Book Review: Boneshaker

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked up this book because I was looking for an interesting read in a genre I hadn't read much of before. I figured that a steampunk, zombie hybrid would at the very least be harmless fun. I'm glad that my expectations weren't all that high, because that is all this was; harmless fun.

Priest sets up a world in which Seattle has been overrun by a poisonous gas that can kill you and turn you into a grey skinned, decomposing "rotter." Enclosed in towering walls, the denizens of zombie infested Seattle live underground in a desperate, dark world that is run by a mysterious doctor. There are dirigible flying pirates, Civil War deserters (because the damn thing has been going on for a decade), one-armed bar keeps, and lots and lots of gas masks. Probably more gas masks than a WWI trench.

So, how does she manage to make it unexciting?

One reason could be that she tells everything rather than shows. I couldn't get interested in how her characters felt, or might feel since she never gave me a clear idea. I got frustrated with trying to figure out how her protagonists Briar and Zeke (a mother and son) really felt about the horrible situation they managed to stumble into. The worst part was that I couldn't connect with them, at all. I found myself liking and preferring the secondary characters over the protagonists of the story because they were more interesting and likable.

Second, the book takes forever to get off the ground like a damaged air-ship, and then stumbles around in the moist, claustrophobic dark. Don't get me wrong, Priest is a clear writer with straight forward prose, but I wish the main characters spent less time trying to get places they didn't know they were headed and achieved some goals along the way. There were moments where Briar could have been looking for a lost set of keys instead of her son, and it wouldn't have made a lick of difference.

Third, well, the prose is dry. In other words, it wasn't interesting to read. I felt myself nodding off or having to walk away because I simply lost interest. This most likely is due to her inability to connect me to the characters or environment that they act in.

Despite my words, don't let them turn you away from this book if you want some fluffy popcorn for desert. It's fun, but it just couldn't grab my attention for very long. She has a very fun concept; it just seems that she didn't quite manage to electrify it to its full extent. I might read another one of these Clockwork Century books. I'm just going to need a little space first.


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Shopping Alone

I know that I use this blog mostly for talking about my writing, but now it is time for me to bring in my life as a military wife again.


I am currently going through what almost all military wives will eventually struggle with, deployment. I have been through the literature and that fun advice that everyone gives you. While nice and all, it doesn't really prepare you for being alone with only a dog. It would be lovely if there was information targeted towards childless wives, but alas there is not. They just kind of lump you in with those that have one to twenty screaming brats. I don't have any yet. Like I said, it's just me and the dog.


I've summed it up to being much like this: It's like living single, but with none of the benefits. I shop alone, make my own messes, clean up just such messes and the dog's, sleep alone, and sit in one super unsettling silence. The worst part is that the housing gave us a four bedroom place (I won't call it a house since it's part of a duplex) that once seemed so wonderful, but is now too big for just me. It's lonely.


Despite what I said above, I have been handling it well until I undertook my first big deployed spouse task, grocery shopping. For one. The routine I once had was blown out of the water in my new need for single portions. I spent a good part of an hour staring at shelves and glass-faced coolers trying to figure out what to get without killing myself with sodium.


I will let you know how cooking single portions goes, because that is certainly going to be a fun challenge.


Aside from the food selection issue, a thought smacked into me with the force of a truck. Shopping for one person, when it should be two, is depressing. I knew that as I pushed my cart around the commissary people could tell I was shopping for one person. It saddened me. It should be two, two people, not one.


Living by yourself when there used to always be another person around is a shock. There really aren't any other words for it. Even if you have a job or a hobby to fill your time, in between there are still the quiet spaces. It's those spaces in which you can hear the air conditioner, the fridge, and the noises  your dog makes when he's sleeping. That's when I realize it's time to go bang on some pots because my husband isn't here to do it for me.


This is certainly going to be an interesting ride.

Sketching Again: Shaking Off the Rust

I know, it's been two months since I blogged, but here I am.


Okay, I'm going to brave for a few seconds and post up the first sketches I've done in... well... forever.  I haven't drawn anything since I moved out to California over a year ago. While I was smashing out Chapter 29 I got the hankering to sketch, and I mean serious sketch. Not sit down with mechanical pencil and doodle something. I got my art box out and dug a drawing pad from the depth of my office closet. The end result is a graphite stained right hand, and these:

Tao

Melody

I know they aren't the greatest. Like I said, it's been a while. I was mostly trying to work on my values. I really need work. If I behave myself, I'll work on my drawing everyday along with my writing, but that'll be a long shot. Everyone I know wants me to do artwork again, so I'm going to try.


In case you were wondering who they are, the girl on the left is Exorcist Tao foul mouthed chain smoker from my novel Hands of Ash, and the girl on the right is my main character Melody. I placed thim in the order that I drew them. Feel free to leave comments below.

