Kalbzayn's Writing World

If someone you knew had been beaten as a child and Hollywood made a movie about it, would you watch it and praise the powerful emotions that it evoked.

Hollywood is about to launch the movie of the time we were all beaten.

What's the worst thing you've ever let an employer do to you?

I was in the military, so I had a lot of personal freedoms taken away and was forced to follow curfew, no drinking during the week, and for a few weeks, no leaving base without another member of the same sex (there were some date rapes at another Air Force base that the Air Force was reacting to). All of that was during tech school, which for me was nearly two years. Pretty harsh, but at least the curfew came and went and only lasted about 4 or 5 of the months.

Janet Orlando tops my tolerance threshold.

I've talked before about a book I stumbled upon called Game Quest.

About half of the book is available to preview online which is what suckered me in.

Anyway, I finally finished reading it. Sometimes I am the slowest reader in the world and happy to get through 10 pages in a night. I guess trying to find time to read while writing my own novel is tough.

This book is very good, though. Once I got into the story I started getting frustrated that I didn't have more time to devote each day to reading it. Then as I got close to the end I just gave up on the other things and plowed through it.

The book is about a computer game company that goes through a hostile takeover by a large company in the 90's. You get to see the takeover through several of the employees from the owners of the company down to an intern, and also the owners' daughter who is a senior in high school when the book starts.

I kept expecting the book to get weird and run off into odd computer geeky passages, but Leopold McGinnis does a good job of writing a novel, not a gimmick.

The emotions of each character are explored fully during the various stages of the takeover. You also get to see the details of how these cold business events happen. Having gone through several downsizing, corporate restructuring events in the past, I can verify that he captured the helplessness the normal employess experience.

The book starts with a bang. The first two chapters are very entertaining. Then there's a block where I thought the pace slowed a bit until the takeover really kicks into gear about a third of the way through. From there on, everything moves quickly and keeps you wanting to read more.

As a bit of a computer geek, I had high geek expectations going into the book. I quickly realized this book is really much more about how people react to the cold, bottom line that companies work under today. There was enough residual geek to keep me satisfied, but none of it would even come close to bothering a non-geek.

The book is available for purchase through his website. If you are interested in purchasing The Red Fez at the same time (here's my review of the novella) you can use this link and get a discount.

If you don't feel like trusting some guy you've never met before, you can order the book through Amazon but you won't be able to get the discount for bundling it with The Red Fez and Leopold won't make as much money.

If you tell him I sent you, he'll probably autograph the book which he can't do if you order from Amazon. I also got a bookmark, so I'd push for one of those, too.

Update: I've decided that I might as well use somebody elses hard work to get people to read my stuff. So, anybody that buys either Game Quest or The Red Fez can email me at kalbzayn at gmail dot com (or just put a comment in a post) and I will email them one of my short stories in PDF form.

What happens when a national relic suddenly is missing in Algiers in 1936?

Well, there's the grapefruit embargo ordered by the French, of course. And a wild every man and woman for themself free for all.

Leopold McGinnis' novella The Red Fez tells this mystery. The pace is non-stop. The coniving is convincing. The friendships and associations are pushed to their limits as everbody hides information trying to get their hands on the relic.

Habibi, the Algerian man who constantly waxes his mustache and hides things in his bra, has the relic. But, British collector, the French government, and a local bar owner are all trying to get their hands on it.

My favorite part was when Habibi escapes from the desert. I won't give away any details, but I laughed out loud.

The book is in a zine format with a attractive, sturdy, color paperback cover.

This is a story I would have loved to have written and highly recommend.

McGinnis sells the book from his website.

He has a novel, Game Quest, that he also sells and if you buy them both you get a discount.

I've also reviewed Game Quest here.

Update: I've decided that I might as well use somebody elses hard work to get people to read my stuff. So, anybody that buys either Game Quest or The Red Fez can email me at kalbzayn at gmail dot com (or just put a comment in a post) and I will email them one of my short stories in PDF form.

