tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65415740967959103632024-02-19T06:14:00.996-05:00Shooting for the MoonThe personal blog of an aspiring Urban Fantasy author.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.comBlogger96125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-36293692994839826932013-09-03T19:29:00.001-04:002013-09-03T19:29:33.925-04:00What I've Been Doing Lately...Between trying to write and trying to keep myself fed, I've been really busy lately. In my spare time, I got into a lot of stuff I really wanted to review here, but didn't have the time too. So today, because I had a brief break, a bunch of mini-reviews:<br />
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<i>Secrets of the Wolves</i>: Sequel to <i>Promise of the Wolves</i>, which I reviewed on Lupines and Lunatics awhile back. Been meaning to get around to it for awhile. Now I have, and it's... eh, okay, I guess. It has the "middle of the trilogy" problem where the heroes are running around a lot and getting nothing done. Kaala is juggling three or four goals the entire book and all of them remain unresolved by the end. I liked the characters and the evocative world-building, but I don't think I'll bother with volume three. Not really invested in it.<br />
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<i>Shift</i> and <i>Alpha</i>: Yes, I finally got around to finishing Rachel Vincent's werecat series. But I didn't have much to say about it, so I didn't write a review. Honestly, the series kind of ran out of steam in these last two volumes. <i>Alpha</i>, in particular, is padded up and dragged out, making it especially annoying when it fizzles after the final battle, with about ten pages of wrapup. More annoyingly, much of that padding involves milking the Marc/Faythe/Jace love triangle for everything it's worth, which is not only annoying on the surface, but badly undermines the series' feminist underpinnings. Still a strong series overall, but it's too bad that Vincent couldn't keep it together the whole way through.<br />
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<i>The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian: </i>Picked up this collection of Conan the Barbarian stories to study for a writing project. I was really surprised when the first story, <i>The Phoenix on the Sword</i>, reminded me of Shakespeare. More violence and gore than the bard, yes, but the characters and their dialogue feel like they jumped right out of one of the history plays. Somewhat unfortunately, this turns out to be Early Installment Weirdness, and the subsequent stories trade verbal eloquence and kingly dramas for pulpy adventure yarns. Which is not to say the stories are bad. To the contrary, it's easy to see why Howard is still being ripped off decades later. Evocative writing and Conan's charismatic mix of boasting bombast and "fuck off" cynicism allow Howard to transcend the formulaic storylines. They cannot, however, transcend Howard's less-than-progressive attitudes towards women and people of color. Still enjoyable, but I cringed inwardly at several points.<br />
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<i>The Lone Ranger</i>: I didn't dislike this anywhere near as much as some people did. In fact, I thought it deserved more credit than it got. A lot of the critics overlooked the frame story. They shouldn't, and not just because Johnny Depp is reminding us that he can still act instead of just mugging for the camera. It's because it provides context for the entire film. Here is the minority sidekick, left on the sidelines of history, reduced to literally working for peanuts in a circus sideshow. Now, he has his chance to tell the story his way, and to hear him tell it the story is a lot different than what you may have heard; he, the alleged sidekick, is a larger-than-life character and the white hero is a dull, boring cipher. It's over-the-top, yes, but so was the original Lone Ranger, what with his squeaky-clean image and impractical silver bullets. So who's to say there isn't as much truth in this as the story we'd heard before? This isn't really a film about cowboys and indians and outlaws and crazy-awesome train chases. If the old west is america's time of legends, than what this film is really about is mythmaking, and myth-remaking, and our changing perspective on the american experience. It does has problems; most notably, the middle of the film is overlong and overstuffed. But I think it's a much deeper movie than everyone has said.<br />
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<i>Pacific Rim:</i> On the other hand, this one everyone seemed to like and I just didn't get. People were all like, "Holy shit, america actually made a good kaiju movie/mecha anime!" And I was like "Well, yeah... but it's kinda dull." It made for a decent time in the theater, but the plot was cliche and predictable, coasting on the strength of it's cast and effects. Which were enough, but the next day I couldn't remember a single thing that happened.<br />
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<i>Elysium: </i>Like <i>Pacific Rim</i>, I liked this in the theater, but the luster wore off quick. People have said casting Matt Damon as the hero to a bunch of oppressed people of color makes the film racist. While that certainly doesn't help matters, the real problem with <i>Elysium</i> is that it can't decide whether it's about A) classism and economic injustice, B) healthcare, or C) immigration. The correct answer is B, because that's the only way the plot makes sense from an "under the hood" standpoint. As a class parable, it fails because the resolution does nothing to alleviate the poverty in the world. As an immigration story, it's a very black-and-white treatment of a complex issue of international relations, and the metaphor becomes riddled with holes. Not understanding this, the film waffles around a while before settling on C and imploding. Another criticism I'm hearing is that it's overstuffed. It is, but I think that it still could have worked if they had picked one thing for the film to be about and stuck with it. I kept mentally comparing it to 2011's vastly underrated <i>In Time.</i> That film also covered a lot of ground, but did so successfully because they chose one theme and rode it all the way through. But <i>Elysium</i> has the screenplay equivalent of ADD, resulting in a disorganized film that's not only heavy-handed with it's message, but isn't sure what that message is. And who the HELL thought it was a good idea to cast the consistently-awesome William Fichtner in a role where he has nothing to do?!<br />
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<i>Teen Wolf:</i> I keep waiting for the moment when this series finds its voice and ascends to awesomeness, but after three seasons, it still hasn't happened. Not that it's a bad series. It's held back a lot by weak writing, with bland dialog in abundance. But a talented cast and solid production and effects shores it up. Actually, any given episode of <i>Teen Wolf</i> is a well put-together hour of television. But every episode is also predictable; with maybe one or two exceptions per season, the things that happen are exactly what you'd expect to happen. And the show shies away from killing important characters- bit players and tertiary characters die by the dozen, but anyone who's popular with the fans or close to one of the main cast is pretty much immortal. We rag on Joss Whedon for killing off people we've come to love, but that element of danger- the feeling that nobody's safe- is the very thing that keeps us invested in his characters. But <i>Teen Wolf</i> is gun-shy, and after three seasons of it there's no tension in the plot. And it doesn't help that this season's overarching story was virtually identical to the last one, with screentime stretched thin among a bloated cast. I continue to watch and hope for that Grow The Beard moment, but I have an awful feeling that if it hasn't hit by now, it ain't coming.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-13130909188886007892013-08-22T18:16:00.000-04:002013-08-22T18:16:05.513-04:00Kitty in the Underworld<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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How about that? The first time I've gotten an offer of a review copy for a major release, and not only have I more or less given up on my blog, but I already bought the book for myself. The irony, it burns...<br />
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I've been a fan of the Kitty Norville series since I started <i>Lupines and Lunatics</i> back in 2010, and these past three years I've seen it be good, bad, and indifferent. The last book hit "good", and this one continues the momentum, although it's also a different kind of book. The appeal of <i>Kitty Rocks the House</i> was in the way it spotlighted the many characters in Vaughn's universe. By contrast, Kitty spends most of her latest outing either alone or interacting with a small group of newcomers.<br />
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Said newcomers, are, essentially, a crazy evil cult. A vampire with a trio of underlings who tranq Kitty, lock her up in an abandoned mine, and attempt to convert her to their cause. Much of the early book is Kitty being tortured with hunger, confinement, and isolation, along the way plunging into the occasional soul-searching monologue. Once she cracks and lets her wolf out, her captors let her in on the purpose of all this: They need Kitty for a magical ritual that will, they hope, destroy archvillain Roman. So, still a crazy cult, but not really evil. I guess?<br />
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The main issue here is that, once it comes out that Roman is their common enemy, the antagonists suddenly stop looking like bad people. Instead, they're flawed but basically decent individuals pursuing a noble cause. It's a strange twist to drop on the reader, and moreso the fact that, after half a book of making these people out to be loonies, Kitty suddenly decides to join forces of her own free will.<br />
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It's to Vaughn's credit that this doesn't come off as stockholm syndrome or anything of the sort. Or maybe it isn't, because frankly, stockholm syndrome would have made more sense. Instead we get the idea that Kitty is entering into an alliance of convenience. That's certainly a good move from a practical standpoint, but it's the same issue I had in <i>Rocks the House</i> where Kitty talks Becky down from the planned pack-coup and Becky never even brings up Kitty using her as bait back in <i>Kitty Goes to War</i>. Real people are not this reasonable. Is Kitty so detached emotionally that she can just shrug off the events of the previous two days and throw in with her captors? She certainly wasn't back in book 2, where she got a similar treatment over a much shorter period of time and likened it to being raped.<br />
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But keep in mind that all this comes after having a few days to reflect on the book. In the moment of the story, there's enough good in play that even major missteps don't kill it entirely. This a very introspective book, with Kitty considering her place in the world and just what it might require to defeat Roman. At the same time, though, Vaughn doesn't overdo it and descend into navel-gazing, but keeps the focus always on the driving conflicts and driving questions of the story. Along the way we get backstory on Roman and set up for future conflicts. I'm still not sure that the Long Game storyline is playing to Vaughn's strengths as a writer, but things have gotten a lot more interesting now, and with the various forces starting to move openly, maybe there's life to be breathed into this plot yet.<br />
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One thing that struck me as particularly interesting, and it's so subtle I can't be sure whether or not Vaughn intended it. Kitty's relationship with her wolf half has changed due to the events of this book. Before, it was a very one-way thing; Wolf-Kitty was a oppressive presence that whispered things in Kitty's ear and took control of her once per month. Kitty mostly tried to ignore her influence. But by the end of this book, the relationship has become two-way; now Human-Kitty exerts the same influence over herself when in beast mode, and at one point they have something akin to an argument. The implications for Kitty personally and her universe are fascinating, and I hope those get explored further going forward.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-56200304903779492832013-06-24T20:37:00.001-04:002013-06-24T20:41:27.439-04:00Blood and Chocolate<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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(I finished this book more than a week ago, but drama kept me away from the blog. Sorry. Hopefully regular posting will pick up from here.)<br />
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<i>Twilight</i> may have busted the YA Paranormal genre open, but <i>Blood and Chocolate</i> was out eight years before. It's an artifact of an earlier time, when Anne Rice and White Wolf roleplayers still ruled the night. More cynically, you could say it was from a time when authors and publishers still cared about quality, when the emphasis was on polishing stories rather than releasing tons of them fast, like the metaphorical spaghetti thrown at the wall. So <i>Blood and Chocolate</i> is a very well-crafted book, tightly plotted and effectively written. But for all that, it proves that the more things change, the more they stay the same.<br />
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The plot is a victim of history; it wasn't yet insufferably cliche in 1997, but it is today. Paranormal girl - subtype werewolf - meets muggle guy, falls in love, and tries to pursue that love in defiance of the supernatural community's rules. A crisis of leadership among the werewolves, resolved by the usual bloodsport, complicates things.<br />
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What becomes apparent very early on is that this is very much a 90's story, meaning a lot of things are dated. Teenagers without cell phones, just for example, but it's not just the difference in technology that's off-putting. <i>Blood and Chocolate</i> is also rather obviously written by a baby boomer observing "those crazy kids". I don't mean to say that it treats its cast with disrespect, because it doesn't. It's just... off. Major characters seem like stereotypes; our chief love interest is a bundle of new-age cliches, halfway between hippie and hipster. His wannabe girlfriend is a perky goth girl with jealousy issues. The two of them hang together with a circle of misfits that pretentiously calls themselves "The Ameoba", and attend concerts for vaguely-described but implicitly loud and obnoxious bands. I imagine teen readers of the day rolling their eyes and saying "This author just doesn't get it."<br />
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If you can get over that, <i>Blood and Chocolate</i> a pretty good read. It takes a bit long to get going, but once it does it sucks you in. Until the end, where it gets hit hard with two of the persistent gremlins in the genre's gears: the romanticization of borderline-abusive men, and the bullshit non-ending that resolves nothing.<br />
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(Spoilers ahead)<br />
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In addition to muggle boy Aiden, wolf-girl Vivian is pursued by Gabe, the pack's alpha. While Gabe isn't much older than Vivian and does harbor affection for her, he's clearly in it out of a sense of entitlement. As the new king, he needs a queen, and in his mind he deserves the pick of the litter, so to speak. Which eventually leads to him pinning Vivian to a kitchen counter for make-outs, a scene that dug up bad memories of the attempted bathroom-rape in <i>Nightshade</i>. However, in the last thirty pages or so, the novel's treatment of Gabe does a complete 180 and in the last scene Vivian agrees to move away with him and the pack to their new home.<br />
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What makes this extra-squicky is the way in which Gabe ultimately wins Vivian over. She's moved to sympathy when he bares his soul to her and admits to killing a past lover.<br />
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Yes, really. But he regrets it a lot, see?<br />
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Well, alright, it <i>is</i> more complicated than that. He fell in love with a human woman and one day transformed accidentally while they were in bed together. When he did, she freaked the hell out. He tried to calm her down, but she was too scared to listen to reason, so he struck her, forgetting all about his lycanthropic superstrength. This is supposed to humanize him, and to make the point that weres and humans Just Can't Be Together. It succeeds on the latter, since something frighteningly similar happened when Vivian tranformed for Aiden. But the former? No sale.<br />
