Concept Art!

So I stumbled upon some of the most beautiful art from one of my favorite books ever. The Phantom Tollbooth is about a boy named Milo who was always bored and could never seem to find anything to do... that is until he receives a magical tollbooth in the mail. What followed was a fantastic journey, taken through many lands like Dictionopolis, The Doldrums, The Islands of Conclusions, Digitopolis, and even the Castle in the Sky. He meets up with Tock, a magical watch dog, the Humbug, Dr. Kakofonous A. Dischord and DYNNE, and even one of my favorite characters, the Mathemagician.

Needless to say, I must insert in here that this book is full of fond memories and a wonderful love of puns comes from this when it comes specifically from the English language when taken literally. I came across some concept art by someone who has re-imagined the settings in which they took place. I hope that you will have as much fun with it as I did and be transported once again to the fabled lands within the Kingdom of Wisdom and feel compelled, like I did, to reread the novel once more.

Concept Art for The Phantom Tollbooth

A Terrifying Vision?

So I was wandering my favorite News sites when I came across this link:

Good Heavens

It gave me the giggles I must admit. No net neutrality and e-publishing dominating the world. I can see it now, a world much like Minority Report and The Fifth Element all smashed up: awesome clothes and no hiding from anything you could do. Imagine, You go to write something, much like a satire and BOOM! the police come crashing in though the roof and arresting you because your satire was going to be written on a piece of paper and you were not going to publish the satire, but try to self publish it.

...

I know it sounds ridiculous, but it made a funny picture in my head. Seriously. I totally mean it.

Of course that was only after reading what Cheryl Morgan had to say on it. I have to say though, some of the other people there also have valid points, but still, totally give it a look-see. Its amazing.

Something Random...

I'll be honest... I didn't have anything to really post today, so instead, I have this little piece here:




Have fun today.

This post is made possible by the wonderful people at mildlyhotpeppers.com.

I love their comics sometimes and they are sometimes just a little silly, but today, I feel a little silly is needed. Click on the picture to make it all good.

Children's Books

I'm posting this now on Monday, because I am not sure if I will be able to post on Tuesday this week. So I will post this cute little reworking about children's books in the name of Science Fiction. Yes there are only three of them, but I figured that you all might enjoy it.

Books for fun...

The Joys of the Rewrite...

Some authors, if you ask them, will say they wrote exactly what they meant to, word for word, page for page, leading you down into their interpritation of reality as if it was seamless and required no after thought. Some authors will admit to painstacking brain and writer's block, horrific times double checking sections of their writing to make sure that all was as they had wished it to be. Some will however, go so far as to tell you that they re-wrote the whole novel after beginning it, some will even tell you that there were multiple re-writes.

Then there are the relative few (or many, depending on how you view it), that rewrite their books after they have been published. You heard me right. Many authors, contrary to teh belief, rewrite their books after they have already been published. The following is an article about just that phenomenon. See if you have ever noticed these, though many of them are older books, they are still fantastical books. Enjoy:

Writer's who Rewrite

More on Borders...

Borders has always been one of my favorite book companies. So much so that I worked for them at one time, however I am becoming more and more concerned with the way that the company is trending into bankruptcy. Today I saw another article in yahoo news about borders, mainly this one, and I have to say, I have been seeing a lot of articles like this one all over the place. Almost every day, there is something new about how borders is failing as a company. That's not right. As a Brick and Mortar supporter, I recently spent over $300 in online orders from them because of their coupons. However, one of the things that makes it so hard for Borders appears to be their inability to keep up. Rather than creating a book reader all on their own, they have relied on Sony, Kobo, and Cruz as their dealers in teh new digital age of e-readers. Barns and Noble's Nook has done so fantastically that it is now almost on par with the Kindle, Amazon's one-two hit KO machine in the ePub world.

Now the only other thing that concerns me is the fact that because they have so much diversity, they assumed that they would be able to capture the market of people who did not want to get something so expensive as their competitor's models. B&N and Amazon dropped their prices drastically, leaving the bookseller in the dust.

To make matters worse, Barnes and Noble released an ap for the iPad which was a Nook app designed jsut for kids, thus widening the playing field for color eBooks with Apple. What has Borders done in terms of applications for various things? There is indeed a Borders App, which is power by Kobo, but that seems to be it and all that it is there for it. The application is free too, so that means that Borders does not neccisarily have anything on it's bottom line.

However, do not think that Borders is the only one in the lurch. Barnes and Noble is also in tehir own form of litigation. Currently, they are being sued for their Nook display by fellow eBook company Spring Design, who designed the fellow Alex eReader. They claimed that they shared the idea for teh dual screens with B&N, and that B&N stole the design from them and released their eReader early to compete with Amazon. The logistics of the case can be read here.

Needless to say, the state of Book stoday is in a strange and sorry mess. I am hoping that at some point in the near future, we will not have to close down our beloved Brick and Mortar stores in favor of Amazons large eStore. While eBooks are fun and easier to carry, I will shudder at teh day that real books are no longer able to be sold. This is one reader who still prefers to hold an actual bound copy in his hands.

