Kat Zantow's Blog, page 7

Lions and Tigers and Zombies, oh My!

Not too long ago I read an Amanda Hocking book, and found myself suitably entertained.  Check out the blog post title. Yeah. It was kind of like that.
In case you missed it, I reviewed it over at The Canary Review.


In Hollowland by Amanda Hocking, hardcore teenager chic Remy travels with a Canadian, a rock-star, and a fashionista teenybopper through a post-apocalyptic, zombie-ravaged landscape on a quest to find the military quarantine holding her brother. Romantic subplots are plentiful, but for a post-apocalyptic tale of horror and adventure, there aren't enough zombies to fertilize a garden. The true monsters the companions encounter are their fellow man (in the form of polygamous cults, armies of psychopaths, and military law). But while these subplots are tense and suspenseful, it was a downer that the slow-moving zombies never made me fear for the character's lives or health. In part, this was because they had a lion in their car.
Wait, what? Is that a typo?
Nope. It's a lion. Lioness, to be precise.

Read the full article

On fairy tales

Godmother told Cindy to show up in a pumpkin.
Or did she get the schedule mixed up?Recently I've been working on re-imagining a fairytale. I hear this genre/trend/mental exercise is hot lately, though sometimes the weakest point of a good story. (Unfortunately I haven't kept up with any of the new fairytale television cutesies. I saw the first episode of Grim, and my brain threw up.)
To be fair, anything that calls itself Grim has a lot to live up to. I grew up listening to the real Grimm tales, and they were really damn grim. As I recall, Cinderella's step mother ended up dancing on red hot iron shoes. It was great. I think it formed me into the cheery person I am today.
But I don't know that I am completely behind the Brothers Grimm interpretations either. The young girls still seemed too innocent. 
The way I see it, there's no reason to lock a girl up in an impenetrable tower to keep her isolated. Not unless she's done something to require this maximum security dragon-guarded prison. And signs do point to criminal behavior. Clearly, Goldilocks could be convicted of breaking and entering. Snow White seemed to have some slave driving mining operation going on. And Rapunzel? She carries a garrote with her everywhere. Don't get me started on Cinderella. 
The powers that be put princesses in towers not as a cruelty, but to try to stem the tide of destruction. But then the much put-upon girls lean their pretty little heads on their hands and sighout the windows until a prince rides up. One look and the prince can't keep his sword in his pants.
Just one look, and that maximum security prison crumbles. He sweeps her off her feet so her pretty little shoes won't get dragon's blood on them. The poor prince is smitten. He wants to keep her safe. But can he keep his land safe from her? 

An historic lack of updates?

Dear Internet,

You know, a lack of updates is a good thing. It means I'm doing something more interesting with my life than staring at my computer.

Oh wait, all I've been doing is staring at my computer.

No, don't get excited. I don't mean fiction. I've been proofreading (despite the raging success of Henchman, I got tired of being a starving artist) the letters of the founding fathers. It's, like, historical. Too bad I'm not writing historical fiction. I'm getting a good sense of early America. All anyone cared about back then was who got a Brevet. (Pretty much an honor/pay bump/temporary booster rank).

And believe you me that some noteworthy presidents have really awful cursive. Also, I have found, however, that six commas to a sentence is not uncommon.

What I'm trying to tell you is that I'll get more free time in about a month. I'll get time to photo/scan in pictures, to enter more stories in contests, and release a sequel, at the very least.

honorably and respectfully,
Yr. obed. sert.

ZZ.

On Art and Writing

Painting and writing feel like they should go together well, but they really don't.

I really enjoy both. But they come from different impulses. The writing plays off my obsessive daydreaming, while the art comes from my love of shutting off my brain. Sometimes when I paint it's as refreshing as sleeping. (And that is an important consideration, with my current level of exhaustion.)

Art and writing take my free time and tear it into pieces between them in a catastrophic tug of war. And then my free time just ends up ripped in half with shreds missing, and either art nor writing is happy with the situation.

It's tough. I will need to begin much more aggressive time scheduling in the near future.

Accountability is also important. For the coming year I'm going to post a new piece of art a day to my blog. They don't necessarily have to be painted that day, but they often will be.

I also downloaded WriteOrDie in an effort to build accountability for fiction. I think it might work better for short stories than anything else. Maybe blog posts, too. (I do also like http://writtenkitten.net/ to get me through tough articles.)

Accountability, speed, and quantity will be my goals for 2012. Right now there is too much thinking, and not enough doing. Maybe I'll start wearing warpaint to face the blank piece of paper.

Last ditch holiday shopping made easier and free

December is a rough month. There's the icy cold on sunny days, there's the dreary rain on warm days, and everything melts into a slushy mush of christmas shopping.


Commercialism kicks into high gear, and it's stressful even at the best of times. And in this economy? I know I have negative dollars. Plus the first year out of college? How do I even track down my friends' physical addresses.


Let's sum up the problem:
how to give gifts with zero dollarsmany friends have become wandering hobos with laptopswhat do i give people i don't even like much?So I hit upon a solution to all three problems: Give an ebook.
So here's my Christmas gift to the blog: until Christmas I am offering Shadowing at Smashwords for the freeness of zero dollars with code  QQ54E for zero dollars. The nice thing about Smashwords is that you can download a book in any format, from PDF to ebup to mobi. Just make sure you enter in the code so you don't accidentally pay me money or something. (That would kill the Christmas spirit. And I don't want anyone unhappy during the holidays. Now the rest of the time...)Perhaps you don't realize why this free of freeness is a magical development. Allow me to explain: 
The current sociocultural model, despite the war on Christmas, still dictates that you give gifts to a bunch of people, half of whom you dislike. Also, you may or may not dislike sword and sorcery cliche subverting shenanigans.  Here's how this works: 
MS Paint rendition of a punnet square to decide
whether this (or any) ebook will make an excellent gift
this Christmas season.
Did I mention this was done in MS Paint?
Using my Netbook's trackpad? Yeah. Recipe for success.

