Month: April 2010

The not-so-amazing iPad

The other day I stopped by the campus tech store to check out Apple’s much vaunted iPad.  I’ve heard a lot of glowing reviews, so I thought I’d see what it was like first hand.

To be honest, I was profoundly underwhelmed.  It looks really cool, but, as I played around with it, I got the impression that it’s more of a flashy toy than anything useful.  It’s too big to fit in your pocket, so you’ll have to carry it around in a briefcase or a backpack.  If you’re going to do that, I think you might as well just carry a laptop.  If you’re looking for something really portable to surf the net on, you’d probably be better off with a smart phone.  At least you could also use that to call people.

The sales clerk seemed decidedly underwhelmed with the iPad.  We were chatting about it and he agreed that, for people who have laptops and/or iPhones, it’s a complete waste of money.

If I had $600 that I absolutely didn’t know what to do with, I wouldn’t be buying an iPad.  I’d probably buy this instead:

At least it would appreciate in value instead of becoming obsolete once Apple releases the next model in six months’ time.

Ancient Egypt on the silver screen

I read today that Will Smith is planning to make a movie entitled The Last Pharaoh.  The title seems to be a bit of a misnomer since the movie is about Taharqa, one of the Nubian kings who ruled over Egypt during the Third Intermediate Period.  There’s really no way you can claim he was the last pharaoh.  In fact, he wasn’t even the last pharaoh of his own dynasty.

Apparently, Smith has hired Randall Wallace to write the screenplay.  Wallace has written screenplays for a number of historical epics, such as Braveheart, Pearl Harbor, and The Man in the Iron Mask. Interestingly, Wallace was also involved in writing  the computer game Titan Quest (quite frankly, given the game’s paper-thin storyline, he should probably leave that off his resume!).  While Wallace isn’t exactly known for his scrupulous historical accuracy, he does at least write entertaining screenplays.  That gives me hope that The Last Pharaoh might at least be enjoyable, even if it is bastardized history.

Oddly enough, ancient Egypt hasn’t been well served on the silver screen.  I’m trying to think of a truly good movie about ancient Egypt and I’m coming up blank.  Usually films about Egypt are undermined by a fatal combination of hackneyed story ideas and historical inaccuracies that make Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth look like a scholarly monograph.  Which is a shame, really, because Egyptian culture is rich with ideas for good movies beyond the tired revived mummy trope.

My favorite museum

Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved visiting museums.  My first museum memory is of the tiny Egyptian collection at the Buffalo Museum of Science (I think it consisted of two mummies and some broken pots!).  Since then, I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to visit some of the greatest museums in the world.  But there’s one in particular that will always hold a special place in my heart: the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

When I lived in Pennsylvania, I managed to drag my parents to the Penn museum with alarming frequency.  Although the museum has a wide ranging collection that includes artifacts from China, Mesopotamia, Rome and Mesoamerica, our excursions were almost always confined to the spectacular Egyptian galleries.  Even now, I can close my eyes and picture in vivid detail the monumental statues of Ramesses II, the mummies in their creepy blue-lit ‘dioramas,’ and the spectacular remains of Merenptah’s palace.  The Penn museum’s Egyptian collection truly has a bit of everything.

I also love the fact that the Penn Museum is totally old school.  You won’t find multimedia kiosks, cartoon characters, or colorful dioramas of daily life here.  Everything is presented in a formal, business-like manner.  The Penn Museum seems to remember that it’s there to educate, not entertain.  Also, because it isn’t as much of a tourist destination as, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, youcould go there and explore without being crammed in with 5,000 other people.  My family and I would often be the only ones in a gallery, which made it feel like it was my own personal museum.

I’ve been to museums with much larger and more impressive Egyptian collections, but they’ll never displace Penn’s place in my heart.

The devil is in the details

As preparation for my next writing project, I’m working on a short story involving the novel’s main character in his younger days.  I’m having a blast with it, but it’s turning out to be one of the most challenging things I’ve ever written.

For starters, it’s not always easy to decide when events in Egyptian history occurred.  My story is set against the backdrop of the tomb robberies in the Valley of the Kings.  I’ve been using James Breasted’s Ancient Records of Egypt as a source, and he dates the particular trial I was using to year 19 of Ramesses IX.  The trouble is, modern scholarship gives Ramesses IX a reign of only 18 years and the trial itself is now dated to the reign of Ramesses XI.  I ended up having to use a totally different trial as the basis for my story.  Thankfully, I hadn’t gotten so far that I had to do a major rewrite, but it was frustrating nonetheless.

The other problem I’ve encountered is that the Egyptian way of life was so radically different from ours.  I have a scene where the main character goes into a tavern and orders lunch, but, once I’d written it, I realized that I had no idea how he’s going to pay for his meal.  The Egyptian economy was based on bartering and I’m not quite sure how one would purchase a meal in a tavern under that system.  It’s not like he’s going to be carrying a bunch of stuff to trade.  That little problem forced me to hit the books to come up with a solution (the tavern lets him run a tab).

Compared to this, writing the Andrewverse is a cakewalk!

Microsoft OneNote

I fired up my new copy of Office Enterprise the other day and, even though I’ll never use most of the programs, there is one program (besides Word) that I really like: OneNote.

OneNote is a digital note-taking program.  You can use it for just about anything, from taking notes in class or a meeting to researching travel destinations.  I’m using it to organize my writing research.

