Renee Carter Hall's Blog, page 7

Signal boost: Disabled Poet Seeks Healthy Macbook

Awesome person who also happens to be an awesome poet had something lousy happen to her, and here’s a chance to help restore balance to the universe by contributing to making something good happen for said awesome person/poet. Best of all, the donation perks are poems custom-written just for you:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/disabled-poet-seeks-healthy-macbook/x/1631391?c=home

I know that psychologically it’s probably hard to feel like contributing to a funding campaign when you can see that the goal has already been reached. Do keep in mind, though, that in this case, the goal was only half the cost of a new computer, and personally I’d like to see it get a lot closer to the full cost. (Besides, custom poems, people! Textual art that did not exist before in the entire world! How cool is that?)

Which reminds me that I still need to decide on my favorite season… (Whatever it is, it’s definitely not this bizarre hybrid winter/spring/sprinter/wring thing we’ve been stuck in for the past several weeks.)

 

Flashback: Beyond the Mind’s Eye

We put our satellite TV service on hold for the summer (a few too many other bills to pay at the moment), so amidst listening to a lot of NPR and watching DVDs, I’ve also been digging through some of my old VHS tapes for amusement, and recently I had a chance to sit down and watch Beyond the Mind’s Eye for the first time in years.

As far as I know, there were four Mind’s Eye videos produced: The Mind’s Eye, Beyond the Mind’s Eye, The Gate to The Mind’s Eye, and apparently one called Odyssey to the Mind’s Eye that I had completely forgotten about until I found it in our video cabinet (I’m guessing it wasn’t all that good, because I have absolutely no memory of it). Of the three that I watched back in the mid-’90s, Beyond the Mind’s Eye was my favorite, and I also had the Jan Hammer soundtrack on CD, which I’ve still been listening to off and on through the years. (There was also one produced called Virtual Nature, where the clips all featured an animal/nature theme, but since it was mostly stuff I’d already seen and the soundtrack was just okay, I never got that into that one.)

For those who aren’t familiar with the Mind’s Eye concept, it dates to the earlier days of CGI — lots of shiny metallic surfaces and undulating blobs and artist’s mannequins — and each installment is essentially a collection of clips made for commercials or companies or by students or studios showing what they could do. All those little disparate clips were then edited into surreal music video segments, creating kind of an animated video album. There wasn’t any real narrative beyond just sometimes the clips having a similar mood or atmosphere, so it was the music that really tied things all together.

Coming back to this after so many years, now that we’ve had everything from Jurassic Park to Gollum to Avatar and beyond, now that CGI imagery can depict fur and hair and every texture imaginable with incredible realism, I was worried that this was going to feel dated to the point of being laughable. And I didn’t want it to be laughable, because it was something I’d loved, and I hate outgrowing things I love.

In the end, though, I was surprised at how much I really didn’t pay attention to the simplicity of the imagery — or, to be more accurate, the simplicity of it didn’t register as something negative, something lacking. Instead, it looked like a style, like a conscious choice by artists instead of not having the tools to do any better. And all over again, I fell in love with the strangeness of the landscapes, the hypnotizing imagery presented just for a few seconds before something else shows up. Back when these were first released, watching them was cool because it was all brand-new and amazing (look, it’s all done on computers!), and it felt cutting-edge. Now, it’s still cool, but not because it feels like the latest technology — instead, it’s cool because it feels like art.

And I found myself wishing they’d bring back the Mind’s Eyes series, working from that perspective of an album/art project. Yeah, there are tons of CGI short films out there on YouTube and so on, but there’s nothing I’ve seen as a whole that strikes me quite like the Mind’s Eye concept, because more often than not the focus is either on making an animated narrative, or in showing off how realistic something can look.  (And if somebody is doing something similar, point me in that direction!)

If you’ve never seen any of the Mind’s Eye segments, a lot of them (maybe all of them) are on YouTube. Here’s the one that was my all-time favorite back in the day (especially the music), “Seeds of Life” from Beyond the Mind’s Eye:

 

Poem: “Waking”

While fiction is my main medium these days, every so often my muse tosses me a poem. This may actually be the first prose poem I’ve written (unless you count some of my flash fiction pieces, which I really don’t).

