A week or two ago I discovered the blog How To Write Badly Well. Anyone can write badly badly, but it takes real skill to write badly well, and that is what the blog tries to explore. (The blog only has twenty entries so far, so it’s possible to read from the start if you’re so inclined. Some of my favorite entries are here, here, and here.)

One post asked for badly-well-written 300-word stories, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I made an attempt to ham-fistedly combine fantasy and sci-fi, while also abusing the character map. I wasn’t the winner, so I figured I’d post it here. Enjoy.

Aõgÿne could do this. He knew the dragon had a weak point near her upper rectum, if only he could trick her into exposing it. He tossed an antimatter grenade to the dragon’s left. The implosion would tear a tiny rift though the space-time continuum, which he hoped would frighten the beast. When the grenade detonated the dragon turned with a screeching hiss. At once he activated a laser-tipped spear and hurled it with all his might. It was a direct hit, and the creature cried out in pain as the laser burned through her bowels. Aõgÿne now unsheathed his sword, approached the writhing dragon from behind, and slit her throat in one swift motion. This Wævian moon would be terrorized no more.

But he knew the victory was bittersweet.

After six months on Fa£aña, he would now have to leave. It was all part of the job for an intergalactic dragon slayer like Aõgÿne, and leaving had never been a problem before. But falling in love was never part of the plan. His heart ached as he thought of leaving Eröå behind.

He paused before entering the building to watch her through the window. The sight of her beautiful elvish features was too much for his heart to bear. He scribbled a message on an electronic tablet and placed it in front of her door.  With a heavy heart, he flew away from the moon at three hundred times the speed of light. But he knew there was no speed so fast that the memory of Eröå wouldn’t catch up to him.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson is the best book I have ever read.

So I mentioned in a post over two years ago that I was going to start reading The Chronicles Of Narnia.  Well I just finished them over Thanksgiving break, and I thought I’d share my thoughts.

First of all, it didn’t take me two years to read them, I just read a lot of other stuff in between.  Especially after I finished The Silver Chair, I think it was over a year before I went back to the series.  I can easily say that it was my least favorite book in the series.

As Jonah mentioned in a comment on that post, the books were not written in the order in which the story takes place.  The Horse And His Boy and The Magician’s Nephew were written after The Silver Chair, but before The Last Battle, although the stories take place much earlier in the Narnia timeline.  I think The Magician’s Nephew needs to be read next-to-last to be properly appreciated.  There’s just too much in the story that you wouldn’t understand or appreciate if it was the first Narnia book you read.  Of people I’ve talked to who have read the series, they either didn’t like The Magician’s Nephew at all, or they liked it but only when they read the series for a second time.  I thought it was great, which is probably because I read it next-to-last.  Reading The Horse And His Boy where it is presented chronologically, however, is probably not going to detract from the story.

I will avoid spoilers even for this fifty-year-old book series (although, really, isn’t there a statute of limitations on spoilers?), but I have to say I was disappointed with the treatment of one character in particular.  Seriously, I think this character must have been named for a person who C.S. Lewis really liked when he started writing the books, but while he was writing the last book this person must have run over his dog, repeatedly.  The ultimate treatment of this character was just unnecessary.  In a way it reminded me of the gratuitous demise of Chef on South Park.  If you’ve read the books I’m sure you know who I’m referring to.

(Actually, I’m avoiding spoilers because Stephanie is reading the books now, so don’t leave any spoilers in the comments please!)

A little over two years ago (over Thanksgiving of 2004 I think), I began reading The Baroque Cycle, a series of three novels by Neal Stephenson.  In all, they total out at around three thousand pages.  Last night I finally finished the third and final book.  I’m not sure if I’m just a slow reader or if the books needed to have a lot of useless information taken out or if I just don’t allocate enough of my time to the task of reading.  Probably all of the above.

Part of the slowness is a result of the reading level, which is on par with The Lord Of The Rings, which I spent about a year and a half on (I think I spent a semester or summer on each book, including The Hobbit).  Both were filled with long, descriptive passages where you read five or six pages before anything actually happens.  Which isn’t to say that I disliked either set of books.  But sometimes I would get tired of them and put them down for a month before picking them back up.  Now I’m just looking forward to being able to read other things that are hopefully a little faster in pace.  Next up is The Chronic[what!]cles of Narnia, which shouldn’t take me nearly so long.  We got a single-volume copy of the whole set for Christmas last year, but I haven’t had a chance to read it.

