Notes, assorted

Woo! I think I managed to finish all the big and most of the small revisions I wanted to make to the space pilots story. Now I have just a few little things left. I might actually ship this out by the end of the week!

(On the off chance you'd like to beta and haven't said so yet, I'm always happy to add readers to my cabal. Leave a way to contact you in the comments.)

I have also been plowing through my recent McKay's haul. Some notes:

Flight, by Sherman Alexie - I have read Vonnegut, and sir, you are no Vonnegut. Which is unfortunate, because I loved the stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. This had some very nice moments, but it paralleled Slaughterhouse-Five much too closely.

Echo, by Jack McDevitt - Stephen King blurbed for the front cover, and he writes, "The logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke." This is all too true, in all possible ways. The characters are little more than cardboard and the prose is often wince-worthy, but the concept and the mystery grabbed me by the brain and wouldn't let me go. The ending was a total letdown, but the journey was great. (This is my new philosophy for reading novels, BTW, since it appears no one knows how to write an ending anymore. I include myself in this group, as those of you will be subjected to have volunteered to read my novella will find.)

The Risk Pool, by Richard Russo - In complete contrast to the above, Russo didn't have much of a story, but his characters could walk off the page and into the world, and his prose danced beguilingly before my eyes. I'm always happy to go back to his dying Rust Belt towns.

In music notes (heh), I've been downloading things from NoiseTrade, which is an excellent service where artists provide a few tracks of their music you can download for free in the hopes of hooking you into paying for more of their music. Its fatal flaw is a lack of ability to browse by anything, including artist name or genre, but if you check out their weekly featured artists, you can at least run into some good tunes. I like these:

Elenowen, a male/female duo from Nashville. Their lyrics could use some work, but they can write an excellent indie pop/rock tune. They compare themselves to The Civil Wars, which seems pretty accurate.

Andrew Belle. I like the first two tracks here especially. More rock than anything else, I guess? The Greg Laswell and John Mayer comparisons on the site seem accurate enough.