Waking

The bird feeder is pulverized — shards of plastic, bent wire. I imagine your weight on it, your claws on the metal oak leaves, your glossy doggish coat, the hump of your shoulders, pressing down hard. I look for tracks, but there are none. You came in the night, in the moonlight of a wavering spring, and in the night you moved on. How many other worlds move through our coffee-and-timecard lives — around, above, beneath? We might think we’re the center of this orbit, and most days we’re allowed to believe it — until the sight of you strolling past the woodpile, as we might drive to the grocery store, a worn-down path. As if this house is at the bottom of the sea while we sleep, shapes darting in the darkness past the windows, great forms looming in the deep.

 

Signal boost: KLINE layered sketchbooks Kickstarter

As those of you who’ve read already know, I’m something of a notebook junkie, so when I saw Neil Gaiman tweet about a sketchbook Kickstarter, I had to check it out.

I’ve been wondering for a little while if some kind of new sketchbook/journal company was going to come along to be a true competitor for Moleskine. Not in the sense of creating a cheaper version (that’s been done pretty well by a couple of companies now), but in the sense of taking a similar idea but improving on it, particularly in terms of using better materials. (I’ve always hated the Moleskine paper in both the regular notebooks and the sketchbooks; it doesn’t seem to truly take anything well, or at least not any media I use.) And there’s also the aspect that, in trying to appeal to the broadest market possible, the Moleskine brand has gotten… well, kind of diluted. While the pop culture geek in me thinks it’s fun for them to have Star Wars and Lego and Hobbit tie-in versions, the creative iconoclast in me (smaller but vocal) can’t help feeling a bit turned off. Call me a notebook snob, but it’s harder to trade on the elite caché of being the notebook of Picasso and Hemingway when you’ve got Darth Vader on the cover. *shrug*

At any rate, when it comes to being the next sketchbook that all the really cool artists are using, I’ve got my money (literally) on KLINE. I’m impressed by the quality of the materials and construction they’re using (look, actual artist-quality paper and not slick beige stuff!), I love that it’s been created by artists for artists, and while I know I’ll probably wind up doing more writing than art in mine, well, there’ll be that watercolor paper in the back just waiting patiently for something to be done with it.

And their Kickstarter’s a chance to be able to someday say that, yeah, I got one of the very first KLINEs. You know, back before they were trendy and you could buy them anywhere. (*arches eyebrow, sips exotic tea*)

There are still a couple days left to contribute and get your own:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/klinenyc/kline-layered-sketchbooks-and-journals

 

Real Dragons Don’t Wear Sweaters – free today only

Just a note that my fantasy/humor/young adult e-novelette Real Dragons Don’t Wear Sweaters is available free for today only, as part of Free Ebook Fridays at World Lit Café.

Get your free copy here!

All Dinkums wants is to be a real dragon, a fierce crimson-scaled firebreather like the ones living in the northern caves. Instead, Dinkums is pink, fuzzy, and cute–until Skye, a teen witch bored by school and ready for a challenge, finds a way to transform him. But Dinkums and Skye are both about to learn that being real is more complicated than they bargained for.

And of course, if you enjoy reading it, reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, Smashwords, or wherever else you like are always very much appreciated.

“The Longest Night of Summer” in Bradbury Quarterly

My flash fiction piece “The Longest Night of Summer” is now online in the Summer 2013 issue of Bradbury Quarterly:

http://raybradbury.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/summer-2013/

(One of these days I want to write something longer involving carousel horses, though right now I have no idea what. So far, I have this piece and the poem “Carousel, Abandoned” from years ago, which appears on the poetry page of my website.)

 

Friday Finds: Dancing tiger, Henry Jones’ Grail diary, and cartoon physics

I’ll be back soon for a regular blog post, but first, a few scattered shiny things from the Internet:

Dancing Tiger by Cindy Budiono

Check out this incredibly detailed replica of Henry Jones’ Grail diary from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (my favorite of the series). He’s also created a ton of other replicas, well worth checking out on the main page.

And finally, I give you the Laws of Physics: Cartoon version, laid out with scientific precision.

Giveaway winners, and off to camp…

Random.org came up with #4 and #3 as the winners, so congrats to Frank S and Erkhyan! I’ve contacted both of you at the emails you used to comment, with the details of claiming your prize.

