Dinosaurs. In the novel. Do it.
WORD COUNT: 30,000
I suppose so, if I make a character in "President Churchill" an amateur paleontologist or I somehow bring in the term "thunder lizard" (dinosaur means, named for the way scientists get the impression they "thundered" or stomped quite loudly whenever they walked). I'm seeing a Depression-era gang named the Thunder Lizards right now! I was just reading on Wikipedia's "Dinosaur" entry that the word actually means terrible lizard, but thunder has that extra cool factor AND it's easier to say!
Dinosaur: Cultural depictions, paragraph three --
The popular preoccupation with dinosaurs has ensured their appearance in literature, film, and other media. Beginning in 1852 with a passing mention in Charles Dickens ' Bleak House, dinosaurs have been featured in large numbers of fictional works. Jules Verne's 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 book The Lost World, the iconic 1933 film King Kong, the 1954 Godzilla and its many sequels, the best-selling 1990 novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton and its 1993 film adaptation are just a few notable examples of dinosaur appearances in fiction. Authors of general-interest non-fiction works about dinosaurs, including some prominent paleontologists, have often sought to use the animals as a way to educate readers about science in general. Dinosaurs are ubiquitous in advertising; numerous companies have referenced dinosaurs in printed or televised advertisements, either in order to sell their own products or in order to characterize their rivals as slow-moving, dim-witted, or obsolete.
And now, even though I can't STAND Dickens (even A Christmas Carol is getting to be a headache for me), I will likely after NaNoWriMo month make looking that up a goal just because. After I brought the kids to school for the day -- even with Sarah's 101 fever she's still able to chase around Jeffrey, so don't tell me she's too sick for school! -- I got to church for Coffee With The Boys where of the nine of us assembled only Pastor Janet and Tim were not wearing glasses!
I also learned that one of our members is eighty-five today ... then before my work alarm went off I looked through Main Street Books to see if there was anything worth picking up in their used section, and of course there always is, but wait -- I have my own book to finish, never mind picking up a few more! But they can wait until December, or should ...
Even though that 1960 copyright book about the Know-Nothings I considered seems to bear some eerie parallels to our own situation in the United States now, starting with an anti-immigrant movement that coalesced into a political party where a country is half-slave and half-free (read today: half-capital holder and half-laboring class) ... but I digress.
Last night I finished reading a book I'd had sitting for a few weeks and then picked up with abandon, Robert Silverberg's The Alien Years (ISBN 0061050350) which is essentially two generations of Earth being taken over by these giant alien squids that come to be called Entities as seen through members of the biological and extended Carmichael family.
Oh, there's resistance to this conquest of the world, but by very few and scattered forces around the world since the Entities have effectively cut power and employ the vast majority of people they haven't converted to their cause -- whatever it is; the novel doesn't go into the Entities' motives, making them as alien as possible -- in various projects around the world, and the meager resistance human put up ends up quite useless.
That's not giving anything anyway, believe me -- the strength of the novel comes from the characters (at least the humans) within it who grow up under this barely felt alien domination as well as those who lived in the world before the Entities arrived. Perhaps it's best summed up by the back cover mantra, with which I conclude today's entry because I have writing to do!
They came. They saw. They conquered. We survived.
David
I suppose so, if I make a character in "President Churchill" an amateur paleontologist or I somehow bring in the term "thunder lizard" (dinosaur means, named for the way scientists get the impression they "thundered" or stomped quite loudly whenever they walked). I'm seeing a Depression-era gang named the Thunder Lizards right now! I was just reading on Wikipedia's "Dinosaur" entry that the word actually means terrible lizard, but thunder has that extra cool factor AND it's easier to say!
Dinosaur: Cultural depictions, paragraph three --
The popular preoccupation with dinosaurs has ensured their appearance in literature, film, and other media. Beginning in 1852 with a passing mention in Charles Dickens ' Bleak House, dinosaurs have been featured in large numbers of fictional works. Jules Verne's 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 book The Lost World, the iconic 1933 film King Kong, the 1954 Godzilla and its many sequels, the best-selling 1990 novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton and its 1993 film adaptation are just a few notable examples of dinosaur appearances in fiction. Authors of general-interest non-fiction works about dinosaurs, including some prominent paleontologists, have often sought to use the animals as a way to educate readers about science in general. Dinosaurs are ubiquitous in advertising; numerous companies have referenced dinosaurs in printed or televised advertisements, either in order to sell their own products or in order to characterize their rivals as slow-moving, dim-witted, or obsolete.
And now, even though I can't STAND Dickens (even A Christmas Carol is getting to be a headache for me), I will likely after NaNoWriMo month make looking that up a goal just because. After I brought the kids to school for the day -- even with Sarah's 101 fever she's still able to chase around Jeffrey, so don't tell me she's too sick for school! -- I got to church for Coffee With The Boys where of the nine of us assembled only Pastor Janet and Tim were not wearing glasses!
I also learned that one of our members is eighty-five today ... then before my work alarm went off I looked through Main Street Books to see if there was anything worth picking up in their used section, and of course there always is, but wait -- I have my own book to finish, never mind picking up a few more! But they can wait until December, or should ...
Even though that 1960 copyright book about the Know-Nothings I considered seems to bear some eerie parallels to our own situation in the United States now, starting with an anti-immigrant movement that coalesced into a political party where a country is half-slave and half-free (read today: half-capital holder and half-laboring class) ... but I digress.
Last night I finished reading a book I'd had sitting for a few weeks and then picked up with abandon, Robert Silverberg's The Alien Years (ISBN 0061050350) which is essentially two generations of Earth being taken over by these giant alien squids that come to be called Entities as seen through members of the biological and extended Carmichael family.
Oh, there's resistance to this conquest of the world, but by very few and scattered forces around the world since the Entities have effectively cut power and employ the vast majority of people they haven't converted to their cause -- whatever it is; the novel doesn't go into the Entities' motives, making them as alien as possible -- in various projects around the world, and the meager resistance human put up ends up quite useless.
That's not giving anything anyway, believe me -- the strength of the novel comes from the characters (at least the humans) within it who grow up under this barely felt alien domination as well as those who lived in the world before the Entities arrived. Perhaps it's best summed up by the back cover mantra, with which I conclude today's entry because I have writing to do!
They came. They saw. They conquered. We survived.
David
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