Had another great writing day yesterday. I’m hopeful for another repeat performance again today, but I’m not sure if it’ll happen or not. Why?

My favorite daughter had volley ball practice (two 2 hour sessions).

I’ll be doing an interview.

I have a major release for work tonight.

I need to get things ready for camping this weekend.

If I can squeeze in a little writing time, I’ll be happy. Maybe I’ll get lucky. Who knows. I do need to get a new Unorthodox Writing Tips written and up. I had written five weeks worth some time back and those have run out. I need to take a fiction break and write a few more so I don’t have to stress about those. I need to get a couple book reviews out. Speaking of reviews…

Recently I had listened to Rendezvous with Rama. It’s a great concept, but he story is told with large data dumps and paper cut-outs of characters. The only real substance is the actual concept. So I’m onto Rama II. I remember reading this book when I was younger (I think 15 or 16) and I had liked it at the time. I’m listening to it on audio now. I’m a couple hours in an… nothing has happened yet. When I say nothing I mean there was a nearly 45 minute data dump on the Earth’s history to get us to that point in the story. Based on my experience this is most likely what Clarke added to the story. He’s great at data dumps and huge amounts of ‘telling’ a story. So far I don’t like any of the characters. There seems to be a great attempt to make them more than what they are. I’m bored with it. Seriously bored. To the point where I most likely won’t finish the story and I doubt I’ll continue on into books 3 and 4.

If you’ve made it through Rama II and the subsequent books, am I giving up too soon? Should I skip ahead? Will the books get any better? I hate books that dump information and drag the story on. So far 100% of what I’ve gotten through so far has added nothing to the story so I feel I’ve wasted my time. This book is suffering from bloat.

Sorry, just had to rant there for a moment. I think I’ll move on to another book before this one lulls my brain to sleep and starts to affect my writing.

Little tangent there. Sorry about that.

Oh, some curious news. I saw I had gotten a couple of hits when I mentioned Jay Lake in a post. My post about censorship. To his post today over at (http://www.jlake.com/blog/) he mentions a post he might not put up or will be censoring. This after I noticed someone came to my page after searching on Jay Lake. Curiouser and curiouser. Did Mr. Lake find my post? The world may never know.

HEY! Quick maintenance question. I have everything set up so if you are subscribed to the blog via email and reply to the email you get it should be adding a comment to the blog. That doesn’t not seem to be happening. If you’re getting these posts via email and have replied, I’ve never seen it and it didn’t post a comment to the blog. If you know how to fix this, please get a hold of me and let me know. I’ve already looked online and everything suggested to have checked in the options I’ve done. So color me confused.

I’ve got work to do and duck pictures to download.

Until Tomorrow!

WOO WOO!