New Writers are Schlock?

British writer Edward Docx has recently in the pages of the Guardian, blasted literature. Wait, I must be a little clearer. Literature was fine, it was the genre fiction that he was unhappy about. To be specific, it was actually a blast on the fact that there was a lot of people reading it. The fact that everyone seemed to love reading it too was apparently shocking and also a little unnerving to him as well. To put it exactly as he said it, and I quote:

"I realise we are sailing into choppy waters here. With Larsson now dead and so decent a chap, how dare I go up on deck and start explaining – amid the storms of publicity and howl of Hollywood and the relentless sluicing of the sales – that his work is not very good even by the standards of his genre?"

Not only does Docx say that Larson is not particularly good, he also states that Dan Brown is the same way. To read the rest of the article, please refer to the following link here.

To add more fuel to this fire, there are a few other people who are in the same boat and have similar views and even discuss as to why it is that these novels seem to be so popular. For example, Laura Miller wrote on why we love horribly written novels. The link for that would be here.

I would weigh in more, but I sadly must head towards my bed. Good night all.

Astrology has a new Bent...

So recently, I was just told about the fact that there might be a change in the Astrology signs that we all know and have come to enjoy having in our lives. Here is the article. It's not what I originally wanted to put up, but it is something that is amusing and I think I will write a short story about it in the near future... so think of it as a way to archive it for myself?

Zodiac Signs Power! Activate?!

Posting A New Schedual

So as everyone knows, I am absolutly horrible with time. I am good with deadlines, but sometimes, people are just not nice and do not accept said deadlines and are very dissapproving of said deadlines and even try their hardest to distract me so tha tI am not able to reach said deadlines (and I am telling you, sometimes it is so easy considering that... oh! Shiney!)

... Ahem...

As I was saying... I will now have a new update schedual. I will try to have it all ironed out by the begining of Febuary, since there are somethings that I absolutly must finish and post as soon as I can. In the meantime the schedual for the upcoming year is going to look a little like this:

Monday:
Tuesday: AuthorBlog
Wednesday: The Time in Between
Thursday:AuthorBlog
Friday: AuthorBlog/The Time in Between
Saturday:
Sunday: PernishiaBlog (pending game)

Originally, Pernishia was supposed to update on Saturday, but because we no longer play game on Friday night and have since moved it to Sunday night... I figure why not. Mondays and Saturdays I am currently off. Even I need some time away from my craft, though Ideally, I would love to write something every night, but I simply don't have the dedication yet, nor the discipline, which I am working on.

In the meantime, I should probobly go back to work. Night all!

The Batmobile

So I love my site i09. They always have some interesting new things. Today, I have to say that my expectations have been totally met in a really strange way. Use this link to see every incarnation of the Caped Crusader's ride.

The Batmobile... and it's incarnations...

Have fun!

Dick King-Smith; Age 88

Sad news today was announced as it was told by publicists that Dick King-Smith, the creator of the book that launched the famous movie "Babe". He had writtn more than 100 books featuring animals and did not actually publish his first book, "The Fox Busters" until 1978, when he was in his 50s. The book that started his greatest success was known as "The Sheep Pig" about a little pig that was trained to act and work like a sheep dog.

King-Smith is survived by his second wife Zona, three children, 14 grandchildren, four great-grandchildren and one great-great grandchild.

He lived a grand life, and I shall leave you with a great quote:

"That'll do, pig. That'll do."

Brick and Mortar

Books are becoming a precarious thing. I have not as of yet gone over to the "dark Side" as some of my friends are calling it and gone to Amazon and bouight a Kindle (though I will say I wouldn't mind owning one...), however, I do have the iPad. That is not neccesarrily the same thin in this new "Digi-volution" of books. More and more people are now joinging the movement that is known as the Digital E-reader. Kindle, Kobo, Nook, you name it and the company proboly has one. It is getting cheeper to buy books and keep them in digital libraries that are easier to keep track of than an actual bookshelf of books (easier to cary too).

I have a rather extensive book library myself; over 17 thousand books as I like to say. I have probobly in my lifetime, read more than that by at least double the number thanks to local and school libraries. However, I now have noticed that even I have calmed down on what my parents and friends used to call "deranged sprees of cathartic spending on books". Instead of going to the bookstores and spending hours in tehre rummaging over books and buying anywhere from a hundred to a thousand (and in one unlucky case $4,376; I kept the receipt. I'm proud of it...) on books. In the last month alone, I have spent less that fifty dollars on new books. Instead, I have found something that makes it worth my dollar: the digital e-book and the free audio book.

Many of you have heard my case for and against the audio book. Not much has changed on that I fear. However, my stance on the digital book, the eBook, is much different. I applaud the idea to allow people to read on the go, without the encumberance that a hardback or paperback book, however many pounds they may weigh, my cause someone hand strain or back pain. That sounds a little harsh, but it is true. More people are reading thanks to the digital revolution than were previously. Read on I say.

