More on George R. R. Martin

First off, if you haven't already, go and read my rambling post about Martin I did earlier this year.

Back? Good.

Well folks, despite my passion and absolute conviction for not wanting to read Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire, I gave in, and read the first three books. Yes yes, get your gloating out of the way, but let me at least give you some semblance of an explanation. I watched, re-watched, and then watched the first two seasons of the HBO series and on a whim downloaded the audio book of A Game of Thrones. Really, it was the audio book that did me in, it was so good. Now I'm not talking about the story here, I'm talking about the brilliant reading of Roy Dotrice. In fact here's this:

Isn't that fantastic? Seriously. I'm not too familiar with audio books, I've listened to I Am Legend and one or two others in my time, but this is the first one that really captured me. I certainly read faster than the audio book, but I actually chose to listen instead of reading to myself and, indeed, I didn't even listen to the radio in my car during the time I was listening/reading to the series.

In any case, there's one other important factor to consider before I get into the meat of this post: I stopped at book three. This is because of the HBO series, I will continue to watch the show, but I know if I get too far ahead I won't be able to experience it to the fullest. I must also say, that HBO did a hell of a job, yes they did change this or that, and yes it doesn't follow the books exactly, but I think it's certainly one of the best out there especially with the last jaunt in epic fantasy that television tried to adapt: Terry Goodkinds The Sword of Truth. Gah, don't even get me started on that piece of work.

The result of this little journey for me is that my feelings really haven't changed all that much. Martin is a fantastic storyteller, but he ruins it with the episodic nature of his style and even with a brilliant narration by Dotrice, I could not get past the feeling that he just didn't think us readers would understand. It could be that that's how he needs to keep track of things, but I highly doubt it considering his brilliant short stories and other works. Aside from that, though, they were everything I imagined they would be. They filled out story lines and drew a much richer picture than any visual medium could have, indeed, the show feels more complete and the feeling of a vague sense of inside jokes is gone now that I understand the characters storylines and histories better.

All that being said, some of his actual writing quirks were highly irritating. I won't go into all of them because it's been a couple months since I finished and honestly they're all pretty minor, but the one that really bothered me while reading was his use (and over use) of  "Ser". At first I thought "okay, this is a more historically accurate term and he's just bludgeoning us with his knowledge and pointing out our error in using 'Sir'". But no, my friends, he really is just using it to show off and actually he's using it incorrectly as far as I'm concerned. While the honorific "Ser" is indeed a Middle English term, it was only used in place of "Sir" as a gender neutral alternative. Looking at the etymology of "Sir" we see that it is a shortened version of "Sire" in which case "Ser" just doesn't work. But, lets give him a pass on that and focus in on the fact that it is used as a gender neutral alternative; reading the books one of the things that stood out to me was his lack of female knights which would be an appropriate usage of the term, indeed if he was trying to avoid the whole "only men can be Sir" feminist trap, why on earth did he make his female have less social standing than the male characters? Is it because that's more historically accurate? Sure, but then why even bother with the gender neutral word "Ser"? Because he wanted to be a pretentious asshat, that's why. I certainly understand the usage if you're going to make your male and female characters equal, but it's utterly useless if you're not and only serves to jar the reader every time Ser so and so comes up, which is rather often. He could have pulled off the use of Ser had he really wanted to, which is the frustrating part. His female characters are strong, coniving, and every bit as powerful as their male counterparts, but any powerful woman was dubbed a Lady and the closest we come to a female knight is Brienne of Tarth and Martin makes sure we know on every other page that she is most certainly not a knight and thus will never be called Ser.

Blah. Like I said there were a few things that bothered me, the most jarring of which was Ser and of course the writing style, but all that being said it is an amazing series and well worth the read. Just don't get your hopes up that the next book will be out any time soon and instead just enjoy the HBO series.

