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May 01, 2007
Geek Mafia Sequel News, Various and Sundry Media
Things proceed apace on all fronts. Danger lurks around every corner. Well, not danger, but Steven Rambam. So I'm still hiding out, posting to the blog from remote locations, and generally keeping my head down and buried in work and books.
The show must go on and I've got books to sell you people. So, I got back the text of the Geek Mafia sequel from the talented and professional copy editor today and I'm going to start getting it ready for layout this week. I've also got Austin coming up with a cover design and all that, and, along with our new format I'm excited about the possibilities. I'm going to make some announcements soon about possible ways for you, the readers, to be directly involved in the final product, but I'll have to see where the book is after we do an initial lay out.
Those many of you who've noticed the tons o' typos in the original Geek Mafia will hopefully be happy to hear that I'm going to hire my new copy editor friend to go through the first book as well and some day there'll be a new edition of that out as well, in the new format too.
In other news, well, I've been working slowly on the Cthulhu-related novel and I'm about half way through the first draft. I hope to hit it hard in the next couple months, but there are lots of other projects demanding my time and attention. Still, it'd be nice to get it into people's hands by Halloween and I think that's absolutely doable (hopefully sooner than that).
I've been to the movies - finally saw Hot Fuzz, which is awesome! Lots of fun and totally funny. It's a dirty shame that the film is only playing in one theater in Sarasota and even then only four times a day. It's going to no doubt totally disappear once Spider-Man 3 opens up on Friday, so catch it while you can.
Right now I'm reading Christopher Hitchens's new book, "God is Not Great." I'm about halfway through and it's a pretty mixed bag. Fun to read, but not well organized at all. It also occasionally devolves into pretty puerile little snipes and cheap shots, which might be fun to read (and might not) but overall tend to detract from his point. But really it's the lack of organization that weakens the book the most. Chapters will start on one topic and then wander off to something almost completely unrelated. Points are brought up and criticisms made, but no follow up comes to drive the point home to it's logical conclusion. For example he has great fun taking to task CS Lewis's insipid Lunatic or Lord argument for the divinity of Jesus, making plenty of cutting remarks and pointing out some logical flaws, but he never get to the final point - Liar is an equally valid third option (applied either to Jesus or to those who wrote about him). Also, much of the book relies on personal anecdote or specific examples that are interesting enough by themselves, but without a formal structure to tie it all together, the book just sort of rambles on. Still, I'm enjoying reading it quite a bit, so I won't say it's a bad book. I'll just say it's not liable to convince the unconvinced.
Posted by rdakan at May 1, 2007 11:54 AM