Reading
Finished Monkey Wrench Gang. It was starting to get a little repetitive with the destruction. Destroy property, run away, camp out. Destroy property, run away, camp out. About ¾ of the way through, the action really picks up. A vigilante group bent on catching the eco-terrorists starts to catch up to the gang, and the chase scenes are straight out of an action movie. But then the action stalls. We spend a ponderously long time as the vigilante group bides their time while the gang walks around in circles in a canyon trying to find a way out to freedom. On and on and on they go, getting hungrier and thirstier and more pissed off. If I’m being honest, my eyes started glazing over during this part. I just wanted that momentum from earlier back. This is ostensibly the final chase scene of the book, the big climax, but it starts too soon and ends too late. I must have had a greater patience in the past because I don’t remember feeling this way the last time I read the book. It sucks because there is so much good writing in here, so many wonderful passages describing the natural landscape and a lot of snarky commentary on the government’s capitalistic tendencies. This book needed an editor, for sure.
If anyone has recommendations for books that deal with nature and the natural landscape and are written eloquently, I’d love to hear them.
I started reading Space Battleship Yamato by Leiji Matsumoto, which I got from the library. This is a manga adaptation of a famous anime from the 70s. I didn’t know that going in, but perhaps watching the anime is the superior experience. This manga, like a lot of others, drops you straight in the middle of the action with very little character introduction or worldbuilding. It’s all teased out to you as you go. I expected that. What I didn’t expect was the large time jumps that would happen from one page to the next, glossing over major events like battles and shipbuilding. Months (or years) would seemingly pass, and you wouldn’t know it until you noticed a major change to the characters or setting.
Unfortunately, I didn’t really like this one. I pulled my bookmark out at about the 50% mark. The artwork is great, with the soft, round edges of the characters and spaceships. It lends the setting a cloud-like appearance, which also gave it a groovy 70s vibe.
I also started Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, a Locus Award-winning space opera novel and first in the Machineries of Empire trilogy. The novel was also nominated or shortlisted for other major science fiction awards, so it has high expectations attached to it. I’ve read some of Lee’s short fiction in the past and have found it hard to follow at times, so I expected the same here. I read a few reviews that went over the difficult nature of the prose and prepared myself for a challenging reading experience.
What I found was less difficult than I was led to believe. You are dropped in the middle of the action right away, with our main character Kel Cheris in the middle of a battle. The setting isn’t described in great detail, and there are terms that are thrown at you that aren’t explained, but can be at least guessed at through context clues.
The general consensus of this novel is that it’s a bit hard to follow and a bit hard to picture at times, but the book grows on you as you learn the terms and the nature of the world, which is based on a set of mathematical principles that govern reality. Use different mathematics, and reality warps around you. It’s a very interesting concept, and it was what drew me to the book at first. I’m about 15% of the way through and I can honestly say that I’m on the fence with this one. It isn’t that hard to follow (I find some classic 19th century literature harder to follow), but I’m not terribly interested in the setting or the characters. Kel Cheris is a character we barely know. We only know that she’s brutally efficient in her work and that she has a distaste for the needless death that seems to occupy her world. The setting is also barely sketched out, so it isn’t terribly engaging. I don’t mind having to figure things out as I go, but 50 pages in and the world isn’t coalescing into being for me. I’m going to give it another 50 pages and hope it can grab me. I’m at the point where a new character is about to be introduced, so I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with them.
Other than that, I am 80% of the way through Towers of Midnight. I’m in the home stretch. I’m not sure what I’ll pick up next, but I’m learning to let that be okay. I don’t need to plan out my reading like it’s homework.
Writing
You may or may not have seen that I had a flash fiction piece accepted for publication. It’s called “A Walk Out of Doors,” and you can read it here. I’m hoping I get another acceptance this year so I can break my one-story-a-year streak. I have 6 other stories out for consideration at this time (some of which have been in limbo since late 2024), so I’m hoping for an acceptance among those.
On the novel writing front, I pounded out 1,500 words in a single writing session last Saturday. It was all the writing I did, but I’m proud of it nonetheless. With limited time now for writing, I need to take all the time I can get.
I also printed out an old short story that I had critiqued by my writing group last year. I want to rework it into something more coherent (and better). Even though I wrote the story back in 2018, it has a certain relevance to current events that I hope will give it an edge in the market.
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What have you been reading and/or writing this week? Let me know in the comments below.
The Night Bulletin 