Yet more Game of Thrones goodies. This one details the effort of capturing the look from the Belfast set (Northern Ireland for the geographically challenged).
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql6kqCK_85g]Check out my own Fantasy novel, The Darkening Dream.
On Sunday we shot the live model for my new cover for The Darkening Dream.
The artist, the amazing Cliff Nielsen, works out of a 1903 former power station! This was totally awesome given the 1913 setting of The Darkening Dream.
The interior is even crazier!
And our studio location where Cliff has set up his stage area and lighting.
The artist behind his camera. Turns out he’s a Canon 5D Mark II shooter as well!
Enter our lovely young protagonist, Sarah Engelmann, played by the talented Dana Melanie.
It just takes a bit of costume and some hair styling to take her back a hundred years! This cover is a bit allegorical. In the book, Sarah is plagued by dreams of violent super natural deaths, and entangled with more than a bit of the violent supernatural during her waking moments.
So for the cover we are trying to capture a bit of a nighttime Sarah caught in the junction between these waking (natural) and sleeping (supernatural) worlds. Just a note for total verisimilitude, Cliff will have to Photoshop off the nail polish (like 2 minutes work) because Western women didn’t wear nail polish between late antiquity and the 1930s! (Although the Chinese did)
Cliff earning his keep.
He shot using the 24-70 2.8L which is a great lens for studio work.
Hair fix.
I thought this shot during break an amusing contrast of period and modern.
Dana was a fantastic sport and even put up with a second — and creepy — crucifixion pose. In the context of The Darkening Dream this isn’t really Jesus type crucifixion, but more Conan on the Tree of Woe or Odin sacrificed and hung from the world tree Yggdrasil. Rest assured, it has certain magical/occult significance in the story.
Cliff had to shoot from high up on a ladder.
During this part of the shoot it was suggested that I draw in a small dark mustache and cultivate a sinister silent movie villain laugh.
Or perhaps it’s the reverse.
All in all, it was a fantastic shoot and we got great images. I can’t wait to see the finished cover in a couple of days.
Read more about The Darkening Dream here.
Or check out the cover design here.
Or read the first two chapters for free.
With my novel The Darkening Dream steaming along toward release, it’s high time that I offer a taste of the book itself. So to that effect, I’ve put up the first two chapters as a sample.
I even used my CSS mastery to format them in fairly close approximation of the real book. Although I used times, which is a good looking screen font, instead of Arno Pro like the printed book. But I did include the appropriate interior art that I’ve been developing. This includes chapter heading illustrations and custom separators. Each different point of view has a separate icon, in the case of these two chapters the horn for Sarah (our protagonist) and the tree for Charles. Why, is fairly clear even in these brief chapters.
Please share your opinions on the opening either here or below the sample itself.
Also for those who care about the geekdom, I upgraded the little red buttons I use on various places on the site to support roll over highlighting. This was easy, but figuring out how to flow the pair of them underneath the sidebar book cover took longer than all the other tasks today, including the styling of the sample. HTML/CSS is like that. At first I forgot about display:block and then, for some slightly mysterious reason, I had to use float:left to get them to sit side by side. Go figure.
As I’ve discussed before, I commissioned a new cover a couple weeks ago for The Darkening Dream. Well I’ve got a concept sketch now (to the right, click it to embiggen). You can compare it to the old cover at the bottom of the post.
NOTE: This is still just a sketch, not the final new cover and the titles are quick hacks that I whipped onto the concept sketch. Still, I wanted to see what people think.
We shoot the model this weekend. Cliff Nielsen, the artist uses a composite style in which he blends photographic and hand drawn elements. The final result will even better and much much more detailed and specific. This sketch is to get a sense of layout, color, and positioning.
Overall I’m stoked.
The interior is also rocking along and I hope to have the E-Book on the “shelf” (i.e. Amazon etc) right around the New Year.
So write in the comments: What does this cover say to you, would you pick up the book and see what it’s about? What do you think it’s about?
The old cover -- made by yours truly
For more info on the new cover, click here.
For more information on The Darkening Dream.
For more posts on writing, click here.
Restaurant: Il Pastaio
Location: 400 N.Canon Drive. Bevery Hills, CA 90210. Phone: 310.205.5444
Date: December 2, 2011
Cuisine: Italian
Rating: Excellent neighborhood Italian
Il Pastaio is one of the Drago brothers many many excellent Los Angeles Italians. This is probably the flagship of brother Giacomino Drago’s collection of seven restaurants. The pastas in particular (the name does mean the Pasta Maker) are incredible. This meal, however, was just a quick lunch.
A lobster salad with marinated peppers and cucumbers. I’m a huge lobster salad fan and this was no disappointment. Look at all that juicy lobster meat!
Gnocci in pink sauce. A classic, but very good.
