Helen Lowe's Blog, page 31

On Supernatural Underground: “What Makes A Hero?”#9 — Calm and Chaos

Ye-es! Finally got there — “What Makes A Hero?” (in Fantasy) #9 has posted on Supernatural Underground and this month’s theme is Calm and Chaos.

Rock on over to check out what it’s all about, but the summary version is whether a cool head or a certain degree of hotspur-to-berserker chaos is a better basis for a fantasy hero. Although there may be a few wrinkles in the mix…

Just click on the link to “read all about it!”

What Makes A Hero #9 — Calm and Chaos

Chaos…

Here’s a snippet:

“…Calm or Cha...

“Having Fun With Epic Fantasy”: A Compleat List — & SU News

Having Fun With Epic Fantasy — Always!

On November 1, I refeatured The Band of Brothers, on the Supernatural Underground. (AKA “SU”)

Lagurtha & her “band of sisters” (Vikings)

It’s one of my first posts in the Having Fun With Epic Fantasy series, which I began on SF Signal and have continued here. (The bulk are done, but I suspect there are a few more posts extant, hence the “continuing” verb tense. )

Because I like to think (ha! ) that it’s a fun series, I’m posting a compleat list of (links ...

About The Characters: Meet The Minor Players In “The Wall Of Night” Series — Meet Miro

USA

The About The Characters post series focuses on the minor characters in The Wall Of Night series, in large part because:

“I think it’s the presence of the smaller characters that “makes” a story, creating texture around the main points of view.”

~ from my Legend Award Finalist’s Interview, 2013

Initially, the series focused exclusively on characters from The Heir of Night, but now I’m continuing on with minor characters from both The Gathering Of The Lost and Daughter of Blood — in alphabeti...

Inside the Writing Life — & Channeling “The Wind In The Willows”

Back on May 9, I channeled my inner Pride and Prejudice and opined that:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged — that the more point-of-view characters and settings a book contains, the bigger, and longer, it will be.”

Open for some serious writing business…

As a child, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame was a favourite read — and one of the more famous quotes from the book is Ratty’s view that:

“… there is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as messing round in boats...

Having Fun With Epic Fantasy, Supernatural Underground, & All That Writing-Life Jazz

Owing to the exigencies of the writing life, I’ve had to defer Instalment #9 of the what Makes A Hero in Fantasy series on Supernatural Underground. Most likely, it’ll post over the weekend – but if not, then very soon thereafter!

What makes a hero?

In the meantime, in order that November 1 not pass unnoticed, I have posted a Having Fun With Epic Fantasy series post as an off-course substitute – and because it’s kind of “heroes” related, I’ve gone with “The Band of Brothers”, which was Instalmen...

It’s Halloween!

It always feels a little odd celebrating Halloween in New Zealand, given the festival’s very close association with the northern hemisphere autumn. Even the nature of contemporary celebration—dressing up in scary costumes, jack o’ lanterns, trick-or-treating—are all activities that make more sense in the gathering dark of autumn nights, rather than the long, light, evenings of the southern hemisphere’s late spring/early summer.

It’s probably not surprising, therefore, that I rely on books to im...

“Giacometti” Revisited

On Monday, when discussing Joanna Preston’s award-winning Tumble, I mentioned how the opening poem, Female, Nude, is ekphrastic, i.e. it was written in response to a work of art. In the case of Female, nude, the artwork was a Man Ray painting, Ingres Violin.

I also mentioned that the poem was Joanna’s contribution to an ekphrastic poems series that I curated in 2013.

So today, while the ekphrastic theme is fresh, I’m refeaturing Giacometti, my own contribution to the same series.

Giacometti was ...

What I’m Reading: “Tumble” by Joanna Preston

Tumble by Joanna Preston is the third and final What I’m Reading post on books that I’ve heralded in previous months.

Tumble (Otago University Press, 2021) is Joanna Preston’s second poetry collection, and won the Ockham NZ Book Awards’ Peter and Mary Biggs Award for Poetry earlier this year.

In terms of disclosure, Joanna and I were in a poetry group together for a number of years. During that time, several of the poems contained in Tumble were shared and workshopped with the group. As noted i...

Gorgeous Words: A Quote by Angela Carter

“October, crisp, misty, golden October, when the light is sweet and heavy.”
.
 ― Angela Carter, 1940-1992

~*~

I love this quote by Angela Carter, which I feel epitomizes the “gorgeous words” tag.

On June 10, 2019, I reviewed Angela Carter’s seminal short fiction collection, The Bloody Tower, and mentioned then that the work:

“ … stands out … for the amazing use of language … [comprising] … the bold and the bawdy, the richly sensual and the outright sexual, and the bloody and savage.”

No surpr...

What I’m Reading: “The One Hundred Years Of Lenni and Margot” by Marianne Cronin

I’ve managed a much shorter time period between Marianne Cronin’s The One Hundred Years Of Lenni and Margot arriving on my TBR table and actually sharing my terribly important thoughts, than I did with last week’s book, The House in the Cerulean Sea.

Only six week this time, rather than three months! Things are looking up.

At the time of the Just Arrived post, I wrote:

“…this book is a 2022 winner of the Alex Award, given by YALSA (the Young Adult Library Services Association, I believe) in th...