November's Story On Patreon

Click here to go to Patreon! 

This went up on, well, the last day of the month, let's be honest. I thought it was done mid-month, but after a couple alpha and beta readers had one or two suggestions, I worked on it more. And then, you know, there was Thanksgiving and then my kids were sick, but I got it all finished before I GOT SICK TOO.

Seriously, if you're like, "Why haven't you posted since 2013?" It's due to a few reasons:

1) Now I have TWO KIDS. In 2013 I only had one and life was easy and fun-loving and I had time to write blog posts and books and fritter away the hours on beautiful things. Then in 2014, I had my second kid, Zoe, and since then living has taken on hurricane dimensions. Yes. Also, I started a website on Wordpress, and I like it much better. I'm pretty sure Google abandoned Blogger, for the most part. But what do I know? I usually don't hang out here. I hate the address, and the name, Talking to the Walls. Because yeah, I started this blog in 2005, before I even understood what the hell a blog was. So obviously, I was way into railroad ties and their innate poetry. Hence the ridiculously unrelated address.

2) Well, like I said. I started a website with a domain name that makes sense for me and what I do (I'm a writer, and my brand is me: Nicole Grotepas, the best brand name IN THE FREAKING WORLD).

3) But I can't just let this site DIE. Because it's my living record! So I leave it here. When I get a hankering to turn my life into an empire, I think, "My god, I'll double post! I'll double post the living crap out everything! I'll put all my stuff on my other website and this website and Patreon and FB and Twitter and Tumblr!!!" And like, right now, I do it for a few days and then quickly burn out. So yes. This site is still live.

4) Did I mention I have two kids? People with more than that are idiots. Well, I mean, I admire and pity them all at once. Sure, they can say to me, "It's fine. It's easy! Once you get past two, it's like THEY TAKE CARE OF THEMSELVES AND THEN SOME." The and "then some" is that supposedly once they have a kid over 7 or so, that kid then proceeds to baby sit the younger ones. You've seen this on such disastrous (yet addicting, so I'm told) shows like that one that went down in flames because of some sex-abuse scandal. You know, where basically the parents don't even parent, because that's why they had thirty kids!

Ok, so I do think that people with lots of kids are a bit cuckoo, but more power to them! I do not feel personally responsible for their troubles. Or anything like that, I just know that for myself, I CAN BARELY HANDLE TWO. I adore my kids, I really do. They regularly melt my heart and make me laugh and grin so hard my face feels like it's about to crack in two. But, yeah, they also suck the life out of me. They're little energy vampires. I constantly mediate their battles. I am a warden. And at night, I can barely hang on long enough to possibly fold the laundry and watch a bit of some BBC police procedural on Netflix.

Anyhoo. Did I complain about being a parent? Yeah, well. I love it. And I don't. But mostly I do.

The point is, if you're looking for some new sci-fi, and you have .99 cents to spare per short story, I am on Patreon and I NEED YOU.

Ringworld, Arthur C. Clarke, "The Call of Cthulhu," and Cordwainer Smith

Listing them out makes me realize how scattered I am. Scattershot approach, I always say. Have as many irons in the fire as possible, you get more done that way. Um. Yes.

I've begun reading from the short stories of Clarke, Lovecraft, and Cordwainer Smith because Ringworld is starving me in a number of ways. The ideas are interesting and for that—as a hypothetical situation, you know, a planet in the form of a ring around a sun—I give Larry Niven credit. But the characters lack soul. The conversation is dull and even the moments of introspection that crop up from time to time for Louis Wu are emaciated.  

The interaction between the three different races could be more than what it is, and from time to time there's not enough insight into why the kzin or puppeteer (the two main alien races) do strange things. Niven seems to want to convey a sense of danger or mystery to certain actions, but instead I feel cheated in moments such as when Speaker-to-Animals (the Kzin, who is like a humanoid cat. Think Cats-the-musical-creatures with the height of a Wookie) leaps into the bushes suddenly after grinning maniacally at Louis Wu. Later we learn that Speaker-to-Animals was just going hunting, not that something monstrous happened to him, as the foreboding tone initially suggested. 

Niven leads you down a path part of the way and then jerks you in another direction, for seemingly no reason except perhaps because he can. I get it: he wants us to feel as confused as Louis Wu does by the aliens and their oh-so-alien behavior. I guess that's one way to accomplish it.

But to me this is the problem with a surplus of show-don't-tell. You end up with just the skeleton, which, as interesting as that is, requires some skin and meat to make it attractive. This is why when I pick up Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu," I devour it. It's why as soon as a friend loaned me Cordwainer Smith and I saw that there was more than just soulless dialog and fruitless introspection, I dove in headfirst. 

I knew nothing of H.P. Lovecraft until last winter. Kind of insane, don't you think? It blows my mind that despite my eight years in college studying literature and before that, the twelve years of public education, I read obscure things like the City of Ladies, but no Lovecraft. 

This baffles me even more when I see in his writing such carefully constructed prose and beautifully rendered scenes that I can feel the horror growing (and it's not gory horror, at least, not so far. It's the kind of horror that suggests that "we live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far." As soon as we figure out the universe, we'll go mad...) with each sentence as the protagonist journeys further into his discovery.

Perhaps I go overboard. I haven't finished the story yet, though it's short. I am also in the midst of "Scanners Live in Vain" by Cordwainer Smith. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever get through Ringworld. I DID finish the story "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke and I am sad to say it was a huge disappointment. This is the only Clarke I've ever read and the sheer uneventful nature of that short story makes me wonder if I ought to read any more.  

The thing is, I think I struggle with hard sci-fi. I don't really know where the line of demarcation is separating hard sci-fi from soft (?) sci-fi, but I'm going to say it's between Ringworld and Lovecraft. I know, I know, Lovecraft is horror. Not sci-fi. 

So what is hard sci-fi? I plan to research it more and perhaps when I'm done with Ringworld and the short stories, I'll put up a review.