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Even if you can put that aside, though, there's the fact that the ending undermines the entire strory. <i>Blood and Chocolate</i> is about Vivian struggling to break out of an oppressive society. She fights with her mother, her old friends, and the pack itself to reach for something greater, something she loves, something she can't have under the old ways. Then at the end, she decides that she'd rather stick with the old ways after all. This isn't played as a tragedy, either. It's sold as a positive outcome that will eventually bring Vivian happiness. My first thought is that it was a sequel hook, and had the book been written today I would take that as a given. If so, it serves as an example of why not to do that: since no sequel was ever released, everything is left hanging and the reader never gets closure.<br />
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Now that I think of it, though, there's another explanation. Remember, the author was a 40-something, possibly with children of her own, writing during the era where Gen-X and Gen-Y were ascendant. To her, this <i>is</i> the happy ending: the kids get over their teenage rebellion and settle down to realize their parents were right. Life goes on as it always does. It's not a <i>bad</i> theme necessarily, but it's woefully ignorant about just how deep the cracks between boomers and post-boomers run. (And just how disgusting we find it that an entitled prat is held up as Prince Charming.) Again, <i>Blood and Chocolate</i> is a victim of history: it sees the generation gap of the 90's mending over time, when in reality the rift between 20th and 21st century values would just get worse.<br />
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(End of spoilers)<br />
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Annette Curtis Klause is a rather obscure writer. If wikipedia is to be believed, she's a YA librarian who dabbles; she published three novels over a seven-year period, a fourth nine years later, and a smattering of short stories since. <i>Blood and Chocolate</i> was the only one of those that really found a following, partially because after <i>Twilight</i> blew up, <i>Blood and Chocolate</i> rode it's coattails to renewed prominence. I'm glad she's still around in some capacity, since she's certainly skilled enough to write for a living. I just hope she's been able to keep up with the times.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-45044763510692031672013-06-06T19:40:00.000-04:002013-06-06T19:40:14.721-04:00Sorcery!<i>Sorcery!</i> is a 1983 <i>Fighting Fantasy</i> spinoff, recently re-released as an iOS app by inkle. inkle has done something here that takes courage - instead of porting over the <i>Fighting Fantasy</i> system, as with Tin Man Games' <i>House of Hell</i> port, they risk the slings and arrows of nostalgic fans by changing the rules. I never played the original, so I don't know how much it's been changed, but the gamble has paid off. I would, in fact, go so far as to say that <i>Sorcery!</i> is a new quality benchmark for app gamebooks.<br />
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The plot is nothing special; to save the realm from an evil wizard, you must go on a long journey to find a MacGuffin called the Crown of Kings. <i>Sorcery!</i> was originally a four-book series, so you don't find the crown in this first volume - instead, you spend the book traversing the Shamutanti Hills en route to the city of Khare. What you encounter - and how you deal with those encounters - depends on which of the many paths you take to Khare.<br />
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<i>Sorcery!</i> was originally aimed at an older audience than its parent series, and so set out to tell a more significant tale with deeper mechanics. On the first count, it seemingly failed; it serves up a bog-standard "long journey to find MacGuffin and defeat evil wizard" affair, although hints of a deeper backstory are scattered through the book. The main selling point in the plot, though, is that it spreads out through four books, with the player being able to import his character to the next upon successful completion. Unless I miss my guess, <i>Sorcery!</i> was the first book to actually do this, but many of the best-remembered books of the golden age; <i>Way of the Tiger</i>, <i>Lone Wolf</i>, <i>Fabled Lands</i>, etc., were built on the same conceit. But <i>Sorcery!</i> did it first, so chalk up one point for that.<br />
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The mechanical innovations are more significant. An innovative spell system and options for stealth and guile provide multiple solutions to problems, rather then just hacking your way through everything. If battle is too much randomness for you, you can always just take a different path. There are several routes through the Shamutanti Hills, and many allow you to rely on wits or magic instead of swordplay. It's even possible to get through the entire book without once entering combat (excepting a tutorial fight at the beginning) through use of the right paths, spells, and choices. Alternatively, you could risk danger for loot or other advantages. There's enough replay value here that you can keep coming back. Just yesterday I thought I was done, but then read a post on inkle's blog which mentioned things I hadn't even heard of, and now I want to replay again to find the jewelled collar.<br />
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When you do have to (or wish to) fight, you'll find that inkle has overhauled the combat system. In place of dice-rolling, you have blind bids in a manner similar to <i>Queen's Blade</i>, although much simpler. Each turn both you and your opponent bid a certain number of Action Points. Whoever puts in more wins the round and inflicts damage proportional to the loser's bid (so bigger attacks leave you exposed). Alternatively, you can bid 0 AP to defend, doing no damage but ensuring your opponent won't do more than one damage either. AP regenerates, but slowly, so a big attack also means you can't bring as much force to bear next turn.<br />
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It's fairly brilliant. It solves the age-old problem of making a fight challenging within the limited mechanical confines of a gamebook. There are tradeoffs to consider, but not so many that it becomes a chore to make decisions. A bigger bonus is that each round of combat is described in fair detail, and these descriptions contain hints to the opponent's next action. Now <i>this</i> is a great idea. No longer are we just stopping the story to roll some dice before proceeding. Instead, we're actively participating in a fight and being rewarded for paying attention.<br />
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The biggest success in this book, however, is the writing. Yes, the plot is cliche, developing somewhat but never rising above the standard 80's fantasy fare. But the characters shine. Jann, the helpful but annoying pixie, is the biggest standout, but nearly every character has personality and life, even the nameless townspeople whom you get some information from and then walk away from. The main character has personality too, or at least develops some in response to your choices.<br />
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There are some flaws worthy of mention - aside from the plot, the big one is that looking up spells in the middle of the action is a chore. It was apparently much worse in the original, where you couldn't consult the spellbook at all once the action started, but even this less retarded version is annoying. There's no search function or index, instead you have to page through the spells one by one until you find the one you're curious about. The overworld map, though a nice touch, is tough to move around on, with a larger than necessary player character making the screen cramped, and controls are finicky. And the app itself is a serious battery guzzler, at least it is on my iPod Touch. But none of this seriously impedes the enjoyment. <i>Sorcery!</i> is the best app gamebook in the genre's short history, and a definite must-play.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-49940665367459013942013-05-28T19:04:00.000-04:002013-05-28T19:04:00.511-04:00UnWholly<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Unwind </i>captivated me so much, I got fanboyish. The first thing I did after reading it was grab the sequel from the library, something which I never do. I originally intended to review them both at once, but backed off on that because my feelings on them are radically different. While a perfectly good book, <i>UnWholly</i> isn't quite on the same level as its predecessor.<br />
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The story is certainly gripping. As before, Shusterman sets a fast pace, and his world-building is excellent. In fact, in terms of craftsmanship <i>UnWholly</i> is arguably better than <i>Unwind</i>. The latter had issues with characterization and occasionally slapdash plotting. <i>UnWholly</i> gels much better as a story, but it's also a much more conventional story. I'm reminded a bit of <i>The Matrix</i> trilogy; The first installment was never really intended to have a sequel. Yes, the ending left things open, but the story that the writer intended to tell had been told. More importantly, all the good <i>ideas</i> had been used up. So the creators escalated, going from battles to wars while keeping the same basic style and format.<br />
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So too with <i>UnWholly</i>. The first thing that happens is that the hopeful ending of the first book gets a reality check. Turns out that's it's not as easy as implied to change the world. The small victories of the first book have created new problems, and those that benefit from the existing social order are fighting back. The plot proceeds with both new and returning characters caught up in a struggle to keep what they won from falling apart. Good drama, but not as original. Several plot points are retreads, and one of the new characters is a blatant carbon copy of a major player in the previous book. And while the ending doesn't leave us hanging on everything, few of the major points are resolved, because a trilogy (Now expected to be a quartology) is <i>soooo</i> much more interesting than a duology.<br />
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Well, that last bit is a little unfair. I can't in good conscience accuse Shusterman of the issues that usually go along with writing for a series. There's no padding; in fact, he crams quite a bit into these 400 pages, and most of it is interesting. He also paces perfectly: brisk movement, but not so fast you lose track of what's going on. And while there are open threads at the end, he wraps up just enough to make the reader feel satisfied instead of teased. But he does cram in too much. We have heroes both major and minor returning from book 1, additional protagonists, and two or three new villains. That's a lot of plot to go around, and at times it feels like those NYC dog-walkers who march through the affluent areas holding a dozen leashes at once. The author is able to keep all the dogs walking straight and the leashes relatively untangled, but one hopes the third volume doesn't collapse from the mass of it all.<br />
<br />
My major issue with the book, however, is that the nature of the conflict has changed. <i>Unwind</i> had no major antagonist. Minions like juvey cops and uncaring beaurecrats were personified, but they were punch-clock villains or glorified muscle. The main villain was a nameless, faceless, disembodied social order. This isn't bad; Winston Smith never meets Big Brother, and the closest thing to an antagonist Guy Montag has is his disillusioned boss. In both cases, it worked marvelously well. When you remove any guiding force from an antagonistic society, the villain becomes the society itself, and a society is simply a manifestation of the will of its citizenry. In other words, the villain of <i>Unwind</i> was us, the readers. Our decisions, our desires, our failures in the present are what caused this mad world of the near future to come into existence.<br />
<i><br /></i>By giving us clear antagonists, <i>UnWholly</i> dilutes the effect. We now have someone to point at and say "You are the problem!" Worse, <i>UnWholly</i> adds a conspiracy angle, which means the problems are no longer our fault at all- we were tricked by some distant schemer or schemers. Both of these plot developments are well executed, but one of the themes of <i>Unwind</i> was that people must be treated as people. Giving the audience a human target upon which to project their disgust undermines the message.<br />
<br />
I don't mean to imply that <i>UnWholly</i> cheapens its predecessor. Dystopians and realpolitik stories have been written <i>with</i> human antagonists, and they've worked. And <i>UnWholly</i> works, too. I dove right in, finished it in less than a week, and then cursed under my breath that the third volume isn't out until September. I rarely recommend a book more highly than that.<br />
<br />
But while it's not a step down, it's definitely a step sideways. It's driven by story and character where <i>Unwind</i> was an exploration of ideas. They're both great, and I recommend them both, but I recommend them for different reasons. <i>UnWholly</i> is <i>Tom Sawyer </i>to <i>Unwind</i>'s <i>Huckleberry Finn</i>. The latter will be studied decades from now. The former is that other great book with many of the same characters.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-19677102847943606102013-05-21T18:49:00.002-04:002013-05-21T18:49:52.715-04:00Unwind<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgry1s2h5eec5wcB9g79XKHkyfvMQqEpR43vU1bJVisGHrXAcIGqqyBJJPF7QhpAxJpeYmmR28h4tqmJpXPzgaJRrftpTHZnW2I294v2Ny6GhT2WHGQDb0wVeTwTB6DnlwpHr0MHpmA9Lw/s1600/unwind-cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgry1s2h5eec5wcB9g79XKHkyfvMQqEpR43vU1bJVisGHrXAcIGqqyBJJPF7QhpAxJpeYmmR28h4tqmJpXPzgaJRrftpTHZnW2I294v2Ny6GhT2WHGQDb0wVeTwTB6DnlwpHr0MHpmA9Lw/s200/unwind-cover.jpg" width="130" /></a></div>
Winston Smith, hero of the seminal dystopian <i>1984</i>, once remarked "The best books tell you what you already know." Whether George Orwell meant it to be ironic or not is debatable, but it's very true. A great story doesn't preach to the reader. Rather, it brings clarity to things the reader already knew from his or her own life experience. It uses what the reader already knows to impart an understanding - perhaps great, perhaps small - of the nature of the world and the human condition.<br />
<br />
I'm prepared to call Neal Shusterman's <i>Unwind</i> a great book. In fact, I'm prepared to call it one of the most significant YA books of the past ten years. I'm even prepared to say that it's the kind of book that will, and should be, stocked in school libraries and taught in junior high english classes decades from now. It's skillfully written and tensely plotted, but more than that, it has ideas. Important ideas about important things.<br />
<br />
The premise is that a generation or so before the story begins, the pro-life and pro-choice factions of the American public came to all-out civil war. The problem was solved by a compromise: from conception to thirteen years of age, human life is protected by law. However, from thirteen years to eighteen, a child can, with his parents' consent, be "unwound". He or she is carved up into his component organs, which are then transplanted into donors who are in need (or just prefer new eyes to wearing glasses all the time). The rationalization is that life of the body doesn't technically end, but pretty much nobody actually believes this, least of all the kids sentenced to it. Our main characters are Connor, Risa, and Lev, three teens due to be unwound. Escape from the authorities, they go on the lam, trying to survive until they become legal adults.<br />
<br />
It's a great premise, and as I said, it makes for a great book. I am not, however, prepared to say that it is perfect. The plot has a kind of thrown-together feel; essentially, our heroes move from one adventure to another, meeting other characters and situations along the way. I got the feeling that I wasn't really reading a novel, but a series of short stories jerry-rigged into one. I don't mind <i>that</i> either. Dystopians are about dysfunctional societies, so many of them use the plot as simply an excuse to move the protagonist around and observe the setting. But there are places in <i>Unwind</i> where the seams are visible. Lev's character arc shows it the worst. When we first meet him, he's a doe-eyed innocent brought up to celebrate his potential unwinding as a religious experience. Early on, he's separated from the other two and disappears, then the next time we see him he's a kind of Artful Dodger in training. The next time we see him after <i>that</i>, the world has beaten him into a cynical loner with anger issues. How he got from point A to point B to point C is given only a cursory explanation.<br />
<br />
I don't mean to say that the plot of <i>Unwind</i> is bad, because it isn't. Despite some rough edges, it moves at a brisk pace and is never anything less than involving. But it's obvious that neither the plot nor characters are really that important. What's important are the ideas.<br />
<br />
So, what about the ideas?<br />
<br />
