Leigh Bardugo's Blog, page 617
December 13, 2013
Jean Paul Gaultier Couture 2007 | Details
Jean Paul Gaultier Couture 2007 | Details
bryankonietzko:
faitherinhicks:
HAHA! They announced it,...
HAHA! They announced it, finally! I was incredibly fortunate to be asked to draw a short Avatar: The Last Airbender comic (10 pages) for Dark Horse’s Free Comic Book Day offerings! Being a giant ATLA nerd, I was BEYOND thrilled to contribute to that world in a small way. The story is written by one of my favourite comic people, Gene Yang, and will be available in May on Free Comic Book Day.
Above is the final cover, coloured by Cris Peter, who also coloured The Adventures of Superhero Girl, along with pencils, inks and thumbnails for the process junkies. I was drawing the cover before the story was nailed down, so I was told to draw “something exciting with Sokka & Suki, something action-y.” haha, okay.
So happy I go to do this! *_*
We’re all big fans of Faith’s work and very excited to work her for a short spell before she vanishes into the Nameless City.
liznorris24:
poeticterrorism:
Sevan Biçakçi, for all your tiny...
http://fashiondailymag.com/art-in-the...
Sevan Biçakçi, for all your tiny city in a magic ring needs. Also: frozen birds, enchanted pomegranates and creatures of the deep.
so cool
annlarimer:
sea-change:
e’rybody’s all like “fandom’s where i found community and understanding...
e’rybody’s all like “fandom’s where i found community and understanding and happiness’
and i’m in the corner like “fandom’s where i found my high blood pressure and an insatiable urge for murder”
Fandom has it all, really.
steinerfrommars:
ruckawriter:
malformalady:
A rapier,...
A rapier, manufactured in the mid-19th century by the technology of the old masters as a gift to one high-ranking person. Such exceptionally flexible rapiers were made in Toledo in the beginning of 17th century. They were sold in gun shops and coiled in a circle to show its flexible properties.
Want.
oh!
The perfect gift for any Slytherin on your list. HINT HINT.
Author Chat (Final Round): ALL THE LIES!
It’s my pleasure to bring you the final round of Author Chat with me, ML Brennan, Teresa Frohock, and Django Wexler. This time, we come clean about the books we pretend we’ve read and how we pitch our own books at cocktail parties. And we will be taking questions! (See below.)
Round 1: Unicorns, Highlanders, and the Characters We Kill (on ML’s site)
Round 2: Worldbuilding and Things We Put in Our Books Just Because They’re Cool (on Django’s site)
Round 3: Cons, Fans, and the Books We Wish We’d Written (on Teresa’s site)
Q: Is there a book you pretend you’ve read, but haven’t? Answers after the break!
Leigh Bardugo: I always nod or smirk as appropriate when Jonathan Franzen’s books are mentioned, but I’ve never read them. The problem is that, at this point, I’ve read enough of his commentary that I’m incapable of giving him a fair read. Am I missing out? Tell me fellow panelists. Unless you haven’t read him, in which case, nod or smirk as appropriate.
ML Brennan: That’s funny, because I lie about reading Jonathan Franzen too! I will also shamelessly front about having read much more Ray Carver and Flannery O’Connor (though I have read a bit) than I actually have. I also will often allow people to get the impression that I’ve read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, though in truth I never made it past Tom Bombadil, despite several attempts.
Here’s a funny story about book faking — a few years ago, I had a literary fiction manuscript and I was trying to find an agent. At one point I was having a phone conversation with an agent who was interested in the book, and she asked me, “So what books do you think have a similar audience to yours?” Now, I had a few actual comps, but they weren’t big sellers. So I said, “Oh, I definitely think Jonathan Franzen’s CORRECTIONS and Jeffrey Eugenides’s MIDDLESEX.” Which were both huge, and NEITHER OF WHICH I HAD READ.
It was a good thing I had a fire extinguisher on hand, because my pants promptly combusted.
(fact: the agent actually responded very positively to that answer)
Django Wexler: *Nods and smirks* Ahem.
For me it mostly goes back to the classics. I have a long rant about how I don’t like James Joyce, but honestly I’ve only ever been able to make it a small part of the way through any of his books. The same applies to Moby Dick, which I was forced to read MOST of and have never been able to like.
In high school, my dirty secret was that I’d never actually read The Lord of the Rings past the middle of The Two Towers, where those stupid ents just go on and on and on. I was an SFF fan, but I preferred Dragonlance and Dune to Tolkien. I finally did sit down and read the trilogy sometime before the movies came out, though.
Leigh: Django, have we had the Dragonlance discussion? Because Raistlin.
ML: I loved Dragonlance! Raistlin was cool, but I really like that one Knight of the Black Rose. He only popped up here or there, but he was just so cool. Also, Dune is awesome. (until about halfway through, when it’s 50,000 years since the original, and poor Duncan Idaho has been cloned so many times that he basically has a bar code imprinted on his ass)
Leigh: But what an ass.
ML: An ass so spectacular it was re-cloned for 50,000 years, bred into the Atreides family, and then *inbred* to. That, dear friends, is an ass for the ages.
Leigh: Is this the right time to say I actually loved Moby Dick? But I did muddle around with The Hobbit.
Teresa Frohock: GROUP HUG! I, too, have sinned. Especially with Franzen. I had an instructor in college who had us read Walker Percy and I compare Franzen to him a lot. I can only take so much upper-middle-class-white-male-angst in one lifetime, so I peeked at the Franzen’s prose and read reviews.