I just read that a Canadian company is making a new kind of cigarette that, among other perks, contains some vitamins, especially Vitamin C. They've found a way to make killing yourself good for you.

I read through the comments over there and noticed that people think this is stupid.

Well, earlier today, I read something that shows why such a stupid sounding product might be pretty easy to market. Apparently, the nutrients/vitamins in our fruits and vegetables has diminished quite a bit since 1950ish. In fact, according to that article, Vitamin C has declined 20% in fruits and vegetables between 1950 and 1999.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em. It's way cooler than taking vitamin supplements like an old person.

My wife started a new blog last night. She's way more interesting than me, so you should go check it out.

So far she's already talked about tall men in little cars and why racoons are cooler than snakes.

As an added bonus, she's probably going to want a custom template that I'll get to design some day.

Stop on over and tell her "Hi".

I was driving the kids to the petting zoo yesterday singing along to some kids tunes. About halfway there, one of the characters in my book told me a secret.

I've been blowing off my book a bit recently because a character needs to have a reason for being able and for wanting to do some of the cool things he needs to do.

Also, there's a group of bad guys that steal an item. In fact, that's one of the main plot lines is everybody trying to get that item. I managed to get them to steal it, but didn't really have a reason why they should care about it.

Then one of my main characters told me his secret; he's a werewolf.

At first, I told him to shut up with that cheesy stuff. Then he told me that the bad guys were werewolves, too. He seemed pretty determined so I thought about it off and on throughout the day.

He's right. It works perfectly. It makes so many points of the plot work flawlessly that I must have intended it from the start.

But, werewolves? I don't really have any interest in werewolves. Never have.

I am excited that it makes my book writeable again. I did a little wikipedia research on werewolves and found a few things that were pretty interesting about werewolves and my plot if you go with the more historical werewolf.

There goes my book changing on me again. The good news is that since this really belonged as a plot line from the start, all the other plot lines will blend around it effortlessly.

My main character drops down to the least important main character and everybody else gets a promotion. The two new main characters have an amazing reason to get involved with each other. One of the bad guys that I didn't really like will either get deleted or killed. I'm hoping on the latter.

There you have it. I'm writing a werewolf novel. And you can't talk me out of it but give it your best shot.

I didn't finish my book in time to win the 2006 Pulitzer for fiction. I'll try better next year.

The winner is Geraldine Brooks for her book March.

The book apparently explores the father from Little Women and explores what he did while he was away during that book which takes place durning the Civil War. Interesting concept. Strange to see the Pulitzer give the award to a book that poached a character from another book.

E.L. Doctorow was one of the finalists for his book, The March which is another book set in the Civil War.

Odd that two of the three finalists would be books with basically the same title set in the same historic backdrop.

The third finalist was The Bright Forever by Lee Martin.

I had heard of Doctorow's book, but know nothing about it. I had not heard of the other 2 books. That's an improvement on last year where I had not even heard of any of the 3.

According to the Pulitzer website, nobody won the award for Drama. There were finalists, but no winner. Do they announce that prize later or did they just decide that they didn't like any of the finalists enough?

Maybe they should have added more explosions.

Last week I got nearly no writing done on my book. I did sit down one night and reoutline quite a bit of it. I switched around the ending and worked on getting the main characters to interact more throughout the book. I think I'm ready to get started again. I still need to work a little harder at giving the bad guys motivations other than because they need to do what they do to make the plot work.

I think I'm going to work on writing the rest of one characters scenes instead of writing the book straight through. I want to get one of the characters to the end of the book so that I can wrap everybody else around her plot lines.

While waiting to get time to work on the outline I started working on another short story about a wife who suspects her husband of cheating on her. I wrote about 1500 words by Friday and added another 1000 over the weekend.

I'm going to continue trying to write bits of both stories everyday until the short story is done

Some kids dad helped him get set up on the internet and scanned some stories the kid wrote and illustrated.

What a cool way to get a kid interested in writing and the technology (especially if he is showing the kid how to scan the pages and post them to the site). I'll have to put that one in my future todo list with the kids.