Well, <i>Unwind</i> has been marketed as a book about abortion. It isn't. The pro-life/pro-choice civil war is given only the barest of mentions, and in so far as Shusterman has an opinion, it would seem to be contempt for both sides. He portrays the Great Debate Of Our Times as an unhealthy distraction that blinds us to more serious issues, and engenders fanaticism and obsession. This idea is developed further in the sequel, which explicitly defines the Unwinding Accords as a method of avoiding problems rather than having to talk about and deal with them.<br />
<br />
If you wanted, you could construct a Liberal Christian interpretation of the novel that frames it as a condemnation of the pro-life movement. The idea that unwinding is acceptable because the body lives on as a collection of transplanted organs is a slap in the face to Conservative Christians for focusing on the life of the body - which never lasts forever anyway - over the life of the soul. But except for a discussion between several characters about what makes them alive (the eventual conclusion being that they can't know), Shusterman eschews any spiritual or metaphysical argument in favor of concrete, secular ones.<br />
<br />
No, the true thrust of the book goes deeper. Broadly, it's about man's inhumanity to man. Specifically, it's about a lot of things: selfishness, political partisanship, apathy towards others ("Not my problem" is practically the mantra of the damned), trophy children. Most of all, though, it's about depersonalization. It's about what happens, and what we're capable of, when we start thinking about our fellow human beings as problems rather than people. It's about what happens when people stop having names and instead become part of a "them". It's about how absolutely critical it is to a society that everyone be acknowledged as someone.<br />
<br />
This is something that we, the people of this place and time in history, need to learn. But then again, it's also something we already know.<br />
<br />
Read this book.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-4027148010397976922013-05-13T18:16:00.000-04:002013-05-13T18:16:14.682-04:00On Dirty Hands<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2aj2QnNoKVLvQRV-nBdABDJEV5FtuEYZ3TgARJStUUM1ohkcC5gaEqrWZw_IVE7_rCYiko5mYMxGlS7n_8eWUaZvrZrzLhbExG4wD47jWyAdsvxIbhNG0iwPGelZvgYSNUO3qqhBfENg/s1600/the_dude1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2aj2QnNoKVLvQRV-nBdABDJEV5FtuEYZ3TgARJStUUM1ohkcC5gaEqrWZw_IVE7_rCYiko5mYMxGlS7n_8eWUaZvrZrzLhbExG4wD47jWyAdsvxIbhNG0iwPGelZvgYSNUO3qqhBfENg/s1600/the_dude1.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
See that picture? It's a quote from one of the internet's favorite movies, <i>The Big Lebowski</i>. It occurs after Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski has just watched his best friend Walter Sobchek pull out a loaded gun and shove it into the face of an old man, finger on the trigger and screaming at the top of his lungs... because said old man crossed the foul line in a bowling game. An important bowling game, sure, but as The Dude points out, it's kinda hard to see Walter as the good guy in this situation. It's a lesson that people in politics ought to take to heart, and don't. In a democracy at least, supreme power is in the hands of the people, and a smart politician tries to get the people on his side. Being an asshole is a bad way to do that. It's an equally bad idea in religion; whether you're evangelizing or just trying to go about your business and worship as you choose, you need at least a silent agreement that the rest of the populace won't run you out of town. Acting like a jerk is a great way to turn said populace against you.<br />
<br />
This isn't rocket science, and in fact smart people in both fields have known it for centuries, even millenia. So why do we now, at the most educated time in human history, still have people dragging the names of their own causes and churches through the dirt with obnoxious behavior?<br />
<br />
<br />
A few weeks ago Tim Dolan, Cardinal of the Archdiocese of New York, posted a <a href="http://blog.archny.org/index.php/all-are-welcome/">rather condescending article</a> on his blog, which compared homosexuals attending church to people coming to a dinner table with dirty hands. He intended it to be a "love the sinner, hate the sin" message, a sentiment no good Christian would disagree with. What people disagree with is his interpretation of what is dirty or sinful, but that's an argument for another day.<br />
<br />
Reasonably enough, some gay Catholics and their supporters took exception. Last week a group of them gathered to <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-amodeo/cardinal-dolan-denies-cat_b_3219675.html">stage a protest</a>. Or "vigil", perhaps. Same difference. They smeared their hands with dirt and ash, attempted to attend mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral, and were prohibited from doing so. In fact, the church called the cops, which may seem a little extreme until you realize that church authorities are ill-equipped to respond if protesters get violent. We can debate how likely such a possibility was. On the one hand, if there's enough anger in the air, all it takes is one good shove to turn a protest into a brawl. But on the other, the slideshow shows about eight or nine protesters, hardly an army of revolution. In any event, the protest eventually ended with neither violence nor arrests, and everybody went home and presumably got on with their lives.<br />
<br />
I heard about all of this via <a href="https://twitter.com/AnneRiceAuthor">Anne Rice's twitter feed</a>, which ought to be a required follow for all liberal and moderate Christians. The link led me to the article linked in the above paragraph. It was written by Joseph Amodeo, who organized the protestr, and I have to seriously wonder what in the blue hell he was thinking.<br />
<br />
I don't know how many of my readers have ever attended a Catholic Mass, but there's this point near the end where you're supposed to shake hands with anyone around you that you can reach. And you're also supposed to receive the Eucharist in your hands, and take the chalice to drink the sacramental wine. And your hands are touching the pews, the missals, the doorknobs, and all these things which are in turn touched by other parishioners. So if you come in with filthy hands, you're going to get that filth on everybody around you. It's intrusive and unhygenic, but more than that, it's <i>rude</i>.<br />
<br />
In other words, Cardinal Dolan acted like an asshole and the protesters responded by acting like assholes themselves. And then Amodeo writes the above article, with its "poor, pitiful me" tone of voice, trying to portray himself as the victim here. At the absolute best, the protesters are pricks the same as the cardinal. At worst, they're bigger pricks. And they doesn't seem to get this at all. I quote:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"What astounded me most was when he said that we could enter the cathedral so long as we washed our hands first. Even now, writing those words I find myself struggling to understand their meaning, while coming to terms with their exclusionary nature."</i></blockquote>
Hey, <i>moron</i>, maybe the meaning is that you shouldn't come to a church expecting to smear dirt on everything within reach and be surprised when they don't let you do so?<br />
<br />
More than that, however, what annoys me about this protest is the utter immaturity of it. Accused of being dirty, the protesters opted for the grade-school response of "I'll be dirty if I want to be!" That's the wrong argument. The <i>right</i> one is "There's nothing dirty about me!" The protesters don't seem to realize that by embracing the analogy instead of rebuffing it, they legitimize Dolan's opinion.<br />
<br />
Numbskulls.<br />
<br />
In the end, this protest probably won't amount to much. It'll vanish into the news cycle and be forgotten, and a week from now we'll all be bitching about something else. But it's disappointing. As Christians, we ought to be better than this. As human beings, we should at least have the intelligence to think through the consequences of our actions. I try very hard to have respect for all my brothers and sisters in Christ, and then they go and make me wonder why I even bother.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-81282554244171462572013-05-06T18:51:00.001-04:002013-05-06T18:51:27.893-04:00Iron Man 3When I heard that The Mandarin was going to be the villain of this film, I was wary. The Mandarin is an awkward and slightly embarrassing character for Marvel, what with the "Yellow Peril" undertones that the company tries to downplay these days. How they wound up handling it is very clever; I won't spoil it here, but I will say it was satisfying both in terms of the story and in terms of Ben Kingsley's awesome performance. There is a problem, however, in that he's really not the Mandarin. Instead of a megalomaniac genius with a set of alien/mystical power rings, we have a guy who's basically bin Laden with superhero technology. I thought that a lot more could have been done with the character. Given that Tony Stark is an american industrialist, Rhodes is a member of the U.S. military, and Mandarin is (traditionally) a Chinese mastermind, it makes fertile grounds for exploring realpolitik.<br />
<br />
Yes, yes, I know. judge the story you're given rather than the story you would have wrote. But this particular film invites it because it felt like a long series of missed opportunities. The story seems to want to be about something, but can't decide what; Tony suffering PTSD from the events of The Avengers? Tony's struggling to balance his life as Iron Man with his life as Tony Stark? Tony struggling to deal with the consequences of past mistakes? Learning that he can't protect the ones he loves? All these things are brought up, fiddled with a bit, then dropped in favor of fight sequences and Tony trading barbs with everyone. The film is great to watch anyway, since Robert Downey Jr. does the latter very, very, well. But still, but still, but still...<br />
<br />
One of the big selling points of the original film- arguably the reason why it succeeded at all- was the fact that it was done without a script. Downey insisted on being able to ad-lib his lines, and eventually they wound up improvising the entire film, resulting in very naturalistic dialog that humanized the characters. (Jeff Bridges famously described it as "a $200 million student film".) The second film continued suit, but for this third installment they've got a new director and the movie feels a lot more scripted. That's not bad per se; the dialog is good, and the performances are first-rate as well, but the lack of spontaneity makes it so much easier to nitpick the film's flaws, including rampant fridge logic, uninteresting villains, and the fact that the plot relies so much on supposedly smart people - both Tony and the villains - doing stupid or nonsensical things. (The latter two have been recurrent problems with the Iron Man films.)<br />
<br />
The performances, as I said, are first-rate, and when added to some great action setpieces, the resulting film is far from bad. (And I <i>love</i> what they did with Pepper Potts near the end.) But the spark isn't really there, and I have a feeling maybe it's time to put this particular hero to bed.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-51530281932119732782013-04-29T20:49:00.000-04:002013-04-29T20:49:12.939-04:00Hungry GhostSelf-published novels take Goodwin's Law to an extreme: A few rough diamonds are obscured by shelves full of poorly-written, badly-structured, generally awful crap. But Allison Moon's <i>Lunatic Fringe </i>is one of the diamonds: a passionate romance that drew the reader in to the strange life of a protagonist discovering her nature as a lesbian, a lycanthrope, and a peacespeaker (a kind of psychic translator/mediator/shaman). While engaging, the book was not without its issues; the plot was uneven, the characterizations spotty at best, and half the book was spent on Lexie and her lover Archer having lots of sex. But it was still a good read, and showed a lot of potential. Eighteen months later, the sequel is out, and Moon has... umm... traded up to <i>different</i> problems.<br />
<br />
I'm hard to please, okay?<br />
<br />
To be fair, there is plenty enough good material here to justify a purchase. Most of it has to do with the characters. In this respect more than any other, <i>Hungry Ghost</i> surpasses its predescessor. Lexie's packmates in the first book were horny lesbians and little more, which had some unfortunate implications. That's fixed here by giving them more page time and more distinctive personalities. New characters - of which there are more than a few- fare just as well, as do the handful of other returners. The best of them is Sage, Archer's brother who shows up for the last third of the book and proceeds to become the most interesting thing in it. A shape-shifter who favors beast mode, he provides an experienced perspective on the world and a smattering of fish-out-of-water humor. I wish he had come into the story earlier, because in a book about defying social norms, it's of great benefit to have a character who doesn't care about social norms. In a zen way, that is, rather than a dickish way.<br />
<br />
The interactions between these varied characters are interesting, and in fact some of the best parts of the book. Well, most of the time. There are moments when the dialogue stumbles and feels contrived, unreal, or overly clever. At other points, it veers into gender-issues soapboxing. For more most part, though, the patter is snappy and engaging. In fact, on a nuts-and-bolts technical level, Moon's writing is much improved since book 1. She is at her best when writing sensually, by which I mean "about sensations". The sound of a wolf's howl, the taste of a live songbird, those are the moments that jump out at me as memorable. It's probably why she chose to write about werewolves to begin with, and you can't deny she has a knack for it.<br />
<br />
Now to the bad: Story structure remains a weakness, and in fact it almost sinks the book outright. The main plot involves Lexie & co. investigating a lycanthropic murder that eventually leads them to a pack of rogue full-blood werewolves. In the meantime, Lexie struggles to find her own identity, cope with the loss of Archer, and eventually juggle three potential love interests: Sage, a butch biker chick named Randy, and Renee, the pack's new leader. On a fundamental, "bedrock" level, all that is fine.<br />
<br />
But the story is crippled by a grand clusterfuck of a second act. The hundred pages or so around the middle are full of subplots that go nowhere: Rory, the mysterious book in the library, Lexie's digging into her mother's past, and the whole business with Lexie's knife. All of these things show up, look like they're going to mean something, then get more or less get tossed aside. Randy also gets tossed aside, despite being central to the first third of the book. The gay male pack is the only one that really makes an impression, and even then they seem to exist mainly to beef up the heroes' army during the big climactic fight.<br />
<br />
Some of this is setting stuff up for later books. Long-time readers know what my opinion is on that: tell the story you're telling NOW, dammit, not the story you're going to be telling a year from now. In any event, the plot does eventually get back on track, but by then it's spent so much time going in so many directions that the reader is likely to feel lost and disoriented. I certainly was, and I was never able to get completely back in to <i>Hungry Ghost</i> after that.<br />
<br />
There's also an absence of passion in that middle part, and I'm not just talking about the switch from erotic romance to a more traditional urban fantasy story. The first book was an endless parade of Lexie and Archer sexing it up during its' middle, and I chided it for that. But I at least got the impression that Moon was deeply invested in her material, on an emotional level. This time around, not so much. In fact a large part of that slog in the middle is because she's trying to set up pieces for the finale, with an air not of enthusiasm, but of rote busywork.<br />
<br />
<i>Hungry Ghost</i> is still in the top 5% of self-published fiction, but it can't get out of its own way. In this it's a bit like its protagonist, struggling to find her own voice and figure out what she's about. But while a confused protagonist makes for a good story, a confused story just brings itself down. Still, I'm hopeful. Moon has improved, and here's hoping she improves more with book 3.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-86307693925619591322013-04-22T19:20:00.000-04:002013-04-22T19:20:53.990-04:00Django UnchainedI actually saw <i>Django Unchained</i> back when it first came out, but didn't have the time to write anything major about it. But as I won't be done with <i><a href="http://www.talesofthepack.com/read/hungryghost/">Hungry Ghost</a></i> until next week, I decided that it's better late than never.<br />
<br />
This is a Quentin Tarantino film, so before even seeing a single frame you have some idea what to expect: subtle self-awareness, top-notch acting and writing, and brief scenes of brutal violence punctuating a surprisingly deep story. In fact, I think this is not only Tarantino's deepest film, but his riskiest. He's very knowingly and deliberately put himself in the awkward situation of being a white guy writing about racism.<br />