In other news, Camp NaNoWriMo has begun, and I’m… well, plodding my way through the first few days of it. Motivation to write this particular story has been a little low lately, possibly because I didn’t have time to do as much research as I probably should have, but also I’m just plain tired from all the extra hours we’ve been having to work lately in Dayjobland. 9_9 Right now I’m cheating a bit by working on a more exciting short story idea instead of the planned novella, until I can get some momentum going (and hopefully get back to more regular work hours sometime soon).

Line counts to meet during the day, and word counts to meet in the evenings…

By Sword and Star Free Book Giveaway – One week left!

Just a reminder that there’s still a week left to enter the giveaway for a free electronic copy of my anthropomorphic fantasy novel By Sword and Star. Two winners will be randomly chosen on April 3.

Enter the giveaway at this post.

 

My Unicorn Manifesto

(Okay, it’s really more of a pet peeve that may edge into a moderate rant, but there’s a part of me that has always wanted to write a manifesto, so here it is.)

Saw this post on Peter S. Beagle’s Tumblr yesterday, which references a debate I’ve seen played out on sites with fantasy and anthro art. In short, what do unicorns look like? (Although really, the question is better phrased as what they’re “supposed” to look like.)

This usually starts up because an artist has dared to portray a unicorn as a horse with a horn, or without cloven hooves, or with the ‘wrong’ kind of tail, or this or that or something else, and the viewer has gotten unreasonably ticked off and decided to act superior about how “it can’t be a unicorn if it doesn’t have (whatever),” and this is therefore not a Real Unicorn.

I hate to be the one to have to say this, but…

*drops voice to a whisper*

They’re not real.

At least, not in the way that, say, Sumatran tigers and snapping turtles and monarch butterflies are real. And what that means is, nobody — no, not even Peter S. Beagle — gets to define exclusively what a unicorn is or isn’t. It can look like a white horse with a horn (or a black horse, or whatever equine color variations you want to use). It can look more like a goat, or a deer, or an alien giraffe. It can use some combination of the classical elements described in various texts — or none at all. It can be a creature of purity and innocence, a fierce warrior, or a predatory monster.

And you know what? You can still call it a unicorn.

So to all the creative types reading this, I hereby give myself, and you, permission to write about, draw, paint, sculpt, imagine, and otherwise do creative things with, whatever kinds of unicorns can be dreamed up. I’m tired of the Fantasy Creature Police. If vampires can be everything from charming counts to sparkly pretty-boys to basically-pretty-much-zombies, then other fantasy creatures get the same leeway.

And yes, audience, you get to have preferences as to what you like in your fantasy creatures. I happen to like gryphons (or griffins, whichever; not getting into that) with four lion paws instead of having talons in front, which isn’t typical, but that’s what I personally like, so that’s how I picture them and how I’ve written them (or will write them, if I ever finish that story someday). But I don’t go to the comments section of everybody’s gryphon art and rant about how they’ve somehow gotten it “wrong” just because they’re not matching up to my combination of criteria. So if you’re going to bitch to artists, visual or otherwise, for not doing the cloven hooves, or the lion’s tail, or whatever else, I hope you have a skeleton in your closet — a unicorn skeleton, that is, or preferably a complete preserved specimen — because that’s the only way you’re ever going to be “right.”

[Postscript: I know the typical response to this boils down to "well, if you don't have some guidelines for what it's supposed to be, then you could just draw a dragon or something and call it a unicorn, and then the word unicorn becomes meaningless." Well, yeah, I guess technically it is meaningless, anyway, because it designates something that doesn't exist in the physical world and is therefore open to interpretation. I don't get why unicorns are so much of a target for this. People don't seem to get so bent out of shape about artists or writers reimagining dragons or vampires or zombies or werewolves or ghosts or anything else with no physical proof. (Okay, strike that -- I have seen recent complaining about werewolves being drawn "just" as anthro wolves, so maybe every creature has its devoted band of nitpickers.) For myself, I've read a book with Pegasus portrayed as almost reptilian with bat-like wings, and another where they have vestigial hands as part of their wing structure. Both took a little mental acclimation, but it was interesting. In the end, your only limitation is what your audience is willing to accept and how much they're willing to stretch their preconceptions.]