I have a new blog, at http://theromaniucfiles.blogspot.com/ .

I decided to move to move because the platform seemed more reliable and flexible. It allows me to watch all of the blogs I want, while LJ only let's me watch those on LJ. This cuts some of the time I fiddle online instead of reading or writing.

So I'll still watch the LJ blogs that I watched here, and keep the account to be able to post comments, but all the posts I'll write from now on will go to http://theromaniucfiles.blogspot.com/ .

Not that many people read this blog, but just in case, he he.

Right now my wife is going through the final chapters of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, my daughter reads a collection of Russian fairy tales and I'm finishing Lukyanenko's Day Watch.

Apparently, I'm having the least fun with my choice.

Oana is delighted with The Last Unicorn. For the first time since she started reading genre literature I can say she is fascinated with it. She has lined up next Good Omens by Gaiman & Pratchett, the first two Long Sun books by Gene Wolfe and the first of the Amber novels and I can see she grows more and more curious about them with each page of the Last Unicorn that she reads. What an amazing book - and amazing writer - to do such a thing, to spark the interest for a genre in a person so reluctant towards it. Which Stephen King's It failed to do for her.

The Night Watch books proved to be a disappointment for me. Maybe I was just expecting too much. Maybe it's the English translation - some passages are really clumsy and somehow I doubt it's Lukyanenko's doing.
I almost didn't buy the books in the first place because of the cover blurb, written by Daily Telegraph (not someone from the Daily Telegraph, but a person named Daily Telegraph, apparently) which had this to say about the book:

"JK Rowling, Russian style ... "

Wow. This Telegraph dude read this book to his little Telegraph children, I wonder ? I bet the "sex on the beach" paragraphs in the beginning of the second book were received enthusiastically by them.

Here in the East we have such a great belief in the professionalism of the Western people . . . Then you find such an example of . . . well, it's a lie! A cheat. Yes, you can find resemblances between JKR and Lukyanenko's books, just like you can find resemblances between chickens and velociraptors, but to advertise it like that, on the front page, I find it really offending.

Still, I bought the books. I really liked the movies - mostly because the acting was vastly superior to anything I saw in American fantasy movies.

The books though . . . literary speaking they are better than the Stephenie Meyer books but that's about it. They are nothing more than fantasy soaps. They are better than the Twillight series (hey, in my opinion!) because the characters are more real and because the cliches are not so annoying but they are generic Urban Fatntasy, with werewolves and vampires, witches and mages. No russian mythology, sorry, just your usual stock fantasy creatures.

Fortunately, two novels by M. John Harrison and two by Gene Wolfe are on my coffee table right now, with no opinions by Telegraph on the cover and no cliches inside.

I also have another revision of Our Last Real Leader posted on the Baen workshop. No other achievements, I'm afraid. I managed to write about half of a ghost story, than got stuck. I'm also stuck with the Letters story, and with the Nicholas story. Stuck, stuck, stuck.

My resolution for this month : to have at least two short stories finished.

Unfortunately, we Eastern Europeans don't believe in resolutions.

Stuck.

This story, about the two letters, got stuck in my head.

I'm not sure why. I like the core of it, the letters themselves, which I already have. I changed the story around them, though, about ten times already.

In the beginning I wanted my story to be a "Dying Earth" type of story. Letters from our future, discovered in an even more distant future. There is an inherent sadness that attracts me to this theme. The characters in these stories confront fragments of a reality long gone. This implies the sense of loss, the illusion of closeness, the final tragedy of being confined in one tiny segment of the great stream of time.
This is what I like about these stories - and why I like Gene Wolfe's New Sun.

After the first drafts, my story changed. I think it abandoned the "dying earth" setting, or at least the classic one. The more I thought about the distance - you have to think about the Distance when you write about letters, I discovered - the more I wanted my Distance to be between other points. Not a Distance in time.
But.

There are two worlds, the old tales say. The Real World, where humans live, and the Other World, where others live. There was a time when everybody mingled. Or, at least, some mingled.

Then the Communists came and started a pretty successful pogrom against our mythical world, since it was frailer than the Church and they had to have some results in their Atheist Wars.

Then the Capitalism came and brought enough glitter to cover the blind spots left in my peoples consciousness. My people learned their new mythology from western films: they learned that ours is the country of vampires!