<br />
He pulls it off. I would expect no less from Tarantino, but a big reason why he pulls it off is Christoph Waltz. Waltz won an Oscar for his performance, and deserved it, because his character King Schultz is the single most important person in the film. Consider him to be the perspective character for the white audience member, a stranger wandering the land of slaves and plantation owners. Schultz is an outsider by means of being a German immigrant, whereas the audience is separated from the setting by time, but the principle is the same. We know enough to properly identify the heroes and villains, but take for granted what makes them so. Schultz's character arc throughout the movie is his coming to realize just how awful things are. He begins the film regarding slavery as a bad thing, but his distaste is academic and detached, and he's not above playing the system against itself. But as his journey with Django takes him deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast, the true inhumanity of the institution slowly unfolds before him.<br />
<br />
The plan to rescue Hilda is perfectly sound, but the genius of it is also its great failing: it's legal. This means that Schultz and Django can pull it off while still remaining respected members of society, but it also means that they have to acknowledge the rightness of the society, or at least pretend to. Schultz is fine with this at first, but becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the prospect of turning a blind eye to the brutality around him. Finally, he's offered the chance to walk away with everything he came for, exactly the victory he planned, in exchange for just one thing: he has to acknowledge that Candie is a honest man, and that the society that he lives in just. And Schultz can't do it. He scuttles his own plan at the very moment of success because, as he tells Django, "I just couldn't help myself." He couldn't go on paying lip service to a society so fundamentally corrupt.<br />
<br />
If Schultz is the most important character in the film, the second most important is probably Stephen, Candie's loyal slave. Stephen's first scene is one of the best constructed scenes in the film, because it tells us in a few minutes 90% of what we need to know about the character. We see him sitting at a writing desk, writing out a check to which he affixes Candie's signature with a stamp. Then, through the window, he sees Candie's carriage approaching, and so he goes out to the front porch where he plays court jester, lobbing insults and repartee at Candie's entourage and even Candie himself for the amusement of all. Later scenes establish him as the power behind the throne, smart where Candie is merely educated and subtle where he is brutish.<br />
<br />
So, to break down the conflict: we have a black hero and his white mentor/sidekick on one side, and a white villain and his black servant/vizier on the other. What you'd expect from this setup - the traditional/cliche resolution - is that Candie kills Schultz, then Django kills Stephen and Candie, probably in that order. Or, alternatively, Candie kills Schultz, Stephen backstabs Candie in some fashion before dying, possibly redemptively, and then Django kills Candie. But neither is what happens. Instead, Schultz kills Candie - sacrificing his own life in the process - after which Stephen takes over the plantation in all but name and becomes the villain that Django must defeat in the denouement. And the movie is much, much better for it.<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Django Unchained</i> is a movie about racism, but it's also a movie about the rejection of racism. It's about the evil that white men do/did, and how that evil is destroyed. Had Django killed Candie, the film's message would be simplistic and wrong: a white villain as the source or avatar of evil, and a black hero restores justice by killing him. Black = good, white = evil. Simple, and completely off base. This happy ending would have been achieved through the demonization of whites, which is merely racism in a different form. Django becomes the man who hunted monsters and became one himself. Instead, Candie's death - and the symbolic rejection of what he stands for - must be at the hands of a white man. In doing so, and accepting his own death as penance for standing by and doing nothing for so long, Schultz earns redemption for his race.<br />
<br />
Portraying Stephen, a slave, as a villain on par with Candie is perhaps Tarantino's most controversial choice as screenwriter and director. One could even, if so inclined, see it as of blaming the victim. But the story is more complex than that. As Django was once a slave, Stephen is a slave as well. But while Django has only ever been seen fighting against the system, Stephen has embraced it, sacrificing his dignity in exchange for power. In many ways he's a shadow figure to both Django and Schultz; Django in that a slave's life has affected them both deeply, Schultz in that they both game the system for their own purposes. Stephen would have learned firsthand the cruelties of the society in which he lives - he mentions having seen slaves castrated before - and he went along with it because the society empowered him personally. In Stephen we see most clearly that it is not a person's skin that makes him righteous or corrupt. The society is the source of corruption, and whether individuals are good or evil depends on whether they allow it to corrupt them, or defy it to follow their own conscience and sense of justice.<br />
<br />
<i>Django Unchained</i> was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar last year, but ultimately lost to <i>Argo</i>. I never saw <i>Argo</i>, so I'm in no position to say whether or not it's a better film, but <i>Django</i> is certainly a film that deserves respect. It is, as the Library of Congress likes to say, "culturally significant," and one of the deepest and most thoughtful meditations on racism in recent years.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-64169198109989708712013-04-18T20:01:00.000-04:002013-04-18T20:19:49.500-04:00Seven Lady Werewolves120 pages into <a href="http://www.talesofthepack.com/read/hungryghost/">Allison Moon's latest</a>, and making steady progress. Review when I'm done (probably about a week and a half), but I just wanted to share something. Those who've read the book will know what it refers to.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
Seven lady werewolves, lying all in bed, and the little one said:<br />
<br />
LEXIE: "Roll over, roll over."<br />
<br />
So they all rolled over when they heard her shout and the one on the outside... fell out!<br />
<br />
HAZEL: "Stop crowding m... AHHH!"<br />
<br />
*THUD*<br />
<br />
Six lady werewolves, lying all in bed, and the little one said:<br />
<br />
LEXIE: "Roll over, roll over."<br />
<br />
So they all rolled over when they heard her shout and the one on the outside... fell out!<br />
<br />
JENNA: "Lexie, we're trying to slee... AHHH!"<br />
<br />
*THUD*<br />
<br />
Five lady werewolves, lying all in bed, and the little one said:<br />
<br />
LEXIE: "Roll over, roll over."<br />
<br />
So they all rolled over when they heard her shout and the one on the outside... fell out!<br />
<br />
SHARMALEE: "Hey, I don't need any more brui-"<br />
<br />
*THUD*<br />
<br />
Four lady werewolves, lying all in bed, and the little one said:<br />
<br />
LEXIE: "Roll over, roll over."<br />
<br />
So they all rolled over when they heard her shout and the one on the outside... fell out!<br />
<br />
MITCH: "Brat! When I get my horm-"<br />
<br />
*THUD*<br />
<br />
Three lady werewolves, lying all in bed, and the little one said:<br />
<br />
LEXIE: "Roll over, roll over."<br />
<br />
So they all rolled over when they heard her shout and the one on the outside... fell out!<br />
<br />
CORWIN: "See, this is why I'm drifting bi-curi-"<br />
<br />
*THUD*<br />
<br />
Two lady werewolves, lying all in bed, and the little one said:<br />
<br />
LEXIE: "Roll over, roll over."<br />
<br />
So they all rolled over when they heard her shout and the one on the outside... fell out!<br />
<br />
RENEE: "Oh no, you're coming with me, sister!"<br />
LEXIE: "AHHH!"<br />
<br />
*THUD* *THUD*<br />
<br />
One lady werewolf, all alone in bed, and she looked around and said:<br />
<br />
LEXIE: "..."<br />
<br />
Lexie, that was your cue...<br />
<br />
LEXIE: "..."<br />
<br />
Lexie?<br />
<br />
LEXIE: "..."<br />
<br />
MEDIC!LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-34689003311115404912013-04-15T18:59:00.002-04:002013-04-15T18:59:45.498-04:00Kitty Rocks the House<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgELwwP6_aatRhyphenhyphen4eFEJiwlV7ydikjESec6UA4ULgFNPOiTzifZ5Yxvb2OYx1Nnyp3w8g_RO4c5HA6eWCnKvv5H2jbGJcAYZCrBfgRZaNi6mw5n8WKl29XmJDCOhcG_mYDOZjP9y-fpuqY/s1600/kitty-rocks-the-house-copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgELwwP6_aatRhyphenhyphen4eFEJiwlV7ydikjESec6UA4ULgFNPOiTzifZ5Yxvb2OYx1Nnyp3w8g_RO4c5HA6eWCnKvv5H2jbGJcAYZCrBfgRZaNi6mw5n8WKl29XmJDCOhcG_mYDOZjP9y-fpuqY/s200/kitty-rocks-the-house-copy.jpg" width="124" /></a></div>
Since I don't have the time or energy to write long-ass reviews anymore, I'm suspending my review blog. But since I still read, and still have things to say about the books I read, I'll provide leaner, meaner mini-reviews here for now. With luck, it'll be less filler and more killer.<br />
<br />
The fact that I liked the latest Kitty Norville book will surprise nobody. Those who read my review blog will know what a fanboy I am. You'll also know that I've felt the series has been in a slump. Read through the reviews of the past three books, and you find the same overarching theme: entertaining, but the series has "lost it's spark".<br />
<br />
<i>Kitty Rocks the House</i> has the spark.<br />
<br />
It's not perfect, of course. The middle is slow, and there are missed opportunities along the way; things that could have been awesome, but aren't. It lacks the unbridled creativity that characterized the early books. And I still think this Long Game nonsense is a misstep; dragging the series away from the personal drama that makes it unique in the crowded urban fantasy genre. But for the first time since I can remember, what happened here stuck with me.<br />
<br />
We have two plots here, advancing more or less concurrently: the first concerns Darren, a new werewolf who gets offered a place in the Denver pack, then tries to take over. A complaint about the series- one that I've echoed myself- is that after Kitty became the alpha of the Denver pack, Vaughn spent most of the subsequent books having her run off to Vegas or London or San Francisco or Central Nowhere, county of Bumfuck, Montana, 59702. She did precious little with the characters back in Denver. So when Darren shows up and challenges her alpha-dom, there's a strong reality subtext: a major argument against Alpha Norville is that she's been spending so much time travelling and playing conspiracy games with vampires that she's forgotten about taking care of things back home. And Vaughn pulls off this bit meta-commentary without seeming either preachy or apologetic about it. Nice.<br />
<br />
That said, I wish that Darren had posed more of a challenge. When it comes to a showdown, Kitty essentially flexes her charisma and gets the entire pack on her side. Even Becky, the main holdout, is easily swayed back to Kitty's side after a brief conversation. Given that Kitty used Becky as bait back in <i>Kitty Goes to War</i>, I expected there to be more conflict here.<br />
<br />
The other storyline has Kitty, with Cormac's help, investigating a vampire priest. He shows up in town looking for Rick, and after Kitty brokers a meeting between them, Rick goes missing. This is a generally more interesting story. Rick is one of the constants of the Kitty-verse, and to see him questioning himself and being in danger adds the needed tension that's been missing from recent books. The problem here, however, is that pacing is sluggish. Not terribly much happens here until the end- it's a main cause of the sagging middle that I mentioned. When that end comes, though, it's totally worth it. There is action, and pathos, and revelation, and new ideas that I looked at and thought "Dude, awesome!" And the ending sets up better stories for books to come, and teases the possibility of a spinoff. (<i>Another</i> spinoff, I should say. Cormac's getting his own soon.)<br />
<br />
Those who are following this series have already bought <i>Kitty Rocks the House</i>. Those who aren't want to start at the series beginning. But those who were following it and gave up at some point want to give it another chance now, because the series has come home, and I have a feeling good times are ahead.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-73041024823167794062013-02-19T20:05:00.001-05:002013-02-19T20:05:08.003-05:00Movie Review: Warm BodiesI'm late to the party, seemingly as usual. Girlfriend and I wanted to see this movie for Valentine's, but got delayed until last weekend. The movie was worth the wait. It was funny, it was moving, it was romantic. And it was very well acted; Nicholas Hoult is perfect, and Rob Corddry plays again type so well I didn't know it was him until the end credits.<br />
<br />
It was also rather overtly political. I seem to be seeing political overtones in everything these days; maybe I'm still recovering from election season. But then again, perhaps the resurgence of zombie fiction speaks to a kind of cultural zeitgeist. Humanity has always made supernatural monsters out of natural horrors. The vampire, for example, represents the allure and danger of sexuality, which is why they've become more sympathetic over time as society's attitudes change. The zombie, likewise, represents the "faceless masses"; apparently human, but unable to think, or show mercy, or be reasoned with by any method other than buckshot. It's the fear of being destroyed by your fellow men. This has been an underlying theme of politics for much of the 21st century to date; the "us vs. them" mentality that characterizes partisan rhetoric and undermines attempts at compromise.<br />
<br />
The movie is aware of this. It doesn't draw direct parallels, as well it shouldn't. Doing so cheapens the message into a tract. But the producers are aware of the deeper meanings in the plot; one of the headlines that fly by in montage near the beginning reads "President Infected". Later R tells us it's been eight years since the trouble started; the typical duration of a U.S. Presidential regime. And the zombies are divided into normal zombies (moderates), and skeletal "boneys" (extremists). The difference, according to R at least, is that the former seek to hold on to the shreds of their humanity, even though they must now eat humans out of necessity. The boneys have given up all hope and embraced their inhumanity, existing now only to kill and eat.<br />
<br />
Many great love stories -- especially those in the Romeo and Juliet mold -- are actually stories about cultures in collision, and <i>Warm Bodies</i> is no exception. We don't see much of the human culture, but enough that we know what it's like; reeling from years of fighting for their lives, these people close themselves off, building a great wall to keep the zombies out, and sending the young and fit out into the dead lands to scavenge what remains, knowing that they are likely to return as zombies themselves. These people aren't inherently bad, rather they're mortally afraid of something they don't understand; afraid enough that they're not willing to take the risk to understand. In their own way, they're not so much different than the zombies, and their stone wall and stockpile of arms only perpetuates the problem. Salvation for both sides comes only through understanding; in the end, we have to teach our children about playing hide and seek rather than scoring headshots. As R notes, "It was scary, but all great things start out a little scary."<br />
<br />
The ending has been criticized as being too upbeat. While I can see where that criticism comes from, it's important to remember that this is fundamentally a story about hope; the hope that we can, despite everything, learn to overcome our fears and look at each other with respect and dignity.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-69400762831074953622012-11-17T16:14:00.000-05:002013-01-26T09:03:12.259-05:00Post-Mortem on The Evil Eye<div>
(Cross-posted from Goodreads' <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/73797-gamebook-fans">Gamebook Fans</a> group)<br />
<br />