So it's a win-win choice as a gift. If you liked the book and like your friends, go for it. If you hated it AND hate your friends, you can inflict the book upon them. 

Eats, shoots, and leaves

True grit: cowboys have it embedded in the seams of their faces.The cowboys had it right. They were free agents with nothing more to weigh them down than a gun and a (possibly stolen) horse. They weren't burdened with consumerist culture and the accumulations of years of acquisitive tendencies. None of this schizoid postmodern existence. Just the sun on their faces, potentially fatal dehydration, bullets every which way, and the quiet of nature.
Ignoring the deconstructive readings that problematize the lone gunman fantasy with criticisms of the marginalized and mistreated Native Americans, gender politics, general race relations, and the fallout of shootouts and casual mayhem -- the cowboys had it right.

It would be great to go west, where there are no rules. To discover the great untamed land. Walk out of the society that would rather have them working in a store for an honest living. It's an escapist fantasy for people droning in jobs they hate. I can relate. It's all Man vs. Society. Man eats, shoots, and leaves. 
But generations swing like pendulums. Once the tv channels were full of cowboys. Now they're full of cop shows, which tend towards the other side of law and order. But as long as cynicism and darkness are in (see the popularity of the super successful Batman reboot, the popularity of Dexter) the outsiders can do their thing, just in different clothes. Cowboys can't come back in a big way; too many cheesy shows and movies have come and gone.
After all, the wild west is gone. But unexplored territory isn't. 
Now it's time for the wild web?

Slice of Life

Not only is the Slice of Life the boat Dexter uses to dump bodies, but it's also a lame narrative and theatrical technique. It aims to be naturalistic, (anti-plot and in favor of almost randomized events from the characters' life).

Slice of my evening:
Read some of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. Toasted almonds over a wood stove. Pet the cat. Tried to find a tutorial on how to make a Photoshop tutorial, but it must've been too meta. Hunted stink bugs with a flashlight and drowned them. Ate delicious tilapia soup.  Looked at some interesting illustration style doodles. Bought the domain katzantow.com for a dollar (don't bother checking it out until I say so because it is good and empty). Still excited over getting 3rd place in that fantasy short story contest (I'll post up links to the story whenever they get the pdf version up). Then I felt guilty over being behind schedule and sat down to write an article for the Canary Review. And then to an hour of working on the Shadowing sequel...

Trees!

Fun fact: I like painting trees. Both of these were commissioned for the same friend who wants a collection of Yggdrasil. The first was supposed to be a tree of life. It may or may not look like a tree of death.
Whomever invented celtic knots must be a masochist.The next time a tree was commissioned for her, it was requested with the wolf and ivy for secret symbolic reasons that you would never guess in a million years.

More tree!Right now I want to paint trees all the time. It's autumn, and the leaves are almost all gone, so I miss the foliage. At the moment is a beautiful sliver of time for autumn yellows in late sunlight. And our Japanese Maple is a brilliant blood red for just a few days. I doubt I can paint the thing fast enough before it vanishes, but it may be time for another painting. 

Tiger Giveaway: We have a winner!

Drumroll...

And the winner to this much anticipated art print & ebook giveaway results (drawn from The Hat (free program) and Rafflecopter (powered by Random) is...

Beep. Boop. Beep. Boop...

Naiya!

Congratulations to Naiya, whose walls will soon have a certain cache of rage and fury embodied in this lovely print, and whose eReader/laptop/phone will soon have a copy of Shadowing, the first book of Moonblind.

He Biltmore, and more, and more...

Technically, only 1% were protesting...Flashback to last week: I failed to update anything because I was on vacation, exploring North and South Carolina. In the North we saw a monument to the One Percent of old. In the South, the streets were overrun with protesters.

Now, I'm going to go out on a limb and postulate that only members of the 99% are reading this blog. If you are in the top 1% and you're reading my blog for fun, you should probably consider becoming a patron of the arts. Artists with grants turn out work much faster.

But even if you are in the top 1%, you've got nothing on the old Robber barons. Namely Vanderbilt. This, The Biltmore, was his house:

Notice that the ants are actually people.So we toured the Biltmore (located near Asheville, aka Beertown USA 2-3 years in a row). This tour was no small thing. In fact, the house is the largest private residence in the US. It's big. At 2,000,000 square feet, containing roughly 500 rooms, of which 43 are bathrooms (only one was visible on the tour). The banquet hall really should count as a multiple rooms, because it's seven stories high and could swallow certain presidential homes with room to spare.

ConservatoryThis is the .00001%. Didn't see any protesters, though. But the house is so fancy that its influence spreads out into the places it touches in town. Even the neighboring McDonald's has vaulted ceilings and a grand piano. It was rumored to be Vanderbilt's favorite eating establishment. All in all it was enjoyable, and an insane display of wealth from another age. My biggest regret is that I didn't approach visiting the house with plans for a day of live-action clue.

They didn't have a waterfall, so they built one.But further into the city, Asheville became more fun with its own unique flavor. It was full of hippies, headshops, beer, chocolate, and art galleries. The art galleries were fun, cocolate cookies delicious, and the Expresso Stout even lived up to the storeperson's claims of being "only the best thing ever." In one of the art places, I came very close to buying a tiny tophat, but I realized I need to make sure my fashion choices do not significantly overlap with Helena Bonham Carter.



Now back in the cold winter of Virginia, and frozen hands. Hobo gloves are going to be a fashion staple this month for NaNoWriMo.


But their boat house was pretty much just a waterfront gazebo.
Poor Vanderbilt, didn't even have the money to put in windows!