Other than a couple of book reviews, that's all of the writing I did for this week. Next week's posts include some thoughts about the polymath concept, and a review for The Dragonbone Chair.
Von Braun Review
Although I’d long desired to find a biography of Werner Von Braun, one of the more complex and mysterious figures of early rocketry, most of the treatments I found seemed unlikely to provide the kind of detail and depth of analysis that I was seeking, so when I came upon a biography of him that was consistently billed as the best study yet done of him and his history, I was optimistic enough to add it to my reading list, and excited enough by its possibilities to read it within a year of its addition.
What is Life?
This might sound like a philosophical question, but I intend it more like a scientific question. We’ve discussed this somewhat before, like in our post about the universe’s habitable zone, but I want to focus in a little closer on what life really is, on what makes one thing alive and one thing not alive, how we might go about defining the difference, and whether what we call life deserves the distinction we have hitherto applied.
Weekly Writing Update
Despite my digression from Verdon's Tragedy, I did maintain my focus on Blood and Dragons. Aside from a few, finishing touches, I can now say that the first part is complete.
Not-so-standard Model
While this is being hailed as the first potentially significant failure of the Standard Model, the Standard Model has really been struggling for years with a variety of problems
Blood Magic S2:E4: Fallen Angel Re-Release
I think a lot about writing action scenes. I don’t mean action scenes in the literary sense, but action scenes in the sense that probably attracted a lot of us to speculative fiction in the first place, the kinds of action scenes with flashing swords, sparking wands, roaring dragons, and pirouetting starships.
Writing 21st Century Fiction Review
I wish that the human brain was a better tool for diagnosing itself, because I would be very interested to know how much of my distaste for this book arose from the writing style, rather than the contents. To be honest, the writing sounded juvenile. It is my hope that the author adopted this style in an attempt to appeal to a broader audience, rather than it being an actual reflection of their intellectual capacity, but I found it quite off-putting, and rather undermining to those parts of the book that are valid. While I realize that an inaccurate understanding of electromagnetism does not preclude wisdom in the area of fiction writing, making a blatantly invalid analogy does make me question how well the rest of the book was thought through before being published. And that was just the most obvious example; the whole tone of the book conveyed a similar impression.
Endings
It might seem like an oversimplification, but it is very viable to divide a story into just three parts: beginning, middle, and end.
Weekly Writing Update
This was a pretty good week, writing-wise.
Cybersecurity Warning
With a title like "Google Bans Apps With Hidden Data-Harvesting Software," you might not be expecting a huge, new cybersecurity scare. In this case, the details make the difference.
IGC Publishing 