Asked why I wrote <i>The Evil Eye</i>, I'd have to answer: "Because I wanted to." I believe that any author, asked about a work he's proud of, would ultimately have the same answer. In more detail: "Because I wanted to write a gamebook." My interest in them goes back a fair ways; I started in elementary school, reading <i>Choose Your Own Adventure</i> and <i>Time Machine</i>, plus a few of the <i>CYOA</i> knockoffs that proliferated in those days. Eventually, I graduated to more complex books. I only ever played one <i>Fighting Fantasy</i> (something about roaming a dungeon seeking dragon statues and trying to avoid seeing the letters in DEATH), but I was a huge <i>Lone Wolf</i> fan, and owned some of the <i>AD&D</i> gamebooks as well. Like many, I moved on in the mid-90s after the market crashed, then got interested in them again some years later by following some of the early indie efforts.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<i>The Evil Eye</i> was actually my second attempt at a gamebook. The first was a very educational failure, which didn't even get half done. The main reason for this was overambition. It was going to be the first of a multi-volume heroic epic, have an unbelievably complex game system, with combats modeled on <i>Queen's Blade</i> (or <i>Lost Worlds</i>, for those of you with no interest in japanese skeevishness), multiple skills, a huge cast of characters, realistic inventory mechanics, and so forth. Unsurprisingly, it was way too much for a first-timer to get right. So I abandoned it.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Undaunted, I tried again. At the time, I was still interested in getting that multi-book series done someday, but I decided to aim a little lower for the time being. The Windhammer Competition was the perfect solution. The competition's restrictions gave me a structure to restrain my wild newbie impulses, and the ability to compare my work against others in the field, newbies and veterans alike, would be invaluable.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
As far as coming up with a plot, I was in a bit of a quandry. The idea was assembled from bits and pieces of ideas I had. I wanted to do something in the same world as my epic, but not using any of the main characters, in case I wanted to change things sometime between now and then. So I stuck with basic fantasy. However, I didn't want to be totally generic, so I tries to brainstorm up ideas to stand out from the crowd. I thought: I don't just want to just do another dungeon-crawl or fozzle-bopping tale. Why not a detective story? I wanted the main character to stand out from the crowd, so I dropped the old implicitly young male warrior and made him an old man. And so on and so forth, until I eventually had enough ideas to put together into a story.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
For design, I again didn't have a plan so much as some ideas. One thing that I was adamant about was that I wanted the book to be driven by the player's decisions, rather than by die rolls. I didn't want to just make a pure CYOA, but nor did I want to frustrate the player by making him dependent on lucky rolls. I eventually decided on three major "chapters", each with multiple paths through. I also put an interlude halfway through, to add some action. Each chapter ends with you receiving a clue, and with all three clues the case is solved and you can go to the climactic chapter to fight the bad guy. There are no dead ends; all paths eventually lead to success, provided your stamina holds out. But taking the wrong paths means you need to jump through more hoops, in the form of combats or lost endurance, to get there. On the other hand, taking the right path through a given chapter or the interlude gives you an item. The climax is a linear series of four battles, but the first three are skipped if you have the right item, and the fourth is dead easy if you have the item from the interlude.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I wrote the first bits- basically the introduction and the Struckald scene- over the course of a week in June. I used ADVELH 2000, which I cannot recommend to my fellow authors highly enough. My first attempt at gamebook creation involved a complex system, stolen from some blog or other, of generating random numbers for section numbers and keeping track of used numbers in Excel. It was horribly tedious and wasted energy that should have been spent on the writing. ADVELH in several years old and limited in certain respects, but automates a lot of the tedium that goes along with gamebooks design. Once the writing was complete, touch-up work was done in Excel.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
After that first week, I had to put <i>The Evil Eye</i> aside for some other projects. In fact, I wound up getting wrapped up on a lot of projects, to the point that I couldn't get back to it until near the end of August. At the time, I thought I still had enough time to get it done before the September 14th deadline. Then I double-checked the website and realized the deadline was actually the 7th. I now had <i>one week</i> to write, edit, and test the entire book.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Eep.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
As you can see, I made it, but because it was a rush job, I'm not happy the outcome is the best it can be. Designwise, it was a big step down from what I originally envisioned. The design was originally a touch more intricate, in that if you botched a given chapter, you could use an item from another chapter to bypass the nasty bit. This idea wound up getting scrapped, because it was too complex to implement in such a short timeframe and required using the items in contrived ways. I wanted the paths to be divided between "right" paths, which would require little dice work and risk, and "wrong" ones which would be much harder. However, I also wanted the game to play differently depending on where you put your stat points, so this devolved into three paths in each chapter, each involving one stat check to get the item vs. just the clue. The puzzle being to find the path that checks your strongest stat. Likewise, because I had very little time for playtesting, I erred on the side of making the game way too easy. Some thought this weakened the book. While I agree, I would much rather make it too easy and endure the grumbling than make it too hard and have players ragequitting on me.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Writing also suffered in places. I was particularly dissatisfied with Vincent's dialog, which in my ears at least rings completely false. The interlude is another area where I really fell down, both in design and writing terms. It's nowhere near the thrilling chase I wanted it to be, and is instead a bland series of stat checks and die rolls, the kind of gamebook design I personally despise. The decision to make the book easy probably saved my neck at this point, but if I have a chance to release a revised edition at some point, the interlude will definitely get an overhaul.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Overall, though, I think I did very well on the story and writing. If you hang around a lot of writers, you'll hear them talk about "pantsers" (authors who fly by the seat of their pants) and "outliners" (authors who plan out their entire plots from the beginning). Both philosophies have their advantages, and I try to use a mixture of both. Having only a week to bring <i>The Evil Eye</i> together, I was forced to rely heavily on the pants. This may have been a blessing in disguise. Pantsing gives you a lot more room to unleash your creativity, and I found the best bits of the story are the ones I made up on the spot. The biggest surprise for me was Georgina. I intended her as a throwaway character of no significance, but in fleshing out her scene she tugged at my inspiration enough that I soon had a whole unspoken backstory for her. I might have to give her a story of her own soon.<br />
<br />
My favorite bit, however, was this one from section 29, which most players probably never saw because it requires failing a fairly simple Test of Skill to climb Westing's wall:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"Surprisingly, you manage to make it all the way to the window, but the window is stuck and wrenching it open while hanging on to the wall proves difficult. You put some muscle into it, and are rewarded as the window swings wide with a rusty creak.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Unfortunately, you put a little too much muscle into it. The sudden jerk of the window opening throws you off-balance. You lose your grip on the wall and wind up hanging awkwardly in midair from the now-open window. Cursing your luck, you hold on and try to maneuver toward the windowsill, but your hold gives out and you fall to the ground, landing hard on your knees and barely stifling a yelp of pain."</i></blockquote>
</blockquote>
The image of an expert rogue hanging helplessly from the handle of a second-story window, kicking his feet and cursing in frustration, amused me greatly. I'm not totally sure why.<br />
<br />
Going into the competition my biggest concern, bar none, was the big twist. I knew how big a gamble it was. It's the kind of thing that redefines the reader's entire view of the story. If it works, it works big, but if it fails you've wrecked all your work. Build-up is the key. The hints have to be in plain sight, but totally transparent. The reader doesn't realize that the truth's been in front of his face until the bomb drops. If the hints are too obvious, the surprise is lost. Too obscure, and the reader doesn't buy it, instead calling bullshit on the whole deal. I was confident I had found the right balance -- and most commentators agreed -- but my worry was that the way in which the clues were conveyed came off like bad writing; not mentioning things I should have, and failing to present a comprehensible picture of the scenes presented.<br />
<br />
Despite my worries, reader response was overall favorable. I didn't win or place, but it would be arrogant to expect that from my first gamebook. I did get a lot of good press and positive comments. A lot of people had good things to say about the way clues were implemented, as numbers which are added together to produce an ever-increasing total. This is interesting because I, myself, thought it was a wasted concept. It does provide some benefit; it helps with pacing, in that the interlude always comes between the second and third chapter, and it creates a sense of slowly putting things together, but there's a whole lot more that I could have done with the idea, had I had time. I had visions of a complex story with both legitimate clues and red herrings, the player forced to figure out for himself which leads are genuine. Perhaps in the future.<br />
<br />
Another thing that many noted, not always favorably, was the old-school <i>Fighting Fantasy</i> mechanics. I maintain that it was the right choice, under the circumstances. In the first draft, I had a somewhat more original system with separate stats for attack and defense, similar in execution to <i>Ookle of the Broken Finger.</i> But when revision time came I stepped back, took a look at it, and realized I had twenty-four hours to playtest a system that I had never used before. Judging this to be not feasible, I instead scrapped it and jerry-rigged something more familiar. We've all played enough <i>Fighting Fantasy</i> to have a pretty good handle on how it ticks, and are thus able to avoid grievous imbalances easily. (I still made <i>The Evil Eye</i> too easy, but I've discussed that already.)<br />
<br />
Regardless of my missteps along the way, I'm satisfied with <i>The Evil Eye</i>. While it certainly could have been better, I was able to tell a good story in the gamebook format, and learned a few things about gamebook design in the process. If you liked it, I think you for your support. If not, rest assured that my next effort will be better. And I may yet get around to that epic series someday.</div>
LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-89185891988843375902012-10-31T10:46:00.001-04:002012-11-01T22:07:08.313-04:002012 Windhammer Competition Reviews and Analysis<br />
(Originally posted on<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/73797-gamebook-fans"> the goodreads group</a>, but I decided to repost it here for fans without accounts.)<br />
<br />
Voting for the 2012 Windhammer Prize for Short Gamebook Fiction has now closed. We shall know the results shortly, but in the meantime it's time to open discussion. It was a breakout year for the competition. The current gamebook renaissance, plus Tin Man Games' generous offer off releasing the top three entrants as an app, attracted a record number of entrants, and I can only guess how many voters. I myself was one of the newcomers, submitting both an entry and a vote for the first time.<br />
<br />
In its stated goal of promoting innovation and supporting new authors in the gamebook community, the competition was a resounding success. Some of the 22 entrants were long-standing members of the community, but there were an even greater number of newcomers and first-time authors. Everyone was experimenting with new ideas, either mechanical or from a broader theoretical perspective. And while I won't say all of the entrants produced good work, most of them showed at least some potential. Whether this potential will eventually pan out into artistic or commercial success remains to be seen, but my hat is off to all the entrants, even the ones I'll be bashing on shortly, for going the distance.<br />
<br />
While the competition was run fairly and efficiently, I do have some minor issues with the format. Two votes per judge is too little in a field of twenty-two entrants. A lot of good gamebooks are probably going to draw naught. A new voting system should be considered for next year; perhaps rate the games instead of just nominating two. I also am a little leery of the randomization method, i.e. none. Yes, the entry list was appropriately randomized, but every voter got the same list, and thus most of them probably played the games in the same order. This may seem like an odd nit to pick, but for me personally fatigue set in about halfway through, and I didn't feel like I was giving the subsequent games a fair shake. (Incidentally, I played the games in reverse order, just to be contrary.) Lastly, a month and a half is, IMHO, more time than necessary. I had things wrapped up in half that time, and spent the rest of October tapping my foot awaiting the results. It was also bad timing for the competition to be closed at the end of November, when the community could easily get distracted by Halloween revelry on the U.S. Presidential Election. (Or a massive late-season hurricane, but I won't blame our organizers for not predicting <i>that</i>.)<br />
<br />
That said, overall the competition was run well, and I thank and commend Mr. Densley for his effort and the people at Tin Man Games for supporting the competition.<br />
<br />
I've provided honest reviews for each of the entrants below. They are listed in roughly descending order, and subdivided into three categories: The Good, The Average, and The Ugly. (It was going to be "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly", but there wasn't really any middle-of-the-road bad in the competition. It was either unremarkable or awful.)<br />
<br />
MY VOTES<br />
--------<br />
<br />
<b>The Evil Eye</b>, by S.J. Bell<br />
Yes, I voted for my own book. Don't give me that look. Every author votes for themselves, why do you think we have to vote for two different entries? Anyway, for obvious reasons, I can't really review this honestly, but I will be doing a post-mortem in a few days, after I've sorted through any comments I've received. Watch this group!<br />
<br />
<b>A Knight's Trial</b>, by Kieran Coghlan<br />
Kieran Coughlan has been producing indie gamebooks for some time, including one of my personal favorites, <i>Hunger of the Wolf</i>. So it's no surprise that his entrant is a book of the highest caliber. <i>A Knight's Trial</i> is a tough gamebook, but also eminently fair to the reader. Death in combat is a very real possibility, but you're seldom screwed by the dice directly. Rather, the solution to your problems is to take a route that either avoids the fight or gets you to it in better shape. As well, the dungeon itself is marvelously twisty, and although there seems to be only one correct path, the right and wrong decisions are obvious enough in retrospect that you can learn from successive playthroughs. What impressed me most, however, is the plot. This is one of three books that tried the "false reality" idea this year, and IMHO the only one that did it right. The hints are subtle; at first they seem to be just the kind of random weirdness that dots your typical dungeon-crawling gamebook, but as you see more and more the recurring themes start to emerge. This, in turn, allows the author to get bolder with the surrealism. By the time you get to a pair of knights sliding down an iced-over water slide with glee, it makes perfect sense in context. And unlike the others who tried this tack, at no point does Coghlan condescend to explain the plot to you outright. Not even at the end, really. He just leaves the clues around in plain sight and trusts the reader to put things together. Great job!<br />
<br />
THE GOOD<br />
--------<br />
<br />
<b>Sigil-Beasts</b>, by Karalynn Lee<br />
I was back and forth between giving my vote to this book or <i>A Knight's Trial</i>. <i>Trial</i> eventually won because it was just better put together, but this is a well-made book on its own merits, with good writing and world-building. This is the only book in the competition that actually gave multiple routes through the story. Others were linear, or had many branches that ultimately converged on the same place, but <i>Sigil-Beasts</i> actually gives you three very different ways to go about reaching your ultimate goal. Even more amazing, each path is well-paced; I am shocked that Lee managed to cram so much into just 100 sections. That said, there are some issues. For one, the final battle is way too hard unless you take the phoenix path. Characterizations are also inconsistent; the main character's relationship with his brother varies wildly between paths, and one path has a romance with the rival beastmaster coming out of nowhere. And (though this is a nitpick) the author describes a basilisk as having a beak and talons. A basilisk is a SNAKE. You're thinking of a cockatrice, or perhaps a griffin. All that aside, this is still very compelling work, especially for a first effort, and I hope to see more from Ms. Lee.<br />
