Back to “Normal”

Blogging again at 1AM when I should be going to bed.  At least my eyes are scratchy – there have been a couple of nights this past week in which I had trouble falling asleep.

Due to the scratched cornea thing, I haven’t been at work for a week.  I’m going to have a shit-ton of things to do when I arrive in the office tomorrow morning.  Hopefully, that won’t be too much past 9AM; ideally, it’ll be closer to 8:30AM.

My eye’s doing fine.  It’s still blurry, but my brain isn’t really paying attention to the specific data from my right eye – it’s more just letting it help out my left eye.  It was healing pretty quick up until now, but I think that’s kind of plateaued.  No biggie – as long as it heals eventually.  I was pretty ok with my perfect vision.

Right now, I’m reading Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds.  It’s his eighth book (of nine so far), and the seventh of his I’ve picked up.  There’s one in the middle called Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days that I skipped over because it’s two novellas that aren’t part of what I originally thought was a series.  There’s not too much of a series-thing going on.  A couple of the books are linked, and most of them take place in the same universe, but I’m not currently reading the seventh of a series of nine.

This one isn’t even a full series:  it’s a collection of novellas and short stories.

I’m not all that impressed.  I think that Reynolds, like many authors, got lazy after his first couple of books.  The guy isn’t really all that great at writing endings – he just kind of wraps up one of the bigger chunks of the overall plotline and calls it a day.  He leaves too many ends untied for my taste.  Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s an excellent writer, just not a ridiculously great author.

One of the “rules” of writing goes like this:  “if you show the audience a gun in Act I, it has to go off in Act IV.”  Reynolds is continually introducing new guns – characters, plot shifts, whatever – right up until the end, many/most of which never actually go off.  As a reader, I prefer to have my questions answered by the author, not to have to make them up myself.  As a reader of fiction, I want to know what the answer is – whether I like it or not – I don’t want a novel to leave me with questions about the characters or the story.  I read philosophy stuff for that.

In any case, maybe I’ll give you a full run-down my takes on each of Reynolds’ books in another post.

I don’t know if I mentioned it, but my new bass came in the mail on Friday.  I’ve played it a bit each day, which is a good start so far.

Blech.  Back to work.  I’m ok with that:  I’m neither dreading it nor chomping at the bit.  Back to work and regular routine.  At least my apartment is clean.  Today was a good day for that.  I cleaned everything I own and made a good dent in the overall clutter of my living space (which was becoming oppressive).  I’m psyched to start the week with good feng shui at my back.

Tagged as: Alastair Reynolds