Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

I found myself inspired by the end of this book. The final sentence really wraps it up, and I liked the color it gave to all the preceding (and proceeding?) stories. It's not really a spoiler, but it goes something like this: "Your efforts will be nothing but a drop in the ocean!" "What is …

Running out of thoughts

Is it possible to run out of thoughts? Or are they in infinite supply? I think you could only run out of thoughts or ideas, if you stopped having new experiences. Every idea is a recombination of things you've already seen and heard, or some conclusion reached based on those experiences. So, if you find …

Simple goals

Have a goal, a simple achievable one. Not simple as in easy, but simple as in not complex. 'Write a novel' is simple (not easy.) 'Write 3000 words per week, or two chapters, every other week poetry counts as x2 word count, weekends don't count, and each story submitted counts as an extra thousand words …

Challenge

Remember when I said I was going to write another novel instead of shorts? Then when I said no wait, I'm going to work on editing? Well, now I've got some other plan. I'm going to sell a story to Clarkesworld, and keep writing stories until I do. If it means I write a novel …

I cog it

I am nearing the end of Cloud Atlas, and the current viewpoint character has a very foreign (to me) dialect. The character is Hawaiian, but in a far future 'we forgot technology' situation. Perhaps some of this way of speaking is familiar to Hawaiians, but it's not to me. And this is not just dialogue, …