<br />
<b>Ookle of the Broken Finger</b>, by Paul Gresty<br />
I was fatigued by the time I got to this, so I didn't enjoy it as much as I felt I should. But I did enjoy it. It's light and humorous (at times darkly so), with interesting characters despite the slapstick plot. However, it suffers from what seems to be a recurring problem this year: there's too much focus on the dice. You can know the right path and still not make it through without a fair amount of luck. And while we're at it, the right path is really obscure. You basically have to wander around the festival stumbling upon things and hoping you don't trigger the endgame before you've got the items and knowledge to win. But the humor and the strength of the writing make up for these problems, even if I did cheat through a good portion of it.<br />
<br />
<b>AETHER</b>, by Paul Struth<br />
I wrung my hands nervously when I read this, because the author did the same basic thing I did in <i>The Evil Eye</i>, only better. The clues are hidden a lot more naturally, and the flow of clues is more intricate and makes a lot more sense. Main weaknesses: bland writing and too much dice work. You're not rolling for everything, but you are rolling a lot to earn clues. The talisman helps, but bad luck is still frustrating. Overall, though, a very solid effort that should be a model for future investigative gamebooks.<br />
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<b>Final Payment</b>, by Zachary Carango<br />
By all rights, this should be one of The Average, as neither the plot nor the mechanics are all that impressive. I bumped it up because it has the best innovation of the competition: it's "spell" system, which is tailor-made to address all the petty annoyances that come up in gamebooks. Pick the wrong skill at the start doesn't mean you get screwed, it means you have to decide whether to spend 4MM on the subcontract. Getting bad rolls in combat can be countered by spending money on re-rolls or for a full heal. Of course, these abilities are limited, and they should be, but a bit of breathing room to enjoy the story does wonders for what could otherwise have been a very frustrating adventure with a tedious combat system. EVERYONE should rip this off.<br />
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THE AVERAGE<br />
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<b>Academy of Magic - The First Term</b>, by Marty Runyon<br />
I actually liked this one a lot. It's got the whimsical tone just right, and the branching is adequate. But it's got a few too many problems to put in with The Good. The main plot, gathering components to rebuild your sabotaged term project, is fine. But the mystery subplot fails hard. There is literally no solid clue to the culprit anywhere in the book; all the evidence you find is circumstantial, and a lack of character development for pretty much anyone means that it's not clear who has a motive, either. You're apparently supposed to find some smaller clues and figure whodunit based on the process of elimination, but this relies on the basic assumption that the perpetrator is someone in your class. That's the kind of detective work that gets Dr. Watson chided repeatedly. (Well, it did before adaptations started portraying him as competent.) Also, the game balance is way off, overwhelmingly favoring a high Mind score and leaving some of the skills nearly useless. However, I give it a lot of credit for a similar idea to <i>Final Payment</i>: a separate pool of points that you can dig into when in a tough situation. Coupled with a mind of 6, it meant I never failed a single roll on two playthroughs. An enjoyable book, but it bit off more than it could chew, in terms of both plot and mechanical complexity. Still, I'd read the sequel. Of note: Most gamebooks have a main character who is gender-neutral but implicitly male. This book goes the opposite way with a main character who is gender-neutral but implicitly female. Interesting.<br />
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<b>Day of Dissonance</b>, by David Walters<br />
I don't have much to say about this. There's nothing especially wrong with it, but unfortunately everything it does right is done better by <i>A Knight's Trial</i>, which also had a much more compelling story. Bad luck for Walters that they had to be in the same competition. Still, it has merit. I quite liked the ending.<br />
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<b>Golem Gauntlet</b>, by Simon Chapman<br />
Standard-issue dungeon crawl, albeit with an original gimmick: you've lost your body, and must inhabit a series of Golems to get it back. Competent, but doesn't get the most out of its premise. There are some interesting bits: a clay body can be baked and hardened, while your wood body can blend in among trees and hide. But a lot more could be done with this idea. I expected to be swapping back and forth to get different abilities, but instead the plot is mostly linear, and you upgrade to better forms as you go. It feels like a waste of a good idea. It also needed better playtesting. Twice the reader is thrown into battles that are nigh-unwinnable.<br />
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<b>Legacy of the Zendari</b>, by Ashton Saylor<br />
Saylor produced last year's <i>Peledgethol</i>, which won second place and was, IMHO, better than the actual winner. (Or at least it was once you realized the battles were unwinnable and cheated through that shit. 3 SKILL, Saylor? Seriously?) [EDIT: Actually, looking at it again, it turns out I misread the rules. Erm... Moving on...] Anyway, <i>Legacy of the Zentradi</i> is not bad, but it's a bit of a disappointment because it's just not up to the same standard. New mechanics streamline combat, which is good. But damage lowers your offensive and defensive powers, meaning that every round you lose makes your ultimate defeat more likely. Annoying. We've also got a "Random Encounter" system which, as in the other three books that used one this year, is pointless filler that wastes time and page space. The writing is generally strong enough to offset these problems, but then at the end it devolves into a mess of cliches and melodrama. Not a bad read, but could have stood a few more revisions. BTW, unless I'm missing something there is no way to reach the end with all 12 achievements, regardless of the author's assurances. The best path available still gets you to the end too late.<br />
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<b>Call of Khalris</b>, by Stuart Lloyd<br />
I'm a fan of Lloyd's blog, but this is the first actual gamebook of his I've read. And it pains me to admit that it is at best hopelessly average. It has a generic setup and is kind of listless. His major innovation is to make you stop at certain points of the story to make you answer essay questions about your character's motivations. Ummm... what? If this is supposed to be a way to draw the player into the story and make them role-play, it fails hard. REALLY hard. The spotlight it shines on the artificiality of the book jolted me OUT of the story.<br />
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<b>Trial of the Battle God</b>, by Andrew Drage<br />
This fantasy version of <i>The Hunger Games</i> has you and seven NPC heroes thrown into a dungeon to fight to the death for glory and your respective nations' prosperity. I am of two minds on this one. On the one hand, a LOT of effort has gone into the game mechanics, which allow your enemies to wander the dungeon the same as you, gaining strength as they loot fallen foes and such. And these mechanics work marvelously, as does the point-based character creation. The writing is also pretty good, for a dungeon-crawl. And it has multiplayer rules, too! For a second time I am amazed by how much an author has crammed into 100 sections. On the other hand, it's an INCREDIBLY combat-centric game. On occassion, you'll find some new weapon or armor or have to negotiate some obstacle, but for the most part you're wandering the maze, battling. And every battle is <i>hard</i>. The enemy heroes are built using the same rules as your character, which means they all have average to above-average stats. So <i>Trial of the Battle God</i> winds up unintentionally spotlighting the biggest problem with dice-based combat: no matter how powerful you are, you have to get lucky or die. You can search for (or loot) new gear, but the way the combat system is set up that hardly matters; I got stronger, but doing so didn't improve my chances in any given battle. Compare <i>The Enchanted Windmill</i>, which used a similar system for resolving combat, but made sure that a boost to your stats actually had an effect. There's an excellent idea for something here, but that something ain't a gamebook. I'm thinking something more like a gamebook/board game hybrid. Something that lets the multiplayer rules really shine. As a single-player gamebook, it's a lot of good, solid craftsmanship put into an idea that just isn't fun.<br />
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<b>Guild of Thieves</b>, Andrew Wright<br />
Curious. Wright won last year's competition with <i>Sea of Madness</i>, a non-linear but otherwise fairly standard gamebook. But instead of continuing in that vein, he's decided to ape <i>Peledgathol</i>, the runner up. Maybe he, like I, thought it was a stronger entrant. In any case, the basic structure of <i>Guild of Thieves</i> is almost identical: you run a series of missions, <i>Mega Man</i> style, gathering allies and building your forces between missions, all leading up to a big final battle. Despite extra polish and streamlined mechanics, though, <i>Guild of Thieves</i> feels like a step back. <i>Peledgathol</i> was a mix of meta-puzzle (you had to get the right keywords at the right times) and story, the latter aided by a small but distinctive cast and a unique voice. You felt like you were playing a fragment of epic history instead of the pulpy adventure stories we're used to. <i>Guild of Thieves</i>? Well, mostly it feels like busywork. Choose your target, roll the dice to succeed or fail, collect money, hire new thieves, etc. etc. The factions you're attempting to control are all pretty much the same. They have nearly-identical stats, and though the flavor is different, it's all so much filler. The game balance is another big problem. Like <i>Legacy of the Zentradi</i>, the author has set up combat (and the broader strategic game) so that if you're winning, you continue to win, and vice versa if your losing. So the game becomes either an exercise in frustration or a trudge where nearly every conflict is a foregone victory. It's dull either way, and the ending turns it all into a shaggy dog story. Disappointing.<br />
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<b>The Enchanted Windmill</b>, by Bert Van Dam<br />
This book feels like a demo or proof-of-concept rather than a complete book, but it's simple and relatively painless. The author seemed to be trying a small-scale tribute to <i>Fabled Lands</i>. Now, I only played the app version of <i>Fabled Lands</i>, and while I had a good time with it, I could see it being very, very annoying on paper. So many passages have to be devoted to housekeeping - shops, towns, etc. - that it cuts into space available for the actual story, and a large body of your time is spent not reading, or even rolling dice, but flipping pages. So it is with <i>The Enchanted Windmill</i>. The mechanics are respectable, but a weak story and lots of bland passages means the book is boring. BTW, that trading minigame thing was done in last year's <i>Sea of Madness</i>, and was stupid there for the same reason it's stupid here: you can set up an infinite loop (in this case, Herbs to Wouwse, Wheat to Heerle, and repeat) to get infinite money. Some players wouldn't even consider it cheating.<br />
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THE UGLY<br />
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<b>A Familiar Story</b>, by Richard Penwarden<br />
Decent writing and adequate world-building, ruined by a grand trifecta of newbie mistakes: too linear, too complicated mechanically, and too much dice work. Way, way, WAY too much dice work. You roll for everything in this game. You roll in combat, you roll for random encounters, you roll for treasure. You even roll for the abilities you get when you level up! It felt like everything was completely out of my hands. I wasn't playing the game, I was watching the dice play the game. And unless you roll lucky for those treasures and abilities, nearly every enemy in the book will have you out-classed. A horrendous misfire.<br />
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<b>The Ravages of Fate</b>, by Ulysses Ai<br />
Putting this one here hurts, because it's got far and away the best writing of the competition: it's a great heroic fantasy yarn with a well-developed supporting cast. The problem is that it's not a gamebook. It's nearly 100% linear. The entire first half is an overlong intro where you journey the frozen mountains with a party of less-than-trustworthy companions. Again, it's marvelously well-written, but almost completely non-interactive. The second half is a big fight between your party and the troll they've been sent to kill. This part I liked a lot, at least in concept. The fight has a lot more detail than just rolling some dice for awhile. You set traps, defend your party (or not), choose methods of attack, and so forth. Even here, though, it feels very scripted. The major events all occur in the same order every time, like a long-winded quick-time event. This should have been a work of static fiction, jerry-rigging it into a gamebook is an insult to both mediums.<br />
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<b>Nye's Song</b>, by Robert Douglas<br />
The same problem as above, really. Good writing, but the story is oppressively linear, and the player never has the opportunity to make a decision that matters. The only real decision you make is how many side-trips to take in the beginning before storming the hall. After storming the hall, you go to the escape, where you can't make any decisions at all. The entire book from that point on is dice work. Granted, I made most of the rolls. Maybe you get more branching if you miss one and things go pear-shaped. But that's still ass-backwards design. Luck should be the fallback when decision-making fails, not vice-versa. And while I respect the old-school <i>Fighting Fantasy</i> mechanics (I used them myself, after all), rolling your stats in this day and age is bullshit.<br />
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<b>The Massacre in Black Scythe</b>, by Mikael Bergqvist<br />
For the most part, this horror story is dull rather than offensive. This is one of those games where there is only one true path, and any deviation eventually leads to a dead-end. That's not bad by itself, but it's tricky to pull off horror using that format. Horror relies on surprise, and you can't be surprised at something after going through it for the 12th time. Badly-written dialog, heavy on exposition and light on personality, also breaks the mood. None of that makes <i>Black Scythe</i> one of The Ugly, though. What does that is a needlessly gory and singularly unpleasant finale where YOU butcher and dismember a bunch of brainwashed children. Ah, no. No thank you.<br />
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<b>Emancipation</b>, by Jake Care<br />
Jake Care is a stalwart proponent of the economy-sized gamebook, so I won't blame him for producing a book that kept me occupied for less than twenty minutes. I will, however, blame him for everything else he did wrong. Like <i>Day of Dissonance</i>, <i>Emancipation</i> is handicapped by the fact that <i>A Knight's Trial</i> did the false-reality idea better. Having played this book before the other two, however, I can confidently say that it stinks regardless. Care does the exact opposite of Coghlan by spelling everything out for the reader. Even overlooking that, the truth is as obvious as it is cliche, and scientifically dubious as well. This book just feels like no effort at all has been put into it.<br />
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<b>Swordplayer</b>, by Nicholas Stillman<br />
