Zen Ken

Interesting....

Oct 1, 2009
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A quote from Supreme Court Justice Scalia:

"I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That’s important, but it doesn’t put food on the table and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise."

Hammer, meet nail. I'm all for lawyers enabling productivity, but if everyone's a lawyer, who's the worker, the doctor, the mason, the engineer, the scientist, the inventor? And I think too much lawyering begins to tip things backwards, into counter-productivity. It was something to ponder.

It's October. Time to rewrite.

Oct 1, 2009
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Nanowrimo is coming up next month, and my first book has been dormant pretty much since the beginning of December. It's time to dust it off, rework it as much as possible and generate new ideas and directions for the sequel coming up in November. The original draft is 19 chapters long. If I edit and revise a couple of chapters a day, that'll leave me half of the month to write new material that's obviously missing in the second half of the book (speed writing to get to the end of the story drops off a lot of things).

Also, I'm on an Ian Fleming novel spree (very dated and interesting 1950s lens of the world - did we really think that way then?). And watching a show called Mad Men. It's like watching the world my parents grew up in, and it's amazingly good. On reading this paragraph, I feel like I'm slowly traveling back in time.

Hmm. Need to update my Books and such venues.

Long trips, weddings and anniversaries

Sep 22, 2009
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Hi Vox. Long time no write.

I just got back from a week and a half long set of back to back trips. Attended the wedding of my best friend, celebrated my birthday (which happens to be also the anniversary of joining Vox).

I can't say that I've written much in the last six months or more. Actually, it's pretty abysmal at the lack of blogging I've been doing.

If anyone is reading the new Dan Brown novel, I can save you the trouble - it sucks. While he's clever and using pieces of knowledge and symbology to tenuously tie things together, he still can't write a decent story. His characters are worse than B movie cookie cutter, and he tends to repeat himself as if he's writing to 5th graders with ADD. And, if you're paying half attention, you'll realize the location of the lost symbol and who the bad guy really is within the first 50 pages of the book. To say it was disappointing is giving too much credit. I think The Da Vinci Code was (sadly) his best piece of writing. Everything before and after is going to be seriously mediocre. But who care, right? He and his non-editing editors made their million. Man, I wish I could do that just once. :)

QotD: My Very First Movie

Aug 7, 2009
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What is the first movie you saw in the the theater?

I was five years old. Star Wars. I don't remember a lot of it at the time, but it was dark, smoky and had lots of lasers. After that it was a pretty steady diet of drive-in movies. I guess there was something special about that movie to make my parents see it in a real theater.

Thanks, Mr. Hughes

Aug 7, 2009
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A lesson from my life coach

Aug 7, 2009
4 comments

Life Coach

Slightly reminiscent of Network's "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" only more self referential. Okay maybe it's more like Ayn Rand's "Anthem", but who cares. It's funny. [via Boing Boing]

Books

Aug 6, 2009
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1. Nemesis

2. Outliers

3. The Name of the Rose

4. Life of Pi

5. Lord Foul's Bane, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

6. Altered Carbon

7. Broken Angels

8. Woken Furies

9. Thirteen

10. To Kill a Mockingbird

11. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

Spin

Robert Charles Wilson

An alright book. Not great sci fi, honestly.

12. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon

A great little story about comic book writers in and past the Depression Era. I think you could get the idea of how it's going to end about half way through, but it's still a very well written book and definitely worth a read.

13. Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson

The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book)

Neal Stephenson

As much as I enjoyed Snow Crash (and to some extent Cryptonomicon), this book turned out to be a disappointment. It wound things up to an ending that was just... uneventful. It felt as if he had overreached and came up short. The point was never really made.