The Weeks of Big Fat Flying Ships

My last two reads have one thing in common: they feature large flying ships.

By now the regular know I love hot air balloons. It is a love that extends to all things flying ships. Anything that flies and isn't an airplane or spaceship is bound to catch my attention.

No surprise, then, if I say that promises of these things was enough to make me read Leviathan, by Scott Westerfield and Winds of Khalakovo.

Leviathan

I'm not sure why I took so long to read this. Leviathan is, by large, the most recommended steampunk book around the internet. Whenever the "steampunk recommendations" topic comes up, it's at the top of the list. 

Flash news: It's there because it deserves to be.

I love this book. It picks up very fast, the two main characters are awesome, and the universe -- the universe! Of course the idea of Darwinists is going to appeal to the biochemist in me. I craved for descriptions of their work, and of the Leviathan's workings.

Official Leviathan art by Keith Thompson

A book that has a freaking huge whale flying through the sky because it is supported by a complex ecosystem of genetically-modified lifeforms is.. is... There is no word for how much this idea makes me happy. It just does. There's no resisting the Huxleys, either.

Besides the genius premise, Leviathan also has a tight plot, hilarious dialogues, characters to root for and it makes for an all-around awesome read.

The Winds of Khalakovo

Click the cover! Go visit Beaulieu's site.

I found Winds from what I believe is Margo's very first Cover Lust feature and immediately became jealous. I still am. With her recommendation about this writer and my immediate love for the four-masted airship, I could not resist buying this the moment I had my Kindle.

After reading Leviathan my craving for airborne adventure was great. I opened this book, ready to jump into an epic tale. I wasn't disappointed.

If you ever wondered where completely original fantasy epics had gone*, well, here's your answer. Winds is a refreshing story of great scale with an unique setting. It plays with a few familiar concepts (elementals, for example) but brings them about in a fresh and unexpected way, mixing russian influences in.

The plot is thick, fast-moving and full of unexpected turns. This book has high magic, political intrigues, racial tensions, arranged marriages, a love triangle (the best I've read about, ever) and much more. Including flying ships. I mentionned that was important, right?

So, please. Let yourselves be transported by the Winds of Khalakovo. You're in for a great ride (aand an expectant wait for the next tome!)

Winter Tug of War

May 30th! What is May 30th? It is the School's Out 4Ever blogfest!

This is a winter story, though. Yep, snow in May.

My group of friends in cégep* were crazy and awesome, both. I was a part of the student's café and spent every single minute between 8 am and 6 pm that I wasn't in class there. Sometimes even minutes I should've been in class.

We did a lot of mad things in our time. The best of them, though, ought to be when we registered for the Winter Carnival's Annual Tug of War contest.

We had big guys at the Oxymel (that's the café's name). We could build a solid enough team, train a bit and have fun. After all, Quebec's Winter Carnival's is meant for kids, too!

We missed the footnote that said the army was in charge of organising this. This is what we were up against:

The man at the very back (you can only see his head) is Hugo Girard. He won the 2002 title for World's Strongest Man

No. It wasn't until January, when our team's captain had her first meeting with the organisation, that we realised what we were getting into. Imagine our surprise when she gathered the group, an amused and sadistic look on her face.

"You're going to kill me," she said. "All the other teams are made of military men, police or fire fighters. They're huge."

She could laugh. As captain, she didn't have to tug.

We went anyway, with out splendid "uniforms". This isn't an underdog story: we were crushed every single time. Well, except when they let Hugo Girard tug for our side. And that one match, at the very end, against the Navy team (they weren't as beef, and had the icy half of the terrain).

The animator kept teasing us. We had our vengeance when he asked us to pick any player to help us tug, and we demanded he did it (that was my idea and I am so proud of it. M'hahahaha).

This event was, without a doubt, the most fun I had all winter. We had all the other teams sign one of our aprons. We had snowball fights in the freshly-fallen snow. We were given consolation prizes and made friends with the Navy team (they were super awesome). It was humiliating, but in a way, that was the great part of it. We didn't have to be serious.

Our team was called the Carebears. We had silly aprons as a uniform. We chanted "Love and Happiness" as our 'war chant'  (it was Love and Dignity, but someone pointed out we'd lost dignity somewhere along the way).

 So, here, have a picture of my awesome team:

I'm second from the right, second row, with the stripped scarf!

Enjoy the summer! ;)

*Cégep is a special type of school we have here in Quebec that is kind of a mix between high school and university, which lasts two years and goes between the two. Our "high school" is a year shorter. It's complicated.

