Aaron Lee Yeager's Blog: Woot, page 2

That was my reaction when I saw that you could buy this:T...

That was my reaction when I saw that you could buy this:
THAT'S RIGHT BABY!  Madoka Magica soul Gems!

I freakin' love that show, and my daughter is cosplaying as Mami (the yellow one) for Anime Banzai, so...yeah I'm totally gonna' have to order one.  :)



In other news, I Got my panel schedule for Comic Con in two weeks.  Thursday Sept. 24th at 3:00pm I'll be on the Anime in the 1990's panel.  (Oh, yeah!)

Friday Sept. 25th at 1:00pm I'll be on the Writing Action:  Fisticuffs, Guns, & Things that Blow Up Real Good.

I'm gonna' watch some of my all-time favorite action films to brush up for that one.  (Hint, Indiana Jones is on the list)

Friday Sept. 25th at 2:00pm I'll be on a panel I pitched, so I'm really excited about it:  It's Dangerous to go alone: Why we love the Legend of Zelda!

I've got a stuffy and academic presentation planned, with graphical data and double-blind clinical studies...nah, I'm just kidding.  I'm gonna' gush about Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess.  (I'll have to refrain from complaining about Wind Waker's art style.  I don't want to be burned in effigy like the Magic panel last year.  ;P )

And, of course, the big one,  I'll be hosting Disney/Pixar Jeopardy Live on Saturday Sept. 26th at 1:00pm.  We'll have prizes, music, a big 'ol game board.  It's gonna' be AWESOME!

When I Was A Boy...

Got something really special for you guys today.  I don't know how this survived, but somehow it did.  
This is a recording of a song my sisters and I made back when we were little kids.  I think I was like eight at the time.  It's a cute little Halloween song, my dad providing musical accompaniment, and it's beyond adorable.  So, if you want to hear what I sounded like before becoming a grumpy old fat guy, have a listen.  :)

Anime Banzai

I am so so glad that there is an anime convention in Utah, and the fact that it's like five minutes from my house just makes it that much cooler.  
Last year I went for the first time and taught some writing classes, and I thought, "how could I have missed this all these years?"  
My favorite part last year was the video game room, where they had an entire arcade of new and classic cabinets setup to run  without quarters.  My daughter and I had so much fun in there, and I learned that I cannot do Dance Dance Revolution like I used to.  Whoo! I thought I was going to die!  I hope they do that again this year.
So, this year I decided to do it right.  I'll be teaching a bunch of panels, running an event or two, and generally geeking about about my favorite thing.
To learn more about the event you can do so by clicking on the image below:

I Am Going To Salt Lake Comic Con!

Okay, you guys are going to love this.  I will be attending the Salt Lake City Comic Con in September.
In addition to the writing panels I usually do, this year at Comic Con is going to be especially cool.  I've put together a pair of game shows.  That's right, game shows, complete with prizes, lovely ladies, a game board, sound effects, and everything.  It's going to be amazing, and I am soo looking forward to it.  I love conventions, I really do, it's when I get to be around my people.  I enjoy conventions so much this year I wanted to give something back.  :)
I don't have the exact schedule yet, but the plan is to do Anime Jeopardy on Thursday morning, and Disney Jeopardy on Saturday night, so make plans to come by.  The lovely ladies will be throwing out prizes into the audience, and we may even have a visit from a dinosaur.  We'll see, shhh, it's a secret!

You can buy tickets for the Comic Con by clicking HERE .

Howdy everyone.I am having soooo much fun working on the ...

Howdy everyone.

I am having soooo much fun working on the TV show pilot to pitch next month.  It's been a long time since I wrote a screenplay, but I was surprised how quickly I fell back into the flow of it.  It's like riding a bike, I guess, just five minutes and I was back in the groove.

