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Dynamically Awesome(Con)

Filed under: Conventions, News and Updates, Personal — Leave a comment
April 16, 2014

ACDClogoThis Easter weekend happens to fall on the third weekend in April, which means only one thing: it’s time to cosplay as the Easter Bunny at AwesomeCon!

. . . okay, I won’t actually be in a bunny costume. But I will be at AwesomeCon. I was invited back to do another presentation at DC’s only genre convention (sorry, otaku, but Katsucon doesn’t count). I’ll be part of a panel this Friday at 4pm, called “Worldbuilding and Fantasy,” and giving a solo talk on Easter Sunday, “Writing Dynamic Characters,” at 11:15am.

I was at AwesomeCon last year, and it was pretty fun. It wasn’t the biggest convention I’ve ever been to (nor was it the smallest), but between what I observed and my brief conversations with Ben Penrod, the convention organizer, I could tell it wasn’t going to be satisfied with a small footprint.  View full article »

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Arabian Nights

Filed under: Reviews — 1 Comment
April 15, 2014

Next week is the final regular session for my workshop at Christendom College this semester. (There’s one more session, which amounts to a pizza party the day before finals start.) I gave my students a choice of topics for the last two lectures, and they chose “Writing the Opposite Gender” and “Hooking the Reader.” The first was last week, and the second is next week.

Shocking even myself, I started doodling up my lecture notes today, and a familiar phrase went through my head. It’s a line from an old TV movie from 2000 that’s stuck with me as I gradually taught myself to write. “You’re starting your story again,” said the Master Storyteller. “You need to hook your audience again.”

The movie in question is a two-part Hallmark miniseries, Arabian Nights. It’s my second-favorite Hallmark Entertainment TV movie (the top spot going to Leprechauns, which is completely different from the horror movie with a similar title), but I’d only ever seen it once. That’s how strong it was and how much it resonated with me.  View full article »

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Agents Gets New Life From Captain America

Filed under: Reviews, Superhero — 2 Comments
April 14, 2014

If two highly-educated men are able to spend the time from midnight to 2am on a chat program dissecting a TV show, you know one of three things.

  1. It’s one of the best shows ever.
  2. It’s one of the worst shows ever.
  3. It’s a show with so much misused potential that those currently in charge should shut up and let someone else fix it.

Considering the show we were talking about is Agents of SHIELD, it should be obvious we’re talking about Option Three.

WARNING. Spoilers for Captain America: The Winter Soldier and “Turn, Turn, Turn” from here on out. View full article »

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Captain’s Orders

Filed under: Reviews — 1 Comment
April 5, 2014

This is my spoiler-free review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. If you’ve seen the movie, you know why I picked that title. (The packed theater erupted into cheers at that particular Moment of Awesome.)

Captain America 2 sets out to raise the stakes for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s a tall order, and easily screwed up. The movie doesn’t screw it up. It succeeds, and it does so beautifully. View full article »

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Agents of Boredom Picks Up . . . Maybe

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Agents of SHIELD has been very disappointing. My high hopes for the show haven’t crashed so much as just petered out due to boredom. I nearly dropped out of it before Elizabeth said it was getting better, and I caught up on Hulu only to find myself meh’d again.  However, there might be a little hope for the show. (Spoilers follow.) View full article »

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Fooling the Audience

Filed under: Resources, Writing Tips — 6 Comments
April 1, 2014

Normally I ignore April Fools’ Day, but it occurred to me that it would be thematically appropriate to talk about a valuable writing skill: hiding things from your audience.

“Wait, what? Hiding things? That doesn’t sound like a good idea! The whole point of writing is to tell them things!”

Exactly! But you don’t just tell them the end first, do you? You build up to it, with clues that set up the twists, but then hide those clues so that it’s still a surprise to all but the most eagle-eyed.