All the gates are shut now. There is no Other World anymore, or there are no more roads to it.

And this is my Distance, irrecuperable and potentially tragic.

As I wrote in the beginning, I like The Letters very much. I do hope it won't turn out to be one of the stories I never finish.

Not much of a note.

I'm just very happy that both my stories are getting such good reactions at the Baen Bar. Elated by the possibility that my words actually express ideas coherently, I started a new story even though I haven't yet finished the Nicholas novella. This new one is something that I haven't tried writing until now, a "Dying Earth" type of story.

In 1600 AD, Mihai Viteazul (or Michael the Brave, if you like) united the three Romanian Provinces under one rule. It was the first Romania and it lasted for less then a year. Mihai was assassinated by hungarians soon after.

On the 24th of January 1859, the Ruler Alexandru Ion Cuza proclaimed in Bucharest the Union of Muntenia and Moldavia. It was the first step in the forming of Romania, which would conclude on the 1st of december 1918, after the First World War, with the addition of the third historical province, Transylvania.

Happy Union Day to me!



Back to what this blog is about : Writing. My Writing, actually.

Yesterday I read and read about the Romanian Elder Gods, the twins who made the World and kept trying to kill each other; or maybe they just tried to have fun? It sure seems like it if you read the stories. They finally ended up as representations of God and the Devil but that happened because of the slavish bogomilist influences, not because they were good or evil to start with. They made the World together because they were bored and then they had tons of fun with it - up until the Giants tried to kill them both, I guess.

Then I had so much data in my head that I couldn't write anything in the story. I have to let everything settle and only use what the story needs.

So, today I'm going to work on revisions, probably focusing on another re-write of "Why I Got Out...". I think it's going to be the last one, too. I'll upload it on baen.bar on the 26th, when the "two weeks break" expires.

Rohmanii, or Blajinii, are a population of small, dim-witted, gentle creatures dwelling in the Underworld of Romania.

In the Nicholas story, Zaharia discovers what they are and who they work for.

Being curious if there's any information about the rohmani on the web, I googled the word.

Here's what I found on the bottom of the first page with results:

[PDF] 5. ROHMANI NUR INDAH cl.pmd
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
(Rohmani Nur Indah). of the data show larger number of facts than .... (Rohmani Nur Indah). Again, Zakaria tries to put forward the ...
eprints.ums.ac.id/660/1/5._ROHMANI_NUR_INDAH.pdf - Similar pages


Yes, you could say it's a coincidence and "rohmani" has a different meaning in a different language. But I know this : the God Game is on.

That's all I'm going to say.

I posted "The Alien Who Almost Won" on baen.bar too, just now.

I talked with Oana about it and we both agreed that we have no idea about what's wrong with it. Is it a Satire or not? Should it be funnier? The protagonist more caricatural? Are we simply too tired? Is there something that wrong that we need to worry?

My wife feels that the protagonist needs to be painted in rougher tones, otherwise the ending is flat. I think that if I make the story longer, the core idea loses plausibility. But maybe it works as it is, without more dramatic alterations.

Now I don't even know if I did a good thing with posting it.

I'm on Twitter as rreugen now. I like it. Twitteriffic now chirrups while I work letting me know that Neil Gaiman is visiting the Edgar Allen Poe's Whorehouse, that Nick Cave is slurping daiquiris in Ankara or Tom Waits hasn't had fun since 1962.

I kept writing on "God Game" (that's the title these days for that Nicholas story), making slow progress. It's probably going to end up novella length. A couple of days ago, while trying to understand what exactly will happen to one of the characters there, another idea popped and whoa! 24 hours later I had another first draft ready! It's a 1 600 words story, called "The Alien Who Almost Won". Not a good title, maybe, but that's it for now. I'll post it on baen.bar sometime next week, still have to work on it some more. I'm not very sure about it. It's my first "real" Science Fiction story. It's also the first Satire I tried to write. I'm pretty proud of myself...but I know that she did it actually, in her secret way. Oana got home...and I got a new story! She IS magic.

I posted the second version of "Why I Got Out Of Private Enterprise" on baen.bar. Last night.
It wasn't easy.