One of the things that is fun about writing for live action is that there are a bunch of things you don't have to worry about because the actors will bring it to their performance.  For example, you don't really have to give your characters much gender nuance.  You can basically write them genderless and just focus on making them really good characters, because the actor or actress will bring all that subtle nuance to the screen for you.  You wouldn't think that makes a big difference, but it's actually quite liberating as a writer.  It lets you take bigger risks and go down routes you normally might not take.  It's actually a lot of fun, already I have a couple of characters who are becoming my favorites.

So, the next couple of months are going to be beyond crazy.  I've got two conventions to prep for, the Jeopardy game shows at comic con and all the contestant searches that come with that.  I've got a TV show pilot to pitch in LA, and on top of all that, I'm still working on the final Wysteria book.

Whoo.  Busy times, busy times.  :)

Oh, what a good week for writing this has been. :)I...

Oh, what a good week for writing this has been.  :)

I'm up to page 120 on the final Wysteria book, and I am so proud of how well it's turning out.  What will be the final fate of Athel, Alder, Privet, and the world of Aetria?  You'll know soon enough.

Also working on a special side product.  A TV show pilot to be pitched to Netflix in September.  Can't talk about much at the moment, but it's super exciting.

Let's see, what else?  Oh yeah, gonna host a pair of game shows at Comic Con in Sept.  Disney Jeopardy, and Anime Jeopardy.  Expect the big announcement for the contestant search soon.  :)

So, yeah.  Super busy, and that's a good thing.  :)

Howdy Yall! (Does Yall have one "L" or two?)

Howdy Everyone!

I'm super excited to announce that the Isle of Wysteria website has been revamped, all bright and new and shiny.

It contains a TON of bonus material. Hidden links, extra scenes, bloopers, cast interviews. Seriously go hang out for a while, it's a tons of fun.

Now my next job is to figure out how to use my new author blog. I swear, I'm really getting old. new skills are just daunting, and I keep staring at the screen and thinking that it might be easier to just take a nap.

Earth Day

Today is Earth Day, which is a day I have come to associate with privileged wealthy trust-fund babies attending expensive universities telling me that I need to feel guilty about something. Or, if you live in California, where I grew up, it's called Wednesday.

Now, I love a good guilt trip as much as the next chap, which by that I mean I purse my lips, raise my steely eyebrow, and play a little mental game where I try to create as many biting retorts as possible in under a minute. This year, however, I am going to try and take a different angle. I am going to choose to believe that this is a chance to be grateful for all we have, and that I can get behind, because gratitude is one of the most beautiful of all human emotions. I love nature, and when you love something, I think it is vital to love it for what it is, not romanticize it and pretend it is something that it is not. For example, I love Sword Art Online, even though it is one of the most flawed anime shows I have ever seen. So many bad storytelling choices, so many mistakes, but it brought me to tears on four separate occasions as I watched it, and I love it all the same. Not because I ignore the flaws, but because I embrace and accept them. I don't pretend it is perfect, I love it as an imperfect thing.

And Earth, as grateful as I am for it, is just a great ball of rock and water. It has no emotions, it has no agenda, it is not alive. It is, however, covered with living things, and what is the purpose of those living things? Well, I can tell you right now, if you think nature is like a Disney movie, where birds and squirrels land on your shoulder and sing with you and help you clean your house, then you are going to end up like that guy who went out to live amid the bears and got eaten by the bears. You see, there is a difference between loving nature and understanding nature, and I think us city people tend to base way too many of our opinions about nature based on how we imagine it to be rather than what it is.

All life on this planet exists for a single purpose, to propagate its own kind though any means necessary. Life, all life, is brutal, aggressive, and tenacious. Trees unfurl their branches wide to hog the available sunlight and choke out the competitors below, animals hunt and kill anything and everything. The oceans aren't like Finding Nemo, they are a never ending sea of carnage, fish murdering and eating other fish. Nature is a fight for survival, and the only law is kill or be killed. Basically nature is a big cauldron into which all life forms are tossed, to see which ones will thrive, to see which ones will climb to the top of a pile of corpses for the right to continue existing. In that sense, humans are a natural byproduct of that natural system.

