Sense of Adventure » Dinosaurs!

The Dinosaur Lords

Victor — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 22:55:10 +0000

As I believe I mentioned, I’ve been writing busily – for only like the last eight and a half years – on a modest little fantasy novel I like to call The Dinosaur Lords.

And by “modest,” I of course mean, “oh, holy crap, it’s a boat anchor!”

Now, while printed out to its full 1000-page (plus) glory, it’d be real Eryops choker …

Because, see, Eryops supposedly had the biggest maw (relatively) of any prehistoric critter. No, really.

… I don’t believe it’s otherwise anchorlike at all. Indeed, I believe it’s a ripping good read.

That’s what I wrote it to be, kids.

And now my burly baby’s gone – *gasp!* – into the world.

What that means (no, really this time) is I’ve sent the full manuscript, plus an (abbreviated) cast list and a (brief) synopsis to a literary agent. (And if you want to give your brain a good steamrolling sometime, try squishing a quarter-million words plus of story into under 4000 words.)

And I’m scared poopless.

Please don’t misunderstand: I’m not daunted. However this plays out, I will make this work. This is a big book in more than mere avoirdupois. And I will do whatever it takes to make it go over big.

But still … this is a huge thing. A huge opportunity.

I don’t feel right about divulging too many details just yet – yeah, sorry; playing cagey again; deal. There are numerous reasons for that reticence, not that I’m going to tell you them, either.

I can say that the already colossal debt I owe certain dear writer friends has just increased substantially.

So … please keep your fingers crossed, as well as whatever other body parts you suspect might prove helpful. If this does pan out it will take a huge load off. And you will probably get to hold the finished novel up to your wondering eyes a great deal sooner.

And believe me – you do want to get your eyes on this.

In fact, you can. Some, anyway. Very soon.

Not to give anything away (yet) or anything but … tune in tomorrow, kiddies. Same station; who knows what time?

Dinosaur Hunt!

Victor — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 06:47:53 +0000

What’s the point of writing a fantasy novel with dinosaurs if you can’t make toy dinosaurs fight?

Left: Corythosaurus + dude. Right: Allosaurus. Implicit: Awesome!

None. None at all.

I told you what I’d do when I got my hands on modeling clay. After Steve Kubica kindly emailed me to tell me the clay I had failed to survive the Great Purge, I went and scored some.

Then the above ensued. On – yes, that is my dining room floor.

This really is something I do to justify spending money on toy dinosaurs help me write. Yes, this really is a scene, although I rewrote it a few days ago, before I got the modeling clay, and hence had to make do with just the dino models. Which really was what I needed.

The beast on the left is, as stated, a Corythosaurus. It’s a kind of hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur. In the book it’s usually referred as a Morion, after the style of helmet. If you hit the handy link you’ll see why. (Hint: it’s the crest. “Corythosaurus” means, “helmet lizard.” Seriously.)

On your right is a big meat-eater called an Allosaurus. In my fantasy it’s more commonly called a Matador, which means Slayer (and has nothing in reality to do with bullfighting; that’s a toreador.) Or as he might say, You Can Call Me Al.

The dude is Jaume, Comte dels Flors. The title means Count of the Flowers in Catalan. He’s a Hero. Capital H. Which you might gather from the fact he’s, you know, stabbing an Allosaurus in the chest with a freaking spear.

And yes, in the book he has an actual head. We’re dealing with Plasticine and very small scale, here.

Another reason I took and posted the picture is that Steve “S. M.” Stirling, in our last writers group meet, asked if humans weren’t like pimples on dinosaurs. And the answer of course, is, some of them, sure. But not these dinosaurs. Nobody’s riding into battle on a 130-foot Amphicoelias.

Currently I’m rewriting a scene that really has me stoked: the book’s first inside view of a big Dinosaur Knight vs. Dinosaur Knight battle. After a brief, supernatural prologue the book opens with a battle, in fact a larger one. But it’s all viewed from the perspective of a bystander. This is getting down and dirty and participating.

I’m stoked because I feel as if it’s shaping up to be the bangingest battle scene I’ve ever written. Though I’m confident that once I throw a rewrite through the final battle, it will surpass this one. Still, I really am having fun with this. Walking Emma Dog along the ditch this afternoon I was declaiming a particular passage that had just come to me over and over out loud. Emphasis on loud. Fortunately there was no one else on the ditch to have me committed.

(Emma is smart: she manifestly understands a fair amount of spoken English, and also manifestly understands that most of what Daddy says is not worth paying attention to. So she was, y’know, cool. Also, she already knows I’m nuts.)

