You can’t make a living as a bookbinder, you might say. Not in this age of TV and videogames and Kindle.
Well, it’s been a couple of years since we both graduated, and this is what’s happened:
Heather’s at the North Bennet Street School following her dream. She’s learning how to conserve books and make them into works of art. And she just made a hand-bound copy of the Silmarillion with a title printed in Tengwar.
See more here: http://bookwyrmbound.com/
Yards to Gardens works kind of like a Craigslist for people who want to start a vegetable garden. The idea for this website grew out of a problem that is common in urban environments: there are a lot of people in apartment buildings who would like to garden, but they don’t have space to do it. Meanwhile, people in houses may want to have a vegetable garden put into their yards, but they don’t have time to do it. Yards to Gardens helps these yard-owners and would-be gardeners find each other.
You post a “want ad” to the Yards to Gardens website listing what you’re looking for, a gardener or some gardening space, and the ad goes up on a giant map of the Twin Cities. The icons on the map show you what yards and gardeners are in your neighborhood.
Currently the system only works in the Twin Cities area, but the Yards to Gardens staff are hoping to expand to other cities soon.
A bit of the artwork from the comic
Like a twisted version of Coyote and Roadrunner,* Ms. Vane Black is chasing John Henry Hunter across a magical version of the American Southwest, and she will stop at nothing until she kills him.
The visuals for this comic are gorgeous. Just look at this. Mehlos does something with the coloring so the grasses and live oaks of the Old West seem to glow from the page. There’s a lot of fire magic involved in this story, and it sure benefits from the treatment. Even if this comic didn’t have any plot to it, I’d recommend people go look at it just for the pretty colors. There is a plot, though.
The other thing I like about this comic is that Vane is a badass, but she isn’t a babe. In fact, she looks kind of sick and the other characters notice. But Vane doesn’t need to be gorgeous to show people who’s boss.
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* I’m not kidding about the Coyote and Roadrunner. There’s a bit where Vane tries to lure Hunter into a cart full of dynamite.
What’s the word for the opposite of schadenfreude? ‘Cause I’m getting a heck of a vicarious thrill out of Rich Burlew’s sudden good fortune.
Order of the Stick Kickstarter page.
My relationship with the Order of the Stick goes back about three years. I was a junior in college and I’d just moved into Benton House, the science fiction and fantasy dorm for helpless geeks like me. Such a helpless geek, in fact, that I’d signed up to help take care of the house library of fantasy books.
Well, there was this funny looking book in the graphic novels section called Start of Darkness. If I remember right, I read it in one sitting. Holy moly, it wasn’t merely a comic, it was literature as well. It was a tragedy. The title is a pun on Heart of Darkness, guys! Then I devoured On the Origin of PCs (try saying it aloud). Then I moved on to the OOTS website and blasted through them through finals week.
Cannon Fodder owes so much to this comic. And Redcloak is awesome.
Check it out! One of my old writer friends got published! Staking Shadows is a paranormal romance in which Summer Sun McKellar is one of the few remaining humans after most people in the world have been transformed into soul-sucking … things. Summer’s taken it upon herself to re-kill as many of them as possible. But when one of the soul-suckers spares her, it gets complicated.
I read a couple draft chapters back in 2009, and if it’s still like the draft, this is not your plain ole vampire story. Way to go, Rebekah!
I’ll admit I’m a bit late to the party on this one. The first Artemis Fowl book was published in 2001, when I was a bit older than the series’s target demographic, so it got past me until just now. But I’m still #12 on the library waitlist for Game of Thrones, so I thought I’d give it a try. And after reading it, I want to know why these books were marketed only to kids. The subtext here is brilliant.
Artemis Fowl is a millionaire, a criminal mastermind, and twelve years old. His dad has conveniently gone missing after an explosion on a Russian cargo ship and his mother has shut herself up in her room out of grief, so he can run around and do his moneymaking schemes without too much trouble. His accomplices are Butler and his sister Juliet, the butler and maid of the Fowl estate. And… and… the awesomeness of these characters… you simply have to read about them for yourself:
The Butlers had been serving the Fowls for centuries. It had always been that way. Indeed, there were several linguists of the opinion that this was how the common noun had originated. The first record of this unusual arrangement was when Virgil Butler had been contracted as servant, bodyguard, and cook to Lord Hugo de Folé for one of the first great Norman crusades.
