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Posts Tagged ‘indiana jones’

Indiana Jones, Tor.com Column, Website Updates!

First things first: for your regular weekly dose of crazy Max thoughts about weird geek stuff, go check out this article I wrote for Tor.com on why Indiana Jones isn’t that bad of an archaeologist really:

Indiana Jones isn’t that bad of an archaeologist.

I mean, okay, the low relative quality of his archaeological expeditions is so notorious it’s become a bit of a truism. There’s a great McSweeney’s list of the reasons Herr Doktor Jones was denied tenure. Even as I make this argument, I can hear friends of mine who spent their summers on digs cringe inside, across the continent. (Hi, Celia!) But hear me out. This won’t take long.

(Looks at rest of essay)

Um. Maybe it will. Keep reading anyway.

This brings us to an important housekeeping issue: starting with this post, I’ll be over at Tor.com once every other week, posting weird off-the-wall essays on geek madness.  Since blog post writing (especially at this length) cuts into fiction-writing time, I’ll be restricting myself to brief posts on this site on the weeks a Tor.com piece goes live—mostly pointing your way to the Tor.com column.  I have Grand Schemes about multimedia elements to complement the Tor.com pieces, but that will take shape when I have more time than I do at the moment.

Speaking of which: second important housekeeping issue!  Due to Deadline Confluence, I’ll be less available on social media and the like than usual for the rest of the year.  Basically I’ll be keeping old-fashioned Visiting Hours—I’m At Home to Friends or Reasonable Facsimiles Thereof on Twitter and Facebook Monday and Wednesday afternoons.  All other times, my currently live Schemes require above-average levels of Brutal Focus.  Plus side: if I come through this alive, you’ll have a book, and a game, and I might be able to play Dragon Age: Inquisition!

Third important housekeeping issue!  I’ve done most of the website redesign I’ve planned.  The site doesn’t look much different, but I’ve created individual book pages, added a description for the Craft Sequence, and given you a menu of delectable and free short fiction upon which to browse.  Also, my Events page is up to date with confirmed Con appearances through August!  Coming soon: fan art gallery.

Fourth—ah, no, this really isn’t a housekeeping issue, it’s just that Breaking Bad / Frozen video you’ve seen elsewhere.  Still great though!

Slower

As prophecied, some days you feel like a nut, some days you don’t.  Or something like that!

Today was a slow day for writing; the morning was action-dense and I spent the entire afternoon ruminating on copy edits.  Editing is funny because while often there’s a linear relationship between time spent and output, sometimes that relationship breaks.  With writing, I have a pretty solid over-under range on the number of words I can produce during an hour’s work.  Editing, sometimes I stare at a paragraph, or even more often a line, pacing back and forth and wondering what’s wrong, why the words clash or the grammar doesn’t quite seem to line up.  Then I look at the clock and feel a little despair.

Of course, ten minutes later I fix whatever was bothering me and skip through three pages of smooth dialogue, good character development, uninterrupted story—before I hit the next mine.  Wonderful!

I’ve been playing Uncharted 2 to unwind recently.  Really fun game, smooth, exciting, but I can’t help but laugh when I compare Nate Drake’s Murder Per Second ratio to, say, Indiana Jones’s.  I don’t think they fall within an order of magnitude of one another.  At one point a little box popped up on my screen saying: “Congratulations!  You have shot 100 bad guys in the head!” which indicates that, since I have horrible aim, I have killed well over 100 people in this game.

I wonder if it’s possible to make a game that feels as engrossing as the Uncharted series, while retaining the Murder-per-second ratio of the Indiana Jones films (which isn’t, you know, the lowest thing in the world—Indy does for a bunch of Nazis & cultists over the course of his career).