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A programming note. I opened this LiveJournal thing without a clear idea what I would use it for, and since then I feel like all I have been writing are entries about my writing progress. That is actually not true, as I have shared a bit of short writing ('Vivid Pain'), a few essays ('Redemption' and 'Hell') and a discussion ('Distributed Peer-to-peer Viruses and Evolving an AI') That last one actually created a strange incident: a week or so after creating Jenny's web page (more below), I decided to do a google search for "jcbronsted" to see if her page showed up on the results. (It does not, but does for "j c bronsted", at least at the time I did that search.) What did show up was a site in the cyrillic alphabet (turned out to be Russian). I was confused and went to that site, trying to determine why my name had appeared there. After translating the blurb, I figured out that someone had translated a portion of my 'Distributed Peer-to-peer viruses...' article into Russian!! Turns out this web site had collected a series of articles about Peer-to-peer technology or maybe viruses or AIs or something and offered little blurbs culled from each. I assume it was done automatically with a web crawler, as that particular entry has appeared in other similar autogenerated lists. But this one actually translated my essay! Very odd. The web site is not loading right this moment, but I will post the link just in case. I assume it's one of the short-lived pages that gets regenerated every so often as its crawler wanders the internet. http://124omsk.ru/ssylki-na-2009-01-04-delicious/ What I really wanted to bring this around to was the idea that up until this point, whenever I wrote an essay or entry for this LiveJournal, I did it with the consideration of how a potential reader who I do not know might react. I presume that some day there might be a person I have never met who has read a book I have published and seeks me out on the internet. With that possibility in the back of my mind, I have always considered that I do not want to be political or potentially offensive in what I post. Unfortunately, this has limited my posting. There are several essays I want to work on, and this would be a great place to address them. Yet this restriction has hampered me. Therefore, I have decided that I will go ahead and turn this LiveJournal to that use, with a disclaimer. Whatever my political, philosophical, or areligious views might be, I do not use my novel-writing as a polemic platform, intending to argue those views. In fact, The Redemption Saga is religious in a way that I am distinctly not. (I worry that people will assume entirely untrue things about me because of it: but that is OK.) I try my very best to separate my views from my writing, as doing anything less would ill-serve the stories I try to tell. There of course are things that creep in unintentionally, and when I detect them, if they are not appropriate to the story, I excise them. I do not want a potential reader to be turned away from my books because of something I wrote on this LiveJournal, but I want a place where I can write the kinds of essays that are scrabbling around in the back of my head. There is one on morality that I am certain would be controversial—and even that I will temper as best as I can so that it is not offensive. This might be a mistake, but I am willing to take that chance because I desire a place to explore some of these ideas. It will also potentially make my postings here more regular. As a caveat, I want to say that my thoughts are ever-evolving, as I learn and reconsider. There are certain things that I can't imagine would change (like the idea that killing a person for any reason is utterly repugnant), but even those are subject to reconsideration, usually to the effect that they are strengthened. What I mean is that I reserve the right to change my mind, and anything I proffer here might be an ephemeral point of view. Healthy and academic discussion is welcome, though I do not promise to respond to anything. Especially negative reaction. Don't forget that on the internet, the mere act of pursuing an argument is to lose it. Meanwhile, I finished the rewrite of Angie and have returned to Gathering Thunderheads. Work on that has gone very well this week, but most of that has been putting down what I've already written in a new order with slight revision for the new structure and a very little new content. Once I reach Part Two, nearly all of it will be new. Parts Three and Four will probably be more reordering and slight revision and a few new chapters. But I will see how it shapes up. Perhaps as I get more into this writing, I will have more in-depth thoughts that will ellicit new essays. |
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