At the age of ten, Butler children were sent to a private training center in Israel, where they were taught the specialized skills needed to guard the latest in the Fowl line. These skills included Cordon Bleu cooking, marksmanship, a customized blend of martial arts, emergency medicine, and information technology. If, at the end of their training, there was not a Fowl to guard, then the Butlers were eagerly snapped up as bodyguards for various royal personages, generally in Monaco or Saudi Arabia.
The whole book reads like this.
Artemis’s latest scheme is to kidnap an officer of LEPrecon, the fairy police, and hold her ransom for quite a lot of money. Of course, the situation devolves into a standoff in which Colfer has the chance to trot out heist movie tropes and play with them. There’s a fairy sergeant with a cigar in his mouth, a dwarven convict who’s sent to work in a plea-bargaining deal, and the smartass techie who walks the fairies through Fowl Manor via his headset. He’s a centaur. He loves carrots.
There are, unfortunately, parts of the book that induce giggles for the wrong reasons. Artemis has at his disposal the most cutting-edge of 2001 technology. Near the beginning of the book, he steals some data from a fairy in Saigon and then e-mails it to himself. One can only assume he was using a Hotmail account.
But seriously, just read it for the Butlers. Go read it.
Well, it’s been said that you can learn how to become a better writer both by reading great books and awful ones. Turns out that you can learn from reading books that are just sort of okay, too.
Stealing Death by Janet Lee Carey was published in 2009 and is aimed at the YA market. It’s got a neat premise: After a fire burns down his home, the Gwali, a sort of grim reaper/boogeyman, steals the souls of Kipp’s parents and puts them in a sack. Kipp will go to incredible lengths to get that sack back. It’s also refreshingly different that Carey decided to set this story in an African-like society. (Although the girl on the front cover is quite clearly a white person with darkened skin. But I digress. That was the illustrator’s fault.)
I was disappointed to find that Carey took such a cool idea and made a mediocre story out of it. There’s nothing at all wrong with this book. But I got about twenty pages into it and wondered to myself why I didn’t care what happened next. The answer: It’s only a made-up story. Kipp isn’t real, so it doesn’t matter what happens to him. When you’re writing fiction, this is a very bad sign indeed.
Carey tells us, outright, that Kipp is sad that his parents and little brother are dead. Okay. And he has a crush on his landlord’s daughter. Okay, but where is the evidence for this? Does he do anything to show that he’s sad? No, he just sort of packs up his stuff and starts on his quest. He’s okay, but he never makes that jump from “generic YA protagonist” to “person I care about desperately.”
I suppose the writing lesson to take away from this is that crafting a compelling story is hard work.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia
I was listening to the Pandora radio the other day when all of a sudden a piece of videogame music came up on my list. Intrigued, I had to go look it up. I turns out that The Spirit Engine 2 is a pretty good freeware RPG, and judging by the YouTube comments, its ending credits are beloved by Nightwish fans. Must be all that semi-Latin chanting.
Check it out! http://youtu.be/y5fRCfgiH_g
Here’s a rather remarkable blog post by Nathan Bransford, who’s had experience as a publishing industry insider:
Self-Publishing vs. Traditional Publishing: Which Way Will You Make More Money?
Bransford crunches some numbers and comes to the conclusion that unless you’re, say, Sue Grafton and you’re making a big splash in the print market, you’ll actually earn more money by self-publishing. Whoa. That means no querying to agents, no waiting for a publisher to pick up your work, no waiting two years to finally hit store shelves. Instead, he says, put your best work up there on Amazon and then market the heck out of it.
Self-publishing used to be the last resort of people who wrote cruddy books. But the whole industry is going through a sea change with the advent of e-readers and I don’t know where we’ll all wind up. And I don’t know what I’d like to do with my next novel once I’m finished with it. I write because I love to write, and I want to reach as many people as possible. Money would be nice. 🙂
Cannon Fodder won’t be ready for at least another year and a half, anyway, so I think I’ll wait and see what the industry is like then.
An online serial novel by Abra Staffin-Wiebe. This is a world where everything runs on a magical stuff called aether. It powers the steamships, the city lamps, the walking elephant skeleton down at the circus. Everything’s going fine – more or less – until a technician decides to light up down at the power plant…
The Circus of Brass and Bone is the story of survivors who are trying to pick up the pieces after a very big boom. If you’re into post-apocalyptic steampunk (and who wouldn’t be?), check it out.
http://www.circusofbrassandbone.com/