The Grace 9

It's been a long time, but the Grace 9 is now complete:

Link is right here.

I know that Grace is a hard story to follow along with as it goes along. I add things in earlier chapters and sometimes I take a fuckload of time between one chapter and the next. All I can say to the people that regularly read my work as it comes out is sorry and, also: Thank you. I think I would be writing Grace regardless, even if you guys both dropped it and called it shit, but having people to say some things at the other end of chapters is a tremendous help.

Few notes for the future:

1) I consider this chapter to be the halfway point of the story. I can't say for certain how many Chapters are left, but this is certainly a spiritual halfway point at least.

2) This may make the story even more confusing for everyone reading it right now, but I'm going to add two more chapters to the earlier parts of the story. One chapter will replace the First Interlude (probably) while another will be something I was going to do in later chapters but really belongs in earlier parts of the book. It'll probably end up between chapters 2 and 3.

They will be good chapters though, so don't worry. One will have lots of Nari.

3) I worked so hard on this bloody space battle and the concepts behind it, so if you feel it completely sucks and want to condemn it as garbage, please don't. There's only so much a man can take. That said, I do want to hear your takes on how it went down. A good two months of rewrites went into that stupid space battle.

4) The 'Grace Discarded' file that contains a fair chunk (though not all) of the crap I write and then throw out of the story is now longer than 4 chapters put together.

5) The song that will play during the space battle in the movie/anime version will be Kawai Kenji - Emiya

Re: Address to the Muslim World

So I figure that since it's directed at me (I guess?), I may as well talk about it. It's here in case you want to hear it, although ever since this speech was uploaded Youtube has been unusually slow. I'm not sure if this is because it's handling that many incoming connections from crappy Middle Eastern cybercafes or if Zionists are interfering or if adding an HD feature to a website that doesn't make any money has proven to not be such a great idea.

When I said after his election that I didn't expect him to do much in the way of change from the status quo, I guess I sort of underestimated him and his speaking abilities. It doesn't cost much to deliver a speech after all and he apparently has a speechwriter that has a passing familiarity with Islam, which is a lot more than Bush could ever say. Indeed, I suspect that they probably brought in some Muslims from somewhere when they were writing the thing and consulted a couple of academics at a few of the big universities' Near Middle Eastern departments.

It was well researched, it was respectful and it was eloquently delivered with the kind of power that one normally associates with Obama's oratory. And let me say, this is not what Muslims are used to hearing from American presidents. And I'm not talking about Bush, I'm talking about all of them. That reason alone makes it a bit of a historic change-of-tone and most likely a positive one. Talk is cheap and all that, but it's better than nothing. So good thing a man such as this was elected President.

But nonetheless, there are a few things that gave me pause. First the content, then I'm going to talk about the structure of the speech because I'm an English minor geek.

The content is the easy part, because he said nothing particularly special. Reiterating long-standing calls for freezes on Israeli settlements was nice and I think he might almost be serious about them. That's great. I don't think they actually will stop building the settlements, but at least we as a world are starting to recognize that the militant asshats swimming in their pools amidst Palestinian drought might actually be an aspect of the problems of the region.

Calling on Hamas to renounce violence is an old line, though for what it's worth I think they probably should. Speaking from a perfectly practical perspective: Violence only really works when you have it in sufficient quantities to serve as a deterrent against an aggressor. Right now whatever meagre losses Hamas inflicts upon the Zionists are outweighed severely by the political effects of Palestinian disunity. That's a harsh reality that one must acknowledge.

Overall, the speech is pretty much what I imagine a lot of us would have wanted to hear from an American president. It's a bit preachy, but it at least offers some of the basic respect that most of us feel has been completely absent from American-Muslim discourse since the last forever. So that much is nice.

The structure is pretty important. At a very basic level the speech's objective is to sort of butter up Muslims with flattery and Obama's certainly good at that sort of thing. His campaign strategy did often boil down to making people feel so good about themselves that they just had to support him, after all. I personally enjoyed the reference to Cordoba.

But there's this problematic quotation:
... when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.

I honestly think this quotation will spoil the speech for a lot of the people it's directed at.

Isra is the story of the Holy Prophet's Night Journey from Mecca to Jerusalem. The short of it is that the Prophet was taken to Masjid Al-Aqsa in a single night, where he met with his predecessors and led (not joined, that's a complete distortion) them in prayer. This story is the reason why Al-Aqsa is so holy in the first place and it sorta encaspulates on a symbolic level the doctrine of Islam as the ultimate and final successor to the Abrahamic religions.

But... well let me explain:

The faith of Islam is composed of two aspects. First there is the acknowledgement that there is only One God and that he has no partner or offspring. The second is that Muhammad (pbuh) is the legitimately inspired Prophet that He employed as His Messanger. Both aspects are extremely important.

So at the center of the Night Journey is the issue of one's faith in the Holy Prophet. Muhammad is a Prophet of few physical miracles and there is no physical evidence that proves that the Night Journey occurred and that Muhammad travelled from Mecca to Jerusalem. It is an article of faith that each Believer (and Disbeliever) must come to terms with. If one acknowledges its truth, one is for all intents and purposes a Muslim.

Barack Obama obviously did not convert in the middle of his speech, so one can say that he's using the story in the same way I use the stories of Menelaus' battles at Troy to illustrate why Frank sucks at DotA. And that's a really bad idea. Most Muslim will know that story as well as I do and the theologically-minded ones will recognize the manner in which he's using it.

It won't kill the overall effect or have destructive results, but it's still something that will have a souring effect.

Anyhow, that's all I've got to say about it. I'll release more Grace... soon. I'm not sure when.

The Grace 8

Wow, I managed to finish Grace 8 without taking months to do it! Here it is.