The night before I stayed up until 5 AM, talking with Oana about anything, and enjoying her so much that I didn't even realize how late (or early in the morning) it was. We got up a couple of hours later, because we are Responsible Parents, fed the girl, spent time with her, got bored (how can a 6 year old child talk SO DAMN MUCH???) then I let Oana go back to sleep and I started a revision of "The Alien..."

And, as it sometimes happens when you're dead tired, things really clicked, the words found their ways and in less then 2 hours I had a polished gem (okay, not a gem, but, you know, a polished thing)!
And, as it sometimes happens when you're dead tired, I closed the TextEdit without saving.

This is a True Story.

I started over. Despite the boiling anger. Despite the tiredness.

I revised it, and saved, in the end. But it's not that good, not even close. The gem, the brilliant revision, the great great award winning short story is gone forever. Maybe my career along with it.

Ah well.

I refused to go to sleep, of course, because I'm dumbly obsessive (or obsessively dumb) and I stayed awake until 2 AM in the night. I wanted to post that second version of "Why I Got..." but I also wanted to make sure that the "two weeks between posting revisions" rule is not broken.

And guess what? No comments thus far. I could have slept and posted the darn thing in the morning. Heh.



A nice Tom Waits short : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOrG1r3S6ZA

All my comments in the JBU Slush are boorish and picky. I don't think I'm a nice person. In real life I usually am polite, so I can fool a lot of people.

And my 2000 words story posted there? Maybe I should critique it myself. Not aggressively, something on the lines of "it's 2000 words too long".

That was stupid. It's not that bad. Not when I put it next to the Cara story, anyway. So I'm writing stupid things tonight, better here then in the story I'm working on now. I'm supposed to work on it.

No, the story is not that bad. It just has a wasted beginning, and (according to the last comment I got) the part that I like the most actually sucks and it's incomprehensible. So, it's a good story. I'm a bad writer. It gets blurry, the distinction, but it's fine, I'll just blame Vanity or some other trait that I can capitalize so that it feels like a Someone, Someone else, who could leave if I yawn and pull the sheets over my head.

There's also the comfortable way out, it's just a bad day, or night. It's the seventh day of this new year, and my wife is not here but in a car on the way to Bucharest, and with her most of myself, including the only pair of eyes that I can use to look at me and like me.

I received my first Fantasy&Science Fiction Magazine a couple of days ago. It's smaller then I expected. I read it in 2 hours. "The Night We Buried Road Dog" was amazing, so good that it buried the rest of the stories completely. I subscribed for a year, but this novella alone worth all the money. The magazine will switch to 6 issues a year, down from 11. Tough times. Tell me about it. What can I cut?
Lucius Shepard's Films article was very good too. I'd like a film critic or a theater critic in my country with his passion and no mercy when facing dilettantism. We don't have one. We only have ass-kissers. Maybe it's a national trait that we don't advertise, though I can see how it would make tourism a viable industry again.
Sure, I don't agree with him, not when he (seems to me) implies that Americans are responsible for "draining the world of individual colors". Actually, I'm almost offended by that. At least when it comes to my country, I like to think, with national pride, that my people are the ones doing it, my people are the ones who willingly celebrate Saint Valentine's Day (although the saint is not even in our religion, but we are modern people) instead of the Dragobete. It's my people who think Vampires have anything to do with their mythology because they saw foreign movies about it.
Stupid Japanese, or Dutch, they hang on to their Cultures. But we're hanging on with the ass-kissing. That, we won't let go.

I'm going to sleep now. Nothing left to do. Self-pity, check, useless anger, check. Big emptiness, check.

Besides this LJ entry, I managed an amazing count of Zero Words written today.
They sound great.
Maybe I'm not so bad after all.

My wife's birthday came on the 28th of December.

On the 27th I thought it would have been nice to have written something for her...

But it was wishful thinking, right. I don't know why but everything I start seems to stretch and stretch. The thing that started with "Nicholas" is about 8 000 words now and barely starting.

But somehow, on the night of 27th, an idea formed and I started to write it and in about 4 hours I had a complete First Draft! And the story is only about 2000 words long!

I've revised it. It so easy to revise over and over again when the story is so short.

And, because this morning I still felt it's not embarrassing, I posted it on bar.baen.com. If anyone wants to read it, it's up in the Baen's Universe Slush Forum.

It's called "Why I Got Out Of Private Initiative".

It's really short.