Lissa Dobbs's Blog: Shadow Walkers of Grevared, page 24

Meet Ethan Grimley III

Name: Ethan Grimley III

Ethan Grimley III

Age: 12 winters

Appearance: strawberry blonde hair, green eyes

Family: Ethan is the son of Gregory and Eva Grimley. He had an older sister, but she died when he was little.

Hometown: Land’s End, Moirena

Current Home: Ymla, Corleon

Favorite Subject: Combat

Friends: Kayne Soulton, Faylen Icebreeze, Electa Norris

Favorite Teacher: Damion Simmons

God/dess: Gaia

Pantheon: Greek

Weapon: Harpe

Weapon’s Features: The Harpe of Gaia gives Ethan strength and accuracy beyond his skill. It also glows and can provide light.

Favorite Activities: Ethan loves hanging out with his friends. He enjoys practicing his combat skills and playing kickball.

Favorite Foods: Ethan loves fist meals – meat, cheese, and veggies between two slices of bread. He also enjoys griddle cakes, candy, his mother’s bread and pastries, and warm soup on a cold day.

Fears: Ethan is afraid of not measuring up to others’ expectations of him. This causes him to charge into situations without thinking about dangers and consequences.

Greatest Desire: Ethan wishes more than anything to be the greatest Shadow Walker that ever lived. He wants to fight monsters and other creatures, and he wants to travel to all the lands of Grevared.

 

 Read more about Ethan and his adventures at http://www.lissadobbs.com

Share your blog! Help Each Other Out – Team Tangible — Tangible Triumph

LETS ALL HELP EACH OTHER First of all If you re-blog this post you help me, I help you and you help your readers, so everyone wins.. There are thousands of good blogs out there and think of all of that we are missing. Source: Share your blog!

via Share your blog! Help Each Other Out – Team Tangible — Tangible Triumph

Fickle Mind

Well, I was going to move all this to my website blog, but I think I’d like to keep that one for author spotlights, book reviews and releases, and maybe book contest giveaways and such. Now that my feces are consolidated, maybe I can get the post I’ve been working on for this one done and up.

If there are any authors who would like to be featured, just let me know.

Best wishes!

Lissa Dobbs

The Shadow Walkers of Grevared

New Blog Site

I’ve been moving stuff to my new blog location on my website as well as working on new posts. Come visit me there!

 

http://www.lissadobbs.com

 

Best wishes!

Shall We Play a Game?

It’s time for more questions! Be sure to answer before 10/20/2016 for your chance to win a set of ‘Ware the Dragon. Grab the dragon’s jewels before he grabs you!

In Sherri S. Tepper’s The End of the Game, what kind of animal is a fustigar?

Which classic character fell down a rabbit hole?

How was Narnia accessed before the wardrobe?

Smart Wasn’t Always Cool

I’ve seen some advertisements lately for a set of dolls that comes with experiments. Being bored one day, I looked them up, and their goal is to encourage girls to use their brains and show their aptitude for the sciences. This is really cool to me, especially coming from an education background where there is more and more encouragement for girls to pursue science. This is awesome!

For those of us who grew up in the eighties, though, being smart wasn’t cool. Sure, there were gifted programs, and many of us participated in them. But this came with a price, a heavy one. Even the teachers didn’t support these programs as they took us out of class one day a week. I even had a math teacher once who told me that if I was smart enough to miss class, I was smart enough to figure it out myself. Not cool, Ms. R*******! (And I still can’t bisect an angle.)

The same can be said for the rise of female interest in things like comic books, superheroes, and gaming. I love the stuff! Always have. But I came to love it in a time when girls weren’t supposed to. While other girls my age were talking about make up and which boy they liked, I was more concerned with whether or not my D & D character was going to survive her next mission and if I’d finally be able to use the Ring of Dispel I’d gained two quests ago. I was labeled weird. Period.

Nothing changed as I grew older. I was still weird. Most of my friends were guys because it was okay for them to game, and if I talked about comic books, they understood what I was saying. The same wasn’t true for the girls I had to be around. Needless to say, I spent a lot of lunches alone, and I spent a lot of time reading and creating worlds, and – okay, yeah, this is weird – reading the encyclopedia for fun.

But here’s the kicker – in the end, it made me stronger. While those other girls weren’t happy if they didn’t have a boyfriend, and while they were waiting on Mr. Cute to call for a date that Friday night, I was living. I was visiting Midkemia and travelling in a time machine. I was drawing maps and running guilds – everything from stonemasons to magicians. I was climbing through underground tunnels to find a way into the castle, and I was creating the spell that would transport me to another world. Writing papers was a no-brainer because I read so much I knew a good bit about almost everything, and, dammit, I could build a radio and make a Commodore 64 dance.

