Probably the most time consuming activity, however, (other than sleeping and work) has been politics. Hi. I’m Brad, and I’m a political junky. I can’t seem to get enough of this soap opera that has unfolded over the last nine months. And I’ve stumbled across a handful of websites that update many times per day. I’m practically glues at times, switching between them, seeing what the latest scuttlebutt is on McCain or Obama. I don’t like to foist my views on others, but in case you’re wondering, I’m pro Obama.

I’ve been working on my latest novel, The Winds of Khalakovo, quite a bit. I finished rewriting and polishing the first ten chapters so that I could send it off to my agent. That’s done, and I’m working on the rest now. I’m hoping to have a good second draft done by the end of this month. No, I’m committing to it! You heard it here first.

I’ve also had a few nibbles on some short stories, but nothing confirmed yet, so I’ll hold off posting any news for now. More info as I have it, but keep your fingers crossed for me.

Solar-Power Breakthrough

Researchers have made a major advance in inorganic chemistry that could lead to a cheap way to store energy from the sun. In so doing, they have solved one of the key problems in making solar energy a dominant source of electricity.

Daniel Nocera, a professor of chemistry at MIT, has developed a catalyst that can generate oxygen from a glass of water by splitting water molecules. The reaction frees hydrogen ions to make hydrogen gas. The catalyst, which is easy and cheap to make, could be used to generate vast amounts of hydrogen using sunlight to power the reactions. The hydrogen can then be burned or run through a fuel cell to generate electricity whenever it’s needed, including when the sun isn’t shining.

If you’re a member of SFWA, and you’d like to give the story a read, you can do so here.

Anyway, the book… Here’s the product description, via Amazon:

In a city that runs on a dwindling supply of magic, a young boy is drawn into a life of wizardry and adventure. Conn should have dropped dead the day he picked Nevery’s pocket and touched the wizard’s locus magicalicus, a stone used to focus magic and work spells. But for some reason he did not. Nevery finds that interesting, and he takes Conn as his apprentice on the provision that the boy find a locus stone of his own. But Conn has little time to search for his stone between wizard lessons and helping Nevery discover who—or what—is stealing the city of Wellmet’s magic.

I didn’t know what to expect from the book, because I hadn’t read anything about it before buying it, but I’m familiar with Sarah’s writing from her short fiction (as well as trading a few crits on good old OWW). I was certainly not let down. The Magic Thief was a wonderful ride through the city of Wellmet told through the eyes of Conn. It’s being marketed as a middle-grade novel, but to me it holds its own to "older" YA novels. It is difficult for me, as a writer, to attain that trancelike state of reading where the world falls away and you live the book. But with The Magic Thief, it did so practically from cover to cover. If I had to make any comparisons, which are often unfair but useful for those who haven’t yet read the novel, I would liken it to The Thief, by Megan Whelan Turner. There are some parallels in plot, but I’m speaking more of the simplicity and beauty of prose and story. Sarah’s style is perhaps a bit more bright and shiny, particularly early in the story, and so I think it lends itself more readily to younger readers.

I loved the interplay between Conn and Nevery. I’m hopefully not giving anything away by saying that the way their relationship grew from an initial, chance meeting into one of deep complexity was a treasure to read. The same was true of Conn and Benet’s relationship as well as a few others that revealed themselves only after the story was in full swing.

Sarah did a good job of closing the story while leaving a few unanswered questions for the rest of the trilogy. I’m certainly ready for more whenever they come out.

If you have a young reader of fantasy, or if you enjoy books written in that vein, I would strongly recommend this book.

Overall, I enjoyed it. I hadn’t seen a take on a monster movie like this, viewed purely from the point of view of the victims. That particular strength became a weakness, oh, about ten minutes in. One of the characters, Hud, got hoodwinked into filming the movie for his best friend’s going away party (and for the rest of the movie, essentially, so that we, the "ones left alive" could view it after the fact, a la Blair Witch). Hud took to his assignment like, well, like his job as an actor depended on it. And that was the problem. You quickly came to view Hud as a proxy for the filmers. His actions, which were largely questions stiffly framed to draw out exposition, came off as a clumsy attempt at painting him as part of the scenery. And that sentiment struck me before the beast showed up, which was an issue.

That being said, I new it wasn’t going to improve, so I simply suspended disbelief, and largely it worked. The story doled out the information in relatively small chunks, never giving too much away, but enough to keep the viewer interested. You never did get any sense of where this creature came from or why it had found itself in Manhattan. There was an overturned tanker, from which the monster liberated itself, and that was just about it. That in itself was cool. They stayed pretty tight to the point-of-view of these characters, who wouldn’t be privy to any of that information, and I appreciated that they stayed tightly within that frame.

The beastie had some tricks up its sleeve, too. It wasn’t just a run around and stomp on things creature, though it did plenty of that. It had babies, little Alienesque creatures that stormed through the darker parts of Manhattan. And they did Alien-like things after they bit you, too. I liked the effects quite a bit, and they weren’t overly gratuitous with them. They spaced them out between the more human-focusing scenes of the movie, never giving the thing too much airtime or daylight for that matter.

Here’s the other main problem I had with the movie, though. The monster? Man, did it have a lock on these characters. Wherever they went, there it was, giving them all the grief they could handle and more. I know, there’s no story without it, but when the monster follows them around, apparently by accident, it makes the viewer overly aware of the hand of the director, and just like the guy behind the camera, it was too present, especially in the middle and later portions of the movie.

But overall? I liked it. Don’t expect anything deep. It’s just a little diversion, but a tense and interesting and scary one at that.

I give it a B-

What about you?

If anyone has ever wondered what Stockholm looks like, well I have just the thing. I humbly submit to you the pictures I took (no captions, sorry) via this web album.