Typewriter Text to Your Computer: How to Get Good Results

Now that I've told you all where you can go to use decent OCR software, I will now cover how you can get good results with this software. These methods were discovered when cleaning up my own OCRed (look Mom, a made up word) chapters that I had written on my little S&C Skyriter. I wrote some of them while I was still trying to keep the spools from sticking when I first got it, so the text was a tad iffy. My later drafts look much better since my spools no longer stuck and I had gotten much better at typing on my machine. So here are a few things that you can try while writing with your own machines that can help you get good results when using OCR software.

• Keep the draft clean. Since the OCR software reads the shape that it can see on the paper, it's best to try not and screw up and then fix it by backing over the word to cross it out. When in the flow, it's tempting to just hit the backspace or move the carriage so you can cross out the words with a handy ///, XXX, or even a horizontal line. This can be read in many strange ways, by the software, and it becomes tedious to go through and get rid of all the funny combinations. I suggest using white out tape to go over  your mistakes. I find it quite handy, and it keeps my manuscript clean for the software. Make sure you cover all of the mistake, or you may get the odd colon and period in the middle of a word.
• Have crisp, clean letters. This is a little harder to achieve with a typewriter, so I suggest using any means necessary. You want the crispest, cleanest letters you can manage or you might get words that come out like this: ducL:. It was supposed to be duck,but the software didn't read it that way. My periods are also often mistaken for commas and my Is for ones. This is why I find it best to make sure that my letters come out as sharp as possible. Currently my letters are a tad gummed up, so I might get better results when I clean them. Using a typeface that is easy to read might help too. The g on my machine is a bit funny, so I get a lot of words that look like this: hugGed. 
• Use a good quality scanner. This will also maintain the sharpness of your letters. I have a good one, so I don't have this problem. If you have an old one, invest in a new one, or borrow a friends. Many printers do double, triple, or quadruple duty these days, so a good scanner shouldn't be hard to come by.
• If converting to a Word doc, try to spell everything right. I know that as writers we should try and do this anyway, but it doesn't always happen. By having good spelling, the amount of red and green squiggly lines should be reduced which makes fixing and finding the OCR errors much easier. 

I hope this helps for any writer who is crazy enough to write on a typewriter. I find that preventative measures make everything easier in life. 

For my first blog on using OCR software: Typewriter Text to Your Computer

Typewriter Text to Your Computer

Hi, there. I know that it's been a while. It appears that I've been writing these things monthly. I guess my writing has kept me busier than I thought.


On that note, since I've been using a typewriter to do my rewrites, I've been looking for a way to convert scanned PDFs of my chapters into text. I noticed that Adobe had that option for roughly $20 a year and looked into it. Well, according to reviews that I searched for because I needed to know if they could convert text that had been typed out with a typewriter, I found that their PDF to Word conversions couldn't handle it. Why? Apparently their OCR software couldn't read the inconsistencies that come with typewriter text.


For those who don't know, OCR is the alphabet soup term for optical character recognition software. It's a program that reads the characters of a text and tries to turn it into the closest representation possible. From my research I discovered that most versions of the software aren't good enough to handle inconsistent characters well. None of them can handle handwriting. It was frustrating. Then I found this article that listed 10 softwares that have free options, five for online and five for desktop. It pretty much did the work for me.


I experimented a bit with the Google Docs option, but my PDF files were all too big. So decided to try the one that the article recommended: OnlineOCR. To say that this was a god send would be a little over the top because the free service can be a little limited. It only does 5 pages an hour for guest users. So, I suggest registering if you're going to use this service. They give you 20 credits (a credit per page) to start out and you can do PDF files, an option you don't have when a guest user. Additional credits can be purchased, or earned through their Bonus Program.


I took advantage of the 20 credits, and had one of my PDFs converted. It took a minute for the file to upload to the site, but then the conversion was relatively quick. (Although, this could depend on your internet speed, and your computer.) Even though it wasn't entirely accurate, OnlineOCR did a pretty good job. I'll still have to go through and fix the little problems like wrong letters, missing words, and formatting, but it beats transcribing my work. While not perfect, the service saved me quite a bit of time and effort that I can put back into my writing. (And gave me a good laugh. It's like reading auto-correct texts.)


So there you are. My first advice blog to the people who can't afford one of those fancy USB Typewriters or have the skills to do their own soldering. Or for those who have a monster collection of those clack-clack machines and still transcribe their own writing. I'm sure many of you have looked into such software, and been unhappy. So far, I have not been disappointed.


Now back to my novel.




Update: If you are a blogger, and are happy about the service that Online OCR provides, they will reward you credits for a blog review written by you. Just make sure you send them an email with the link, something not posted on the site that I had to discover by myself. It's worth it if you have a mound of pages. (Added 5/21/12)