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A Fairy Tale: Into the Perilous Realm

Filed under: Reviews — Leave a comment
February 10, 2015

23500493Recently, I gave you all a review of Shanna Swendson’s Enchanted series, an urban fantasy romance set in a version of New York where wizards, fairies, gnomes, and elves live among unsuspecting humans, hidden by magical illusions, with lives both astonishingly similar and predictably different from reality. My future co-author Elizabeth Hajek has given her own enthusiastic verdict on the series, and I should note she hadn’t even finished the sixth book before deciding to endorse it.

Well, while I waited for Swendson to publish the next book in the series, I decided to take a look at what is currently the only book in a separate series written by her, titled simply A Fairy Tale. This is similar to Enchanted because it takes place in New York, it’s a fantasy, it’s women’s fiction with significant cross-gender appeal, and it’s very good. It’s different because it’s adventure rather than romance; it’s urban fantasy only in that some of it takes place in New York; and it’s not as light and humorous as Katie’s adventures with Magic, Spells, and Illusions, Inc.

It’s also one of the best examples I’ve found so far of adapting British fairy folk tales to the modern fantasy genre that is their direct descendant. If you like your fairies to be less like Walt Disney’s Tinkerbell and more like Jim Butcher’s Queen Mab, you’ll be right at home.  View full article »

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Spider-Man is Back with Marvel

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Okay, okay, the superhero Spider-Man, a comic book character that predates the X-Men, never left Marvel. Well, except in one respect: Sony bought the movie rights to the character’s franchise back when no one expected superhero movies to be this big and mainstream.

The cinematic rights to Spider-man had been bought in the 80s, and eventually wound up in Sony’s hands. Marvel has reportedly wanted them back now that they’ve been so successful with their “Cinematic Universe,” the collection of shared-world movies (and now two TV shows, Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter) that began with Iron Man in 2008. It’s been a rumor for years now that Marvel might get Spider-man back, or that Sony might relent and recognize the earnings potential that would come with crossovers.

Unlike most pie-in-the-sky, Internet-geek-community rumors . . . this has now been confirmed as true.  View full article »

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Women and Swords. Sold.

Filed under: Plugs and Promotions — Leave a comment
February 5, 2015

You know you’re a sword geek when you notice the sword before anything else on the cover.

Okay, let’s face it. Like most men, I’m a sucker for a pretty face. Like most geeks, I’m a sucker for a pretty face with a smart brain. But give that smart, pretty woman a sword, and . . . sorry, where was I?

When my friend and future co-author Elizabeth Hajek was offered the chance to host a giveaway for Michelle Moran’s upcoming book Rebel Queen, I thought “good for her.” When I realized it was about Rani Lakshmibai, I thought “I should really buy this book because history and battles and sword-wielding queens oh my.”

Now, I should say that I know about as much about Indian history as I do about American football. That is, I can kind of recognize the names involved and where they’re supposed to go and vaguely how things fit together (though I still can’t find the goalie), but just like I’ll confuse an NFL team with ones that play baseball (that’s the one that plays indoor and bounces the ball a lot, right?), I’ll get north and south India mixed up, which, take it from me, is worse than getting northern India mixed up with Pakistan.

However, as I read the back cover text for Rebel Queen, I realized that I had heard of Rani Lakshmibai.

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SFWA Now Welcomes Indies; Do Indies Care?

Filed under: Industry, Publishing — Leave a comment
February 4, 2015

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the world’s most well-known union for SF&F professionals, has finally opened up membership to members of indie presses and self-publishing authors. As they acknowledge in their announcement, it’s a decision that took five years to make.

Yep. Five years. Five years in which the publishing world has changed more than in the previous fifty. The writing was on the wall as far back as ten years ago, so this heel-dragging on a membership model designed around 1970s publication standards (updated only to adjust for inflation and canonize or excommunicate certain outlets) has been particularly head-scratch-worthy.

And that’s not even including the fact that membership gives you . . . well, basically nothing.  View full article »

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William Shakespeare’s Star Wars on Sale

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If you’re viewing this anytime after this week, I’m sorry. But hey, you get a review, right?

Audible.com is running a sale on the first books of series. There are several good choices, all for $4.95 each, but I didn’t go through the whole thing yet. I got distracted by William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, a New Hope.  View full article »

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What If Groundhog Day Were Directed by Jackie Chan?

Filed under: Just For Fun, Writing Tips — Leave a comment
February 2, 2015

Happy Deja Vu Day!

The movie Groundhog Day is famous, and it always gets referenced on February 2nd (at least here in the US, where it’s one of the weirder holidays ever dreamed up before pot was legal). Of course, the movie Edge of Tomorrow is a lot more recent, and has more guns, so maybe that little trend is on the downslide.

Well, here’s something for your relive-each-day enjoyment: two martial arts short films with the same concept. View full article »

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A Writer’s Analysis of the Enchanted Series

Filed under: Editing, Reviews, Writing Tips — Leave a comment
January 28, 2015

As I said in my review of Shanna Swendson’s Enchanted series, I wound up with a lot more to say that was really appropriate for a review. Like many of my posts, it’s a long one, clocking in at over three thousand words, but it’s aimed more at writers than all readers. And, I promise: spoiler free! (Well, except for the romance angle.)