That metals consisted partly of water was obvious from the fact that, when you heated them up, they became fluids.  But some other substance must be combined with water in order to create a metal.  The missing ingredient was supplied by invisible rays from the planets, which penetrated the ground and combined with the water that was there in the earth.  The rays from that dimmest and most sluggish of planets, Saturn, created the basest of all metals, lead.  Jupiter was responsible for tin and Mars for iron.  Venus did copper, the moon silver, Mercury, obviously, accounted for mercury, and the Sun made gold.  This was why the gold-hungry Spaniards, in their explorations and conquests, had never strayed far from the Equator, for that was where the Sun beat down most directly, and produced the richest posits of its precious Element.

It’s Christmas Eve and I am back in Newton for a few days.  Unfortunately, I have to go back to Charlotte today.  You see, I am taking care of Stephanie’s fish over the Christmas break, and I’m apparently bad at it, because I left him at my apartment yesterday and he’ll probably die before I get back there—unless I make an emergency fish-trip today.  His name is Mo, short for Molybdenum, which is element forty-two on the periodic table of the elements.  This is the kind of thing that happens when you marry a chemist. :)

I also finished reading Michael Crichton’s State Of Fear Wednesday night, which meant I only spent five nights reading it.  Not that I exactly set any speed-reading records for that, but I don’t typically read that fast so I’m mentioning it as an indication of how much I enjoyed it.  This marks the fifth Michael Crichton book that I’ve read since Garrison introduced me to the author in seventh grade.  I’ve read: The Andromeda Strain, The Lost World, Prey, Jurassic Park, and State of Fear (in that order); I think it’s my favorite of them.  I am starting to pick up on a certain “Crichton pattern”: a part fiction/part research paper story about a few good guys—at least one of whom is extremely intellectual and holds radical new theories that modern science rejects—go up against bad guys who started off meaning well but things got out of control.  And of course every book has to somehow incorporate chaos theory, the idea that humans can’t predict and therefore can’t control or understand the behavior of complex systems and that trying to do so is a recipe for disaster.  Look forward to long lectures wherein Crichton states his scientific views through the personas of his characters.  The Andromeda Strain doesn’t quite fit into that model but it was his first book.  Not that I’m complaining—I happen to like the way he writes.  I’m just noticing a pattern.  State Of Fear stated a lot of things that I’ve really kinda thought for years but I didn’t realize there was so much evidence for it.  For those of you planning to read the book I won’t spoil it by talking about it...  I wasn’t even planning on getting the book, but it was on sale at the bookstore and I read the inside flap and saw something to the effect of “from the glaciers of Iceland to the volcanoes of Antarctica” and I was sold.  I have always had a fascination with Antarctica for some reason.  Which might surprise some people who know me and my abhorrence for cold weather that seems to intensify with every passing winter.  But I still think Antarctica is really cool, probably because there’s so much there that no one understands or knows anything about.  And I wonder what all is trapped under the ice, since it was a jungle many many moons ago.  Speaking of cold weather, I’d like to see a survivor somewhere that’s not super hot.  I’m not saying they should go to Antarctica or Siberia or Greenland... I’m more thinking somewhere mountainous like the Andes mountains or Nepal.  I’m getting tired of islands.

This morning I had a dream that the day before I had let an army recruitment guy talk me into signing up for the Marines, and that now I had papers saying Boot Camp would start at 1 am on January first and that after six months I was going to be deployed to Tokyo for some reason.  And then when I was slowly becoming conscious, I was freaking out thinking “why did I sign up for the Marines, there’s a war going on and people are dying, why would I do that??” and I was laying there trying to decide if I had dreamed that or if it really happened, and I finally decided that it was a dream by walking through everything I did yesterday and realizing that I never met any Marine recruitment guy.

Stephanie just called and said I don’t need to pick up Mo, her parents will pick him up on the way back to Laurinburg tomorrow.  That saves two hours of my day.  Wahoo!

I don’t care what your momma says
  Christmas time is near
I dont care what your daddy says
  Christmas time is dear