To write the right way …

I finished reading Timothy Zahn’s "Cobras Two" yesterday. I was reluctant to put the book down and take up another book because I’d become so attached to the Moerau family and the other characters in the book, I’d gotten to know them, gotten comfortable with them and now didn’t want to move on to somebody else :p But unfortunately, unlike in life, there are no continuations to friendships made in books (unless the authors has written a sequel – or a few) and so I had to decide what I was going to read next. I since I enjoyed re-reading "Corbra" and because of the whole Johnny/Jonny connection, I thought of re-reading "Battlefield Earth" but couldn’t find the book and so I went through several other books before deciding to read the first volume of "The Early Del Rey" – a two volume collection of stories by Lester Del Rey with autobiographical commentaries by the author himself.

This book reminds me a lot of reading some of Asimov’s anthologies because the introductions to the stories give them a personal touch – a feeling as if you are talking directly to the author himself. I have loved what I’ve read so far because I can get a glimpse into the early writing career of Lester Del Rey and to a certain extent, it inspires me to try writing a bit more 🙂 It has been ages since I’ve written any fiction – I think the last bit of fiction I did was called "Dad’s Gone" and was actually inspired by somebody else’s writing – a story written by an online friend of mine in Australia. It doesn’t have the kind of story that I usually like to write – something which evokes a sense of wonder. This is more an introspective, character-based story with just a science fiction background. But again, I am wandering and am travelling further and further away from my original thought :p

I would like to write again. I want to write the kind of science fiction that people used to write in the good old days – science fiction which evokes a sense of wonder in you about the possibilities of science and the universe around us. The kind of stories which used to always amaze me and make me want to read more – and even try to write some. I don’t know if it is the market which has changed or the writers but I don’t see that kind of science fiction anymore. Or is it just that I’m not looking in the right place? Science fiction, if it is at all there, seems to be more about drama and characterization than about science itself. Maybe I’m not explaining it too well but I just don’t find the kind of science fiction that I used to like … So maybe I should go out and try to write some of my own … Or maybe I should not afflict anybody with bad writing :p

What dreams may come …

I dreamt again today and I think I have started dreaming again … OK, that’s not accurate – I have again become aware of the fact that I dream. I think we always (or almost always) dream when we sleep but don’t always remember that we had dreamt. I have always been fascinated by my dreams – in fact, that was one of the reasons that I wrote "The Mind of Morpheus Mentor" – which of course is still unfinished :p That started originally as a different story, a story which tried to describe how I saw dreams, or rather, a story that described what I thought dreams were – another life that we lived when we slept.

It might sound crazy but I used to wonder if we really rested when we slept or if we just lived another life. Maybe it’s like that old Chinese paradox which goes "I slept and dreamt I was a butterfly and then I woke up and wasn’t sure whether I was a man who’d dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who was dreaming that he was a man" :p Actually no, I didn’t think that my waking life was a dream – I just thought that both my waking life and my dream life were both separate lives. I would wake up after a full night’s sleep and feel not a bit rested, feel so very tired and lethargic and I’d have had all these dreams of strenuous action. So I used to think that maybe I did do all those things while I slept …

Of course, dream life being usually much more interesting than real life, it is probably just a dream to wish that dreams were real :p

Need to Write

Hmm … Blog’s been out for a day and no response from anybody <vbg> I guess nobody has either downloaded it or really found it useful … Oh well … and here I thought that it might actually revolutionize the way that people post :p

I do find the new right-click HTML shortcuts pretty useful … I’ve been putting paragraph tags in by hand till now but now all I do is select a paragraph and right-click and select "Paragrahp" from the context menu and I’m done – not too shabby if I do say so myself …

Anyway, not much going on today at work … the current project I’m working on is still going on … we are supposed to be working on phase 2 at the moment even though phase 1 has not been deployed yet and I’ve completed my stuff on phase 2 and am currently fixing bugs for phase 1 … I’m kinda inclined to go on to phase 3 but it might turn out to be a major mess since too many phases of work at once can become a pretty confusing thing … I guess we shall see …

I was thinking of a story that I’d written half-way a long while back on my way to work. I’d started the first version of the story a long time ago in 1990 but lost it when one of my teachers erased the diskette on which I had the story saved. I restarted it a couple of years ago on my Windows CE 2.0 HPC while waiting for a flight in Las Vegas but never completed it … Recently, when I bought a Targus stowaway keyboard for my iPaq, I added another paragraph to the story but never got around to doing anything further with it … But now it seems to cry out to me <g> So maybe it’s time that I started on it again … but that would mean taking time away from something else like coding or gaming … decisions, decisions!