Hope everyone who celebrates Thanksgiving had a good one. Me, I'm still full.

We're now officially in the holiday season. Like every year, this time of year presents some unique challenges in terms of balancing work with recreation. Staying focus becomes more difficult with all the family and other obligations that pop up. With that in mind, it'll be interesting to me to see how I do on my own writing progress. This week so far has not been a good one for progress. Fortunately, I still have a few more days.

Here's this weekend's links, then I have to get some writing done. Have a good one.

Women Who Pretended to Be Men to Publish Scifi Books
In 1980, science fiction writer and editor Ben Bova told a group of women writers, “Neither as writers nor as readers have you raised the level of science fiction a notch. Women have written a lot of books about dragons and unicorns, but damned few about future worlds in which adult problems are addressed.”

TSS: The 100 Best Characters in Fiction
Today I thought I'd share an interesting feature from Book Magazine with you - the 100 Best Characters in Fiction since 1900. Do you have a favorite character who is NOT featured on this list?

Phoenix Mars Lander Shuts Down
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has shut down, but its legacy will live on as scientists sift through its data and findings.

Princeton Scientists Discover Proteins that Control Evolution
Evolutionary changes are supposed to take place gradually and randomly, under pressure from natural selection. But a team of Princeton scientists investigating a group of proteins that help cells burn energy stumbled across evidence that this is not how evolution works.

10 Tips to Improve Your Fiction Writing Skills
Writing fiction, whether short or long, can be a very trying experience indeed.  So many writers of fiction have different processes for achieving their writing goals that it’s hard to sift through what works and what doesn’t.

Genre at the End of Time
There is a superb passage midway through Greg Bear’s City at the End of Time in which our universe hits the end of time, rolls back and rolls in again like a wave crashing against a sea wall. Echoes of those final moments reiterate; people, all unaware, repeat and repeat and repeat their final actions. […] There are times when I look at science fiction today and see precisely what Greg Bear is describing. The same bits of sf hitting the end wall, rebounding and coming back again in ever fainter echoes of the past.

NOTE: This post originally appeared on my old blog, but in an effort to bring forward the various book reviews and other relevant posts I'm re-posting here so I can have them all in one place. Plus, since this is Thanksgiving week, it buys me a few days to work on my fiction and other, newer blog posts while still ensuring I get my fill of turkey.

I picked up a copy of Lord Darcy by Randall Garrett a while back as part of my research into a potential future project that would blend the genres of fantasy and mystery. Lord Darcy is just that: alternate historical fiction blended with mystery. It's a world where Richard the Lion-Hearted did not die on the battlefield, but instead went on to build the foundation of the greatest empire the world has ever seen.

Lord Darcy is Chief Special Investigator for the Duke of Normandy and, as such, he's called in to solve particular crimes perpetrated against members of the aristocracy. Much like Holmes had his Watson, Darcy has his O'Lochlainn: Master Sorcerer Sean O'Lochlainn, to be precise. Magic works in a sort of alchemy meets science manner. There are Laws of Magic and symposiums, all regulated by the government to the point where sorcerers must be licensed to practice else face severe penalties. There is also Black Magic, outlawed and dangerous as one might expect. Rest assured Darcy and O'Lochlainn have a tangle or two with practitioners of the dark form of sorcery.

Lord Darcy is a collection of short stories. While some are clever, others are so brief it's hard to immerse oneself in them. There is the novella Too Many Magicians which I found kind of droll--much of it is told through dialog and it quickly wore me down and I really found it confusing at times.

Lord Darcy (the character this time) and others come across as flat, and I think this is the biggest flaw with the entire collection. The characters have histories--Darcy himself is in his 40's (I'm guessing)--but we're never given much of a glimpse into his past or anything about his personal life. It's all about the crimes and the ease at which he sees what no one else can. This unfortunately is the fatal flaw in this book for me. I never cared a whole lot whether the crime was solved or not, the murderer discovered, or the conspirators brought to justice. Sorry, but that's just not good.

By my count, this is my 17th consecutive weekly writing progress update. How's that for some consistency?

Here's what I've accomplished this past week:

Pages edited went up 18 from last week's 38 to a current number of 56. Total page count went down by 5 from 377 to 372. That gives me 23 pages for the week (remember this is editing, so a reduction in total page count works, too. ;-) ). Not as good as last week's 25, but I'll take it. If I'm remembering correctly, I wanted to hit at least 20 pages/week, so I made it (this time).

