Michal Wojcik's Blog, page 11

Award Nomination

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Those Who Make Us: Canadian Creature, Myth, and Monster Stories has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award for best edited anthology. I’m rather ecstatic.

Industrial Fantasies East and West

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Olivier Armstrong from Fullmetal Alechemist: Because I do fan art now, which brings me that much closer to becoming a monster.

I finished the last volume of Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist yesterday. It’s a justly famous and popular comic with endearing characters and some really exceptional pacing—I’d compare the way the panels flow to Jeff Smith’s Bone—but what really struck me was the effortless way Arakawa blended fantasy elements into an early twentieth century industrial setting. W...

Norwegian Wood

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I wouldn’t have picked up Norwegian Wood if it wasn’t by Haruki Murakami. The back cover promises semi-autobiographical recollections of college days. Those narratives makes up a respectable (but not overwhelming) chunk of contemporary literature in western countries and largely don’t fall into my wheelhouse, though at least coming out of a different culture adds another layer of interest on top of the more typical explorations of early-adult ennui.

The novel is still twice removed from the...

Becoming Deviant

I’ve blown the dust off my old DeviantArt account. If you want to follow my drawing and painting, that will be the best place to do it. I’ll still share some paintings and drawings on this blog, but I plan to upload most of my new output on DeviantArt. It’s funny to think that One Last Sketch was finally living up to its title again, but I think it’s more appropriate to keep the literary focus going here.

I’ve actually lived up to my vow from nearly a year ago to draw something every day, and...

Leaving the Perilous Realm

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I’m three-quarters of the way through Thomas Wharton’s The Shadow of Malabron and I’m just not feeling it–not the characters, not the world, not the story. Passages go by where I realize my inattentiveness several pages later, reading but not registering, and then having to flip back to figure out why Will is doing this thing or why the wolf is over there. Not a good sign, and one that chafes because Wharton’s glacially-paced Icefields kept me far more engaged. Much more happens in Shadow, y...

The Perilous Sea of Story

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There are a lot of books on writing fiction, so many that I wonder just who’s buying them all. They’re either disproportionate to the people who actually sit down and write, or publishers can always count on writers (published and unpublished and self-published) to buy these books to the degree that releasing one is always a safe investment. Or else I’m missing something about the marketplace completely.

Bafflement comes out of bias; I haven’t found many of these books very helpful for my ow...

A Street at Nightfall

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A quick perspective exercise in ink and watercolour using MyPaint 1.0.

If you’re tired of my bumbling attempts at digital painting, I recommend taking a look at Carciphona, a webcomic with some gorgeous artwork. It’s one of those stories the creator seems to have had in mind since she was a teenager and has refined over years and years; her passion for that story and characters really shines through.

I’ve had a lazy winter so far. Drawing and painting a lot more than I used to, only writing...

Screaming for Vengeance

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In retrospect, this one was inevitable. Created with MyPaint 1.0.

Pulpy Thoughts

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Back in 2013 I wrote about new digital distribution models being ideal for a return of old-style pulp literature, because those “new” models looked a lot like experiments from the early days of mass print. The small presses I hoped would specialize pulp have largely failed to materialize, though in a large part that “lack” links directly to my own narrow definition of “pulp.” The media filling the void left by pulp magazines and dime novels doesn’t often look much like the stuff I seek out f...

The Adult Appeal in Young Adult

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I’ve been trying to get into Avatar: The Last Airbender on the urgings of Alasdair Czyrnyj, with the eventual goal of being able to intelligibly about The Legend of Korra. Avatar has all the hallmarks of a great show custom-made to appeal to my interests: dynamic animation, strong characters, solid storytelling and a “land of adventure” setting with distinct, inter-meshing cultures. Yet I find myself continually pulled away from the show, and despite watching the first episode back in Decemb...