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Thoughts on the Queen Mary 2’s refit

I’m a huge fan of the Queen Mary 2. My Dad and I did a transatlantic crossing on her not too long after she entered service, and it remains one of my all-time favorite vacations. The QM2 is a splendid ship. Her interiors are beautiful, the food is first-rate, and the atmosphere on board is pleasantly relaxed. She also retains a sense of intimacy despite the fact that she’s the largest ocean liner ever built. But after twelve years of service, Cunard has decided that it’s time for a change. Next month, she’ll travel to the famous German shipyard Blohm + Voss for a month-long refit.

Carinthi-Cam01_37V PICTURE 1_zps0lygzqz8
A rendering of the Carinthia Lounge courtesy of Cunard.

One of the biggest changes is that the Winter Garden will be replaced with the  Carinthia Lounge. For me, it’s a sad development. The Winter Garden was one of my favorite public rooms on the QM2, though I realize that’s a minority opinion. Critics and passengers alike tended to view it as the weakest of the ship’s public rooms. Many saw it as kitschy, and they had a point. Originally, the Winter Garden featured a mural of tropical birds sitting amidst a backdrop of generic jungle foliage and an equally leafy carpet, and they both looked like something from Blanche Devereaux’s bedroom on The Golden Girls (sadly, the mural seems to have been replaced with a frosted-glass version of the same motif, as seen here). There was also wicker. Lots and lots of wicker.

Winter-Garden
The classic incarnation of the Winter Garden, complete with birds. Photo courtesy of Cunard.

Nevertheless, the Winter Garden has a place in my heart. It was usually fairly empty, and it was a great place to have a drink since there was a bar right there in the room. I also liked the fact that the Winter Garden had a sense of history behind it. Winter gardens, verandah cafes, and the like were fixtures on transatlantic liners throughout the golden age of ocean travel. The following photos come from a 1920s Cunard brochure in my collection:

mauretania
Mauretania
lancastria
Lancastria
andania
Andania

 

Their decorative DNA lived on in the QM2’s Winter Garden, but the Carinthia Lounge lacks any connection with the past beyond its name (the Cunard fleet had four separate Carinthias over the years). Although the space is named after the Carinthia that entered service in 1925, the decor doesn’t do much to evoke the feel of the 20s. On the contrary, it seems more reminiscent of the 50s. That’s not to say that it’s an ugly room; far from it. It just feels rather generic. Say what you will about the bird mural, but at least it was memorable.

However, most of the changes to the QM2 are to be welcomed. I’m particularly pleased that Cunard has decided to downsize the casino in order to add single-occupancy cabins. This is a wonderful development. For me, one of the biggest impediments to cruising is that the fares are based on double occupancy. My usual travel companions aren’t terribly interested in cruising, which means I’d have to either pay the exorbitant single occupancy surcharge (which can be 150-200% of the advertised fare) or allow the cruise line to match me with a cabinmate for the voyage. Neither option is particularly appealing, so I never considered cruising a viable vacation choice. Until now.

I’m also glad that King’s Court will be overhauled. It always seemed like a problematic space. When I was on board, it felt like a glamorous cafeteria, which seems a bit incongruous given the QM2’s reputation for luxury. To some extent, there’s not much Cunard can do about that. Any place where you collect your food from serving stations and carry it to a seating area to eat is going to feel like a cafeteria. I do think that the proposed changes are a step in the right direction, though. It won’t change the way people interact with the space, but it will make it more appealing.

One thing that surprised me is that G32, the ship’s nightclub, won’t be axed. It’s a bizarre place. Tucked away at the stern, you can only get to it by walking through the ballroom. It’s also tiny, and there’s not much room for dancing. When I poked my head in, I saw a bored DJ playing songs for an empty room while the bar staff huddled around the bar, chatting. Of course, with the average QM2 passenger being in their mid-60s, it’s hardly surprising that nobody’s interested in hitting the club, which makes one wonder why they’re keeping it at all.

All in all, I’m happy with the changes Cunard is making to the QM2. I think they’ll hold her in good stead as she sails through her second decade.

 

Grammarly review

Recently, the good folks at Grammarly were kind enough to invite me to review their their product. In case you haven’t heard of it, Grammarly is an online “writing-enhancement platform” that offers proofreading and plagiarism-checking capabilities.