The toys will come in very handy rewriting this battle. Of course I’m not reproducing it on any complete scale, even though Dinosaur Knight contingents tend to be small, for various reasons (most of which are, “expense.”) Which is largely why I’m not doing it: these “museum replica” grade dinos cost money. Also I don’t have the time, or inclination, to make a bunch of other inch-and-a-half tall clay dudes to ride on them.

Fortunately, most of the action I’m describing is one on one. Equally fortunately, I have another hadrosaur toy, which by remarkable coincidence is the other common war-duckbill, a Parasaurolophus. Which is also called a Sackbut. No, that’s not an insult. It’s Renaissance for trombone. If I need a third combatant, I can fake it with Al. He won’t mind.

By the way, getting the shot wasn’t as easy as it might seem, given that the subjects aren’t actually alive, and can’t escape or bite me (if you don’t think a twelve-inch Allosaurus could give you a nasty bite, go back and look closer at the little fucker.) The biggest difficulty was the tendency of the spear to droop. Yes, insert dick joke here; I’ll wait. I even tried taping it in place, which probably would’ve been a good idea if only the tape had stuck to the damn dinosaur. Eventually I cheated and propped the tip of the spear – which is actually some kind of dried weed stalk from right next to my front porch – on the Allosaurus’s far shoulder where you can’t see it.

Oh, dear, I’ve gone and given the secret away. The illusion of reality is shattered!

That may not be the best angle from which to have photographed the little tableau. But I simply could not resist capturing the way Al seems to be smiling and waving jauntily at the camera. To get the full manic effect, click on the pic or, indeed, right here.

Sick and tired…

Victor — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 07:28:54 +0000

… of being sick and tired.

In a way it’s kind of reassuring, though, realizing I’ve picked up some kind of bug. It explains why I’ve been so extremely tired even days after I finished my Great Rewriting Siege, why in spite of that I’ve been having trouble sleeping, and, oh, yeah, why I’ve had an upset stomach the last couple days.

It still sucks, of course.

I’m not terribly sick. What’s worst is it’s just enough to make it hard to focus mentally. Which is making it hard to do the other urgent rewriting I need to do. Bitch.

So right directly I’m going to just go and try to get to sleep, see if I can make it a decent sleep. And get a running start on the morrow.

Oh – you may have recently seen something about recent claims that, not only are birds not descended from dinosaurs, but dinosaurs might be descended from birds. Here’s an interesting and persuasive smackdown to that idea, delivered courtesy of Smithsonianmag.com‘s Dinosaur Tracking blog.

One more river to cross!

Victor — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:27:51 +0000

Okay, I’m not yet finished with the rough draft of my epic (in several senses) fantasy novel, The Dinosaur Lords. But I’ve at last hit the final milestone before writing those most blessed words of tongue or pen, The End!

Another, slightly creepier take on Hesperonychus.

And after only six and a half years. Gee.

Now, it’s true that even when I write The End, the novel won’t be done done. it’ll still need rewriting. And the original writing is always by far the hardest part. Not to say there’s not a mess of doing left; the book may hit 275,000 words and near 1000 pages in draft. Which’ll get trimmed down.

The case with me – and what I still, after over a decade, struggle to operate in accordance with – is that I don’t know my story or my characters until I’ve told the story once. What I have struggled with is my perfectionism, which chokes me for fear I’ll do something, anything wrong. Which ironically is a foolish fear, because of what I said: I don’t know the terrain ’till I’ve walked it.

The key is: it will be done soon. At long last.

As a matter of fact – how about when I finish the draft – let’s not count too many eggs as laying – a quick once-over I start posting chapters here for your delectation? Plus you can offer helpful suggestions, spot typos, that kinda thing.

Let me know, please. And to all my friends and fans – thanks for sticking by me, and having faith. I will justify it.

More on yesterday’s post: Above is another take on our little friend Hesperonychus elizabethae. It’s credited directly to the discoverer, Nick Longrich, whom I perhaps unkindly characterized as Captain Obvious. (But, come on. “It’s basically a predator of small things”? What gave you your first clue?) He turns out to be at least something of a fanboy. Huge surprise.

Anyway, as opposed to yesterday’s cute li’l face-muncher – by the way, here’s the link to the article I foolishly forgot to put in yesterday – this version looks kinda creepy to me. More like something that would swarm over you and devour you alive by itty bitty bites. Or the minions of some evil villain.

Heh, heh.

I’m sure I’ll find a role for both versions in this sprawling Dinosaur High Fantasy Cycle I’ve embarked upon. Somewhere.

(Important Safety Tip: in this ficton dinosaurs are animals. And monsters; can’t forget that. They don’t talk or dress up in clothes or anything. Although the war-dinosaurs sometimes get additional armor after the fashion of Medieval war horses. So, yes, Ian: armored freakin’ dinosaurs!)