Percentage complete went up to 15.05% from last week's 10.08%.

Total word count is interesting. When I started this second edit, it was at 112,737. It now stands at 109,520. That's good because I think I may wind up adding back in about 2-3,000 words of new material. I therefore like the downward trend, and I think it (hopefully) shows that I'm trimming the fat.

That's it for this week.

Happy writing everyone.

Here's this weekend's batch free of commentary since I'm knee deep in work.

Have a good weekend.

Secrets Of Great Characters, According To 6 Science Fiction Authors
Amazing stories need great characters. And when you're writing a story set in a futuristic or fantastical world, it's more important than ever for readers to be able to relate to your characters. It's also harder than ever, because your characters' lives and experiences will be totally different than your readers'. How do you make people identify with someone who lives in the future, or on another planet? How can your main character stand out, against a bizarre and colorful backdrop? We asked six great science fiction authors for their advice.

Inside the Blogosphere: Science fiction and fantasy's bedroom antics
In science fiction and fantasy, should sex be included in the narrative or not? Should there be different standards for its inclusion in young adult or adult literature? John Ottinger throws the thorny question to a panel of leading scifi bloggers. What should those standards be? What are your personal standards and why?

Good Night, Sweet Phoenix
Five months ago, it landed on the Martian surface — and into our hearts. It gave us soil analysis data, photos of the sky from the red planet, and even hope of extraterrestrial life. Now, with its power deteriorating, its sunlight exposure shrinking, and Martian temperatures dropping to almost -100°C, the Phoenix lander's time may be up.

Will eBooks Kill Book Sales?
The debate on whether eBooks will kill book sales continues.

How to solve all your naming dilemmas
Writing advice.

Spacecraft Force Field Could Protect Mars-Bound Astronauts
Fusion researchers in the United Kingdom, Portugal and Sweden have demonstrated the feasibility of a force field that could be used to protect astronauts on their way to Mars from radiation in space.

Last month, I received all four of Bujold's Sharing Knife books from EOS. Their original call for advanced readers was for book four in the series, Horizon, due out January 27, 2009. But they sweetened the offer by throwing in books one through three. I jumped on it, promising to review not just Horizon, but all four books. As promised, here is the first of those reviews.

Like many novels, Bujold's Beguilement is multi-layered. On one level, it is a fantasy novel where Lakewalkers patrollers protect the lands from malice. On another, it's a romance novel where the veteran patroller, Dag, and a runaway farm girl, Fawn Bluefield, meet under life-threatening circumstances and, as one might suspect, develop a mutual relationship which becomes romantic.

There are other things going in Beguilement, such as the dichotomy between Lakewalkers and farmers, but, for purposes of this review, I'd like to focus on the fantasy and romance layers first.

First, the fantasy: In this respect, Beguilement is good stuff. It takes place in an unnamed world where Lakewalkers, thought to have once been lords and known to be sorcerers, patrol the lands searching for signs of blight and its cause, malices. A malice is a concentration of energy, what Lakewalkers term 'ground', brought to life under mysterious and not fully understood circumstances. Malices are not good. They bring with them beguilement and death, draining the ground from other beings in order to evolve into increasingly more powerful beings. Worst of all, a malice doesn't understand death. This grants them a certain immortality.

Enter the sharing knife.

A sharing knife is a special Lakewalker weapon that, when used on a malice, 'shares' a death with the creature. This act of sharing is the only way to kill a malice.

As much as the book's title denotes one of the principal powers of a malice, it also refers to the effect Dag and Fawn have on one another. Herein enters the romance.

Dag is a dry-witted Lakewalker, a veteran with over twenty malice kills and a reputation as a capable, resourceful patroller. He has tragedy in his makeup, which I won't say necessarily haunts him, but certainly fills him with a sense of regret. It is this regret which increasingly weighs heavy on him when, out on patrol, a new malice threat and a farmer girl named Fawn Bluefield enter his life. I won't ruin anything about the encounter with the malice, only that both Dag and Fawn survive and go on to become lovers. It's an odd relationship: by custom, Lakewalkers and farmers do not interrelate in such ways. They take this 'forbidden love' back to Fawn's home where much drama ensues between herself, her family, and Dag.