Grammarly is simple to use. You just paste or upload your text and click the review button (though you also have the option of choosing from several different standards of review, including business, technical, and casual). When it has finished its review, your writing is given a numerical score (100 is the best) and then it takes you through the piece line by line to show you where it thinks you goofed.

I spent a great deal of time playing around with Grammarly, and I used samples from many different sources. Unfortunately, I came to the conclusion that I can’t recommend Grammarly since it’s bedeviled by false positives and bizarre suggestions.

Grammarly’s commonly confused words checker is particularly inept. It wanted me to change ‘seat’ to ‘set’ in the following sentence: “The Green Party has given a seat to London Assembly member Jenny Jones….” It also thought that ‘culled’ should be ‘called,’ and ‘polity’ should be ‘policy.’

The spellchecker is similarly dodgy. It flagged ‘unbeliever’ and ‘China’ as misspelled words! I suspect punctuation might have had something to do with it: ‘unbeliever’ was originally in quotes, while ‘China’ originally had an apostrophe and an ‘s’ at the end. But a program that gets confused by basic punctuation doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Grammarly’s grammar checker also got tripped up on a number of occasions. It flagged the word ‘have’ in the following sentence: “A total of 30 new peers have been appointed…” Grammarly argued that the subject of the sentence was a singular or uncountable noun and therefore it did not agree with the present tense verb ‘have.’ The original sentence was correct, however. ‘Total’ can take either a plural or a singular verb depending on context: if it’s preceded by ‘the,’ it’s singular; if it’s preceded by ‘a,’ it’s plural. Here endeth the lesson.

Grammarly is not without its benefits, though. Having multiple standards of review is helpful, although I wish that I had more control over what it was looking for. The ‘creative’ standard seemed to work best for fiction, but it’s a barebones evaluation. It doesn’t flag passive voice or sentences that begin with conjunctions, and while those things are arguably less of an issue in creative writing, it would be nice if you could choose to include them in a creative-level review.

Grammarly’s plagiarism checker also seems to work reasonably well. When I used articles that I’ve published online,  each one was flagged because of its similarities with the published version. One cool thing is that Grammarly will compose a citation in each of the standard styles (e.g. MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.) that you can use to cite the work. It’s a rather handy feature if, like me, you hate formatting bibliographies.

Alas, these pluses don’t outweigh the minuses. Wading through a slew of false positives and erroneous suggestions gets old fast. Even when Grammarly got things right, I didn’t find it all that helpful (I don’t need to spend $29.95 a month to find conjunctions at the beginnings of sentences!). Until they fine-tune things, you’re probably better off sticking with MS Word’s spelling and grammar checkers followed by old-fashioned human proofreading.

Warning: Busyness Zone Ahead

The next few weeks are going to be quite busy for me as I make the final revisions to Evil in Thebes and prepare to start the query process.  Consequently, this blog probably won’t be updated much in the meantime.  I’ll still keep up with Twitter though, so feel free to watch as my Twitter feed bears witness to my rapidly deteriorating mental state over the next few weeks!  Catch y’all on the flip side!

Even in the digital world, Formatting 101 is important

As I read more and more ebooks on the Kindle, I’m starting to detect a quality-control problem.  For example, in both of Aliette de Bodard’s Aztec mysteries (which are awesome, by the way), I’ve noticed formatting glitches galore.   Hyphens are missing.  Text is improperly italicized.  And in Mike Shevdon’s Sixty-One Nails, two characters’ dialogue will  often be smushed into the same paragraph, which makes for an incredibly confusing read.

Both de Bodard and Shevdon are published by Angry Robot, but the problem is not confined to one particular publisher.  I’ve heard reports of similar problems in ebooks published by other companies.  These kinds of basic formatting errors might have been understandable back in 2007, but ebooks have been around long enough that they should have worked out the kinks by now.   I have to wonder, do ebooks actually undergo any kind of independent proofreading?  Or do they just take the electronic files from the print edition and transform them into an ebook?

Thoroughly Modern Marple

I just read that Jennifer Garner (of Alias fame) has been cast as Miss Marple in new Disney film.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with Agatha Christie’s books, Jane Marple is supposed to be an elderly spinster who lives in the small English village of St. Mary Mead.  Apparently Disney, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to ‘reboot’ the Miss Marple franchise by turning her into a hot thirtysomething.

