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The good morning, good night thread

Started by Ed, October 22, 2007, 03:49:05 AM

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Ed

#1065
July 26, 2009, 06:07:52 PM
Well, after yet another driche day (overcast grey, with constant pelting rain) I finally decided - to hell with it, I'm booking a holiday. So in a few week's time I'll be winging my way to Pisa, en Italia, for a few days, and then on to Florence for a week in a nice secluded villa, with its own pool, and views over the Tuscan hills :dance:

Cost an arm and a leg, but what the hell - life's short, isn't it?
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

delph_ambi

#1066
July 27, 2009, 02:32:39 AM
Sounds idyllic, Ed. Definitely the right decision.

delboy

#1067
July 27, 2009, 02:34:49 AM
Just done the same here, Ed. A week in the Algarve. Like you said, cost a bit, but what the hell!

Derek
"If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don't send it to me. Don't show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They're not going to publish it."

Robert B. Parker

Woody

#1068
July 28, 2009, 06:52:21 PM
Ed - is anyone looking after CD whilst you're gone?
___________________________________________________________
Writers Anonymous(http://www.writersanonymous.org.uk)-a source of sinister anthologies
Perception is nine tenths of the look. Brave Dave the Feather in Caribbean Conspiracy

Ed

#1069
July 29, 2009, 02:36:39 AM
I generally manage to find internet access and pop in once or twice every couple of days, Woody. Derek has mod status for anything that crops up on the board, too, but it pretty much runs itself, TBH.
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

Geoff_N

#1070
July 29, 2009, 03:24:43 PM
Good for you, Ed, and Del. We're not gonna need our passport until October. What a wet summer! My feet are going rusty.

Ed

#1071
July 29, 2009, 06:06:52 PM
It's been a really awful month for weather, hasn't it? I thought it felt quite autumnal today. Last year was possibly worse, though.

Re the hols - the Algarve is a good choice, Del. It's only about an hour's flight from London, isn't it? Hard to believe that few hundred miles could make such a huge difference in weather.

I thought about putting off our hols until October, too. It's both cheaper and cooler then, which suits me fine. I used to take my hols in May and October for that reason. This year I don't think I could make it to October without some respite, though. I feel bone tired after the year I've had. I'm still managing to keep going on the work front, but I think it's getting progressively harder. Week by week I'm hearing of more and more people losing their jobs. I don't think the recession has bottomed out yet.
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

delboy

#1072
July 30, 2009, 03:36:45 AM
QuoteThis year I don't think I could make it to October without some respite, though. I feel bone tired after the year I've had

Same here. It's been a very long and very stressful year. Maybe it's because the holiday is just days away so I'm mentally preparing for it, but I don't think I could make it another week, let alone a few months.

Derek
"If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don't send it to me. Don't show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They're not going to publish it."

Robert B. Parker

Ed

#1073
August 11, 2009, 05:27:34 AM
Welcome back, Del - how was it? I hope you enjoyed yourselves and came back relaxed and happy :smiley:

I'm off later today. Staying in a hotel near the airport tonight, and then flying out at about 7am tomorrow morning. I'm not sure when I'll next get internet access, so can I hand the crit group batten to you for the next few days, please, Del? There is a few ongoing dicussions, and another four threads that can go into week 2 if you can think of a discussion topic to go with them. It's not always possible to think of one, so don't worry too much if you can't.
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

delboy

#1074
August 11, 2009, 05:39:42 AM Last Edit: August 11, 2009, 05:40:48 AM by delboy
Yep, no problem, Ed. I'll try and keep things ticking along. Have a great break yourself!

Portugal was great. Totally relaxing. A tad hot for old pale face Del, but we had our own pool so there was no problem in staying cool. Excellent food - especially the local Piri Piri chicken. The driving experience was wonderful. Had a nice little Peugeot and I think there are only about other six cars in the whole of Portugal. No traffic jams, no trouble with parking. Only traffic jam I came across was back in Wales after we landed - masses of tailbacks on the M4. Sigh.

Plyaed lots of chess around the pool, taught the boy some card tricks, and read a couple of books out there. One non-fiction book on Remote Viewing which was very interesting and is a subject that warrants further investigation, and another that was an object lesson in what happens when an author doesn't adhere to Elmore Leonard's advice of "Missing out the bits that people skip". It was a six hundred page book that not only changed viewpoint (I hate that - a book starts in the third person limited, then jumps to an omniscient narrator who had a view of the moment of creation, and then jumps to a first person hard-boiled PI narrator and thereafter moves between them) but was also filled with so much redundant prose that I found myself skimming great swathes of it. In the end I skipped the last two hundred pages and left it in the living room cabinet for the next holiday maker's enjoyment... Having said that, the author is a best selling pro writer and I have to go back to work next week... >:(

Great to be back!