That, in a nutshell, is what Beguilement is about. The story has points of slowness, but I never felt like it bogged down. The writing is excellent and tight; while there are other sub-plots intertwined with the main ones, none of them were a distraction. If anything, exactly the opposite: there's plenty of character-building here, and the characters are grounded, believable, and exceptionally thought-out. Fawn, despite entering the story as a runaway farm girl (which seemed a bit of a stereotype), soon shows us she is much more. Dag, for his part, plays the role of veteran soldier-sorcerer well; it's what lies beneath that draws the reader in and allows us to sympathize with his past and what he hopes for his future.

I found Bujold's system of magic and such concepts as the sharing knife to be original and intriguing. In many ways, it was this intrigue which kept me reading and wanting to know more.

One warning: Bujold leaps from one book to another with nary a break in the story. I imagine her having written all four books at one time (is there a fifth still to come?), then the publisher coming along later and slicing it into the four books we currently have. This probably isn't the case, but that's how one might look at it. With that in mind, if you read Beguilement, you'll at least want to pick up Legacy, because it picks up right where book one left off and goes a long way towards concluding the storyline begun in book one.

I think Bujold delivers with Beguilement and the larger The Sharing Knife series as a whole. Superb writing, well-grounded characters, and a colorful world and intriguing magic system all come together to form an entertaining, engaging read.

I had a pretty decent writing week this past week: 25 pages edited, leaving 339 to go, and I reached my week's goal, exceeding 10% completion of this second pass edit.

Here's the page progress chart:

% completion trending upward:

Word count trending downward.

This is a good thing.

I'd previously established that, for fantasy, publishers are looking for novels in the less than 110,000 word range. Of course there are exceptions to this, but as a new writer I don't want to give anyone any excuses, so I'll play by the rules. It took some work getting the word count down to this level. When I started, it was upward of 130,000. That's OK, though: One thing I'm learning as I continue to edit is to be concise. Why say something in two sentences if you can do it in one? That, and oftentimes there are 'extra' words that can be whittled down, making the prose more direct.

That's it. I hope to have some more good progress to post next Monday. Until then…

We were out at the Rocky Hill Ranch mountain bike race last weekend and who did we see there racing but Lance Armstrong himself. It was a bit of a surreal experience as we've watched him on TV often over the many years he competed in and won the Tour de France. My wife and I are both cyclists; my wife has raced mountain bikes for many years. I've mostly been a spectator, though I've been getting into the competition side of things a bit more lately. We ride both dirt and road, and if you follow me on Twitter you'll likely see a ride update here and there in my updates.

However, all that aside, it's been a good week thus far for writing and for finding some cool links. Here they are:

Humans Built Fires 500 Thousand Years Before They Could Speak
Though the ability to make fires is considered one of the great breakthroughs in human civilization, it may have been a more primitive activity than we thought. A new archaeological study has revealed that homo sapiens' ancestors were regularly making fires about 790 thousand years ago.

The Opals that the Martian Sea Left in its Wake
The question at this point isn't whether Mars was once covered in liquid water — it's just a question of how long that water was there before it evaporated. This image provides new evidence that water washed the Martian shores for a tremendously long time. Long enough to reshape the rocks in that crater and to leave behind whole beaches of pearly, hydrated silica commonly known as opal.

Researchers may have found King Solomon's mines
Archaeologists believe a desert site in Jordan may contain the ruins of the elusive King Solomon's Mines.

5,000-Year-Old Mummy DNA Part of New Human Extinction Mystery
The so-called Tyrolean Iceman, a 5,000-year-old mummy found in an Alpine glacier roughly two decades ago, lived in an era when people were smelting copper and living in cities. But a recent study of his mitochondrial DNA — circlets of genetic material passed on solely through mothers — revealed something astonishing about this recent human ancestor. He is from a distinct genetic group that mysteriously disappeared. Perhaps no one sharing his genetic lineage survived into the present day. Or perhaps humans are evolving so quickly that even our close ancestors are genetically distinct from us in significant ways.

Rejection
Author Henry Miller summed it up best when he wrote that, to become an artist, you must "be crushed … have your conflicting points of view annihilated." He wrote that you must be "wiped out" as a human being "in order to be born again an individual." He used words like "carbonized" and "mineralized" to describe what a writer must endure before he or she can "work upwards from the last common denominator of the self."

The Deep-Water Disaster That May Kill Us All
The images you see above are of a deep lake in Camaroom called Nyos — before and after it killed almost 2,000 people with a burst of poison gas. No, this wasn't caused by pollution or global warming. It's a natural phenomenon called a "limnic eruption," and scientists believe that a big one deep beneath the ocean might be enough to cause a mass extinction event.