This takes the cake for the most absurd thing I’ve read today.  When one thinks of Miss Marple, one thinks of George Orwell’s old maids bicycling to Holy Communion, not someone who could appear on the cover of Maxim.  Miss Marple’s sublime ordinariness is part of her charm.  She’s not a high-powered secret agent, she’s just a run-of-the-mill English lady who happens to have a gift for piecing clues together.

At first I thought this was going to be a prequel, but then I read that it’s going to be set in the modern day.  So not only are they shaving decades off of Miss Marple’s age, they’re also catapulting her decades into the future.  It looks like Disney’s just trying to cash in on the Marple name, but I have to wonder if that’s a winning strategy.  Presumably, the changes they’ve made are designed to appeal to a younger demographic, but I doubt that many people under the age of 50 know who she is.  And the people who already do know who she is probably won’t care much for the changes they’ve made.

Since this is a Disney film, we probably won’t be forced to watch New Marple thrash around in bed with some buff boytoy.  Nor will she be called upon to solve a disgustingly gruesome crime.   For that we should be thankful.  The Miss Marple stories were never about gritty, realistic dramas.  They were the coziest of the cozy mysteries.

Sigh.  I wonder how long it will be before Justin Bieber is cast as a young Brother Cadfael?

Merry Christmas!

Just wanted to take a moment to wish all my dear readers a very merry Christmas.  While I was disappointed that Santa Claus didn’t leave Diablo III under the tree, I’ve been having a wonderful time visiting family and friends.  I also received some cool new books to read, including Affairs and Scandals in Ancient Egypt and His Majesty’s Dragon.

I’ve also been writing the last chapters of my Egyptian novel.  I’m currently working on the penultimate chapter, so I should be done with the first draft within the next few days.  Because my writers’ group has already commented on the earlier chapters, I can start making preliminary revisions right away.  We’ll be discussing the last chunk of my novel on January 25 and, with a little bit of luck, I’ll have the older material well polished by that point.

I’m not dead

Sorry for the lack of recent updates.  At the beginning of the month, I came down with pneumonia while on vacation.  I’d always thought of pneumonia as a kindly disease that gently whisks the elderly off to the Pearly Gates.  But I’ve since discovered that, if you get it when you’re young, it’s a nasty, grudge-wielding monster that is determined to make you miserable since it realizes it probably won’t kill you.   Once I finally got to the doctor and got some antibiotics in me, it went away fairly quickly, but its after effects have lingered on.  Even now, I still break out in a nasty, phlegmy cough from time to time.

When I haven’t been coughing myself silly, I’ve been working on my ancient Egypt novel.  Being sick slowed me down considerably, but I’ve picked up momentum now and I’ve submitted the first two chapters to my writers’ group.  We’ll be discussing it tomorrow and I really look forward to hearing their comments.

I also have a backlog of completed short stories that need to be submitted for publication.  I was hoping to mail them out tomorrow, but, with the president coming to town, I don’t think I want to venture downtown.

The Death of Print?

I read today that the fabled Oxford English Dictionary will most likely never be printed again.  When the next edition comes out, it’ll most likely be in digital format only.  In the article, a pundit predicted that the death of the book was imminent.  I somehow doubt that books will really fade away that quickly.  I think that versatile tablets like the iPad, rather than one-trick ponies like the Nook or Kindle, are going to be the future of e-reading.  But the iPad and its imitators are going to have to become a lot more common, and a lot cheaper, before demand for ebooks completely supplants demand for printed books.

Eventually, I think the day will come when printed books are relegated to the same niche market as vinyl records.  And part of me is saddened by that.  Books have been a huge part of my life and, even as a kid, I thought there was something thrilling about going to a bookstore and browsing for something new to read.  There’s a little spark of magic there that you just can’t get downloading something over Amazon’s Whispernet.

But even I have to admit that sometimes convenience trumps magic.  I don’t own a fancy tablet or an e-reader.  All I have is the Kindle App for my iPhone, and I’ll be the first to admit that the iPhone isn’t the best platform for reading.  It’s acceptable and that’s about it.  Still, there is something to be said for being able to download a book from the comfort of your home without being forced to run to the store.  And if you live in a small space like I do, it’s nice not to have another physical book to take up valuable shelf space.

What do you think about the digital revolution in reading?  How long do you think it’ll be before ebooks are the norm and paper books are only purchased for their nostalgia value?