Here I go again. Now in Prague.
An Archaeologist Plays Indiana Jones, Part 6
Here I go again. Now in Prague.
Month: September 2018
Meet the ‘Jake and the Dynamo’ Paperback
Large, luxurious, very readable, and suitable for coffee tables.
I am really pleased and impressed by the paperback release of Jake and the Dynamo. As you can see here, Lee Madison’s cover art transferred beautifully.
Getting the physical copy in my hand, I was able to appreciate some of the art I’d not been able to get a good look at before, such as the spine:
I had assumed the spine would probably be unadorned, so I was pleased to see the title logo accompanied by Pretty Dynamo’s insignia and a lightning bolt. The back is also great:
An Archaeologist Plays Indiana Jones, Part 5
Here we go again, and this time I make it out of Sri Lanka. The game I’m playing is Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb (2003) from LucasArts.
The Pulp Magazines Project
I failed to post yesterday partly because I had stumbled upon the Pulp Magazines Project, an attempt to create readable scans of public-domain pulp magazines. The site describes itself thusly:
The Pulp Magazines Project is an open-access archive and digital research initiative for the study and preservation of one of the twentieth century’s most influential print culture forms: the all-fiction pulpwood magazine. The Project also provides information and resources on publishing history, multiple search and discovery platforms, and an expanding library of high-quality, cover-to-cover digital facsimiles.
This online archives contains, unsurprisingly, a lot of titles that had disappeared from the public consciousness. What will probably most interest my readers is the site’s archiving of Weird Tales, probably one of the most famous of all pulps even though it was in perpetual financial trouble during its run, which published H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Robert Bloch. The site has only a handful of the total 279 issues. In fact, at present it only has 425 issues total of the various pulps it is archiving. But the scans are high-quality and readable. So last night, I was reading the January 1935 issue of Weird Tales instead of doing something more responsible or productive.
An Archaeologist Plays Indiana Jones, Part 4
Been a while since we had one of these, so here I go, in honor of the new Tomb Raider … I guess … a game based on the original tomb raider.
Magical girl sidekicks rise up!
I’ll probably get how-do-you-do-fellow-kids’d for this.
Which says a lot about our society.
‘Jake and the Dynamo’ Is Still a 5-Star Novel on Amazon
And remember, only you can change that!
Er, wait …
The latest:
I was grinning throughout. I always like when the potential for an interesting premise is taken advantage of. This is well done here. Lots of room for laughs and an over-the-top running gag added to this. What I really liked was that this novel could be hilarious while also making fighting scenes meaningful. There are consequences and you come to care for the characters. This is something I rarely see. The battles are not just plot points.
Goodreads Review: ‘Ivy and Bean: No News Is Good News
Ivy and Bean: No News Is Good News by Annie Barrows
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Probably my personal favorite in this goofy chapter book series, No News is Good News sees Ivy and Bean jealous of their friends at lunch because everyone else has Lowfat Belladoona Cheese in a Just-for-you Serving Size … but that’s not important. What’s important is that the cheese comes wrapped in red wax that can be modeled into all sorts of shapes.
Their attempts to pester their parents into buying them the cheese come to naught, so with the help of Bean’s well-meaning but somewhat clueless father, they hatch a plan to sell a homemade newspaper that they create by spying on the neighbors. Hi-jinks ensue.
Barrows’s books are well-crafted enough that, though meant for children, they are accessible to the adult reader, and it is likely the adults who will best understand (and be able to predict the outcome of) the humorous situations Ivy and Bean get themselves into, whereas children are more likely to read this as an adventure story or comedy. For the adult, this is probably a half-hour read, tops.
‘Jake and the Dynamo: Dead to Rites’ Progress Update
I’m now at 81,190 of a projected 90,000 words (I suspect it will actually be closer to 100,000). I just got to write a scene I’ve really been looking forward to for a while.
Still can’t seem to get my protagonists to a rock concert, just as in the first book I couldn’t seem to get them to a restaurant.
This is passing through a writer’s group as a I go, so I think it’s time to go back over the last two and a half chapters before sending it off to them. I’ll likely flesh out what I’ve previously written and up the word count by a hundred or so, which usually happens when I edit my initial drafts, as I tend to write “skeletons” that I flesh out on a second pass.
Jake and the Dynamo: Dead to Rites
And don’t forget, you can still pick up the first volume of Jake and the Dynamo on Amazon. It’s available in both Kindle and paperback formats.
The Book of Gold
(With apologies to John C. Wright)
If I need motivation to write, the place I go first is to the essay entitled “Your Book of Gold” by John C. Wright.
Wright explains, in a fashion that is almost poetic, that every writer or every avid reader has one book that is especially precious to him, that affected him at the right time and in the right way, to change the course of his entire life. Wright encourages every would-be writer to publish with this idea: Even if you sell only eight copies, your book will be for someone that Book of Gold, the book that changes his life.
As an example, he names Voyage to Arcturus, the dense, highly imaginative, and awe-inspiring Gnostic parable by David Lindsay, which in Lindsay’s lifetime was a complete failure. Wright names it as one of his great inspirations, as did, previously, C. S. Lewis. Although I found it too late to be as taken with it as Wright or Lewis were, I also read the book and found it to be an astonishing work of imagination. Even though the novel was a commercial failure, it sparked the imagination of others, and in that sense was a great success. For those to whom it mattered, it became what Wright calls “the book of gold.” Continue reading “The Book of Gold”