Rosalind Franklin and the DNA discovery

Ladies and gents, I present to you, Rosalind Franklin:

This lady here is a british biophysicist, most known for her work in x-ray crystallography. She was a specialist in the field, and had successfully obtained what was qualified by another scientist, J. D. Bernal, as "amongst the most beautiful x-ray photographs of any substance ever taken".

I'm not discussing Franklin only because she was a good at x-rays, though in itself it's quite an achievement. Franklin had a great deal to do with the discovery of DNA structure, because she managed to take this picture:

Photograph 51

This, to a crystallograph, reads as "double helix". Apparently it's super obvious. I don't know. I'm no crystallograph.

What I do know was that this picture, one of the key elements leading to the discovery of DNA structure by Crick and Watson, was taken by Franklin's colleague and showed it, without her permission, to Crick and Watson.

They built their model based on this x-ray photograph, in addition to everything else they knew. Most think they couldn't have done it without Franklin's photo -- at least not so fast, which means they might not have been the first.

Now, not to remove the credit from Watson and Crick. They put together many pieces of a complex puzzle and came out with the right answer. That's an incredible achievement.

When they published their structure in 1953, however, the only mention of Franklin's work was as a footnote. Ten years later, Watson published a memoir recounting his discovery of DNA structure, The Double Helix. He discredited Rosalind Franklin on every occasion, calling her 'Rosy' and burying her contributions under allegations that she couldn't interpret her own data.

Crick, Watson and Wilkins received a Nobel Prize in 1962 for their work on DNA and other nucleid acids.

Franklin died in 1958, at 37, due to the consequence of x-ray exposure (turns out, x-rays are like radium in this regard).

The rules of Nobel Prizes forbid posthumous nominations. Her name isn't on it, and will never be.

Thankfully, her story is becoming more widely known, and she is increasingly frequently included in the tales behind the discovery of DNA structure, perhaps one of the biggest scientific discovery of our times.

Longhand Post Writing

You know, yesterday's post about writing longhand? It was written... with pen on paper. Yep!

It took me exactly one page, which is nifty for scanning. So there you go, that's yesterday's post in all its handwritten glory. (ha!)

As usual, for a real and constructive post (I try), you can head at Wicked & Tricksy!

Back to writing with me. Look at the bar: I managed to get past 42,000 words. Progress!

Writing Longhand

photo credit: gregwake


I don't know if any of you noticed, but that progress bar on the side hasn't moved in a while. A long while. When April - with its Script Frenzy, A to Z Challenge and finals - rolled around, I stopped writing White Echoes to do everything else. Since then, I've only put a big 3000 words on the WIP, top.

Every time I sit down to write, I stare at the screen and feel completely disconnected.

It's been too long. These characters are light-years away, and even if I had Jacob Wonderbar's spaceship, I feel I couldn't cover the distance between us.

Except... as a writer, I always feel it's a terrible waste not to use a spare hour. When all I have to distract myself is a pen and a notebook - no blogs, no forums, no twitter - there aren't many other options than writing.

Writing longhand.

Here's where the magic comes into play: the moment I grabbed that pen and set the words on the page, I knew what to write.

My brain felt on fire (and soon, so did my hands) but I didn't care.

The pen let me do on paper what I struggled to do on the screen.

So perhaps I'm a bit old school. It's surprising, considering how much I love my Kindle and my two laptops and twitter and the interwebs. It doesn't change how I feel about the back and forth movement of my pen, the sliding of my hand on paper and the increasingly messy handwriting on the page, as the story takes over and I can't write quite fast enough to keep up with my thoughts.

I love it.

I love it like an old flame that visits every other year, without warning, just when you need passion and abandon. It's messy and it hurts and afterward you have to clean it all up (retype) but damn, you don't regret what you did.

I'm getting carried away here. The point is, the next time you are stuck, take a pen (so you can't erase, only scratch off) and an empty notebook. Set the pen down on the blank page. Move your hand to form letters.

Write!

*****
Announcement: For the NaNoWriMo participants among you, today is the Office of Letters and Light's Summer Donation Drive. This drive will serve to pay Camp NaNoWriMo (which provides encouragements and wordcount progress tools any time of the year) and the NaNoWriMo website's servers (as in, move them elsewhere so they don't crash in 2011).

There are cool prizes for those who donate -- exclusive posters, bumper stickers, etc. -- and you can check the details for Camp NaNo here, see the poster/sticker here, or donate at the store. The store will tell you what you can get, depending on how much you donate.

Now I really want November to come back. Talking about NaNo does that to me.