Writing words like pulling teeth

Victor — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:55:00 +0000

As I near The End, it becomes so.

Teenage dinosaur gang dies trapped in mudflat.

It’s pure avoidance behavior. I know that. There’s that within me, as there is within all of us, that wants very badly for me not to succeed. There’s also that within me that shies away from the load of responsibility which will land abruptly on my shoulders when I write those two words at the end of my rough draft of The Dinosaur Lords. (Which just a few minutes ago passed the 900-page, 250,000 word mark.)

No more convenient excuses. Time to act.

So, yeah. Scary.

Yesterday, when he had me over to his house to devour one of the three-dozen ham, egg, bean, and chile burritos he’d made for his work-lunches, Joe suggested I just relax and let it happen, rather than try to force it. “In a very real sense,” he said, “it’s already done.”

Indeed. Joe’s the wisest man I know. Or know of.

A few years back I learned I could most readily complete daunting tasks if I remembered a quote from L. Neil Smith’s first novel, The Probability Broach. (The link takes you to the graphic novel, illustrated by the excellent Scott Bieser; you can read it free online here.) Our protagonist, who’s having a worse day than you and I are likely ever to have, thinks to himself, “Somewhere at the end of this day, a warm bed and a soft pillow were waiting for me. I just needed to make it there.” Or words muchly to that effect.

That’s been of enormous help to me. Years ago when I was assembling my first “Frankenbox” PC, I found myself sitting on the living room rug halfway done and surrounded by components and sheets of instructions that seemed to bear no discernible relationship to one another. And suddenly those words came to me. I took a deep breath, and realized that at some point in the future, the job was done and the computer worked fine. In time/space, it was an accomplished fact. I just had to persevere until I got there.

And so fortified I did.

Like all the many, many other useful and powerful tools I’ve assembled over my life, I don’t always remember to use that one. When I do it serves me very well.

So I guess I should let it do so now, huh?

(Side note: the above image and links, concerning a newly-announced dinosaur discovery, I threw in to honor the book’s subject matter. Don’t forget to run your mouse over the pic for a special message!)

Reviving freezer-burned brats

Victor — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:23:16 +0000

I can’t promise this will bring back seriously freezer burned bratwurst; these were freezer-burned, but I don’t know how badly. How do you measure that, anyway?

At any rate, I defrosted them. Chopped up a quarter-onion or so and plopped it in water in a pot – enough to cover the brats, so there aren’t really any precise measurements here. I threw in a pinch of salt and maybe half a teaspoon of black pepper. Brought it to a boil and added about a teaspoonful of honey. When it was well-mixed I added the brats, in this case three.

Simmered for fifteen minutes, stirring and turning frequently. Then I broiled them for three minutes a side. Done!

With a can of black beans and some Dijon-style mustard you have a tasty meal that also sports quite a low glycemic load. Would also go nicely with my go-to side dishes of olives and walnuts.

Sadly, I succumbed to the lure of starch and ate them on bread. The fact it’s wheat bread saves me from the horrors of high fructose corn syrup (since I searched to find some that lacked it – don’t assume anything!) It does not in fact help with the GL.

I need to lose weight. Seriously. Going low-GL would help. It has in the past. I probably need to go hard-core Atkins for a while.

The difficulty is I’m still detoxing on my news/opinion fast. It may seem like a wussy rationalization; it may even be. But in my experience and observation trying to change too many things at once is a recipe for failure.

There seems to be a case made for total life makeover working. That entails stuff like changing your appearance, your friends, where you hang out, even where you live. We’re talking everything. I’m not going to do that. Most of my life serves me fine.

Slowly but surely I’m getting things under control. I’d like to speed up the process. I guess I’ll do what I can.

On other fronts: while I ate my tasty revivified brats and black beans I watched a Nova episode called “The Four-Winged Dinosaur,” about microraptor. Microraptor was a chicken-sized beast with well-developed aerodynamic feathers on all four limbs. It’s presumed to have somehow used all four limbs to glide – something no other known animal, past or present, has done. The show chronicled microraptor’s role in a dispute between mainstream paleontologists, who say birds descended from dinosaurs, and a Santa Claus-bearded bird paleontologist who maintains they didn’t either.

Now, I won’t claim detachment: I come down firmly on the “birds are too dinos, dammit!” side. For the very unscientific reason I suspect most scientists do: because I want to, dammit!

