I was quite taken with the first book. I wanted to jump right into the continuation of the story. The first book wrapped up enough that I didn’t feel like I was forced to go and get the next book. That is refreshing and I appreciated it.
This story follows Jane and Kate on their continuing journey.
There was a lot to enjoy about their travels and the things that happen to them along the way. The path of the characters is easily believable and they are real, whole people. I often have a hard time when the protagonist is a young woman/girl. There are a lot of things that just don’t relate for me. This story had none of that. Very well written.
It was also nice to see the variety of life that is not often shown in American westerns. The world building was consistent and didn’t break its own rules.
It’s been almost a decade since I moved off strictly paper and onto an e-reader platform. I’ve been writing about it for just as long – back when the Pretend Blog was a Live Journal page and not my own site (check it out if you’re into old news). I’ve long been considering what I want to have as part of a physical collection of things in my home and what I don’t have a desire to physically handle. There are some things that are inherently tactile, and those that are not. There are some that you’ll want to have a copy of, just to be sure you’ve always got access to that copy of it.
Books, and many other forms of entertainment media fall into this category. I’m going to tie books and movies and television together on this one as electronic media actually makes the same argument for a physical copy of something in each case. The most recent thing that has come up for debate is animation or films. Here in the digital age we (nominally) have access to all the media that has gone before. Remember a show from your childhood? Look it up and check it out. Want to watch an entire ‘season’ of a show without waiting? Binge it on Netflix. Have a tradition of watching something every year? Just flip on the TV and go! Right?
Well ~ that’s what’s gotten everyone’s attention right now. “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” will NOT be shown on network TV this year for the first time since 1966. That’s right – 54 years in a row and not this year. Television has been part of the American household for so many decades at this point that there are generations of people that have watched the same shows as part of their favorite holiday season. It is something they never miss.
They never miss until some massive corporation decides they want you to pay for it again and again rather than allowing the ‘payment’ to be in the form of watching advertising. Apple has decided they’re going to miss it this year. Sure, there’s some Byzantine way to give up some of your personal information and sign up for a “free” version of a service and watch the show on your computer – IF you can get the app to load right, if your internet is strong enough for streaming like that, if you have a device that allows more than one person at a time to watch comfortably, if you really feel like going through all that…
Not so much…
There’s this assumption that everyone is on board with paying for all these services and bending technology to their will in order to enjoy the chosen form of media. Then there’s the assumption that people will only want to see that when the company that has purchased the rights says it’s acceptable to see it. Then you will be able to see it, but only in the way or format that the company that purchased the rights deems acceptable. There are now content warnings in front of old movies. Smoking is listed under movie ratings now in case you don’t want your child to see that. They control and edit what version of the media you get to see.
It’s the way things are moving. I’m not entirely opposed to the way things are moving. I think there are a few things that border on the ludicrous, but the truly ridiculous generally resolves itself over time. What worries me is that people consider this loss of continuity in media to be the loss of their personal tradition. Wrapping up your tradition (happiness?) in something that belongs to others is dangerous.
It was Halloween season and we were down for good old scary movies. I wanted to show my daughter a great older movie the other day and was disappointed to discover that I didn’t actually own a copy. Fine, we’ll pull it up on a streaming service and watch it there. Only it’s now behind a pay wall. I can subscribe for an additional $5 per month OR I can buy a DVD copy off Amazon and have it shipped to me for about the same cost. There are times when owning a personal copy of something really matters. I don’t want to wait until some corporation decides it’s time to watch a movie. I want to allow our family traditions to grow and develop and continue without the influence of whatever is going on in the general media.
So I’ll be ordering a copy of ‘great pumpkin’ on DVD to be sure we can watch it when we want. I’ll get a copy of the movie that’s good enough to stick in my memory for 15+ years. I’ll be sure that when I want to watch something, read something, listen to something that I’ve got a copy here. Most of these things will still be digital, but they’ll be here when the time is right.
Release the Kraken! Or the craft. You know, if that’s better for you.
One of the great parts of social media is that it allows people with similar interests to connect with each other (this can be a big downside too, but that’s a different discussion). I’m super happy that I found the Tabletop Crafters Guild group to be part of. There are some amazingly talented people there making inspirational works.
This group, for any of my readers not familiar with them, also runs contests for members on a regular basis. I saw the build contest for the September/October time frame and thought I would try my hand at entering a contest there. A single, life sized prop of a potion bottle – not allowed to use dice in the build. While I didn’t understand the dice restriction, I went with it. I have a handful of old bottles saved up. My wife and I have made a few different crafts with them over the years, so it was just a question of finding the right one and then working up some inspiration. Contact the muse. Get a really good idea and run with it…
OR
Stare at glass thoughtlessly for far longer than I should have. I do love sparklies.
