R.J.K. Lee > Recent Status Updates

Maggots. She knows. She can’t fault them though. They’re just the hungry kids muscling their way to the front of the cafeteria line, right?

Anyone else found themself laughing the whole way through Chapter 46 of Harrow the Ninth? The night before the murder chapter within which “these m*****f***ers had a hunger only thumbs could satisfy.” Had to listen to the chapter again. Such an amusing chapter and excellent book with a wonderful narrator for the audio...Totally lifted my mood and made for a good celebration of getting my story submitted.

“Murder was merely adjustment issues?”

Drags on with only occasional moments of meaningful interest or excitement. Not sure if I’ll bother listening to the last five hours.

Glad to give George R R Martin's "For A Single Yesterday" another read or listen in this case. Personally, this story rates among the most moving of post-apocalyptic stories I've had the pleasure to read. The thematic argument between forgetting the past to move forward and not forgetting the past is very well done. A must-read for everyone.

"Frito Lay or freedom?"

"Cook up some zesty habanera extreme ranch cumquat doritos over this fucking nightmare..."

Time for another listen! Been trying to decide if I like how the show reorganizes the narrative or not. So listening again to mull that over.

The Hex refresher had reset my system to one hundred percent confidence. And I hoped maybe the turtle would give me an extra crazy sheen: Oh, man... Don't fuck with the turtle guy! He's out of his mind! Confidence was not the same thing as reason.

Certainly a Miracle Mood Cure thus far. Just read the boy who wanted to be a circus story and how beautiful. The harsh sense of consequences akin to fairy tales keeps me riveted while a respect for life and character needs brings a satisfied grin to my face. Also: that first story about stealing magical frogs before his wife dies was so charming. Not to mention: a story about a secret eggnog recipe! Read more soon.

I really enjoyed the excellent sound production and the gritty, doomed perspectives on the constant war and devaluation of life gripping this galaxy far, far away, so much so that instead of moving on to the next audiobook, I found myself starting this one over from the beginning for another listen. Not looking forward to certain characters dying again but hey, at least they're alive for a bit once more.

"Numina was the part of the Culture's Contact section that concerned itself with the Sublimed, or at least tried to. It was sometimes known as the Department of What The Fuck?" Always love that Culture humor! Banks does the best naming of things!

Doesn't get interesting until those graduated from the academy try to figure how to deal with working for a military that has destroyed an entire populated planet in Chapter 9. I like having the alternate perspective on the original movies' events but the typical growing-up-naive approach of YA can be irritating.

[a new life] turned out to be just an illusion. Death only backed off a little ways to wait for me on the road ahead. The night I finished building the lighthouse, I took my boat out to sea to look at it from a distance, and all of a sudden, I had a thought. Death is the only lighthouse that is always lit. No matter where you sail, ultimately, you must turn toward it. Everything fades in the world, but death endures.

That linked fairy tale and humanity's attempt to figure it out. This book!

"The chaos, the spilling intestines of a life ending did not hang on walls in palaces. You didn't commission a scene where your ancestor died screaming, holding in his guts with both hands. Nor did the triumphant warriors of one's line ever behead pleading, surrendering men. Triumph required artistic balance. A vanishing point. An amount of blue and gold (expensive!) agreed upon in a contract."

Around here a lot of people want it to be real. They'd rather have an out of control A.I. running things than the human nutjobs who let a nuclear bomb go off in Chicago. You ask me, I'll say no to either choice.

Stupidity was now obligatory. [...] Faith in stupidity was a way of life, a sign of honour in the new regime. She wrote such thoughts in a small gold journal she carried everywhere, an indefensible folly. Yet she was afraid she, too, would begin to see practical advantages in stupidity if she failed to write such things down. Would lose her way. Would never make it home.

'I live,' she said, 'in a republic ruled by madmen. Do you understand?' Thelonius did. He said: 'It's not much different over here.' Through the screen, she laughed. He laughed, too. Even though it was only a tiny laugh, it felt good to laugh with someone again. The laugh subsided.

Survivors who come forward to reveal their childhood recollections have been portrayed as the pawns of a malignant cabal of psychotherapists with extraordinary powers.
[...] again a victim became invisible. This trial put psychotherapists on notice that listening to survivors can carry certain risks and dangers.
[...] not the first time in history that those who have listened [...] have been subject to challenge.

[...] many clinicians, myself included, viewed the capacity to disconnect mind from body as a merciful protection, even as a creative and adaptive psychological defense against overwhelming terror. [...] this rather benign view of disassociation must now be reconsidered. Though disassociation offers a means of mental escape [...], it may be that this respite from terror is purchased at far too high a price.

Survivors of chronic childhood trauma face the task of grieving not only for what was lost but also for what was never theirs to lose. [...] They must mourn the loss of the foundation of basic trust, the belief in a good parent. As they come to recognize that they were not responsible for their fate, they confront the existential despair that they could not face in childhood.

Might be King's best and most heart-wrenchingly sad, fragile story: "...if it's this bad now, he dreads to think what may lie ahead. No, he thinks, dread is the wrong word. Terror is the right one. For the first time in my life, I'm terrified of the future, where I see everything that I am, or ever was, first submerged, then erased. If the pain itself doesn't do it, the heavier drugs they give me to stifle it will."

From Chapter 3: "As long as they could function on a minimal level, they were thought to have recovered. With the end of the war, the familiar process of amnesia set in once again. There was little medical or public interest in the psychological condition of returning soldier." Interesting to examine the similarity in amnesia over trauma study of women as well, as detailed in Chapter 2.

"Dad," Will said, amazed. "I never knew you could talk." Some Bradbury sentences are so simple, yet so perfect. This one had me laughing.

For once she was glad he was full of shit. As in any guerilla economy, there was no underestimating the value of cigarettes these days. People had been wrong to hoard gold for the collapse of civilization. They would've been better served to stock up on Camels.

"The dead guy writing this ponders the fatal mistake of defining love for country by identifying the people one hates." I'm finally getting back to reading novels more, now that my short stories are submitted. Damn this book is great, with sharp intertwining of timelines and character perspective. And lines like that quoted above really bring the themes and character conflicts into focus.

"She didn't understand what Amercans thought the big deal was. The program had been operating in Europe for a little over a decade with scarcely an issue. But Americans had a pathological need to be intolerant of someone, and bioandroids were the current punching bag." - Great politically-charged situation the protagonist, and her new body, is tossed into right from the start.

"Simultaneity is an effect [...] seldom discussed by writers or critics. The reader is always experiencing this phenomenon unconsciously; it [...] underlies all the reader's experiences as a kind of flow. It is not there when a work is mechanically constructed, when one thing is literally added to another, with no cumulative sense of organic unity. [...] variation on key phrases, key images, and parallel elements."

"[...] Having observed in life that many people, even people whose lives are excruciatingly routine, behave inconsistently and that this very inconsistency is one of the inspirations to becoming a writer, so that you can show them in action, the writer is frustrated when reviewers and readers tell him that a flaw in his work is that he is inconsistent in the presentation of his characters."

"[...] and wrists so fine she could slide her hand into the wine-jug behind the bar - although she'd have to be quick pulling it out again, or Leroy the Wine Goblin would bite it off." Fairy Werewolf vs. Vampire Zombie is a fine example of the spot-on playful humor Charlie Jane Anders always brings to her writing. And what a solid voiced observer-narrator in 1st-person POV. A must-read.