That said, I’m afraid I have to call foul for the other side. The basic dispute here was over whether microraptor had sprawling (hence non-dinosaurian) hind limbs, or basically upright, hence definitively dinosaur. They did wind-tunnel tests with a reconstructed microraptor in variations of the “upright hind limbs” configuration. When they found one that worked fairly well, they stopped. Without testing the “sprawled” configuration to see if that glided better.

That doesn’t seem fair.

That said, and quite aside from disagreeing with him about the whole birds-are-dinos thing, I never quite got the insistence that, should microraptor have indeed had sprawling hind limbs, that was the “death” of the theory birds descended from dinosaurs. He appeared to believe it would demonstrate that microraptor wasn’t a dinosaur, but instead an ancestor of birds, which he claims (if I have this straight) diverged from dinosaurs about the time they split up with crocodiles.

How does that follow? What if, for example, microraptor was a so-called evolutionary dead end, and nothing much descended from it?

Bombay Calling!

Victor — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:43:18 +0000

But first, since we needs more graphics on this site, and also since I’ve been dying to post this:

Japan welcomes its robot overlords

Hat tip to Katherine Mangu-Ward at reason.

What’s it got to do with the subject of this post? Well, accomplished rationalizer that I am (it’s a living), I could spin you a mighty explanation about how it pertains to technology and globalization in our modern world. The truth: nothing!

And yes, I know we’re now supposed to call it Mumbai, not Bombay. Bear with me. And always remember: we do digression right! And by “right,” I mean “compulsively.”

What this is all really about is that my phone, hence Internet, service blinked out an hour or two ago. Yes, I suffer from the Heartbreak of Dial-Up. A connection I need to correct here, directly. *Sigh*: it still must wait its turn.

I had no dial tone, either inside the house or at the box in the back. To quote Mojo Jojo, “Curses.” So I called Qwest tech support.

Which connected me with a rather obviously Indian gentleman. That’s subcontinental, not American. After hearing my piteous plaint, he asked if I’d tried calling my landline from my cell phone.

“No,” I admitted. “There didn’t seem much point if I didn’t get a dial tone.”

So he bade me Hold while he called, and I Held, and lo! the phone did ring.

The first time I picked it up I got nothing – although I also didn’t get that utter leaden anechoic deadness when the line is just plain out. I hung up. The phone rang again, and this time I had a connection!

So we’re back in business for now. And I have to get broadband. Arrgh!

Anyway, the reason I named the post as I did is that the incident put me in mind of a classic rock song which you’ve never heard of, “Bombay Calling,” by the sadly overlooked late 1960s/early 1970s group It’s a Beautiful Day. It’s great in itself, a smokin’ four miunute instrumental. Moreover it provided the inspiration (by which I think they meant, “all of the notes”) for one of my all-time favorite songs: Deep Purple’s classic “Child in Time,” which I’m listening to as I type this.

Yes, kids, I know dinosaurs and humans didn’t walk the Earth at the same time. I’d remember.

So anyway – that’s what’s happening. Now to put on pants (“Welcome to TMI Theatre!”), grab Emma, and head out to the Nature Center for a walk while there’s still some daylight yet.

A disaster movie waiting to happen?

Victor — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 03:26:06 +0000

Does anybody else find this, ah, disturbing? Wired.com informs us that Drillers Accidentally Create First Live Magma Observatory.

That’s right: workers at a geothermal site in Hawai’i accidentally busted into a pool of live magma. Which, as we all know, is lava that has yet to come out.

What could possibly go wrong?

Oh.

In other, totally, completely, utterly unrelated news, scientists claim that evidence suggests the Deccan Traps event was the primary cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs. What caused the Traps was a colossal escape of magma to form what’s called a Large Igneous Province. How large? About half of India. Which constitutes an eruption way beyond a mere supervolcano.

It would probably look, you guessed it, a lot like the picture of Kilauea above. Only bigger. Much, much bigger.

So go right on ahead, boys! Poke that sleeping monster with a stick. It’s for Science, right?

Parrots? Parrots?

Victor — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:45:10 +0000

Via Cryptomundo, we learn that a DNA survey by the Chicago Field Museum reveals that “falcons are more closely related to parrots than to other hunters such as hawks and eagles.” Allegedly.

Say what?

I can accept it as a cosmic joke that the closest living relative of the great and terrible Tyrannosaurus rex is the tasty chicken on my plate (get your revenge on Rex with this delicious-looking recipe for marinated red chile chicken.) But to think that the fierce and independent (and, face it, cute) little kestrels I see around here so often, who so perfectly exemplify Gary Larson‘s dictum that “Birds of prey know they’re cool,” are … parrots?

One way or another, that’s what they say here: “Field Museum’s genetic study rewrites family tree on birds.”

Read + weep.