I was reviewing various artwork and reading up on a few things game related for a show I was going to be part of when I came across this full page piece showing a wizard’s shelf of wonderous things. It may truly have just been a muse poking my noggin at just the right time, but I saw tentacles crawling out of a jar in the middle of that art. A horror / nautical thing would be just the ticket.
Inspiration!
I rummaged around the place and found this old bottle with a distinct curve. Waves crashing, getting that lean to one side. I grabbed some ‘goo gone’ and started scrubbing it clean. Once it was completely dry I wanted to give the clear glass a tint from the inside. I’d seen this concept on a YouTube channel. Mix some water, a little food coloring and some glue. Make the mix just viscous enough to coat the inside of the glass container, then bake it at a low temp for about 20 minutes.
Post oven coating-ish
Sometimes listening to YouTube is helpful. This was not one of those times. I can’t all is a total fail. The boiling remnants of that past bit gave the corner where everything settled a nice blue – that was mostly not dry. I would not be put off. I decided that some glue and craft paint might do the trick, so I whipped up a yogurt cup size mixture and poured it in.
Paint-glue crackle sort of fail
Here’s the thing… the bottle has 4 sides being relatively rectangular, and we here on Earth have gravity. The mix just slid to whatever side was down. Also, the stupid oven coating must have done something because the mix wasn’t really sticking. What it left could, maybe, if you were out of focus (squint I tell you!) say it was a misty splash of a wave on the inside of my nautical theme potion.
FINE. I have some glass etching paste for the next step. I can work with a vaguely blue interior. I grabbed the vinyl contact paper and masked out waving tentacles around the bottle. I would have backlit waves with frosty glass etched tentacles and we’d be fine… or not. I couldn’t find any of the gloves we have in the house. None. Anywhere. I’m not about to chance the burns with acid etching paste. Wait! Rubber cleaning gloves – there are some of those under the sink. Sized for my daughter. I couldn’t even get my fingers in. Working to keep the frustration from my voice, I asked my lovely daughter if she’d be willing to help me in my crafting endeavor by applying this paste for me. Happily she agreed. Donning mask and gloves she spread the paste all over the bottle. We followed the wait time on the directions and rinsed it off. Nothing. No visible effect.
Can you see the etching? It *is* there. Sort of.
Undeterred, we still had all the gear out, we went for another round. This time I directed her to smear the paste on much thicker. We waited longer before rinsing it off. Maybe. Maybe there was some etching going on. I don’t know, I sure couldn’t see it or feel it. Another fail.
I moved on to paint. I can paint tentacles and waves and clouds, it’s fine. I grabbed up the craft paint and went to work.
I used air dry clay from a kids brand to model out the rocky coast where this bottle would be set. It was fun to model the clay. Air dry was needed because I couldn’t exactly bake this creation anymore. And then the air wasn’t dry. Seriously. So humid here (hurricane season! Shakes fist at sky) that the clay didn’t dry for painting even after a day. It wouldn’t bother me so much except that I know the next time I go to use this clay it’s going to be hard as a rock – even inside the air tight container I put it in.
The rocky coast pre-painting
I forged ahead. I had an old, rechargable set of LED lights attached to a cork that would be just the thing for a creepy background. I’d charge them up, pop the cork in and the light would help the whole thing…
sure it would. IF the cork actually fit – and it didn’t. Wrong size opening on the bottle, too small.
Back to the ideas part. I needed something nautical… burlap netting. That would work. Add some hemp like cord and just wrap the top of the bottle high enough to cover up the plastic of the LED connection and fake that the cork is actually in the bottle. Cool.
Then to grab the costume tentacles from my daughters Halloween collection. They were the ones that fit on the ends of your fingers so you could make a handful of tentacles wave with your fingers. Will wrap those up around the bottle for effect…
See where this is going yet? Thwarted again. Those costume bits were gifted off to a friend some time ago. No tentacles.
I did have a few, smaller pirate type pieces I could add. I would do that and wrap it all up. I tuned down the lights and bemoaned that I couldn’t make a misty effect to go along with the haunting yellowish green glow. My lovely wife just said, “incense”. Then she proceeded to light a couple of sticks up and waft the smoke across my little scene while I did pictures.
My contest entry – “Release”
In the end this contest entry looks very, very little like the vision in my head. I am however much happier with how it turned out than I thought I would be given how many times my plan just didn’t work. At the time of this writing I don’t know the results of the contest. I have seen some of the competition and they look great. I don’t really expect to win, but there’s always hope right? Even without a ‘win’ in contest terms I will consider this a ‘win’ in learning and experience. I’ll take the things I learned on this project and apply them to my next project. Win, lose or draw, absolutely worth entering a contest.
