Tim Craire's Blog, page 2

Reviving main cover

Main cover for my book Reviving, on Royal Road. Palm trees are always in style.

Alternate book cover, one more

Reviving alternate cover, another

Another one . . .

Reviving alternate cover

I’m publishing Reviving on Royal Road. An alternate cover:

The Bludgeoning of the Suitor

Elizabeth Mallorey is deeply in love with her betrothed, but he is unfortunately . . . bludgeoned. A fourteen-verse poem, with twenty-four illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne, a.k.a. Phiz, who illustrated many novels of Charles Dickens (although all the illustrations here are from other works).Link to Amazon Kindle listing: Elizabeth and the young man in better days:

Could Elizabeth’s father be implicated?

Fletch called it, 35 years ago

Where my friends are

(It struck me how unprecedented in human history it is to have friends with whom I communicate only via LinkedIn; but then it further struck me that in reality this is not unprecedented at all)

One friend lives near me, in a fine hall nearer the road. He and I — before the pestilence — would meet to play hnefatafl and other board games. He survives yet. We continue to play by correspondence, although it is harder to send turns back and forth in this way than it was to meet and drink beer and have the board between us.

Other friends, I speak with only when I am at my workplace. We are all scribes and lawyers in service of our chancellor, and as we compose our writings we speak and joke with one another. Of course the banter subsides when the chancellor herself is present, rather than attending the king.

For the friends who studied with me at my cathedral school, long ago — The School of the Right Blessed Forlornness of Saint Anthony the Hermit — again I maintain contact with them only through correspondence, primarily scrolls sent to their villages by the donkey paths.

I have two friends nearby whom I would meet during tournaments of our village football team, during which we would certainly imbibe substantial quantities of beer and voice our encouragement of our local lads, but alas — again due to the pestilence — we have not so gathered in some time. Both of them seem to disdain the donkey path correspondence option and I seldom hear from them.

Finally, just this morning I received a long letter from an old friend, who now lives — if you can believe this — across the great ocean, where she teaches in a university. I read this letter aloud to my son, and it was as if he was able to see her, because in reality this was a Zoom call with one of the people I’m in touch with pretty much only through LinkedIn, sorry to break through the fourth wall there.

Rotoscoped orcs vs. Tusken Raiders

You know what post of mine in the last few years gets a lot of hits? Rotoscoped orcs, from Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 Lord of the Rings movie. Here are more of them:

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It occurs to me — they resemble Tusken Raiders:

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Could one have inspired the other? Star Wars was filmed starting in March 1976, and released in May 1977. Bakshi’s LOTR was released in November 1978, and was made during the two years prior. I can’t find when the rotoscoping art was done, for LOTR, but it could have easily been after May 1977, so in other words after the LOTR artists had seen the Tusken Raiders onscreen. Bakshi and George Lucas did know each other; Mark Hamill did work for Bakshi around the time of the filming of Star Wars, and Anthony Daniels performed the voice of Legolas.

And why were we talking about rotoscoped orcs anyway? Because they remind me of the dunters in my novel High Iron! You can check it out via the link over in the right margin!

Phosphine on Venus

I’m not saying — I’m just saying . . .

Here’s some discussion: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/09/possible-sign-of-life-found-on-venus-phosphine-gas/

Just stay in bed, don’t trouble yourself . . .

I was struck by how often, in Victorian novels, men visit women who are in bed to chat them up, and perhaps take a nap next to them; I was going to comment on how this seems somewhat creepy:

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-but then I realized that this happens all the time to men, too:

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Apparently this was just a thing back then; or a thing in novels, at any rate. All these illustrations are by Hablot Knight Browne, a.k.a. Phiz.