Michal Wojcik's Blog, page 7

Hindenburg, again

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Well this feels familiar.

I never formally announced that I’d signed a contract with Book Smugglers Publishing to release my serial novella collection Zeppelins are what Dreams are Made of. It was set for publication in 2019.

Unfortunately, the Book Smugglers are scaling back operations and will no longer be publishing novellas.

All rights have reverted back to me.

This is, of course, the same collection I sold to Eggplant Literary Productions back in 2014 shortly before that press shut down....

All systems read

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Martha Wells has a talent for crafting a perfect first paragraph.

I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It has been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible fa...

Three paintings from October

The other thing I’ve been up to this month, in order:

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All of these are abandoned paintings or sketches – two from over a year ago – that I finally went back to and finished.

All you need is art

Some points of interest from the past month: up this time are a novel, a webcomic, a cartoon.

All you need is…to take a break from video games

[image error]I got Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s All You Need is Kill with the intention of writing a full review, but after breezing through this it just didn’t stir much in my brain. There little more to it than the core premise: a soldier in a future war gets the ability to loop back in time and is reborn to the same morning whenever he dies, eventually using what he lea...

Turning thirty

I spent my thirtieth birthday today with the worst cold I’ve had in recent memory, so not much to report there. It’s shaping up to be a beautiful autumn in the Yukon at least – sunny days and beautiful fall colours.

I was at Edmonton Expo last weekend. It was my first time going to a comic book convention; I attended some panels and saw two of the Doctors, but spent most of the time just wandering around looking at costumes and the artwork on display at the tables. I highly recommend going to...

Wizards and zeppelins: Or, the two reasons you should read a book

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Martha Wells wrote something called The Fall of Ile-Rien and it’s my big obsession now. The Wizard Hunters, The Ships of Air, The Gate of Gods – remember those titles. I check in on r/fantasy on Reddit pretty regularly and it’s choked with discussions about the same fantasy series that are all by guys with beards and are all unfinished and now I’m wondering why they’re not talking about this, which is a complete trilogy with a satisfying ending and is pretty much perfect.

I mean this has wiz...

Treachery, sweet treachery

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What to say about The Traitor Baru Cormorant? Just before publication in 2015, it seemed like a concentrated effort to torpedo the book occurred over several prominent SFF review sites and blogs; then shortly after publication came all the counter-arguments and effusive praise, and then it abruptly dropped off my RSS feed. Now it’s three years on with its sequel set for publication in October, and I’ve finally read it.

Seth Dickinson creates a secondary world custom-built for postcolonial th...

The Scrapheap

I’ve been trying to release at least one blog post a month, but that’s proven an elusive goal in July. Two things conspired against me:

I’m building a cabin this summer, which takes up a lot of free time. We’ve had a genuine heat wave this past month in the Yukon, which means I just haven’t been online all that much while I enjoy the outdoors.

So here’s a painting instead that captures my current mood:

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Fantasy heroes, fantastic violence

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On his blog Morphosis, Adam Roberts wrote about fantasy literature’s preoccupation with physical violence. His article covers a lot of ground, but I’m extrapolating on two small parts of it:

How some fantasy (increasingly more of it) portrays killing others without compunction or emotional repercussions as heroic. How authors use the shock of physical and sexual violence as a shortcut to make the imagined world become relevant to the real one. The common reaction of “things just got real” t...

Snippets for May

Yet another jumble of notions for the month.

Comics

I’ve been burning my way through past episodes of The TradeWaiters, a podcast where a group of Canadian web comic artists get together to comic books. The hosts really get into the more technical aspects of draftsmanship, paneling, page and character design, colouring, and lettering, which have all helped deepen my appreciation for the mechanics of visual storytelling. I just don’t linger on the art when I’m reading comics, something I alway...