Derek
"If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don't send it to me. Don't show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They're not going to publish it."

Robert B. Parker

Ed

#1075
August 11, 2009, 09:25:48 AM
Thanks - I'll certainly try. I just hope the kids don't complain as much as they did last year.

This time I'm taking my laptop along, and my wife actually suggested it, which makes me think she might just let me do some writing in peace, in the shade, while she tops up her skin cancer risk. I would like to get a few thousand words into writing a novel, if I can.

Glad to hear you had a good time in Portugal. There's nothing worse than a disappointing holiday, especially when the time and money is as precious as it generally is. Shame about the 600 page doorstop. I looked at a 600 pager in Waterstones at the weekend, but decided against buying it, because I didn't invisage reading it all in just ten days. It'd be nice if I could write that much, though.
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

Geoff_N

#1076
August 12, 2009, 02:16:28 PM
Enjoy your break, Ed.
Del, come on - I want to know who what that book was. Several I have in mind fit that awfullness. Alistair Reynolds is one, especially his Pushing Ice. Great premise, awful cliched, pleonasmed, POV-head-swapping delivery. Amazingly bad considering it is published by Gollancz but then he is established so folk will buy it all the same.

Geoff

Ed

#1077
August 12, 2009, 03:50:49 PM
Thanks - I've actually got 3G Internet acces via my iPhone, which is really cool. The only annoying part is it takes ages to write a reply with the keypad, when I was expecting to be able to tether it to my laptop. Turns out you have to pay more for that and set it up before you go. Predictable, really - things like this always tend to fall short of what you're led to believe f
by the advert, don't they.

But anyway, hello from sunny Pisa :smiley:
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

delboy

#1078
August 12, 2009, 04:25:04 PM
Geoff,

The book in question was Black Angel by John Connolly. I really wanted to like this book (which was why, out of everything I could have chosen, I took this one on holiday). Never read any novels by John Connolly before but I have read a number of his horror short stories, his journalism, and a lot of his pieces on writing and together he came across as a really great bloke with a mass of knowledge about the business of making it as a writer. His website is brilliant and well worth a read. I was aware that he'd created a PI called Charlie Parker (great name!) and that his novels were a crossover between the hardboiled PI stuff that I adore and the supernatural. I've always thought that there must be great potential in such a crossover (I have a copy of Hjortbergs' Falling Angel - made into the movie Angelheart with Mickey Rourke - and that covers the same ground, but there's not too many such crossovers that I'm aware of).

So, it was with great anticpation that I started the book.

But it just didn't happen for me. As already mentioned, the viewpoint change is one that I simply dislike. In my opinion, if there's first person narrative in a book then the whole thing better be first person. How can it logically work any other way?

On reflection, the other thing that I didn'tget was any sense of Charlie Parker's character. There was very little revelation or insight about him. He moved through the book hardly revealing anything. I've read some other reviews of Black Angel and it's been said that the earlier books in the series didn't have this fault.

Also, there were times when Charlie was talking back in a sharp Spenser/Marlowe manner, lots of witty one liners and a cool sense of repartee; but there didn't seem to be any consistency to such speech characteristics. Charlie's side kicks reminded me very much of Spenser's Hawk, and some of the descriptions of minor characters evoked John D MacDonald. Comparisons with Robert Parker and Chandler and MacDonald ought to be great - and certainly point to a high level of writing ability - but here they seemed to come across as a bit of a mish-mash. All in all, I never really 'found' Charlie Parker, and though the plot was clever and straddled all of his history it's character that I look for over plot every time.

Finally, there was a sense of Dan Brown about this. As I was reading it I kept thinking here's another writer who's tried to come up with a plot that's as vast and as epic, as biblical and as potentially world changing as The Da Vinci Code (I haven't checked any dates- so I may be well off the mark here). Plotwise, he probably succeeded.

So there you have it. I'm sure some people will have this as their most favouritist book of all time. Me, I'm wondering if maybe my thinking that genres can be combined is actually right or wrong.

Derek
"If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don't send it to me. Don't show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They're not going to publish it."

Robert B. Parker

Ed

#1079
August 13, 2009, 03:12:51 AM
From what you have said about liking crossover novels, it sounds like you might like F Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack series. I'm just about to start Tomb from the series, so I'll let you know what I think of it. I finished Ghost Pirates on the plane. Have to say I found it a bit meh, but will discuss it in more depth on the book club thread.
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]
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