It's a rare book that has me pissed off right from the intro. But the author of <i>Swordplayer</i> accomplishes this by declaring it "the most challenging short gamebook ever conceived," which tells me right away that A) he's got a bit of an ego problem, and B) I'm gonna be cheating like a motherfucker. The rules also insist that I can't map the dungeon until I find a particular item, to which I mentally respond "Try and stop me, blowhard." Vitriol aside, <i>Swordplayer</i> actually did some things I liked. It offers a completely deterministic battle system, a crude manner of experience points, and encounters scaled to your level, all very interesting ideas. But it's just not very fun. Or any fun, really. The quest is bland, the dungeon is bland, the anagrams are unsolvable, and the puzzles stink. It reminded me of a Sierra game; you carry around a bunch of items and use all of them on every puzzle until something works. When it does, you say "Huh," then repeat the process with the next puzzle. Or say "How the hell was I supposed to think of THAT?!" and ragequit the game. I made it through about half of them before hitting that point. I mean, come on! Using a cap to bail out an acid lake? Wish I knew what the author was on, because I'd like to try some of that...<br />
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<b>Hwarang and Kumiho</b>, by Leidren Sweever<br />
This is awful, but at least it's entertainingly awful. There seems to be a decent tale hiding in here somewhere, but the author's grasp of English is extremely deficient, and the spell-checker doesn't do him any favors. For example, the hwarang's warrior code commands that he "Thrust among friends". Kinky. The mechanics aren't bad, but the design is awful, substituting completely blind choices for die rolls (Section one ends with the instruction to "Turn to 2, 3, or 4"), and making little or no effort to balance the skills. Plus, bugs. At least twice I was directed to a section that could not logically follow from the previous one. The author has the folktale tone and atmosphere down, and the plot is reasonably well-paced, although rather linear. But if you can dig all that up out of the malapropers and mistakes, you're a better man then I.<br />
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<b>Dating a Witch</b>, by Ivailo Daskalov<br />
Ugh. I hate to put this last, because I like the idea and the author seems to be in earnest, but his (her?) English is even worse than Sweever's. Not only that, but the characterizations are awful. Even with perfect English, that would have been a deal-breaker, because a love story depends on the reader identifying or at least sympathizing with the characters. These characters do not behave like any human beings I know. They meet on a rooftop, and for no apparent reason they decide to go out on a date right then and there after dropping awkward exposition about their respective power sets. It grated so much that I couldn't read more than 10 sections into it before giving up and moving on to the next entrant. I'm sorry, I like the world-building and wanted to give the book a chance, but the best summation I can think of is from Simon the Mean Brit: "You can't sing, you can't dance, so what do you want me to say?"<br />
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Important lessons in gamebook design learned from the 2012 Windhammer Competition:<br />
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- Don't stick a bunch of die rolls in an otherwise-linear story and call it a gamebook.<br />
- Don't implement a random encounter table. It's just time-wasting filler.<br />
- Don't hinge too much of your book on die rolls.<br />
- If you're going to ape some other book, don't come off worse in the comparison. (See <i>Guild of Thieves</i>)<br />
- Don't skip playtesting, especially if you're using new mechanics.<br />
- Giving the player a bit of leeway works wonders (See <i>Final Payment</i>, <i>Academy of Magic</i>.)<br />
- Know your limitations. Several games bit off more than they could chew.<br />
- Don't be afraid to innovate.<br />
- Don't use the player's combat stats as his hit points. It just makes battle annoying. (See <i>Legacy of the Zendari</i>)<br />
- Don't write in a language you don't know.<br />
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And that's all I've got to say. Feel free to add your own comments, or reviews of your own!LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-50547573072991414492012-10-11T18:58:00.001-04:002012-10-11T18:58:21.054-04:00All the Lovely Creatures<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Remember that anthology I've been talking about recently? Check it out:</div>
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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16080269-all-the-lovely-creatures"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCyewr3i8RUzmqaxuQM0210btrBXAFnGWeNeav7H0yJ4XR7QTkbDOUgi5WMq6MNW9lix_G2km9p_0G5i79yoRqPLOz9FuT4TpZ_YJ2b1qK-xuP-qI5VkDurYVE3vPV3SNIezG54B7TvjU/s320/16080269.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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The anthology is out, and I'm pleased to be starting it off* with my story, "No Such Thing." It is the second story to feature Gerald Westmoor and Kyle Thompson, (The first, in case you don't remember, is <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16006961-the-case-of-the-dark-angel">here</a>,) and I am very proud of it. The other authors, a few of whom I helped edit, have also put together first-rate work. So, enjoy! There's been talk of doing another one soon, and I hope it comes to pass, because this was a lot of fun!<br />
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*- Okay, I'm only first because the stories were compiled alphabetically by author. Still, I'm proud to be there. ^_^LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-25040592358159312792012-09-28T23:20:00.002-04:002012-09-28T23:20:18.727-04:00Movie Review: LooperBeen a while since I've done one of these, but then again it's been a while since I saw a film that left me with anything pressing to say.<br />
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<i>Looper</i> is painful to recall having viewed. Not because it was bad but because, like <i>Battleship</i>, I can see the much more awesome movie it could have been. Someone had the script for a Philip K. Dick pastiche, and it was incredible: clever, gritty, visceral, and mindbending. The perfect summer sci-fi flick. Then, halfway through filming, the budget ran out. So they shifted gears to a half-assed <i>Terminator</i> ripoff and cut every corner they possibly could. The brillliant futurist cityscapes are replaced with more realistic sets, the cast is pared down to the bare minimum (including reducing Bruce Willis to a supporting player), action scenes are cut out or toned down, and the plot slows to a crawl as they desperately try to make do.<br />
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There are bright spots. That first half is still great, Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a bang-up job impersonating Willis. The movie handles the usual time-travel mindfuckery better than most; There's a remarkably plausible explanation of how altering your own past screws with your memory, and the ending, though predictable, is something I've always wanted to see in a time-travel story. And it's a rare movie indeed where a ten-year-old boy steal the show from Bruce Willis. But the whole does not add up to the sum of its' parts.<br />
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It's a pity, because between the trailers and the buzz I've been hearing, I was psyched to see this. But it all fell apart.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-91114236019902953802012-09-14T21:09:00.003-04:002012-09-14T21:09:45.083-04:00*whistles* FREE BOOKS!Okay, sorry again for a long period of quiet, but I have been hard at work on my writing these past few weeks, and as it turns out I have something to show to you for it. No, not the <i>Bonds of Fenris</i> sequel, though work continues on that. As I mentioned last time, a bunch of us on Goodreads have put together an anthology called <i>All the Lovely Creatures</i>, due out in October. My story is called "No Such Thing", and it's about a vampire detective and his human assistant investigating a haunting. It's actually the second story I've written with these characters. The first never made it to publication, so I decided to release it for free on <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16006961-the-case-of-the-dark-angel">Goodreads</a> and <a href="https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/235842">Smashwords</a>. It's a brief read, maybe 20 minutes or so. I hope you enjoy it.<br />
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In addition, as of today the entrants in the <a href="http://www.arborell.com/windhammer_prize.html">Windhammer Prize for Short Gamebook Fiction</a> are available for download. One of them is my first gamebook, <i>The Evil Eye</i>. If you have any interest in gamebooks, or any fond memories of <i>Fighting Fantasy</i> or <i>Lone Wolf</i> back in the day, I highly recommend you check it out. And vote for me, of course. ~_^<br />
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<br />LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-42787400205399524122012-08-16T19:46:00.000-04:002012-08-16T19:46:14.318-04:00Wolf Girls review up at Lupines and Lunatics! + apologies.My latest review, of the indie anthology <i>Wolf Girls</i>, is now up at<a href="http://luplun.blogspot.com/"> the review blog</a>. Check it out!<br />
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Yeah, I've been neglecting this blog big-time lately. I apologize. But! I've had good reason. A bunch of us from Goodreads have gotten together to produce an anthology of our own, <i>All the Lovely Creatures</i>. It won't be out for a month or two, but when it is it will have stories from a bunch of promising authors, myself included. I've been working on some other projects, too, including the sequel to <i>Bonds of Fenris</i> (which is a ways off still), and some other shorts. No details just yet, but rest assured, you'll hear about it here!<br />
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In the meantime, keep howlin', and I'll post here when I can.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-35946737844951112572012-07-13T00:01:00.002-04:002012-07-13T00:01:38.088-04:00Blog Hopping 7/13/2012<br />
Welcome, fellow bloghoppers! You're looking at the personal blog of S.J. Bell, independent author. My first book, <i>Bonds of Fenris</i>, is currently available at Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and many other fine ebook retailers! Link on the sidebar, get 'em while their hot! It's been making a big splash on the internet, check out the reviews on <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13507425-bonds-of-fenris">Goodreads</a>.<br />
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I was absent from the blog hop for a few weeks, partially due to some real-life drama, but also because I've been busy working on some short stories, which I hope to be able to reveal to you soon. In the meantime, I posted an analysis of the issue of <a href="http://wolfmanbell.blogspot.com/2012/07/on-content-reuse.html">recycled content in e-publishing</a> (springing off from <a href="http://wolfmanbell.blogspot.com/2012/06/on-nuances-of-plagiarism.html">an earlier post</a> which caused some degree of drama between me and the people of Tin Man Games). On a less dramatic note, I also hosted a <a href="http://wolfmanbell.blogspot.com/2012/07/from-snow-queen-to-wolf-girl-guest-post.html">guest post</a> for the <a href="http://www.hic-dragones.co.uk/#/blog-tour/4565397298">Wolf Girls Blog Tour</a>!<br />
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In addition to this blog, I also have a separate blog for reviews, <i><a href="http://luplun.blogspot.com/">Lupines and Lunatics</a></i>. Latest review is <i>Taken by Storm. </i>Check it out!<br />
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Happy hopping!<br />
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<a href="http://www.parajunkee.com/"><img border="0" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7053/6778552714_5a75be99b4_o.jpg" /></a><br />
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This week's ice-breaker for Feature & Follow:<br />
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"What drove you to start book blogging in the first place?"<br />
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My writing career, essentially. At the time, I was hoping to build cachet as an expert on werewolves in literature, which I thought would make me look good when It came time to attract an agent for my work. Well, it didn't help too much. Might actually have hurt, since agents specifically shy away from authors who review other people's books -- the risk of creating drama is too great. But I stuck with it, and it seems to have actually gotten me noticed on the internet, which is a very good thing for an indie author.</div>LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-64878348948748576732012-07-11T14:00:00.000-04:002012-07-11T14:00:02.014-04:00From Snow Queen to Wolf Girl (Guest Post from Jeanette Greaves)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.hic-dragones.co.uk/#/wolf-girls/4565397194" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiDP9MXI53jr9NpMjBJc8xys0tvFO1yp_PWAjk1GDX1AQ_ugsqZDiRpmH3iDSgO0SuZnVrvu6m3uldgJ5X7qZEsUSqxClidHvwjEBn4jnpCdc5Qb_jvSUw_1Brmf6cRinwNjFAsc3J-A8/s1600/WGBLOGTOUR.jpg" /></a></div>
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<i>Today I have a special treat for you all. Hannah Kate of indie publisher Hic Dragones recently released a new anthology, </i><a href="http://www.hic-dragones.co.uk/#/wolf-girls/4565397194">Wolf-Girls</a>.<i> I'll be reviewing it soon, but for now I've been asked to host a guest post for the blog tour. So it's my great pleasure to introduce Jeanette Greaves, author of "The Cameron Girls", who is here today to talk a bit about how she came to writing as a profession. Sit down and have a listen. When you're done, check out the rest of the tour on the <a href="http://www.hic-dragones.co.uk/#/blog-tour/4565397298">Hic Dragones website</a>, or visit Jeanette <a href="http://bloginbasket.com/">at her blog</a>. Now take it away, Jeanette!</i></div>
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My grandmother used to tell me fairy stories at bedtime, some from Grimm, some from Andersen, some that I'm sure she made up because I've never heard them before or since. She didn't tell them every night I spent at her house, but it was enough to make me long for the brilliant dreams that came afterwards. It was enough to sow the seeds of wonder and curiosity, and make me want to believe in something different, something wild and wonderful. <br />
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Thanks to my mother, who realised that I was capable, and that reading would keep me quiet, I learned to read at a very young age, and was given several books, mostly educational, but one was a beautifully illustrated story book with just one story in it. Just one. <br />
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<i>The Snow Queen</i> has a lot to answer for. I read it again and again. I took into my soul the idea of the female hero, the female villain. I learned and believed that women and girls were powerful beings, capable of great acts. I learned that people could change, and change again. <br />
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As I grew older, I sought more of the same, and was disappointed that there was very little out there. Female characters sought marriage, or salvation, they were victims, or bystanders. I discovered science fiction and fantasy, and sank into the arms of the genre. Joanna Russ, Anne McCaffrey and a small tribe of women writers gave me what I hungered for … women who fought, and loved, and were the architects of their own lives. <br />
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To be honest, I wasn't attracted to the paranormal. I read and enjoyed stories about vampires and werewolves when I couldn't get hold of the hard stuff, but nothing stood out for me until I read Suzy McKee Charnas' brilliantly dark and funny "Boobs" in an anthology. If you've not read it, find it. The basic story has been used many times, but never as well as in Suzy's tale. I started to look for werewolf stories. I found George RR Martin's "The Skin Trade", and this too lodged tightly in my brain. Again, if you've not read it, look for it. It terrified me, and I'm not even a werewolf. The idea of the werewolf as a victim intrigued me. <br />
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For all my love of books, I didn't write. I'd put it aside, like most people do, after primary school. We didn't write stories at secondary school, we studied other people's. With the exception of a few narrative poems which I doodled out in the sixth form common room, my well of ideas filled and filled, without every gaining an outlet. That's how things go stagnant.<br />
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I started writing by accident, riffing on funny, erotic stories for the amusement of my friends. One story escaped from me, and grew and grew. It didn't stop. It was about a female werewolf, and I was in love with my own creation. She was (is) a green eyed, red haired, short lady, by no means beautiful. She appeared in the passenger seat of my car as I was driving, and started to tell me her story. She never introduced herself, which meant that at first I had to write from her point of view, because I didn't know her name. It took two years of coaxing before she admitted to "Diana". Since then I've been writing about Diana and her friends and family. There's about a million words of it, some about wolf-girls, some about wolf-boys. I love them all the same. <br />