A spinach parpadelle with a meat ragu. I love this kind of hearty meat ragu. yum yum.
To avoid carb coma.
And parked outside was this totally whacky but cool chopper. If you zoom in you can see that every part of it from engine block to the seat is custom tooled!
Anyway, while this is just a mini glimpse at Il Pastaio’s cusine, it’s a fantastic place. I’ll have to come back and document a much more extensive meal.
Older brother Drago restaurant is reviewed here and Giacomino’s via alloro.
Restaurant: Maison Giraud [1, 2, 3]
Location: 1032 Swarthmore Ave, Pacific Palisades, Ca 90272. 310-459-7562
Date: December 5 & 10, 2011
Cuisine: French
Rating: French “home” cooking at it’s best
I’ve been waiting for Maison Giraud, the new local (just blocks away!) Pacific Palisades restaurant/bakery from acclaimed LA French chef Alain Giraud to open for what seems like forever. The day it did I was there for some pastries. Then we kept trying to get in for dinner. We had to come on a monday at like 5:30!
The Swathmore Ave frontage has been revealing itself in stages since at least the 4th of July.
Inside the chef peers down at your from the French-style board.
Today’s menu.
A pair of nice French whites, one a Sancerre, the other a Viognier.
House baked bread.
They call this a tart, but it’s really a flatbread (aka pizza). “Camille’s Potato and Rosemary Flat Tart. Creme Fraiche, Gruyere.” Pretty yummy.
And another. “Crispy Tomato and Basil Flat Tart. Roasted onions, parmesan.”
“Seared Scallops, leek fondue, meyer lemon & pistachio sauce.” This was one of the best seared scallop appetizers I’ve had — and I normally prefer my scallops raw.
“Arborio Risotto, mushrooms, aged parmesan, fresh herbs.” A lovely mushroom risotto. The weather was cold and dreary (in relative LA terms), so this was perfect.
“Seared Atlantic Salmon. Garlic potatoes, cipollini, bacon, red onion sauce.”
“Cocotte. Beef Bourguignon.” Basically beef stew with the classic additives: potato, carrots, onions, etc. But this was one damn fine beef stew.
Bread dipping good!
We had to get back in a hurry, so we didn’t have time for dessert, but I had that Vacherin Glace one time when the chef was cooking at Bastide (in 2004) and it was one of the best desserts of my life.
I liked the Maison so much that I brought my son back for breakfast on Saturday. This is from the bakery, a fresh apple turnover. Yum!
And fresh OJ.
A decent, if slightly foamy cappuccino.
French toast. Very nice typical variant. My favorite part was the fresh Chantilly cream which was incredible. I’m a big sucker for whipped cream.
Classic Eggs Benedict.
Some more baked goods. Muffins.
And the ultimate pain aux chocolate. This is the only place in LA I’ve tasted where the croissant type pastry actually tastes like it does in France.
So far, I’m very pleased with Maison Giraud. The food is essentially French comfort food with a bit of international adaption, but everything has been spot on fresh and well done so far, and the bakery is outrageously good. Given how incredibly lame most of the Pacific Palisades food offerings are this is all incredibly welcome.
With my planned launch getting closer I started aggressively soliciting online book bloggers for reviews of my first novel, The Darkening Dream. This is a rather tedious process (spent about 10 hours on it yesterday) of combing through lists of review sites, then checking out their policies (sometimes nicely tabbed at the top, sometimes mysteriously difficult to find) and then constructing review query emails.
Still, it’s amazing how many cool review sites are out there these days, and how many of them cover independently published books.
To that effect, if any of you readers run a legitimate book blog*, I’d be happy to trade you a free advance copy (electronic or paper) for a review. No requirement that it even be a good one 🙂 I like to think the book itself will stand (or flop) on it’s own, and I’m a firm believer in editorial freedom (and my own right to knock or praise things on this site as I see fit). For more information on the book itself, click here, or on the cover to the right. I’ll also post any reviews I find out about on my review page with a link back (unless they are scathing and not in the least bit funny :-)).
If you’re interested in reviewing, contact me here.
On the production front I’m awaiting (hopefully any minute) the final sketch for my new cover. The interior layout is also proceeding apace. I have final artwork back on my interior icons and hope to get an alpha of the complete paper typography any day now. I’ll share some of this with you shortly via other posts and even a planned two chapter sample. I also taught myself today how to generate epub and mobi files for the e-book version, which was a piece of cake.
*NOTE: by “legitimate book blog” I mean any site which regularly reviews books in a reasonably professional manner and has a publicly posted submissions policy.