Oh I guess I should mention one thing everyone else seems to be bothered by which is his killing off of characters. Meh, Martin wrote (is writing) a highly realistic world and doesn't baby his main characters which seems to bother a lot of people. Generally in a fantasy novel, the main characters are immune to the hardships of everyone else, not so in Martin's world, and honestly, that's good. It's refreshing to fear for your favorite character and while some deaths are far from glorious, the fact that people can die from disease, a stray arrow, or just dumb luck adds a little something to his story. Sure, it's not for everyone, but it's always good to remember that the medieval times were far from easy, even for kings and heroes.

So while I won't recommend people go out and read the books, they are something to keep your eye on and if the show is not enough, check 'em out to fill in some backstory, but be wary, he's old.

On Keeping a Journal

I began my summer school at cnm not knowing what was ahead of me. Would my teachers be nice? Would they be worth the time, the effort, the money? Or would it be just another semester of uninspired professors and equally uninspired students. English 102 is one of those core classes that everyone must take. This often leads to a certain amount of blah, a lack luster class full of busy work on things you already know or things you don't really want to know. Even still it is also one of those classes that needs to be taken by everyone, like math, English is one of those subject you build up on, and until you have the basics down, you're nothing more than mediocre. Indeed, even after taking the class you are more than likely going to still be mediocre, but the things you learn in such a class are valuable. A review of grammar, spelling, and most importantly a higher level or writing. Higher expectations. A higher degree of analysis. Deeper, more complex stories and plots. Unfortunately this is something you need to be guided on. You need a good teacher in order to get the most out of a class, especially one like English. My 101 professor, for example, was pretty bored with the whole thing. He was being forced to teach the intro class because there weren't more than a few high level poetry classes available to teach. And it showed. I went through that class with a minimal amount of effort, I don't even remember the essays I wrote, much less the stories from them. Essentially the teacher didn't want to be there any more than the students.

This summer however I was put into a situation where the professor cared a lot about his class and his subject. He had a PhD in English, was a journalist for the majority of his career, and genuinely cared about his students. In other words, I actually had to put effort into the class. The very first day he did something unexpected, one of our major assignments was to keep a journal throughout the summer. In order to make sure that we were keeping it we would have to turn it in every time we did a rough draft of an essay in class. This surprised me because I hadn't ever encountered a professor that gave us an assignment not just for busy work, but for our own, 100%, improvement. I started this blog because I believe the more you write, the better you become at writing. It's been iffy, but I do feel like I've improved somewhat. I can express myself better than when I started, I think anyway, I can put my thoughts down onto paper--so to speak--with more ease, and if nothing else my brain isn't as cluttered as before. This ideal was his as well, but instead of a blog, it was a journal. There was no page requirement, no topics given, it was completely up to us to put whatever we wanted down. Now I've had my fair share of experiences with journals, none of them have lasted, so I was somewhat skeptical of the whole thing. This is because I have always had in my mind that a journal was a daily log of what you did, I'm sorry, but that is horribly boring to me. My life is nothing special, I don't do anything fascinating enough day-to-day to put down, nor am I introspective enough to be able to analyze my day-to-day existence in any sort of self improvement way. So I thought about it, and thought about it, and finally shrugged, I would write what I would write. I wasn't going to put the date, I wasn't going to put what I did, I was just going to write. It essentially became another blog, but with no standards. Even though I knew he was going to read it, I didn't feel the need to make it as polished and complete or even as coherent as my blog is. In fact, it was rather strange, but the reason I didn't keep up with my journals previously is because I find the idea of reading my own stuff boring, I need an audience, I am and always will be an attention whore. What is this blog? It is of no importance, I have few readers, but those that do read drive me to keep writing. It may be a sad reason to write, but it's true, I'm an attention whore. I need people to read my writing even if they don't agree, I need them to validate me and make it so I'm "worth" something, even when I know I am not. That is exactly what happened with this school journal. I wrote and wrote and wrote, not because I had any real interest in it, not because I believe I will ever go back and read it, but because deep down I knew that this professor was going to read it.

