Halt! What manner of beast be ye?

Before you write that grand, sweeping fantasy sage, you have to take the test.

Season of Perpetual Vacuuming

Now that the weather is starting to get a bit warm, the cats have begun to shed. I brush Hrothgar and Aethel every day, to minimize fur, just like all those pet-care website suggests. I still find myself having to run the vacuum nearly every day. I don't know where or how the cats produce so much fur.

Last night I brushed Hrothgar, and the pile of fur on the floor was nearly as big as him. I could have knitted another cat.


But what trully amazes me is that this morning, I went in to the kitchen to find the floor covered in a fine dusting of gray fur. At the epicenter of the fur was a strange, calm space of cleanliness. It was almost as if a cat had stood in the middle of the kitchen and willed all the fur to explode off of his body. That's what it was: a cat shedding explosion.

Andy's wrong!

So Andy's been watching all the Harry Potter DVDs this week and now he thinks he's an expert. In anticipation of the final book, I'm re-reading the series, but that's something else.

So this morning Andy announces, "Neville Longbottom will kill Harry Potter."

"Um, no."

"Yes. Voldemort will take over Harry and Neville will kill them."

"No! You're wrong!"

"But we already know that Neville can stand up to his friends."

"NO! NO! Harry Potter is not killed by Longbottom!"

"Just you wait and see."

So there, now it's on record, just in case the crazy idea pans out, even though he's totally wrong. Totally.

Kurt Vonnegut

I couldn't believe it when I heard it.

Vonnegut it one of my favorite authors. Especially Slaughterhouse Five. And Cat's Cradle.

When I was in high school, Vonnegut gave a lecture at KU entitled, "How to Have My Job." My English teacher arranged a field trip for the top English students. It was awesome.

I was only 17 at the time and hadn't read any of his works. I've read most of them now.

Here's Vonnegut's "How to Write With Style."

Flame it up, baby!

It's been a while since my last post but it took something amazing to break my silence. What could it be? Flame decal for my Kitchen Aid stand mixer, affectionally known as the "Kitchen Ninja."

Buy posting it in my bog, I get a 10% coupon. Sweet.

And my Kitchen Ninja is one step closer to the diviness of Alton Brown. (Who has flames on his stand mixer. There. I added that as a post script because the first version sounded completely crazy.)

Cabbits and the Bozone Layer

I'm sitting in a house this afternoon and the lady has seven (7!) animals: 3 dogs, 4 cats. One the cats jumps up on a table near me and I notice it has a deformed little stump of a table and large back haunches. I say, "Is your cat a Manx? I have a Manx."

The woman then proceeds to tell me that her cat is actually a cat-rabbit hybrid. According to her, back in the 60s, scientists combined rabbit sperm with a cat's egg an implanted the petri dish baby in a cat and two months later..Viola! A cabbit was born.

I didn't believe a word of this. I really struggled to find a way to tell the woman that she was full of shit. But she believed it so much and the cat did look funny. It's legs looks kind of rabbity. She pointed out that dogs and wolves can mate.

"But they're both in the same family, both canines," I said.

"Horses and mules have donkeys."

"Same family. I don't know if rabbits and cats are the same family." (They're not. It's impossible. The cabbit is myth. Her "cabbit" was actually a Manx with a spine and leg deformity.)

Apparently if a "scientist" is involved, genetically impossible things are possible. Point in fact, I'm always telling Andy that he can say anything and get away with it if he prefaced bizarre statements with "as a scientist, I can tell you..."

Which leads me to the next item. Andy announced this weekend, "As a scientist, I can tell you that the Bozone Layer is mostly composed of 1950s television clowns."

I just like to picture Bozo floating in space.

Pithy Book Review Time

Time for another Liarbyrd's Pithy Book Review. Today's subject: Newton's Wake: A Space Opera by Ken Macloed.

The title had a lot of promise. (Space opera!) And the premise is cool (singularity, post-human technology, a lost "colony" on a distant planet.) But add all these elements together and the whole thing falls flat.

It's bad. Simply a terrible book. First problem: too many characters. As a reader, I find it had to care deeply about the problems of a dozen main characters. Too much is a bad thing. Pick a narrator and stick with it. The one character who might be considered the "central" character is Lucinda Carlyle. Apparently her family is some sort of space mobster outfit. Fine. She's a criminal. I can tolerate that. But she is dumb. Not just dumb, but intolerably dumb. Dumb. Dumb. For example, she buys a spaceship from Political Faction X. It's a good ship, despite their different politcal beliefs. While planet side, another Political Faction X ship appears and steals her ship.

Lucinda's conclusion? P.F. X stole her ship.

The reader shouldn't be smarter than the narrator and the reader should not be giving more information than the narrator has. It just makes the rest of the plot kind of tedious and lacking suspense. I knew who stole her damn ship immediately it took her another chapter of being told by other characters before she got it.

Second problem: half of the characters are Scottish and the dialog is written in a fucking dialect. What the fuck?! I hate dialects written phonetically in fiction. Nothing is more jarring than having the eye stumble over "dae na" and trying to decipher it. What the hell did the characters say? It tears the reader away from the act of reading and makes them conscious of reading. Breaks the magic, if you will.

And might I add, that lots of writers think that dialect is okay because Mark Twain did it. Well, they're wrong and Mark Twain was wrong. This does not add "color" or make the characters vivid. It makes reading work and drains the story it's power to hold the reader's attention.

And the third problem is that due to the crowded narrative with all the characters, the action and "political intrigue" is just plain confusing. I honestly have no idea what happened in the last fifty pages, I just know it's over. Thankfully.