Title: Already Dead
Author: Charlie Huston
Genre: Hardboiled Vampire
Length: 288 pages
Read: Dec 1 – Dec 9, 2011
Summary: Good hardboiled fun
Already dead is a contemporary New York take on the vampire myth, mated with, and steeped in the tradition of hardboiled crime fiction. Crucial to the hardboiled style, established by such masters as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, is the voice. Huston may be writing decades later but from the first few pages it’s obvious that he’s highly adept at the hardboiled voice. The novel is written in a lean mean first person present, unsentimental, even stripped of all dialog tagging (this last goes too far and it’s sometimes hard to tell who is speaking).
The protagonist is a vampyre (I don’t normally use the ‘y’ but this book does), and he’s also a sort of private dick for the seedy supernatural side of the Manhattan underworld. Huston’s vampires are not obviously supernatural, but the product of a Vyrus (his spelling). The narrator is very specific on the pros, cons, and lifestyle choices required to “live” with the Vyrus. This is no small part of the story’s appeal. The plot, is modeled after the hardboiled classics. He protag is hired to find someone. Several forces all have a steak in the outcome. The protag gets beat up a lot. There’s twisted sex wound up in the reveal.
This may be formula, but the execution is top notch and the ride well worth it.
After nine days of solid crunch I’ve finished the fourth (and hopefully final) draft of my second novel, Untimed (read more about it here). This involved reading the book three whole times in one week. Ug! But the book is essentially done done! I have just a few little tweaks remaining and some work to do on promotional/pitch materials and I’ll need to figure out how to sell it. This book really kicks ass. It clocks in at 75,000 words (just 300 pages) but a tremendous amount happens. Plus the voice is great and (I hope) hooks from the first line.
Now I really have to start gearing back into the production on my first novel, The Darkening Dream, and get that out the door. And start thinking about a new book for January. Woah!
The nerdgasm continues! HBO released another Game of Thrones Season 2 teaser.
NOTE: This is the one released on December 11, 2011, if you want the new January 29, 2012 trailer with more footage from the season, click here, an even newer February 24 version here, and the March 10 one here or the March 18 one here.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBrsM_WlfV8&feature=youtu.be]
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    My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed or all my Game of Thrones posts or episode reviews: Season 1: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] Season 2: [11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20] Season 3: [21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30] Season 4: [31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40] |
Today is a double nerdgasm day. Not only did Naughty Dog announce it’s new game, The Last of Us. But–
the Diablo 3 opening cinematic was released. The game itself should be coming in Q1 2012. Ah, so many games, so little time. I haven’t even had the moment(s) to pop in Skyrim. Been too busy packaging The Darkening Dream and editing Untimed.
Naughty Dog, the company I founded, has just released the trailer for their new game — and new franchise! This is the first new series since Uncharted launched in 2007. I have to say the new one looks totally awesome because it’s well — post apocalyptic zombie (which I love) — and in true Naughty Dog fashion totally gorgeous. Plus I love spunky heroines. This one, seemingly, but not actually voiced by actress Ellen Page of Juno fame* is totally cute, in a kind of jailbait sort of way.
I can totally see how the kind of intimate hand to hand and gunplay mechanics that Naughty Dog has been perfecting with Nathan Drake would adapt perfectly to this sort of The Road meets Juno world.
So I’m even more excited than I was for Uncharted 3, which is saying a lot!
*NOTE: According to this website, the leads are Miss Ashley Johnson and Troy Baker, as given by tweet from someone at Naughty Dog. And @Neil_Druckmann, my friend and the lead designer confirmed via twitter too, so it’s accurate.
Restaurant: Mark’s Duck House [1, 2]
Location: 6184 Arlington Blvd # A, Falls Church, VA 22044 703-532-2125
Date: November 30, 2011 & November 25, 2017
Cuisine: Cantonese Chinese
Rating: Very very good cantonese.
Mark’s Duck house is an amazing Cantonese place I go to when I’m home in Washington D.C.. There’s nothing fancy about them other than the food but they make a lot of stuff, and they make it all really well.
Below is the menu to end all menus.
Picking from that menu can be a bit of a challenge!
We tried to entice my three year-old with this “pasta.” (pan fried noodles with Buddha’s delight) but he declared “that’s not pasta!”
But he did go for this lo-mein with garlic.
Hot and sour soup. Classic, but delicious.
The hot and sour soup is so good it was almost finished by the time I got the camera pointed at it (in 2011, the above photo is from 2017).
Beer really goes best with Chinese. If you’ve ever had Chinese wine (I have) you know why.
Succulent “Har-gow” (shrimp dumplings).
The whole peking duck and a glimpse of the green onions and hoisin.
The pecking duck here is incredible. They make the pancakes for you if you want, but the whole assembly was brought out to the table. I had photos of it the last time I was here.
Lobster causeway style. Fried with lots and lots of garlic and a little chilies. One of my favorite Chinese lobster preps.
“Lightly” fried shrimp with the heads still on.