The sentences spilled out, the paragraphs formed, the entries added up, and the pages flew by and you know what? I enjoy it. I think that it has even become something of a habit, albeit a rather random one. I don't write in it every day, I never planned to, but about once a week I'll sit down with it and just write. I don't feel restrained by the idea that someone is going to read it, because really even if they do they can't really comment, even if they do it's just a note here or there, whereas here every word and entry is criticized and analyzed by people. I think its a good thing for someone's writing to be torn apart, it helps improve it, and gives the author an idea of what they need to do to become better. But I have found that with a journal I can write merely to write. I've said here in the past that I write only to write and I don't care what people think, and that's true, to an extent. With a journal I've found that I can put anything down, no matter how absurd, incomplete, or random. It's rather refreshing to be honest. An essay is written to be torn apart by your professor, just as this blog is written to express my opinion and let others respond, but a journal is just for me. It's a place I can write about the stupidest or most profound things, and it has actually inspired some of these blog entries. It's like a rough draft for here, and if it doesn't make the cut, what the hell I still got it on paper; I still got the experience from the very act of writing. It doesn't all have to make it here, indeed, a lot of it is just getting my thoughts straight about my ideas, and I think it may actually help my writing not be so jumpy. I tend to figure things out as I write and that makes it difficult to follow from a readers point of view, but with my journal, if I have an idea or thought about something I can write it, expand it, change it all I want and then when I come here to actually express my thoughts they're more thought out.

As you can probably tell this isn't one of those that came from my journal, but hell writing by hand is also really, really hard. I find that with my sloppy handwriting two pages is maybe a page typed up. It's a slow, tedious process, but it's actually enjoyable. I also have the selfish idea in my head that, like some great authors, in the distant future my journal may even be published. It's silly, I know that, but I also feel that this blog may even be published! We'll see what happens! Besides you never know, something like this may actually be popular, I don't know why, but people are strange creatures.

Owed to the Spell Chequer

Owed to the Spell Chequer

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

Man that was really hard to write even though I was just copying it over! My English professor gave that to us today, because he grew up in the time of dinosaurs and thinks spell check is utter fail and we shouldn't rely on it at all. I was pleased to note that Microsoft 2009 has a bit of a grammar check now, it's limited naturally, but if you, say, put weather where you needed whether it gives you a pretty blue squiggly. Too bad English is such a whore of a language and has grammar that will gladly bend you over and rape you in more ways than one.

As you all well know by now, I suck at grammar, punctuation, and spelling. It's one of the reasons that I have such a bitch of a time writing, because I'm always second guessing myself, and then I get all embarrassed cause I fail. I can't ever just sit down and write well. I can't even take the advice of great authors and just write a first draft, not care about spelling or grammar or punctuation because I'm like ocd about it. I always stop and go back, cross things out, add words, delete words, change words. For example my little "sci-fi" story thing I wrote a while back I wrote in a composition notebook, it was only like 4 or 5 pages in there cause my writing sucks, but by the time I actually went ahead and transferred it over to the computer I had such a hard time reading it cause of all the marks. I guess it's just a skill you have to learn with practice, but I don't know how to not go back. It's awful! In any case part of my English class I have right now, yeah I know summer school English fucking fail, we have to keep a journal because he says that the more you write the better you get. A theme I've mentioned here, indeed the whole purpose of this thingy, and so I'm going at it steadily. I'm thinking I might even transfer it on here at some point, not sure if I wanna put the whole thing at once or split it up into separate posts for separate entries. We'll see I guess.

I figured I'd share that little poem with everyone, because even though I suck at all that stuff, I still found it super amusing! And hey, I needed a "blog" post at some point, all the other blogs I read-not including Shem, Aaron, or Cory-are all short and kinda not intense? I can't think of the word right now, but they don't seem too content-y, just random thoughts and mini entries about daily lives. Not that mine is much better, but I think this is my first post that's just kinda eh and only took like 10 minutes to type up.

Wow so right before I posted this guess what I did, hit spell check. I'm hesitant to call that irony, but it made me shake my head at myself. I also must say I hate how FF doesn't really spell check stuff written in blogger, it catches some stuff, but hardly anything. I typo'd because earlier and it didn't even say anything.