Ther eis one other price to pay however. In the neverending duel that is the Brick and Mortar stores, mainly Barnes & Nobel and Borders, they are having some problems. I point you now in teh dirrection of a news article from this monday and allow you to read what I am reading as well. Tell me what you think...

News Article: Borders and B&N

The Secret History of the Pink Carnation: Review

So I have to say to all of you: I love Historical Fiction.

Sometimes, it is the most advanced form of Fantasy Fiction that there could ever be. Now when I refer to this, I am refering to that small sub-genre of books that take place in historical setting in the real world, but something has been tweaked for Fiction's sake. An example (though not neccessarily a good book) being "The Other Bolyn Girl". How many times has one wondered what the story of Anne Bolyn is like from her older and more experienced sister? Needless to say, Let me give you a quick rundown. This book actually is two parts. One part takes place in the present and the other takes place in the era of Napoleon.

The main character (or at least one of them), a Harvard graduate student named Eloise Kelly is fascinated with the REvolution of France. She knows that the French eventually unmasked the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian, famed spies in the Napoleonic wars, but as discovers that the identity of the Pink Carnation, another spy, remains a mystery. While working on her history dissertation in London in search of any information on the Pink Carnation, Eloise gets access to a trunk of papers and documents from the early 19th century. This trunk, she is told with assurance, holds the key to the mystery of who the Pink Carnation really is, and as she reads through these letters, the reader is suddenly plunged into a novel within a novel, told from the viewpoint of Amy Balcourt, the second (and more interesting) of the two main characters.

Amy, exiled to rural England with her mother, now wants to avenge, with the help of her cousin Jane, her father's death at the hands of the French. She hopes to be in league with the Scarlet Pimpernel, who heroically tried to save her father. Willig, the author and a Harvard graduate student herself, paints a picture of the tumultuous era with amazing ease and fantastic eye. She also makes the sparks fly between Amy and the Purple Gentian, a dashing English nobleman in charge of Egyptian antiquities for Bonaparte. The whole novelization of the letters is dramatric and breathtaking and fascinating

But when the Pink Carnation's identity is finally revealed after many obvious clues, the reader wonders why it took Eloise so long to get it. Seriously, it wasn't that hard to figure out, just by reading the back of the book. I figured it out when Eloise started to read the letters. More critically, Eloise's appearances come to seem like awkward intrusions into Amy's-and the Pink Carnation's-more intriguing story. Sometimes I dreaded the fact that we were coming back to the present, when all I wanted was to continue with Amy; amusing and interesting and 3 sided Amy, bnot dull, dreary, and over-reactive Eloise.

Needless to say, this book starts out as Historical Fiction, but then later turns into something more akin to Historical romance. Though not really a "boddice-ripper", this was a fantastically laid out story. Go read it. I'll have it on the Shelfari later tonight and give you a link to amazon too.

New Years and Resolutions

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

I think, this is the first time, in a long time, where I have actually gotten to write here within a major holiday. It is a totally New Year and this year, I should resolve to do new things, make new things, be new things, and understand new things. Now, that is what everyone resolves to do, but I am here to tell you that I will do it!

Okay, I will try to do it. Far be it that I go back on sioethign I said. It is always better to be late than to never have arrived at all. So this year, I have a new outlook on Amaretto's tale. Last year was a little bit of a hardship considering that I did not have a computer the majority of time and my then current job (which I have since moved on from) did not allow me the time. No matter when I tried, I was always simply exhausted. It did not help that I worked in a book store and that I was no longer enjoying reading anymore. I was always reading tripe too. I have to admit, I read a lot of young adult books though and I have a feeling that it will inflict itself upon some of my writing in the near future. DO NOT FRET... Amaretto's tale is suposed to be an ever changing idea.

Still, I now have a new computer and a much more manageble job. I also have a new thing to RED ROOM, a fantastic Author Blogging site that I will be also using to my advantage. It looks like a really fun site I have to admit.

As per the norm, I now have a Page set up in Facebook, go become a fan if you like. It makes it easier to keep up with all the blogs and stuff that I am doing at the same time.

Now for soem bad news. The Pernishia blog may stop within teh coming year due to one of the players no longer coming to game. I am not sure what will happen, but our Dwarven Fighter will be moving onto boot camp. He actually goes in Febuary, but he will be assigned to his location afterwards in August. Still I will try to continue it was much as possible without him while he is gone, but August could be the end of the Pernishia Blog in the meantime.

More good news: In the year of 2011, it shall be known as the year of tags and labels! I shall endevor to try to label everything in each blog in an effort to make it better. It is going to mean a lot of tags, but it should make everything easier to find.

There are some more things that I am also resoluting as well besides write more, eat better, lost 10 lbs., fight world hunger... that sort of thing however, shall be kept to the side lines. Perhaps this year I may even manage to finish everything else...