So, without further ado, here’s my analysis of this new favorite series.  View full article »

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Enchanted, Inc.: Fresh Air in a Formulaic Genre

Filed under: Reviews — 1 Comment
January 26, 2015
A pretty good description of me trying to read a random selection from the Paranormal Romance shelf.

A pretty good description of me trying to read a random selection from the Paranormal Romance shelf.

Most of the time, when someone refers to “romantic urban fantasy,” my brain starts turning off.

Now, I’m not opposed to chick lit; in fact, I’ve been so far to the other side that when I was a favorite target of schoolyard teasing, the one thing they never managed to get under my skin was that I avidly read Nancy Drew as far back as the fourth grade. I didn’t get why it was weird. I’d already read every Hardy Boys I could get my hands on, after all! But chick lit fantasy seems to mainly be a genre where you have mere variations on a woman swooning over a vampire, werewolf, or . . . well, no, just vampires and werewolves. Yeah. It’s gotten a bit stale out there.

Well, it turns out there’s a seven-book series that, while not exactly new (the first book came out nearly ten years ago), still brings new life to this particular sub-genre. Enchanted, Inc., by Shanna Swendson, kicks off a lighthearted romantic fantasy series staring one Katie Chandler, small-town Texan girl, who discovers that New York is weirder than most New Yorkers ever dream of. It’s smart, funny, enjoyable, and just a little addictive without ever coming close to “guilty pleasure” territory.

In fact, I suspect that many of my own readers would be interested in a romantic fantasy series that is 1) very fun to read, 2) cleverly described, 3) has no sex scenes, and 4) does not feature a vampiric or wolfish love interest. I welcome you all to prove me right.

contentI spent an enjoyable week and a half reading through the entire series, occasionally discussing it with my friend Lori, and generally just enjoying the change of pace from my usual fare. I wound up being a rather enthusiastic fan of the series by the end, and decided it was something to recommend far and wide. If, like me, you normally get your hackles up at the phrase “paranormal romance,” you owe it to yourself to check out this series.

I’ve got more stuff to say about it — this is a writing blog, after all, and there are some things to look at if you’re a writer yourself — but I’ll be splitting it off into a separate post because it ran long. For now, I’m concerned only with the review portion. View full article »

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Agent Carter: Excellent, Despite the Checkboxing

Filed under: Reviews, Writing Tips — 3 Comments
January 24, 2015

I managed to find a little time this weekend to watch the first (and currently only) three episodes of the new show Agent Carter. I’ve been looking forward to this one for three reasons. 1) It stars Hayley Atwell as a gender-flipped James Bond figure. 2) It’s a 1940s period drama, and as both of my parents are WWII-era enthusiasts, I’ve picked up some of that myself. 3) It’s a Cold War spy thriller.

I was not disappointed . . . well, in that regard. All three were basically what I was looking for, with enough extra twists to keep me surprised on all fronts. I didn’t need the Marvel Comics tie-ins to enjoy the show, though they helped with the suspension of disbelief when it came to the occasional anachronistic piece of tech. They even managed to deflect a bit of the Reed Richards is Useless trope by implying that the Stark family tends to have trouble inventing devices that are actually appropriate for civilian use, in a bit of a “go big or go home” vibe. That is, Howard Stark’s inventions don’t ever fail, they just turn out to be unexpectedly strong.

What I was disappointed with, however, was the same thing that is apparently driving male audiences away, though not to the same degree.

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A Light in the Darkness

Filed under: Personal — 1 Comment
December 24, 2014

It’s Christmas.228283_564760040220120_6873465_n

I stay away from politics and religion on this blog. I don’t do that because I don’t have any or don’t want to discuss them; on the contrary, as my conversations and posts on other sites bear out, I do indeed have them, and I do indeed discuss them. In fact, I stand firmly behind my literary hero G. K. Chesterton in this regard, who (when he was instructed he could write about anything other than these two subjects) said “There is nothing else worth writing about.”

Rather, I stay away from discussing them (aside from the occasional review) because I don’t want to argue about them. Not, at least, here on this blog, which I have always intended as a source of information about stories, whether written or being written. These two subjects are divisive, despite being — by definition — unitive at the same time.

But I am going to talk for a moment about “the reason for the season.” Not a Jesus lecture, not some sermon about how getting together with a bunch of strangers to read from a 1,700-year-old book of 1,900-plus-year-old words on a cold day is the most important thing you can do on an arbitrary day of the last month of the equally-arbitrary year. It’s not even something Christian, really — or rather, not exclusively Christian. And that’s fine. We celebrate a lot of holidays without having a direct connection to the origin of those celebrations.

I look around, in fact, and see a lot of people celebrating a holiday that belongs to a religion I profess, yet they themselves don’t profess the same beliefs. Sometimes they differ a lot. Other times, just enough to really notice. And as I look around for a common denominator, asking myself why Christmas matters to so many non-Christians, I find myself settling on two ideas: hope and family.  View full article »

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