My comments on the Chapter:

1) I think I should have described the Reception Hall a bit more last chapter, but that might just be me. Let me know if you have any trouble keeping track of the action here and things will go well.

2) Does it feel that the story is going anywhere from a reader's point of view? From my own perspective, I'm slowly revealing mysteries from the past while Eisa struggles in the present, but I was thinking the other day that Eisa keeps running into superior forces in the present storyline. I hope that doesn't leave anyone with feelings of stagnation? Please let me know.

3) I've been meaning to go back and alter Weedy's backstory from Chapter 3 for a while, but haven't got around to it. Originally Weedy was going to be from the Lantern, but that back story has sort of been transferred to someone else. I'll get to writing Weedy's real back story soon.

4) Next Chapter is in space. Finally!

5) Only two people read this. The rest of you are bastards.

The Grace 7

Man, it's been a while.

Okay, so Grace 7 is complete.

Few things before link:

1) Ignore the last revision.

Yeah, sorry about that, but I ended up changing my mind and going back to the original chapter idea. You know, with the Archivist at that reception and Eisa planning Something. So err... that's what's happening now. Here's the remodified Grace 6. It's not that much different than what it was originally, but the names 'Claude' and 'Wire' were dropped as being members of Eisa's faction back on Solar, who will got to war if it comes to that. Ctrl + F them in the document if you're curious.

Once again: I'm very sorry.

2) This took so long because I wrote it four times.

There are about 90 discarded pages of this chapter. Probably more if you count the ones I just deleted. Sometimes writing this damn story can be bloody painful. Ugh. I hope the next chapter flows a bit more smoothly.

3) I will try to get Chapter 8 done a bit more quickly.

So, all that aside, here's Grace 7. Yay.

Be sure to check out Unity Plaza if you want to hear about other things by the way.

Open Office is a steaming pile of garbage

Here is my extended review of Open Office 3.0:

This shit really sucks. It's designed for assholes writing reports for their superiors in the corporate world. The plugin system is unintuitive and you spend so much fucking time playing with this setting or that bit of interface that it's impossible to get anything done. The layout is sexy, but the whole program is a fucking mess and needs to die. After a month of struggling with this thing, I think I'm just going to give up. I blame this at least partially for Grace delays.

I'm sorry, Microsoft Office 2003... take me back. I shall never be unfaithful to you ever again.

The Grace 7 woes and Unity Plaza

So some news for these parts.

First, about Grace...

There are times during the writing where I hit a brick wall. I've thrown down a lot of keystrokes in my attempts to write Chapter 7 and it was, in fact, 'finished'. But the problem is that I hate it and it doesn't feel right. So I'm scrapping it and starting from scratch. This required a bit of an edit to Chapter 6, which you may find here.

All that's changed is Eisa's conversation with Vincent at the beginning of the Chapter. The gist of it is that instead of the deal with the Archivist, Eisa is going to stay focused on Abel. This actually doesn't change much of the overall direction of the story. It just changes the order of a few events, really. So hopefully that'll work out.

Next... it's been mostly true for the last year that this has been my writing blog. Occasionally I post about something else, but it's mainly Grace in here. Which I think is cool, I like this blog like that. But I do miss the spontaneous sort of blogging that just sounds off about anything. So I have now made a second blog dedicated to non-serious topics. You might still see posts in here about politics and other serious life-related matters, but for your gaming, your anime and your books you should head over to Unity Plaza. I intend to update it two or three times a week. I also intend to make it bloody awesome.

And to answer the unanswered question: Unity Plaza is from this. I like the name mainly because its origins are obscure, but also because in Tau we are strong.

So anyhow, stay tuned to both my blogs for more great stuff.

This and that

Quick update.

Firstly, Grace 7 is being worked on but as always it's hard and my efforts have borne little fruit so far. I've been on the down for the last week or so, which makes the whole process a bit difficult. I'll get it done sooner or later though. I'm not really sure when.

Second... I don't see much value in talking at length about Gaza. Everything that's happened in the last few weeks is rather predictable. Israel is exploiting the odd period of political flux in American politics to do whatever it wants. Abbas is happy to see his Hamas rivals suffer, since it will mean his reinstallment in Gaza. The Arab states don't want to do anything about it and, even if they did, couldn't do anything about it anyway.

The main innovation I see in this particular conflict is that the IDF now have a Youtube channel (which I refuse to link here) that lets the 4channers of the world see their precision airstrikes in action. One of those precision air strikes ended up being on just some truck that was carrying gasoline, but never mind that. Key is that it looked good.

Obama has been criticized for his silence, which is I think a bit silly. I would be very doubtful that Obama would be a check on Israel. But okay, even if he wanted to do something constructive right now, he couldn't. He hasn't been sworn in and if he contradicts the Bush administration on a foreign policy matter at this point he'll be getting into a counterproductive spat with the outgoing administration.

Though of course, that's an easy excuse. The timing is just as convenient for Obama as it is for Israel itself. His international celebrity will be preserved for a long while longer. But as I said in the post on that matter, all indicators seem to point towards Obama's primary agenda being domestic. He won't do anything for the Palestinians... but that doesn't really differ from what any other American president would do.

I don't believe that the Zionist state in its current form is viable in the long term. Brash thuggishness is not a long term strategy, no matter how many billions in gun money comes in. I know that Israel has a strongly martial culture, what with the draft for both genders at 18, but you have to wonder if war fatigue is ever going to set in there. The Arab states are about the same as ever in their non-action, of course, though one wonders how long that can go on too. The only encouraging thing I've heard from the region is the Turkish Prime Minister making a tour of the region in opposition to Israel, though this provoked at least one Arab guy saying 'what is he doing? This is an Arab affair!'

I have little hope for any short term solutions. But in the next few decades, maybe this sort of thing will stop.