Author – Page 25 – Strider’s Web

Something to Read: Shattered Dreams

I want to mention a new book by a new author, Shattered Dreams, book one in the Luna’s Children series, by Melissa Kay Clarke. I admit I sometimes read romantic/action/adventure fantasy (particularly ones with a Steampunk sensibility, or Dragons and other supernatural creatures), and I quite enjoyed this one. In the interest of Full Disclosure I have to admit that in part this was because I got to be one of the Beta Readers and give my feedback, and then see what changed because of the input. But I genuinely enjoyed the story, liked several of the characters, and found the concepts behind the culture quite intriguing. I am looking forward to checking out the next book in the series, because this is off to quite a promising start.

I read an insane amount of books, and I have decided I need to start blogging about them here. Not in an every-week kind of way, but just when I am reading something I really like and want to share. I have posted about a bunch of favorite authors, and mentioned favorite books that got turned into movies or TV shows, and book-centric conventions and awards. But I don’t think I have usually talked about the books themselves. This is something I intend to correct, as there are a lot of excellent works out there.

Once Upon A Time In Wonderland trailer

From the folks who are doing Once Upon A Time, another twisty little show, this time redoing Alice for modern times: Once Upon A Time In Wonderland. It hits the small screen (OK, not so small for those who have 4K TVs with a huge screen, but lots of us are still watching in SD) on October 10th on ABC. It tends to look like the creators watched the Syfy channel’s Alice and said “I could do that, but with an American accent”, but I really don’t care. I will watch any variation of a classic by Lewis G. Carrol, Frank L. Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, or a select few other writers from the 1800s, and enjoy them no matter where they take them.

Escape Pod Archives

I love Radio Plays and Audio Books, and wanted to mention these for anyone who does not already know of them. Escape Pod is a podcast that delivers a weekly free Sci-Fi audio story, and has been doing so since 2005. It is so successful at it that it is listed as a qualifying professional sale at the SFWA. In addition it has generated two spinoffs, Pseudopod for Horror fiction, and PodCastle for Fantasy fiction. You can subscribe to their podcasts, download the MP3 files from their sites, or got to the Escape Pod Archives searchable collection at Wikipedia.

Divergent trailer

Based on Veronica Roth’s YA series of novels, Divergent will be hitting the big screen next year, and the first trailer is now online. Teenagers in a dystopian future is the setting, and if the first film does well, there are two more books in the series.

Hugo Awards, 2013

The Hugo Awards were handed out this weekend at Worldcon as always, which this year was LoneStarCon 3 in San Antonio, Texas. For the full list of who won and how the presentations went down, be sure to stop by the Hugo Awards site, but I figured I should mention a few on the ones I found of interest.

Best Novel was grabbed by Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas, written by John Scalzi, while Best Novelette was awarded to The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi, by Pat Cadigan. Joss Whedon got Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form for The Avengers, an honor he well deserved. Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form went to George R.R. Martin and collaborators this time around for Game of Thrones: Blackwater, beating out 3 Doctor Who episode nominations and breaking the Doctor Who string of wins in that category over the last several years.

Stanley Schmidt pulled in 2 awards, and Clarkesworld, SF Signal, and SF Squeecast all won in the various Zine categories. I recommend checking out the source article for the full list with all the details and the links, but for the first time in a couple of decades I completely agreed with the winners for those works I was familiar with. Usually I am at around 40%, this one was a nice change.

The Luggage Family

Yes, the Luggage Family were all there at NADWCon this year in Baltimore. Daddy Luggage was built for me by my good friend Jenn, and she built herself the purse version Mommy Luggage, slightly smaller on the other side. Offler (her Con name obviously, and too bad you can’t see her Crocodile hat properly in this image) built herself the darling little Child Luggage, complete with the painted toenails as described in the books. If you are one of the few people out there asking yourself what books? at this point, you have a treat in store for you. The books of Sir Terry Pratchett are amazing and hysterical, satirical and more than a bit silly, and very much worth your time to check out.