Archive for January, 2010

I’ve spent the majority of my reading time, nearly all of my life, reading Science Fiction and Fantasy novels. I love the adventure and the speculation and possibilities that are inherent in those genres.

Reading outside those genres has happened occasionally, but never consistently. I’ve read Stephen King, though most of his works are essentially fantasy. I’ve read books by F&SF authors who dabble outside their original genre (Stephen R. Donaldson, Bradley Denton and a couple others). And then I’ve read the occasional book suggested by some other media outlet. A radio interview with Joe Gores got me to read a couple of his mystery novels. A recent article on James Patterson caused me to look at his books on the shelf of the bookstore recently, which resulted in my purchase of “When The Wind Blows” (Of course, it treads on SF territory) and the consequent finishing of that novel in a day.

I’m going to make a commitment to myself that at least one in every three books I read this year (and for the foreseeable future) will be something from outside my comfort zone of the F&SF genres. I’m going to try to sample all sorts of stories that I haven’t read, in the hopes that it will expand my vision of what’s possible to do with a story.
After all, I just read a book where I doubt any of the chapters was longer than four pages. I flew through the book and it was impossible, almost, to put down. 416 pages and 127 chapters. It’s not something I’ve seen before, but it was certainly effective. What other techniques are out there that I’m not aware of because my reading has been so insular?

So, yeah, it’s not much of an update, but it’s a start. You can now empty the trash.

What took so long, you ask? Remember that other work I do? Well, it kept eating my time, right up through the day before Christmas Eve, and I’d planned a vacation over the Christmas holidays to get away from the computer and hang with my kids some (since they were home from school) and basically just recharge as much as I could. So I took that vacation, and I feel much better now, thank you.

I have spent time working on the export functionality, and basically, the merge in rtf format is kicking my butt. Something about merging the documents together is ruining all the formatting, and I haven’t figured it out yet. For the time being, you can export each document separately to maintain any formatting you want (bold, italics, etc…) which isn’t ideal, but it’s better than nothing. I am going to continue to work on the export merge of rtf since I cannot in my mind call it done until that works correctly. But in the meantime, I’m also going to try to keep putting out little fixes for other things as well.

It’s BACK TO WORK time!