I’ve created a notebook for my Egyptian novel.  Within that notebook, I have tabs, such as ‘background info’ and ‘main characters.’  Under each tab, I have a variety of notes.  For example, each character has their own note with their vital statistics.  It’s wonderfully easy to flip between notes and all notes are searchable, so it doesn’t take long to find what you’re looking for.  You can even import handwritten notes from a Tablet PC and it will allegedly translate your chicken scratch into text.  I don’t have a Tablet PC, so I don’t know how well that works.  Seems like it could be a cool feature though.

But that’s not the best part.  OneNote allows you to clip webpages and PDF documents and incorporate them into your notes.  That makes research a lot less time consuming.

With Word and OneNote, I think I have the perfect replacement for Scrivener.

OpenOffice blues

Last week, the free trial of Microsoft Office on my new laptop expired.  I was reluctant to hand over a huge chunk of change to Microsoft for the full version of their product, so I decided to give OpenOffice a try.

This is not the first time I’ve tried OpenOffice.  When I first got my MacBook, I downloaded OpenOffice on the recommendation of the Physicist, who absolutely loves it.  I, on the other hand, was less than impressed.  I found it to be a buggy, unstable piece of crap that had difficulty doing simple tasks such as putting in lists with subpoints.  The only nice thing about it was the ability to save in PDF format.  After several weeks of putting up with its awfulness, I gave in and purchased MS Word for Macs.  And life was good.

But the Physicist assured me that OpenOffice ran better on a PC, so I tried it on my gaming laptop.  I didn’t play around with it much, but, at the very least, it seemed more stable.  When I downloaded OpenOffice last week, I had high hopes that I’d finally have a decent word processor that could replace Word.

I was wrong.  I didn’t have any problems with stability, but the program had discovered new ways to irritate me.  Using the insert comment short cut didn’t actually insert a comment.  Instead, it opened my note software.  OpenOffice is also unable to open the .docx format correctly.  If you try to open a .docx file that has footnotes, it will display them in the middle of the damn page.  Their predictive text feature is worthless (OpenOffice really wants me to name one of my characters ‘Pantyhose’).  Finally, after experiencing the nice layout of Word 2007, OpenOffice’s cheap copy of the Word 2002 interface was just annoying.

In the end, I decided to go with Microsoft Office.  As much as I hate to admit it, they did a really nice job with Office 2007.  Because I ordered it through my university, I’m going to get Office Enterprise, which has a whole bunch of crap I’m never going to use, like Access, Groove, and Communicator.  Oh well.  It’s better to pay less for more rather than paying more for less.

Happy Easter!

Tonight, I attended the Great Vigil of Easter.  This is the first Mass of Easter season and, as such, it’s the most important service of the church year.  It also happens to be my favorite service.

The service represents liturgical pomp and circumstance at its finest.  The vestments, the incense, and the progression from darkness to light all come together to create an experience that is sublimely holy.  After forty days of austerity and self-denial, it’s nice to celebrate again.

This particular Vigil was made even more special by the fact that one of the candidates for baptism happened to be a cousin of mine whose family I hadn’t seen in ages.  It was completely unexpected, yet wonderful to run into them and have an opportunity to catch up.

Filled with the joy of this festival day, I wish you all a very happy Easter.

“Burn your first novel”

Back when I was just getting started with AToB, I used to spend a lo of time browsing the Internet looking for advice for first-time novelists in an attempt to delay actually working on my novel.  I came across a blog written by a published writer who actually advised new writers to burn their first novel the moment they were done with it.  At the time, I thought that was terrible advice.  I still do.  The implication is that a first novel is always going to be so bottomlessly awful that it should never see the light of day.  Of course, if that were true, we’d never have had Harry Potter or Jonathan Strange.

Learning to become a writer involves more than just banging away on the keyboard until you reach ‘The End.’  You need to learn how to revise and edit your work.  You also need to figure out how to market your work to an agent or a publisher.  You’re not going to learn any of these things if you’ve reduced your manuscript to a pile of ashes.

My own view is that if I’m going to stick with a novel through the long, drawn-out process of writing and revising, then I owe it to myself to take the final step and try to get representation for it.  It doesn’t cost me anything beyond the cost of paper and postage.  The worst thing that can happen is that every single agent rejects my work, but at least I’ll have learned something about how writers go about finding an agent.

Revisions done, for now

Last night, I finished making my revisions to AToB.  Not only am I seventeen days ahead of schedule, but I’m happy to report that the revision process wasn’t nearly as painful as I thought it would be.  It wasn’t as fun as the original writing, but it wasn’t the hours and hours of drudgery I’d been dreading.

I’m really glad I took the time and effort to make the corrections in longhand first.  Putting them into Word forced me to reevaluate each one of them and there were a number of occasions where I decided that the original text was better than the revision.

Now AToB is ready to enter the beta stage.  I’ve lined up a diverse group of beta readers and I’m really looking forward to hearing what they have to say about it.

While they’re diligently reading, I’ll be shifting gears and jumping into my Egyptian project.  I’m going to start off with a short story set during the tomb robberies in the reign of Ramesses IX.  I also have several ideas for the main novel, which will probably take place several decades later in the reign of Ramesses XI.  I have a feeling that this building is going to play a significant role in the plot: