Michael Offutt's Blog, page 155

Women of Foxwick by Cherie Reich

This week, I read Women of Foxwick by Cherie Reich. It's a short story fantasy collection featuring five women who reside in Cherie's magical world.

The blurb gives you a little information about each story so here it is:

Follow five women from Foxwick in this five-story fantasy collection.

A bard will lose her head, if she doesn't find the correct notes. A dragon seer must decide whether to betray her dragons or her fair kingdom. An assassin will journey to the Shadowlands to destroy Death. Twins are selected for the Mage Game, and a princess will journey to Valdale in search of the sorceress who can save Foxwick.

Once I started reading this book, I was hooked and read the whole thing in just a couple of hours.
My favorites in this collection were 1) the dragon seer story, 2) the lady death story, and 3) the twins in the mage game story. But all of them are superb. Those three though are the stuff from which movies are made.
The thing I liked about the dragon seer story was the dragon. The girl in it can communicate with it telepathically, and the dragon had a great personality. Plus you get to see two different kingdoms, get involved in some politics, and see what happens when you throw dragon eggs on the floor. Who doesn't love dragons? They're the backbone of fantasy.In the assassin story, I just liked the idea that someone could be so good at killing things that she could kill Death itself and inherit the office of the Grim Reaper. That was just really amazing.
And I liked the game aspect in the twins story because you got to see how two girls could get a dragon scale, a phoenix feather, and a unicorn hair. The solutions were very clever.

You do get recurring characters. What happens in one story can be reflected in the next. This is the common thread that unites this collection into a tour de force of Cherie's fantasy world, giving you a different location and different perspective with each new tale.
Finally, I want to add that this collection of fantasy tales could belong in anyone's collection. Young or old, kid to adult...anyone and everyone can enjoy them together or just by yourself in an airport terminal quietly reading. I give Cherie's fantasy collection five stars out of five. If I still played Dungeons & Dragons, I would want to have a game based in Foxwick. It was that real to me.
If you would like to buy Women of Foxwick for your very own, you can download it for the Kindle HERE for only $2.99. That's peanuts people! And I'm serious, these stories are worth it.
You can keep up with Cherie Reich at her website HERE.
And you can mark Women of Foxwick "To Read" on Goodreads HERE.

Starry Night

Below you will find a digital painting created by artist Alex Ruiz in an attempt to reinterpret Vincent Van Gogh's work "The Starry Night". I think it's stunning. CLICK TO MAKE BIGGER.
In reading about Van Gogh, I learned that he had a form of epilepsy that could descend upon him at random, cause him to black out, and when he woke...he would have no recollection of what occurred during the black out. People who have studied his life believe that he lived every day with the spectre of death hovering over him and that he stared at things and sought to capture them because he felt, it could be the last time he would ever see them.
In the book I was reading, Van Gogh would never have actually stood under the stars as Alex Ruiz would suggest in this painting. Rather, Van Gogh was committed to an asylum by his brother and wasn't allowed to go out at night. Instead, he would have stared out from his window at the night sky and then waited until morning before he could go to his workshop and paint what he saw.

In any event, the original, and this one by Ruiz, possess a certain magic to them.

Wouldn't you agree?

City of Light and Stone by Laura Diamond

This weekend I read "City of Light and Stone" by Laura Diamond. It's a short story featured in the dark fantasy anthology: Day of Demons (cover pictured at right). In short, Day of Demons is a collection of stories featuring the conflict of demons and humans over the course of a day.

The main character of Hector in Laura's story is a tormented soul that belongs to Satan. He is in his situation because rejection drove him to murder the woman he lusted after, and in the story, he's offered redemption if he can fulfill Satan's bounty of one pure soul at a place called Point Zero before the sun sets.

I think that as writers, we can all slip into the skin and understand Hector's hatred of rejection. Sure, our souls do not belong to the devil, but allegorically-speaking, why couldn't they? And who is to say that the ultimate homicidal impulse for a writer isn't the act of "selling out".

What wouldn't some of you do to obtain an agent, a Big Six contract, and a huge book deal? How is this not in many ways just a caveat to truth? I think that at the end of the day, we are all enslaved by our own personal demons. And if we ever want to stand out from the masses, we may have to do things that go against what we really want and do so before the sun sets...before it's too late.

If you like dark fantasy, I encourage you to pick up a copy of Day of Demons and read Laura's story. As far as short stories go, I'd give it five stars out of five. It's a quick read with a powerful moral...if you deal with demons, don't waffle on what you say and be punctual! To do otherwise will put you at risk of eternal damnation.

Visit Laura Diamond's blog located HERE.

Purchase Day of Demons from Amazon located HERE.

Mark Day of Demons "To Read" on Goodreads located HERE.

HBO's The Newsroom makes me thankful for NPR

Jane Fonda as News Director Leona LansingI'm really liking Aaron Sorkin's new drama on HBO. You can read my first post on this located HERE.


This week's episode of "The Newsroom" brought up a topic that I had not previously considered...that it's important for there to be one hour devoted to news per day that doesn't have to compete for the same advertising dollar as the audience of The Jersey Shore.

Will McAvoy gives an opening "Editorial Comment" in which he plays an apologetic senator's recorded tape and uses this to launch into his own apology, in which he cites his show's failure in the past to report responsible news. In short, ratings instead of content has been driving the national discussion.

I have to say, Will McAvoy has got an excellent point.

Then enters Jane Fonda. Now, Fonda is pretty much a legendary star. And she said basically nothing during the majority of this episode. But I was expecting her to say something. When she did, it was in answer to the aftermath of the congressional elections of 2010 in which many TEA party candidates were elected. In the episode, Bachmann was compared to McCarthy. I can definitely see the resemblance. But Fonda in the role of her character...not so much. I think the intent of bringing that up though is for the viewer to decide because we are the "fly on the wall."

All of that aside, an interesting dilemma was posed by Fonda's character who is the head of the Newsroom and essentially calls all the shots. She said that she has regular "business" in front of "this congress" and stated that McAvoy needed to tone it down and stop making them look stupid (even if they are stupid) because that would make her job very difficult. I don't like this at all, and it had me thinking...how much of our news comes down to us from people who may be afraid to ask the tough questions?

How much of the political and economic discussion in this country is driven by fund raising?
I guess I am more thankful now than ever that we have National Public Radio. I support them when I can, but I will definitely try to do so more often. So my question to you is this. Do you listen to NPR? Where do you get your news for the issues that are important to you? And do you support NPR during their fundraising campaigns?

Helena Soister and The Compass Master

At 523 pages and some 100 chapters, The Compass Master is not a book for the people who gobble up Twilight fan-fiction like it was cotton candy. Fortunately, I'm not one of those people.

So what is The Compass Master? In short, it's a book that chronicles the discovery of extraordinary Biblical artifacts: the alleged final epistle by Paul written by the apostle himself, another by the granddaughter of a female apostle who debunks the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, and one by the monk who hid both of these.

The story is told through differing points-of-view (third person omniscient). The main one is Layla Daltry, a sexy, athletic, and incredibly smart heroine who (when teamed with Zach--an equally sexy male counterpart) is able to unravel a mystery that the Catholic church has kept secret for centuries. Another character is a nun who is in her own right a heroine with church secrets to protect. Finally, there are the bad guys, twin brother assassins in service to an American who want to stop Layla Daltry from fulfilling her quest which could create a firestorm among the academic and religious authorities of the Christian world.

So in analyzing this book, it may be best to start with the question "Who are the Compass Masters?" They were men who called their drawing compasses "diviners" because they believed in sacred mysteries which they could divine through mathematics. In other words, they attempted to explain mysteries through secret codes that they then built into actual structures.

I tend to think that the title "The Compass Master" is a nod to Zach who is essentially one of these "Compass Masters" if not actually a part of that society because he figures so much out by using math. In fact, there is throughout this novel, a theme of numbers and geometric shapes. As Helena points out in this book, it was Plato who taught that by studying geometry a person purifies the eye of the soul. "To them and other medieval intellectuals, numbers were a manifestation of divine order, a human fulfillment of the words God uttered in Genesis: 'I have made everything with number, measure, and weight."

The Compass Master is one of the most cerebral reads that I have taken on since Murukami's 1Q84. I found myself pausing often to reflect upon what the author was pointing out about our knowledge of the Book of Revelation and how it was essentially put into The Bible because the Catholic Church desired control. "Fill them with fear and tell them that your religion alone holds the key to their salvation...Have them focus on the next world while religious and political leaders control wealth and power in this one." Conspiracy theories abound in this tale. But then, you really can't have secret societies and not go into conspiracy theories. That's where all the fun is.

I give The Compass Master five stars out of five. I have read the Dan Brown novels (DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons), and I think this book could easily sit on the shelf with those other books. The amount of research that went into this novel boggles my mind. I tip my hat to Helena for weaving such an intricate pattern of mystery, thrilling history, and a courageous examination into questions not often demanded from The Bible. I hope that she's planning another Layla Daltry book so I can see how the fame she garners from the discoveries in The Compass Master affect her life. I'd also like to see if she and Zach will ever get back together. They seem meant for each other. It is sad to note that the abbey in the book is closing because they no longer have enough young nuns to keep it open. It's kind of a poignant "sign of the times" that as the world becomes more educated, the sun begins to set on the Catholic Church.

If you love historical thrillers, I strongly recommend you invest in this book.

Helena blogs at Becoming Layla located HERE.

You can purchase her book on Amazon for $3.50 on Kindle located HERE.

You can be supportive and mark her book "To Read" on Goodreads HERE.

Pretend

Sometimes I think that the world of "pretend" is so far away. Life becomes too complicated too fast. Maybe we should all just take a lesson from A Bug's Life and return to the world of "Pretend" often. I hear it's a source of great stories. :) Too much reality is a real downer anyway.
I shall be taking next week off. See you the second week of July and have a great Independence Day!

With regard to genre, are you an elitist snob?

If this dragon rode in a spaceship,
is it still fantasy? What if the
spaceship was headed to Eden?
is it still fantasy even though now
it is infused with spirituality?According to sci-fi super magazine io9, San Diego Comic Con 2012 is set to be overwhelmed with fantasy picks this year, chief among them are legions of George R.R. Martin fans followed closely by Hobbit buzz which is filling in the gap for Star Trek 2 (which is absent this go around).

Now, I started to look at the titles of all the things that are going to be there, and I saw the following list:

List of Fantasy at Comic-Con 2012:

MOVIES:
- The Hobbit
- Breaking Dawn
- ParaNorman
- Evil Dead Remake (not confirmed)
- Maleficent (not confirmed)
- Oz: The Great and Powerful (not confirmed)
- R.I.P.D. (not confirmed)
- 47 Ronin (not confirmed)

TELEVISION:
- The Legend of Korra
- Game Of Thrones
- True Blood
- Once Upon A Time
- Vampire Diaries
- Adventure Time
- Dreamwork's Dragons: Riders of Berk (the TV show version of How to Train Your Dragon)
- Teen Wolf
- 666 Park Avenue
- Supernatural
- Once Upon A Time
- Beauty And The Beast
- Grimm
- Merlin
- Being Human
- American Horror Story (not confirmed)

It gave me pause to think...what exactly is fantasy? Is science-fiction just another flavor of fantasy in which there is pseudo-scientific techno babble instead of pseudo-Latin sounding spellcasting? Can "Twilight" be called a fantasy? What about the "Evil Dead" remake? What about the fairy tale shows like "Once Upon a Time" and "Grimm"? Maleficent is a dragon but it's also a repackaging of the "Sleeping Beauty" fairy tale.
"Merlin"...yes that's a fantasy. So is "Game of Thrones" and "The Hobbit". But none of these others seem to fit the type of fantasy that I have in my mind. The kind that has a medieval setting with knights, wizards, and dragons yet tries to hold to the authenticity of a world and is not structured from anything written by the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson.
I struggle with genre labels. I labeled my own book as science-fiction because it has techno babble galore, and some spaceships, and super cities, and some neat gadgets. There is no magic in it though. But you could kind of call what Jordan does as "magic". However, I use scientific mumbo jumbo to explain why it's happening so that makes it more science-fiction, right? The protag is 17 so that counts as young adult right? But not really, if you see what happens to him in the story. When we talk fantasy do we mean this?... ...BUT NOT THIS?One elitist snob on Amazon that absolutely hated my book said, "Now I guess if the reader likes a lot of spirituallity mixed up with their science fiction, it may be just fine. But to me it just sounded ridiculous and pulled it down..." I wanted to respond to this person and ask, "What exactly do you think science-fiction is? What exactly do you think fantasy is?" I'm sure the response would have been "Science fiction should only happen where the main characters are a man and a woman and in space (and barring that please god don't let them get together and get busy because it's blasphemy I tell ya...)"
Humor aside...I think that there is a strange kind of nonsensical, non-logic that flows through the minds of some of the elitists of science-fiction and/or fantasy. It's similar to the kind of nonsensical, non-logic that occupies the minds of those who oppose gay marriage. Maybe the writing and plots have gotten so weird and crazy as authors and writers seek to distinguish themselves with an original idea, that boundaries in fiction essentially no longer exist with the lone exception being that of the obsessive compulsive elitist with boxes clearly labeled for organization and consumption of stories.
In other words, I think that "Twilight" and "Being Human" are now as much science-fiction and fantasy as "Ender's Game", "Dune", and "Foundation". "Harry Potter" IS science-fiction. "Battlestar Galactica" IS a fantasy. They are two sides of the exact same coin.
As for me, I'm going to keep churning out stories for the time being that infuse spirituality with scientific techno babble that no one understands anyway. I'm going to do it until I grow tired of it and then move onto something else.
My question to you is, would you agree that paranormal, cyberpunk, medieval fantasy, science-fiction, steampunk, horror, dark fantasy, and countless other similar genres are now all blended and stuck on the same coin?
With regard to genre, are you an elitist snob?
How do you categorize what you write?