And now?

I’m still doing it. Most of it anyway. I got lost in computer programming when they took away my ‘go to’s and ‘if then’s.

I still stand alone because those same girls who didn’t get it back in the eighties still don’t get it, but now it doesn’t bother me. I buy my home décor at the Hobby Lobby man cave, and I spend my evenings creating a world to explore. This place is populated by everything from humans, to fairies, to angels, to demons, and I don’t have the time to be lonely, and I’m never bored. I may not game anymore, but I’m still concerned about whether or not the character is going to survive the quest. (Let’s face it, even if we’re writing the stories, we don’t always know.)

So, smart may now be the new cool and it may be okay for girls to game in the present time. All this is awesome! But there are those of us who were that way before it was cool, those who spent our childhoods being ridiculed by our teachers and our peers, and we’ve turned out to be strong and independent people who don’t need to be cool to be confident.

Best wishes!

Lissa Dobbs

http://www.lissadobbs.com

Giveaway!

Hello All!

The Chronicles of Ethan Grimley III: Revenge of Cronus is set to release on October 28, 2016. In this book, Ethan and his friends play a game. Visit my Facebook page and answer game questions to be entered to win one of five sets. The more questions you answer, the more chances to win. The drawing will be held October 20, 2016.

Best wishes!

Lissa Dobbs

Small Steps Will Still Get You There

The dreams that we mentioned last week, the ones that ‘someday’ never quite comes for, are achievable if we take one small step toward them each day. Perhaps, for buying the house, we forgo the new sofa that would look much better in the living room and put the money in a special account so it isn’t spent. For the book we want to write, maybe we write up the bios on a couple of characters a day, or maybe we jot down a paragraph or two at lunch. And that trip we so desperately want? Maybe instead of hanging out with the guys every Friday night, we cut it back to two per month and stick the extra cash in a trip jar. Before long, we have what we dreamed of. Does it take sacrifice? Yep. Does it take patience? You bet. But the little steps we take, day by day, will still get us there in the end.

 

Best wishes!

Lissa Dobbs

http://www.lissadobbs.com

 

The Quality of Books

The quality of books.

 

One of my favorite authors, I won’t say which one, released a new book recently, and, of course, I had to get it. I have to say, though, that I was disappointed, not in the storyline, but in the writing itself. It was almost childish and nowhere near what I’ve come to expect.

 

I did a post a while back on the current mindset that books should be short, simple, and to the point. New writers are encouraged not to create complex plots with several characters, and they’re advised to keep their books quick to read. Personally, I think this mentality undermines the purpose behind reading, but what do I know?

Reading this book by this best-selling author got me thinking again about quality. If those who are best sellers and have editors and whatnot can toss together something that seems like editing, if it occurred at all, was only an after thought, what hope is there for the rest of us? I mean, I know my books aren’t best sellers. Heck, I doubt more than twenty people have read any of them, but I know that I try. I write, rewrite, revise, edit, edit again, get someone else to edit, and edit again. Then I usually start all over three or four times before I finally decide that maybe, just maybe, the story’s presentable. And then I’m likely to second guess myself to the point where I re-upload the file a gazillion times after making changes (which sends my email into spasms from where I get notified that the changes have been published).

With all this effort involved with very little return on the time (I know, that’s part of writing, and I do it because I love it), seeing those who enjoy best selling status, who have thousands or millions of fans, and who sell tons of books just toss out something a middle schooler could write better makes me wonder if we’ve fallen so far as readers that we don’t want or expect quality and effort. Have we dulled our imaginations to the point that falling into a good book and getting to know its world is impossible? Have we so much embraced the concept that no one has to put effort into anything to be successful that we no longer care about quality? I don’t know the answer to this, but I know that, while my books may not be perfect, the absolute best of my ability was put into them. And that’s all I can do.

Best wishes!

http://www.lissadobbs.com

‘Ware the Dragon

In the next Ethan Grimley book, The Chronicles of Ethan Grimley III: Revenge of Cronus, Ethan and his friends have some time to kill. They play a game that is still in the naming process, but these are the pieces in real life. I still have some details to work out on some of the rules, but, so far, it’s fun to play.

Best wishes!

Lissa Dobbs

http://www.lissadobbs.com