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"The Cameron Girls" has been rattling around for several years, and the version in <i>Wolf-Girls</i> is pretty much the original version. It's a Cinderella story for werewolves, set in a 21st Century where shapeshifters have come out of the closet and are very much part of modern society. The story came about because I wanted to step outside the box, to take a break from the company of werewolves, and to look at how the rest of the world was coping with the revelation that there was a small but influential group of shapeshifters living amongst them. How would the tabloids react? And how would the 'shifters themselves protect and care for those of their kind who were still alone and scared, or unaware of their powers?<br />
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When Hannah-Kate put out her call for submissions for the anthology, I wondered if my shapeshifters fit the bill. There's nothing paranormal about my werewolves, they are no more influenced by the moon than any other human, they wear silver jewellery without a care, and they are passionately interested in being a part of human society, rather than apart from it. Some of them even change into other animals than wolves. Hannah made it clear that her brief ranged wide, so I submitted two stories, and "The Cameron Girls" was accepted. It's not my first published story; that honour goes to "The Brane", a tale of rock stars and voodoo which was in <i>Writers' Forum</i> magazine in 2009. <br />
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Having read the <i>Wolf-Girls</i> anthology from cover to cover, I'm delighted to see my story in such great company, with so many different takes on the Wolf-girls theme. The mixed-author short story anthology is a brilliant book format … you're sure to find something you like, and may even find a story that you love. Go on, dive in, and don't mind the howling.<br />
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<i>Jeanette's first job involved boiling up pig heads to make dripping. She moved on, quickly, to take a Saturday job gutting and filleting fish. She is now a vegetarian who likes to write about people being torn apart by werewolves. Never doubt the formative influence of weekend work. Read her story, along with 16 others in Wolf-Girls, out now from Hic Dragones!</i>LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-42028154625294844202012-07-05T20:23:00.000-04:002012-07-07T23:07:42.466-04:00On content reuse<br />
<a href="http://wolfmanbell.blogspot.com/2012/06/on-nuances-of-plagiarism.html">A recent post of mine</a> started some e-mail/twitter drama that I'm uninterested in continuing. I may need to at some point, but for now that kind of dialog is beneath mention. Lost in the discussion, however, was the real issue I was trying to bring attention to. It's something that the audience for indie publishing should be aware of, because I expect to see more of it in the future.<br />
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Long story short: some time ago, a <i>Fighting Fantasy</i> fan named Kieran Coghlan wrote a FF-based gamebook called <i>Hunger of the Wolf</i> and distributed it for free on the internet. A few years later, Tin Man Games licensed the book from Coghlan and reworked it into <i>Revenant Rising</i>, one of their <i>Gamebook Adventures</i> line of e-gamebook mobile apps. Changes were made to incorporate the <i>Gamebook Adventures</i> combat system, and to change the setting from Titan (the world of <i>Fighting Fantasy</i>) to their own Orlandes setting. Changes were also made to the plot, though in broad strokes it is the same: Hero is betrayed by comrade, saved from death by not-quite-benevolent wizard, tracks down betrayer via long cross-country trek, has various adventures along the way, confronts and kills betrayer in single combat during a larger army vs. army engagement, is betrayed again by wizard, and must finally escape wizard's control with the help of a more trustworthy ally. The text, likewise, has been changed as little as practical. I'd estimate that between one-third and one-half of <i>Revenant Rising</i> is copy and pasted from <i>Hunger of the Wolf</i>, with the entire middle being nearly identical.<br />
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By all accounts, this was done legally. There was no violation of copyright law or anything like that. However, it was a very questionable move from the perspective of Tin Man's customers, who were asked to buy something that, unbeknownst to them, was already available for free. Again, this is legal, and I can't really think of a reason it shouldn't be, but it leaves a very, very sour taste in my mouth.<br />
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As I noted in my previous post, there is some precedent for this. A chapter of Arthur C. Clarke's <i>2010</i> is lifted wholesale from it's more-famous predecessor. Nobody made this an issue, and Clarke himself even joked about it, because the chapter in question was dry exposition with little to do with the story. Silver Age <i>Superman</i> comics recycled plots every few years, but because back issues were hard to find and the audience was expected to "grow out of them", it wasn't a big deal. <i>Garfield</i> has become notorious for reusing punchlines, and nobody cares because they get the strip for free with the daily paper. Hell, Tin Man will be rereleasing the old <i>Fighting Fantasy</i> books on their platform soon, and people are psyched. What makes this any different?<br />
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Two things make it different. One is dishonesty. When people buy Tin Man's <i>Fighting Fantasy</i> reissues, they'll know exactly what they're getting, and they'll be cool with it. But <i>Revenant Rising</i> is sold as a new work when it's nothing of the sort. Digging through the hype, I couldn't find a single mention of the fact that <i>Revenant Rising</i> is, at its core, a book that I'd read before. You pay for something new and get something you already had and didn't need. If they had just released a <i>Hunger of the Wolf</i> special edition or some such with alterations to remove the <i>Fighting Fantasy</i> references, there wouldn't have been any trouble. But they tricked their audience, and their audience has a right to be miffed.<br />
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The second thing is disrespect, both for their audience and themselves. By pulling a move like this, and then expecting their customers to come back, they beg the question of how they expected to get away with it. There are two possibilities: one is that they expect that their readers will be unfamiliar with gamebooks. Their success, in other words, is based on their readers being naive. The other is that they expect their readers to catch it and come back anyway, because they don't care. Under this logic, they are under no compulsion to produce good work.<br />
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And that's the really concerning issue: their disrespect for their own writing. By doing this the author is saying that their books are nothing but a product to be sold, repackaged, and resold as they wish. They have commoditized their work and undermined their own artistic integrity.<br />
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If you read my blog because you like books, rather than gamebooks, you might not care about this little tempest in a teapot. But consider this: whenever you buy a new e-book, you're essentially making a blind purchase. What do you have to make your buying decision? A cover image, a blurb, and the name of an author that you may or may not recognize. Sometimes a sample of the first chapter or so. What's to stop an unscrupulous author from making some marginal changes and then pushing the same book out under three or four different titles? Maybe under three or four different pen names? He hasn't broken any laws in doing so, but he has broken the unspoken trust to provide his readers with the best storytelling he can. The reader can't be blamed for taking exception. Nor can the reader be blamed for swearing off an author, a genre, or even reading itself. Nobody is going to indulge themselves in a hobby that has them constantly cheated out of their money.<br />
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When authors pull stunts like this, it doesn't just harm their own reputation, but the reputation of honest authors doing honest work. And it means newcomers have to try even harder to overcome the skepticism of an audience who thinks they're probably just another sock puppet pushing another cloned book. Buyer beware in this brave new world of e-publishing, and readers and authors alike beware of recycled content.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-80856283998492089402012-06-25T15:06:00.003-04:002012-06-25T15:06:42.029-04:00New LupLun Review: Taken by StormHeads up, followers! My <a href="http://luplun.blogspot.com/">review blog</a> is now host to my lastest review: Jennifer Lynn Barnes' <i>Taken by Storm</i>, the final volume of her totally awesome <i>Raised by Wolves</i> series. Check it out!LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-24489340665394723382012-06-22T19:18:00.002-04:002012-06-26T11:09:23.512-04:00On nuances of plagiarismI have a perennial interest in gamebooks, which are the perfect way to meld my love of video games and my love of reading. Recently I've been into Tin Man Games' <a href="http://gamebookadventures.com/">Gamebook Adventures</a>, which brings the genre into the 21st century by using code to automate a lot. This isn't really a new idea. <a href="http://www.ffproject.com/">Fighting Fantasy Project</a> has dozens of independently-produced gamebooks, some web-implemented, others in .pdf or Word format.<br />
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After getting a iPod Touch for my birthday, I've been working my way through the available GA books one by one, my latest conquest being book number 4, <i>Revenant Rising</i>. I was enjoying it up until the halfway point, where a dead minstrel spoke to me, giving information about a evil army I was currently trying to thwart. I was instantly reminded of a similar situation that occurred in one of my favorite FFProject indies, <i>Hunger of the Wolf</i>. At the time, I brushed it off and went on, but then I found another familiar situation: a detachment of said evil army camped by a river that I had to cross. And beyond that, a third set-piece: a village on fire, and me given a choice to rush into a burning building to save a peasant woman's baby, or confront the soldiers who were laughing at it.<br />
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With an eyebrow raise, I re-downloaded <i>Hunger of the Wolf</i> and took a look at them side by side. Sure enough, there's some utterly blatant ripping-off in evidence. Not only are the broad strokes of the plot similar, but huge swaths of the middle of <i>Revenant Rising</i> are simply copy-pasted from <i>Hunger of the Wolf</i>, with only slight modifications for the new setting and characters.<br />
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Curious as to how they expected to get away with this, I checked the credits page for Revenant and discovered exactly how they got away with it. The writer for <i>Revenant</i>, Kieran Coghlan, is the same man who did <i>Hunger of the Wolf</i>. The credits page also contains this line:<br />
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<i>"Revenant Rising is based on an existing gamebook entitled 'Hunger of the Wolf' which is licensed to TMG by the writer."</i><br />
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In other words, Coghlan... plagiarized himself? My first thought, before I read the credits, was rage. My second was laughter: well, I guess that's okay, then! My third thought was "Wait, so I just paid $4.99 for something that was already available legally for free? With <i>zombies</i> instead of wolves?"<br />
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(I'm admittedly biased on the relative lack of wolves being a grave injustice.)<br />
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But this raises some interesting questions. Can an author plagiarize himself? Arthur C. Clarke copy-pasted an entire chapter of <i>2001</i> into the sequel and insisted (with some snark) that it was perfectly alright to do so. He has a point. If plagiarism is the theft of intellectual content, one can't really be accused of stealing something that was already one's own.<br />
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But on the other hand, if there's no foul play here, am <i>I</i> justified in feeling ripped off? Or is that just the gamer's sense of entitlement speaking?<br />
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Discuss.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541574096795910363.post-74857516599330092752012-06-14T23:32:00.001-04:002012-06-14T23:32:13.318-04:00Giveaway Results and Blog Hopping 6/15/2012<br />
First things first: The giveaway celebrating Parajunkee's 100th Feature and Follow has concluded. Thank you all for participating. The winners are: <b>Krista Bookreview</b> (totally <i>not</i> an alias), <b>Lauren Amy Watkins</b>, and <b>jenny</b>. Winners have been contacted by e-mail. If you didn't win, there's another giveaway going on at <a href="http://burgandyice.blogspot.com/2012/06/interview-and-giveaway-bonds-of-fenris.html"><i>Colorimetry</i></a> through 6/27. Or you can buy the book at Smashwords, Amazon, or many fine e-book retailers.<br />
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With that said:<br />
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Welcome, fellow bloghoppers! You're looking at the personal blog of S.J. Bell, independent author. My first book, <i>Bonds of Fenris</i>, is currently available at Smashwords and Amazon. Link on the sidebar, get 'em while their hot! It's been making a big splash on the internet, check out the reviews on <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13507425-bonds-of-fenris">Goodreads</a>.<br />
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I have been slacking off on posting here, I admit. It's a combination of working on a novel, a short story, and real-life drama all at once. But! I do have some substantial posts percolating, and I've been keeping up with my reading. My current read is <i>Taken by Storm</i>, from the lovely Jennifer Lynn Barnes, one of my favorite writers. I hope to have a review up ASAP.<br />
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In addition to this blog, I also have a separate blog for reviews, <i><a href="http://luplun.blogspot.com/">Lupines and Lunatics</a></i>. Latest review is <i>The Wolf Gift. </i>Check it out!<br />
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Happy hopping!<br />
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<a href="http://parajunkee.com/"><img border="0" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7053/6778552714_5a75be99b4_o.jpg" /></a><br />
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This week's ice-breaker for Feature & Follow:<br />
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"Who is your favorite dad character in a book and why?"<br />
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Tough call, but I'd have to say Luke's dad from <i>Wolf Mark</i>. Largely because he trains his son to be Sam Fisher, but also because his parenting mantra is "Think about what you're doing" rather than "Do as I say." The text notes that this never works anyway, and is an unhelpful lesson for later in life.<br />
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<a href="http://www.greadsbooks.com/"><span id="goog_534043093"></span><img align="center" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKMreVHm5_M9uAiv3Au0ZALMRnuLtMDdVimF4I3zG8Fq4DB5yaTXGfayhC4C0532nQ2uHDCGBTmdPfzrkWllGxLjrTVFESBLp7US8oX2YqtngmX_YQvGib9a7yPNv3i7NAFO5Si4rmBt8/s1600/TGIFatGReadsGraphic.jpg" /><span id="goog_534043094"></span></a><br />
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This week's ice-breaker for TGIF @ GReads:<br />
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"From your personal collection of books, which ones hold the most value to you - is it signed by the author? or maybe it's your favorite story of all time? Share it with us."<br />
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Well, I do have one or two signed books, but it's really not something I collect. I'm more interested in stories. And on that subject, there are two series which I value above all others: Carrie Vaughn's <i>Kitty Norville</i> books.<br />
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The thing about Vaughn is, her stories are very down to earth. We're used to these epic conflicts and larger-than-life stories, but Vaughn is at her best when playing things low-key. She depicts ordinary people in extraordinary situations: vampires and werewolves and so forth who at their core are human beings with human desires and motivations. It's that realism, that focus on humanity, which elevates her stories above the sea of Anita Blake wannabes crowding the urban fantasy genre.LupLunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01569316994425614394noreply@blogger.com6