Start spreadin the news cause Laura Eno is top of the heap with WRAITH

Pssst...I have an announcement :).
Today is the worldwide launch of Laura Eno's Wraith. You may see it everywhere. But if you somehow live under a rock and have missed it, here's the amazing blurb!
Someone wants them dead. Another wants them captured. No one can be trusted. Secrets, lies, and revelations await Raven and Mikael as their search for Mikael's missing friend leads them to Wraith, a mysterious moon owned by Jeffrey Hamilton, cybernetics genius and Ben's creator. How much of the Oracle's technology does Hamilton possess and where did it come from?

Raven's nightmares from the past threaten her sanity, while Mikael's guilt slowly consumes him. Ben's in more danger than anyone as they race to find the answers to uncertain questions—questions which could lead to death for them all.
Available for only .99!
AmazonUS
AmazonUK
Nook
Smashwords
As a bonus you can download the first book, Raven, for free today only! Click here and enter the code PU65D to download your copy in multiple formats, including PDF.
Visit Laura Eno at any of the below places to get to know her better!

Website - Blog - Facebook - Twitter - Goodreads
That is all. Have a great Wednesday.

Will McAvoy stole the words right out of my mouth

On Sunday night following this week's episode of "True Blood", HBO launched "The Newsroom" with a one-hour premiere episode. You can watch this pilot for free without subscription on the HBO website.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the man behind this endeavor, Aaron Sorkin, he is the one that gave us the frank and sometimes disturbing movie "The Social Network" and the presidential drama "West Wing".
The opening title montage of the Newsroom is a throwback to nostalgia, looking back on an era of idealistic news broadcasters like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.

The show opens with a tirade from Jeff Daniels who is in quite a departure from the role he played in "Dumb and Dumber". I have to say that I like this new role for Mr. Daniels. Now the afore-mentioned tirade I spoke of is sparked when Jeff in his role as Will McAvoy (in front of a room of journalism students) is asked to answer the question, "why would you consider America to be the greatest country on Earth?"

Here is the transcript of the answer in the form of a tirade. I have to say, that Jeff Daniels stole the words right out of my mouth, because I have been thinking these very same thoughts for some time now.

"And you—sorority girl—yeah—just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there are some things you should know, and one of them is that there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies. None of this is the fault of a 20-year-old college student, but you, nonetheless, are without a doubt, a member of the WORST-period-GENERATION-period-EVER-period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about?! Yosemite?!!!"

So why would I say I've been feeling this for some time? Well, despite my love for popcorn television, I'm also dismayed by the fact that some of my friends don't know who the vice-president of the United States is. I'm dismayed that Christian fundamentalist textbooks tout the Loch Ness monster as proof of Creationism and that these kids will become adults and believe this hogwash. You can find that article HERE if you don't believe me. I'm dismayed that there is a universal decline in literacy in this country and that we've gone from a country that used to support poor people to one that now attacks them. I'm dismayed at the partisan divide which has grown so wide, it is difficult for me to see how it will ever be fixed. I'm dismayed that we have the best colleges in the world, and Americans can no longer afford to attend them.



I'm looking forward to many more scenes like the opening of Aaron Sorkin's new drama on HBO because he has a proven track record of filming intelligently written dialog that will cause you to reflect upon the narrative piping in over your television every night. He also knows how to pick out and create memorable characters. This cerebral "popcorn" television may do nothing to ease any of the troubles that plague the United States (economy aside), but I can tell Will McAvoy is being written by someone who feels just like me.


Below you will find an embedded video of Neil DeGrasse Tyson expressing perfectly how I feel regarding the state of education within the United States right now. If you have time, please watch.
So...did you watch the Newsroom? And are you as frustrated as I at what is going on in our country right now? I look forward to reading your comments.

My list of the awesome things I saw in Brave

Here is my list of the awesome things I saw in Brave:

1) Merida's flaming red hair. You just have to see it.2) At last, a female protagonist in the Pixar line of movies. I guess "Elastigirl" kinda/sorta counts, but Merida is better.3) I saw animated haggis!4) I saw a witch who used a cauldron as an answering machine!5) The queen's hair with the two pony tails looked really cool.6) And the lesson that the most important thing between a parent and a child may be communication. In other words, both sides need to really just stop and listen and then comprehend.7) Bagpipes. I love bagpipes. More please.8) Pixar animation. It gives me goosepimples. Cutest baby bears ever! "A Lady does not leave her WEAPONS on the table!" Remember that ladies!Have a great Monday!