I picked this one up early on, but for some reason I didn’t dig into it right away. I can’t place a finger on the reason for that, but I will say I’m glad I picked it up. This book is a great ride. Spoilers ahead~
I’m not normally a big fan of zombie horror. It doesn’t bother me the way it does some, but I also have never found zombies to be particularly scary as a monster type. As with any zombie story I’ve seen, the real monsters and the true horrors are the humans.
As I started reading Jane’s story I thought this could be a fine action story set around the time of the Civil War. As it turns out there is a lot of action, but not in the sense I was thinking. This was certainly NOT the Harry Potter-esque life at a boarding school adventure type. The model of the school Jane attended was the Carlisle school, albeit slightly time shifted. This was racism and the blatant attempts of one group of people trying to keep another group of people down. The school, the treatment of the people and way they were expected to behave was just the starting point for the monsters.
The teachers at the school practiced the sort of abuse that wasn’t just physical. True to abusers everywhere there was psychological abuse riding hand in hand. Early in the story I wanted to see Jane make some move to solve the mystery of the missing family and give the school some sort of “comeuppance” that would allow for some kind of happy ending. I failed to see the problem with that line of thinking right away, but the author deftly moved to remedy the situation by wiping out not just the school, but the entire state of Maryland.
Taking Jane and her friends west into the plains removed any sense of East Coast familiarity from me and placed them all squarely in the path of the most monstrous people in the whole book – the self righteous. Using religion as a bludgeon to maintain the oppression of a people stoked the ugly feelings toward those opposed to Jane. I was sincerely glad when that town was wiped out and Jane’s little band made their escape. The writing here was really wonderful. It’s good writing when you loathe a fictional man that much.
I’m glad the main aspects of the story wrapped up in the first book. The history of each character and development of the world was excellent. The “cliffhanger” for the continuation of the story is there as Jane is in the middle of the prairie, but I do consider the story of the first book wrapped up. I could leave it at that if I wanted, but I suspect I’ll be going out and grabbing up the next book.
I hadn’t realized that I had subconsciously bought into the “that’s how things are” feeling of the way the schools were set up at first. I had to step back at the end and realize just how messed up that was. I’m glad the author put the reading recommendations at the end of the novel and I’d like to add one of my own (since I’m being so bold). For anyone sports minded it’s worth picking up Carlisle Vs. Army, a story about some of the athletes from the school in question and how they helped to shape the modern sports world.
It’s been a weekend of actually finishing things. I feel really good about the number of things I’ve accomplished. Thing about finishing all that other stuff was that I didn’t get much of anything accomplished here.
Found accomplishment clip art? Check.
I was finally able to finish the redecoration of our guest room (with one exception of work I don’t feel qualified to do). Back to reasonably comfortable in there.
Finished the edits for a story that will be published later this year or early next year. I’m excited for that to come out. It was a fun story to write.
Finished a contest entry and submitted it. I can’t post anything about it until after the contest is decided – I don’t think? I’m honestly not sure, but there’s a lot there to write up. I stretched outside my normal work routines and regular artistic endeavors to create a potion bottle prop. It did not live up to the vision in my head at all, but it is finished and in – and that’s a good feeling.
I finished reading a quick little book this weekend too – and I’m around 2/3 of the way through another. Good stories and even more “getting stuff done” vibe to add.
I just need to keep that vibe rolling through the week and get to updating some stuff around here and… Oh, yeah. Writing more.
I grabbed this from Tor’s free download book club and I’m glad that I did.
This was a quick hit of alternate history. The story is set in the early 1900s where an opening to a realm of magic has allowed the Djinn to become part of everyday society in Egypt. The arrival of these powerful magical beings has changed and shaped the way society flows and moves. In this story Hamed is an experience ministry investigator dealing with supernatural and magic related cases. He is called in with his new partner to deal with a haunted tram car. Simple, right?
I loved the setting and the world building on this. It’s a good story that balances the action, the character and the explanation of things well. There were one or two little things I didn’t expect along the way. It was a fun, quick read. If you can get your hands on a copy I would recommend it. Marketing success – I’ll be looking for more from this author!
I have been side tracked lately with a lot of projects / work stuff that amount to not doing the stuff I really enjoy. One of those things I really enjoy is painting. I have a fair number of acrylic craft paints that come in these little round tubes. They can be a challenge to store in an easy to see and access way.
We had this wire rack system from years ago. My wife saw a video that showed a great way to reuse some of the panels from this “build it yourself” paint rack display. To be honest, we still have a number of these in use – they are shaky, but standing and holding some lighter weight things. We did have some leftover panels. Time to make a paint rack!
I watched a couple of videos that gave variations on how to connect the two wire bits in a way that made sense for hanging or mounting the rack on the wall. I don’t consider my art supplies to be art in and of themselves most days. I wanted a “floor mounted” model if you will. I was also not a fan of finding properly sized plastic pipes in white, finding matching caps or any of a list of other things. I wanted this to be something I could do at home with what I had on hand.