I feel I should issue a warning, though. Learning these concepts can lead some people to feel that all stories are ruined forever. If you’re just here for the reviews, don’t read any further. Personally, I find it enjoyable to spot the tricks, especially with a skilled author; it doesn’t ruin it any more than knowing how to spot individual brush strokes will ruin a masterful painting. Still, I’ve seen people become disappointed, and so I give you fair notice.  View full article »

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Don’t Dump

Filed under: Resources, Writing Tips — 6 Comments
March 26, 2014

One of the most common mistakes, even with professional storytellers, is to deliver a lot of exposition in a small space, or otherwise give “idiot lectures” where you have one character being a bit more dumb than usual simply so that a second character will have to explain something to him (and therefore to the audience). This is often called infodumping, and it’s often hard to avoid — but the best authors watch out for it and work around it.

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March 25: Ring Destruction Day

Filed under: Just For Fun — 6 Comments
March 25, 2014
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Kind of like remembering a messy divorce, only with more epic battles.

That’s right, Tolkien fans! It’s the anniversary of the day when, mumbleteen thousand years ago, Frodo, Sam, and Gollum entered Mount Doom to pitch the One Ring into the fire below.

“Wait,” some of you are asking, “Why did Tolkien use modern dates in a fantasy world like Middle-earth? I mean, I get that it’s supposed to be our super-duper epic forgotten past, but really.”

Yeah, I get that. But you also have to remember that Tolkien was three things, in this order: a proud Catholic, an expert philologist, and a fascinated medievalist. What does all that have to do with March 25th? I’m glad you asked!

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Book Prices

Filed under: Industry, Publishing — Leave a comment
March 24, 2014

World-famous, multiple-time New York Times bestselling author Larry Correia recently posted a rant. This is nothing new; he rants a lot, though the difference between him and your average Internet Joe is that his rants are educational snark and not simply complaints. (Well, other than stuff like complaining about government bureaucracy, but hey, if my wife were treated that way, I’d be ticked off too.)

This particular rant was about something I talk about a lot too: the pricing of books. You can click here to read what Correia wrote (language warning), but the gist of it was that someone posted a review of one of his novellas without reading it, simply so he could complain about the price. It seems that a 30,000-word novella written by a very big-name author in a moderately big-name IP (Warmachine), with full-color illustrations and accessible to people who know nothing about said IP, is not worth the huge, huge cost of . . . five bucks.

Similarly, there’s a member of a Facebook writing support group I’m in who has said multiple times that he won’t bother reading any ebook priced higher than $3.99, because “That’s how much mine is and I doubt anyone worked any harder than me.”

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A Radiant Read

Filed under: Reviews — 2 Comments
March 20, 2014

Tonight, multiple-time New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson (who has won and been nominated for far too many awards than I care to list so I’ll just provide a link) will be signing books in my area as part of his book tour for Words of Radiance. If you’ve read his books, he needs no introduction. If not, you should really fix that. His Mistborn series is what he’s truly known for, though Elantris is near and dear to me personally due to the way he writes about chronic pain (and the book deserves a dedicated review). He’s also famous for finishing the acclaimed Wheel of Time series after Robert Jordan died. Now he’s come out with the second book of The Stormlight Archive, and it is incredible.

Pictured: a famous author, and a guy in a Schlock Mercenary shirt who now runs a blog called Novel Ninja. This was taken several years ago, on the book tour for The Way of Kings.

Pictured: a famous author, and a guy in a Schlock Mercenary shirt who now runs a blog called Novel Ninja. This was taken several years ago, on the book tour for The Way of Kings.

I am not, however, going to be at the signing. I’ll be running a writing workshop at Christendom College instead. While I’m disappointed that there’s a conflict, and that Sanderson is coming through today rather than some other day, I’m fine with my priorities. I’m doing my part to get more great authors out there, and I consider that more important than getting yet another scrawled book or tantalizing hints about future publications. Still, it made me remember that I haven’t reviewed this book yet, so I thought I’d introduce you all to an epic series.

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