I am always perplexed by people who fall into the nature=good humans=bad way of thinking, as if humans were the first species to come along and bonk something on the head to earn a quick meal. You see it in movies all the time. Hollywood loves to play that card, in spite of the fact that most of them have never even been camping. No, humans are cruel because that is exactly what mother nature bred us to be. Humans encroach on other species' territory, we destroy competitors, we alter the landscape to make it more suitable for ourselves, not because we are some aberration, but because that is exactly what ALL life aspires to do. We are simply better at it then other species are, which is why we are here.

But, we are more than that, too. I remember seeing a clip from the movie Lucy, where a cityscape is shown, and the narrator clinically asks, "life was given to us, and what have we done with it?" Now, I'm sure the intent was for us in the audience to go, "yeah, humans, what a plague," as if Agent Smith from the Matrix really had anything meaningful to say when he compared humans to a virus. The idea that other creatures form a balance and harmony with the surrounding environment is utter nonsense. All life is designed to take advantage of as much territory and food as possible, and it is only external factors that prevent them from exploding as far and wide as possible. If you could, for example, provide flies with an infinite food source, they would reproduce exponentially, and within a very short time, there would be a mass of nothing but fly bodies that extended out past the orbit of Jupiter.

Do you know what I saw when I looked out on that cityscape in that clip? I saw thousands of families. I saw fathers who tenderly love their children, I saw mothers who vigilantly care for their young ones. I saw traditions of kindness and love being passed on from the older generation to the younger generation. I saw neighbors looking out for each other, I saw communities of people working hard to find their dreams.

And that is the point I want to come to. Yes, nature has bred humans to be destructive and cruel, but we are more than just that. We are also kind and thoughtful, we are grateful and gentle. We sacrifice ourselves and our time for the benefit of those we love. We have within us a spark of nobility, a capacity for compassion and goodness, the potential to become so much more than what we are. We are children of God, and I am grateful for that.

Quick Question

I've had a few people inquire as to why the third Wysteria book took so long to finish. The more astute among you will note that the original plan was to have it finished for Christmas last year.

Well, the answer is simple: I stopped in the middle to write another book entirely. ;P

At Comic Con last September I had the pleasure of meeting with some of the higher-ups from Shadow Mountain, which is the imprint that does all the fantasy for Deseret Book, and I was able to pitch a concept for them that I had been developing specifically for them (which I really had been).

Anyway, they loved the idea, and asked me to write up and submit the first three chapters, and they loved those and asked me to write up the whole thing, which I did in record time for me.

I'm waiting to hear back from them any time now, but without jinxing it I think it looks really really hopeful. :)

Anyway, once I finished that book I got back to working on The Monolith Crumbles, which brings us to now. :)

What's really amazing to me is to realize that in the last 12 months, I have written three full length novels. That's crazy awesome if you think about it, especially considering that I still had my full time job as a stay-at-home parent. I feel so blessed to have such a wonderful family who support me as I go after my dreams. :)

Woo Hoo!

*Pulls back the curtains*

*Wheels out enormous cake*

*Cake explodes, releasing fireworks, unicorns, robots, pixies, and chocolate*

Hey, everyone, got some very exciting news. The third Wysteria book is complete, and has been sent off to the proofreader for a final bit of polish.

WHOOOOOOO!

What a rush this one was to write. I don't think I've ever gotten so deeply emotional during a book before. There were a couple weeks there where my eyes were actually sore from crying while I wrote some of the stuff.

No spoilers ahead, so don't worry, just super excited at the finished product. It's some of my best work, and I am SOOOO pleased at how well it all turned out. You're going to see Athel grow so much as a character, leading her nation during a time of war and dealing with the very real problems that come with that.
I am also pleased to announce that the same cover artist who made the art for the first and second book is back on board for this one. I'll give you guys a sneak peak here in the next few weeks.

So, our current timeline looks like this:
Proofreading and artwork should be done in about a month, and the conversion service normally takes about 4 weeks, so we're looking at a tentative release date for the first week in June, right in time for my birthday. :)