which was itself a Star Trek joke) with a main character named "Odd Jill" (who a character called "Jill-odd", which, if it identifies the Star Trek joke to you, says you are a Star Trek nerd like me), and that story was a very Western-genre-styled fantasy, so I decided I could take the plot of Slocum and the Snake Pit Slavers and turn out something better. So I started writing, looked at a map of this fantasy world, did some rewrites to change her to travelling east rather than north, and then started some geography research. And I found that the area I was writing about had almost nothing written about it.

That lead to my Side Quests. Because I researched it, and got some ideas, and wrote up a ~70,000 word gazetteer about the region (the section about the area I was writing about with Odd Jill is only about 5800 words; the novella itself is just under 14,000). After I wrote THAT gazetteer, I realized I had a lot of ideas about an adjacent area without a lot of development, and wrote ANOTHER gazetteer, which clocks in at ~30,000 words. And another, almost unrelated book, which is about ~24,000 words. And another book, about the other side of the continent, which is ~25,000 words. In and around this, I've had a number of other projects, none of them necessarily that short (one, that is convenient to check, is also about 13,000 words)

And finally, getting back to a novella, which is only about 14,000 words long. That I started about 6 years ago, for a scorching rate of about 7 words a day (figuring 5.5 years), to publish a "pay what you want" duo that has downloaded 123 times (I just checked), and netted me $10.43. The rest of the stuff? I cannot publish it, because it is more less made out of someone else's intellectual property, so it's on their schedule, if they even buy it. The only bright part of this is I blew past my personal goal to write more than 3 books in my lifetime... and I did so without even noticing.

Vlad Taltos spends significant amounts of time talking about klava, which seems to be related to Turkish coffee.

Shannan wrote: "Dragons are my monster of choice, and there have been so many iconic dragons in film and literature. "

Have you read Marie Brennan's "Natural History of Dragons" series, aka "The Memoirs of Lady Trent"?

I have long wanted a Dungeons and Dragons movie made as a horror film. I heard D&D, especially the old, dungeon-crawling, variety, once described as "Subterranean fantasy ******* Vietnam", and I think that could make a fantastic movie. Goblins or kobolds making attacks from the darkness. Huge slime monsters that devour party members. Culminating in a fight in the darkness against some barely glimpsed monster.

One peculiar creature I like from mythology (and D&D) is the al-miraj. As you might guess from the name, it is of Middle Eastern origin, and was supposed to be a rabbit with a long horn. Not terribly a monster, but one I very much like.