Upon the 50th Anniversary of...

Music of the Moment: Exterminate Regenerate by Chameleon Circuit. Because, yes, as most of you are probably already aware, I am a Doctor Who fanboy. :P

I'm working to finish An Iron Sea before I head off to college. It's quite doable. I just need to actually do it. For those of you who may not know quite what An Iron Sea is, it is a novella I am working on. The basic idea behind it is that Antarctica is beginning to build itself a mythology and system of magic, and is affecting the scientists and other people who live there as a result. The main character is a doctor at McMurdo Station with a very scientific mindset who is forced to confront these new occurrences. So far I'm at 23k, and am probably a little over half-way done, which makes me very happy.

I'm following the #amwriting chat on Twitter still, and I have to say that it's probably going to become a staple in my writing life. The overall exchanges there are quite heartening.

I read the book "Education of a Wandering Man" by Louis L'Amour yesterday. It's his memoirs. For those of you not familiar with his name, L'Amour wrote quite a few western novels, probably somewhere over a hundred, though the exact number escapes me. Most people write him off as a writer of cheap stories, but his memoir is very interesting. He was an itinerant worker from his late teenage years until WWII, going all over the world on ships and traveling across the United States doing odd jobs. But, every year he read just over 100 books. And these weren't little things either. We're talking the works of Shakespeare, Bacon, Darwin, Marlowe, Twain, Nietzsche, George Bernard Shaw, Steinbeck, and even religious works like the Koran and the Vedas. The amount and the quality of what L'Amour read a year astounds me. But his memoir is quite interesting and, in my opinion, well worth the read. Check it out.

I'll be reading "Deep Secret" by Diana Wynne Jones next. Someone asked me what I might want as a gift off of Amazon a few months ago. I chose this book because it had a picture of a centaur on the front, and I happen to think that centaurs are the coolest thing since sliced bread. I've leafed through it before, enough to get an idea of what it's about, but I've not sat down and actually read it. So, that's what's next for me.

I'll be planning a possible YA series with a good friend later today. She's a really good person. I often use her as a weirdness filter, running strange story ideas past her to see what might work and what probably won't. She likes my stories, but she can still look at them with a critical eye and tell me that I'm a loonie for attempting certain things. It's really nice to have someone like that who can help you with your stories.

Oh, and as far as the title, today is the 50th anniversary of Hawaii's statehood. My cousin/high school computer teacher told me this when I stopped in this morning to bug him. It's like he expected me to know it since I'm going to college there and everything :P