I needed a spacer that was about the right size and stumbled onto a video where the woman making her version of the rack used a child’s alphabet blocks. I didn’t have alphabet blocks anymore, but I did have a scrap chunk of lumber. I grabbed the saw and cut some little blocks (about 1” or 2.5cm). How to hold them? Zip ties of course. I drilled a single hole through one corner of each block and fastened it once in each direction (up/down, left/right) for stability. Spacing achieved!
Sanding and painting would probably help the blocks
Next up was the other side. My initial thought was to make a solid wood piece, but my woodworking skills and tools have a very low limit. Cutting and drilling was about as far as that was going to go… BUT I have XPS foam! A-ha!
So I carved up 2 slabs of foam and cut grooves into one side. This is one of those times when I wish I had a hot wire cutter for the foam. Doing this by hand with a hobby knife was rotten. It’s gouged, uneven and not pleasing to the eye. I wasn’t overly worried as the grooves should be on the side you wouldn’t normally see. I painted them up and waited for them to dry. I still hate waiting.
A hot wire tool would have made this so much better!
Next step – attach the foam. What to use? Hot glue. It’s what I have and it shouldn’t need to stand up to a ton of abuse. I should just need to make sure the top edge stays in place. Once the glue was dry, done!
I should work on my glue gun aim too…
In practice, when my wife started filling the paints in the rack fell over. She was not pleased. The position as shown in the picture is less than effective for actually standing up while holding paints. Solution? Turn it over. So, the smooth black painted foam is now on the desk acting as the stable foot and showing off all the nasty glue work, the parts of the foam that didn’t get painted right and the unfinished side of the wood block. In the end it is not about the look of the this rack, it’s about the function. Now I’ve got a pair of paint racks that will hold the majority of my paint collection at almost no cost ~ and I didn’t have to leave the house.
Right side up – as intended, not as in use LOL
Onward to the next project! What are you working on?
This was previously published in Watch The Skies fanzine – October 2020
It’s October and ‘spooky’ season is here. This year is looking like it’s going to play out differently than years past. I suspect there will be a greater number of folks than normal staying in and looking for some entertainment that matches the spirit of the season.
I happily recommend the horror / comedy Vampires vs. the Bronx. This movie is the story of three friends living in a neighborhood that is rapidly changing. They’re faced with routine challenges of daily life combined with the encroachment of a corporation that is trying to buy out all the business and people they know. The heroes are attempting to save the local shop they’ve grown up in from being pushed out. While canvasing for an upcoming party they discover the truth – vampires are behind the big business and need to be stopped!
The story is a fun romp. The villains are clearly the villains, the hero is clearly the hero. The issues kids deal with are part of the story as well. It’s nice to see a horror story that doesn’t immediately discount the use of cell phones and their place in our current society. It is reminiscent of Stranger Things, but on a lighter, shorter story arc. There is danger not just from the vampires, but also from day to day life. If you’ve got a tween or an early teen this is definitely a film that should be checked out for the Halloween season.
Normally I’d have notes and various preparation bits that I’d share along with a link to the new video, but this is not about me. It was fantastic to hear from these women. Hopefully we’ll have more of this in the future!
A magical door opens. The space on the other side is clearly someplace… else. Could be in a summoning circle, could be in an ancient basement or it could be at the back of an old closet behind the coats. I’m not always a fan of portal fantasy, but they can be very enjoyable.
I saw the movie title “Monster Hunter” pop up the other day and I was interested. I have been a fan of the Monster Hunter International book series by Larry Corriea. There are guns and tough guys (and tough women) that stomp out and blow up the bad guys. They’re a fun romp.
The movie I saw the trailer for was not for that. It’s a video game adaptation. Video game adaptations are usually pretty weak, but they’ve been striving to get better in recent years. The film makers are likely banking on the draw of Mila for this one. She’s in charge of a military unit that gets drawn into a mystery portal and end up going toe to toe with all the video game monsters. I will likely find this one when it comes to some streaming service.
The next one I saw… I know a number of Nick Cage fans, but this movie looks like it’s begging for a mystery science theater type set up. Really. I can’t see how this will be anything other than a Saturday afternoon kung-fu flick. Having said that, on some distant Saturday afternoon I suspect I’ll grab this off some streaming service, grab some popcorn and prepare myself to be stunned…
This last one can only loosely be called a portal fantasy. Crossing over from life to death is certainly going someplace “else” as stated above but is generally not the same as the two movies listed above. It IS a Pixar movie, so I’ll be watching this one when it comes out as well. Definitely worth checking out the new trailer for this one too.
