Wanton Hubris

And the level marches on! It’s becoming a real bear to get this level done but I’m determined to see it through. It’s 3,829 brushes now and it’s finally been sealed (I was running over limits with it unsealed, so the time was nigh). I’m at the ‘adding gameplay and details’ part of the process now.

City of the Dead

This book picks up where ‘The Rising’ left off and gives me the closure I was talking about in the previous review. I wasn’t really sure where Keene would take the story for a whole other book but we went to some interesting places. The main show piece of the book was really well done, if a tad unbelievable at times, and he really fleshed out the zombie army this time. I got a lot more information about where they were from, what their motivations were and what they had planned for the world. It was engaging and highly entertaining.

This book doesn’t require that you read The Rising first but it would be best so you have some perspective on the main characters and where they came from. This is important with Frankie in particular since she doesn’t get a lot of flavor ink in this book but does in The Rising.

Recommended for zombie fans and those who loved The Rising!

Ignore Everybody

Hugh MacLeod is someone you really have to respect. He did it the old fashioned way, which is the new fashioned way, through hard work and perseverance and blogging. You may not like his tone, his language or his attitude but you have to respect the message.

Creativity is a gift and it should be treated as such. Do what you want to do and don’t sully it with ambition, or lust for money or power. Do it because you want to. Do it because it fulfills you. Do it because you love it.

There was a quote in another book I read a long time ago, The Millionaire Next Door, that ties into this. It went something like: “Don’t chase money. If you’re the best in your field, the money will find you.” That’s not exactly the same message as what Hugh is saying but it’s along the same lines.

This book is highly recommended to anyone who has a creative itch but it unsure how to scratch it. This book shows you how to give yourself permission to scratch.

Ignore Everybody.

The Rising

Brian Keene again! In summary: a fun book with a disappointing ending. I like closure in my novels and this one doesn’t really deliver. You’re sort of meant to make up your own mind about what happened which is OK but on some level it feels like a cop out. My hope is that we get a little more of this story in the following novel, “City of the Dead”, which I’ll be getting to after my current book.

The demons/zombies were great. It was nice to see them treated differently for once. Instead of mindless hordes of shuffling and decaying monsters we have shuffling and decaying monsters who can talk, think, scheme and operate machinery (think guns and cars). Some of the situations this creates are very memorable and made for some fun reading.

I think he spends a little too much time demonizing the armed forces but at the same time it turns them into a third force in the raging war and that works well. The ‘meat wagon’ was horrible to read about but it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that couldn’t happen in this situation. If it does nothing else, it makes you root for the Frankie character that much more.

I highly recommend this book to zombie fans who are looking for something a little different than the standard fare.

The Road

The Road is one of those mandatory books you need to read if you’re going to work on games like Gears of War. The setting is very close to the game and it’s very rewarding to read the book for the mental imagery that it conjures up. Cormac McCarthy’s prose can get very flowery at times and reading the book was sometimes a bit of a chore. I got the feeling at times that he was writing simply because he wanted to hear himself type. However, that might be my ignorance of the craft of writing and I missed what that was really about.

At any rate, the book was great fun to read even though it’s basically one long downer. The outlook is very bleak, the characters are beaten down, and there is very little hope to be had. Cormac drills this into you so thoroughly that you feel the same joy as the characters do when they find something as simple as clean water of a can of peaches. Those moments of elation give you enough hope to carry on until the next one.

I also found his style of dialogue writing to be pretty unique. He doesn’t use quotation marks and he doesn’t even specify at times who is speaking – he simply says what the characters are saying. The words chosen are also interesting in that he really strives to make the speech sound natural, meaning that the way the characters interact is how you would expect normal people to interact. There are lots of “Okay” and “I don’t know” lines and it works.

My only warning about this book is that it takes a little time to get rolling. I came very close to not getting into it myself. In fact, I put it down for a few weeks at first because it was taking so long to get rolling. But, get rolling it did and it was a fantastic read I would recommend to anyone who loves post apocalyptic settings or just a good story about a man and his son facing adversity together and bonding as a result.

I’ve realized something about myself this week. I try too hard and sometimes I kill the creativity bug when it starts to poke at me. Generally, I’ll get an idea for something and I’ll sit down at the computer and start hammering on it. And I mean really hammering. I’ll sit there for hours trying to get it all done and complete and, frankly, I sometimes forget to have fun.

That’s kind of unfortunate because isn’t that the point? Why sit down to work on something if it’s not going to be fun in the end? It’s about the process and the journey and not the final destination, right?

So I need to find some way to remind myself to slow the hell down. Do a little each day and maintain my excitement rather than squashing it in a fire storm of furious activity that makes me never want to touch the project ever again.

Maybe a sticky note on the side of the monitor that says something like, “it can wait” or “it’s not a race”. And maybe I should wait until tomorrow to do that.