Ditto The Lord of the Rings, and for the record, I have yet to read the third book. Whenever I feel the need to immerse myself in Viggo Mortense—, er, Tolkien, I just re-watch the third movie. While I haven’t been particularly happy with what Jackson did with The Hobbit, I think he nailed the spirit and the beauty of Viggo Mortense—, er, The Return of the King.
And to add one new one to the mix, I never made it all the way through Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. I’ve read Moby Dick! But I cannot get through Foundation! Something about Asimov’s prose induces a coma in me. Every time that I’ve attempted to read it, I’ve had to go and wash my brain out with Dune.
Leigh: I made it through all of Foundation even though Asimov kept pulling the same trick again and again. I was like Charlie Brown with the football.
Q: How do you pitch your book to strangers?
Leigh: It depends on the stranger. I’ve done enough events now that I my panel pitch is pretty set. But if I’m at a party and someone asks what my book is about, I usually mumble something like, “It’s a fantasy series set in a world inspired by Tsarist Russia. You know—kingdom on the bring of collapse, girl with powers, adventure, romance, a guy gets cut in half.” Then we can move on to the spinach dip.
When I present at a school and the kids aren’t familiar with the book, I’ll run down some of the ways I’ve seen bloggers and librarians describe the series online. My favorite: Anastasia meets Harry Potter meets Avatar: The Last Air Bender. Runner up: Harry Potter if Durmstrang was cool. The strangest: Twilight if Edward was a Volturi. There are no vampires in my books, but that lets me put funny pictures of Robert Pattinson in the Power Point.
I’ll admit that I’m occasionally shameless about foisting my book on people. I was once flying back from New York and a flight attendant was reading Mockingjay.
Me: “Ugh, I loved that book! You know what was also great? Shadow and Bone.”
Her: “Oh! I haven’t heard of that. Who wrote it?”
Me: “I can’t remember. But it was soooo good.”
Always be closing, people. Always be closing.
ML: True story, Leigh picked this question because she knew it would terrorize me. It is terrorizing me, too. I can already feel the anxiety-sweat starting. PLEASEDON’TMAKEMEPITCHMYBOOK! *sob*
It’s not that I don’t like my book — I really do, and if I’m having a conversation about it, I can really hit all the things that I did that I think are pretty cool — rethinking of classic monster mythos to fit natural world and species population balance, looking at the whole delayed adulthood phenomena, family drama, non-Western creatures like the kitsune, and that kind of thing.
But most of the time I say, “Well, it’s about this vampire—-” and the person’s eyes glaze over and they say, “Oh, like Twilight.”
And I’m all, “No! Nothing like Twilight!”
Them: “Really? You should’ve made it like Twilight. That sold a lot of books. Hey, you’re writing about vampires, so you must really love Twilight, right?”
Oh my god, I think I’m actually starting to have a traumatic pitching flashback. Let’s move on to Django.
Django: This is something I’ve had to do SO MANY TIMES that I’ve developed some reasonably pat responses. My favorite is that The Thousand Names is either George R. R. Martin with guns, or Bernard Cornwall with magic, depending on which direction you come to it from. (Though I always feel like a jerk compared myself to famous, talented people!)
The problem is that if people ask me to drill down a little, I just can’t. Summarizing the plot was hard enough for a synopsis, doing it in conversation is terrifying! So I tend to babble something about military fantasy, and muskets and cannon, until they start looking at me funny and edge away.
Teresa: This kind of question used to terrify me, but I’ve gotten better about reading people’s responses so when I’m talking to someone, I can sort of temper my answer. In print, it’s a little harder, but it goes something like this:
Miserere is about a man who had to make a choice between his duty to his family and the woman he loved. He chose wrong. Everyone lives in a world that is like Eden gone rancid, a place called Woerld, where demons are real and the angels are far away. But the story, the real story, is about a man who returns to the woman he loves and frees her from the demon he unleashed on her soul.
It’s about adventure, love, and war. Ilona Andrews compared it to Ladyhawk, and I’ll use that comparison too, because I adored Ladyhawk and it’s an easy reference for most people.
Felicia Day recommended it to C.S. Friedman and Sarah Monette fans, and I’ll go with that too just to give people an idea of the darker overtones in the story.
If they’re hooked enough at this point to ask questions, then I’ll go into a little more detail. I think the more you do this kind of thing, the easier it gets.
Or not.
I’m still conflicted when people ask about my books, but I am gaining experience with practice.
Got questions for any of us? Hit is up on twitter with the hashtag #authorservice and we’ll pick our favorites to answer.
@TeresaFrohock
@DjangoWexler@MLBrennan
@LBardugo
odinsbitch:
disa:
Mythology Meme || (2/10) Women of the Norse...
disa:
Mythology Meme || (2/10) Women of the Norse Pantheon
Companion of the Tree,
You tend the beauty and health of the Worlds.
Yours is inviolate grace.
Yours the envy of every Power. (x)
Relevant to the book I’m supposed to turn in today.
Relevant to… things. You’ll seeee…
taiadiregis:
YA Meme | 3/5 Protagonists → Alina Starkov [The...
YA Meme | 3/5 Protagonists → Alina Starkov [The Grisha Trilogy by Leigh Bardugo]
"For the living and the dead, she would make herself a reckoning. She would rise."