Stir-fried chive-blossoms. It sounds weird but they are incredibly good.
Baby bok choy with garlic. I don’t love full sizec bok, but these were quite nice actually.
Sizzling beef short ribs with black pepper sauce. These were tasty, but the hard part was getting the meat off the bone with chopsticks and teeth!
Filet Mignon with black pepper sauce. Very tender and delicious.
Sauteed mixed seafood in a nest.
“Sweet and sour pork.” At the Panda Express and the like they always have those fried pork balls (which I call fried lard balls). This is the ultimate version. Incredibly tasty!
Ma Po Tofu. Non spicy Cantonese version. Nice texture, but lacked the depth, heat, and mala of the real thing.
We had way way too much food as usual here. Seven people and this could have fed twelve. I rolled on out very satisfied, indeed.
The Darkening Dream just received it’s first pro review, from Kirkus Reviews.
Read it here on the new review page. Highlights include:
“A vampire novel with actual bite” and “wonderfully twisted sense of humor”
In other writing news, I’m through all the heavy lifting with regard to the Untimed line edits and hope to be done in a day or two! Woot! The book has shrunk 6,000+ words down to 75,000 without loosing any scenes.
Title: Steve Jobs
Author: Walter Isaacson
Genre: Biography
Length: 656 pages
Read: Nov 23 – Dec 1, 2011
Summary: Character study, not history.
It’s no secret that I’m a huge Apple fanboy. I owned an Apple II+ back in January 1981, a first generation Mac, and countless Apple’s since. As of late 2011 there are no less than five Macs, five iPhones, and two iPads in my house. I use no PCs and even my router is an Airport Extreme! I even owned a Newton and, one summer, used a NeXT as my primary computer!
But there was more to the experience of reading this book than pure fanboydom. As a technologist, programmer, and all-around nerd I lived every detail of the personal computer revolution. So except for the very beginning of this book, set in the late sixties and early seventies (before my coherent time) I remember the launches, products and moments first hand.
This biography is primarily a character study. It seeks by detailing the man’s actions to try and quantify and qualify the traits that made him the iconoclast that he was. The hero of this book is not a particularly likable man or even that rational. He was a fierce demon of passionate opinion, amazing taste, and an extraordinary instance of talent at the intersection of technology and art. Steve was willing to look beyond the baggage of how things have been done and see the way in which people actually approach products in their everyday life. His passion lead him to place the fulfillment of his product vision — from top to bottom — above nearly everything else in his (or those around him’s) lives.
This certainly worked out pretty well for the products, although it did take about twenty years for him to really get his groove on and learn from some of his earlier mistakes and excesses. But he never lightened up. Still, since most of us didn’t have to live with him, but do get to live with his products, hundreds of millions came out winners.
There are tremendous lessons in the book about designing great products. About focus, about integration, about simplicity and usability. About not painting your factories funny colors or shipping with far to little memory or a ridiculously slow optical drive. There is what feels like a very detailed portrait of the personality. The prose is top notch and pulls you along effortlessly without getting in your face. Isaacson certainly had extensive personal access to the man (and his colleagues). It’s a good read.
But for me it was a bit lacking in detail. Mostly I think this came down to length and an emphasis on character. The book isn’t short, but the man’s life — despite ending tragically early — was full. Steve did a lot. A lot. So none of it is nearly as specific as I — with my extreme interest in the subject — would like. You can read this book and really have very little idea what the hell NeXT was doing for 10 years. I do. I used several of them. Wrote some code on them. Followed them from founding through launch and beyond. Shook my head at the product (too slow — too expensive — too incompatible!) and read an entire book just on the topic. So if you want to read this book to understand exactly how Jobs got ousted from Apple, or how he wrangled his way back into its boardroom — it’s there — but the details are compressed. Even things as major as the LaserWriter are given about two sentences in passing. I might go find some books that detail the blow by blows of the product decisions because… well… I guess I care.
Still, I highly recommend this book for anyone with an interest in products, creativity, technology, or even the psychology of forceful individuals. Likable or not, Steve was the defining idea-man of the computer age.
Find out about my own books, here.
Or for my full list of book reviews.
An Icelandic TV station aired this peek at the end of shooting in Iceland for Season 2 of Game of Thrones (the awesome HBO Fantasy series). It even includes a glimpse of Ygritte (one of my favorite characters from the series) around the 6:30 mark.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JkFjvggMouU]Interesting those volcanic and glacier landscapes. Pretty alien looking, and this is only Iceland, I think GreenLand might be even more foreboding. But certainly this makes a great looking “beyond the wall” — which is a major part of books 2 and 3. I don’t envy them shooting on an Icelandic glacier in December! There’s probably two hours of sunlight up there too.
And also today there is another making of video on HBO’s site, this one about one of my favorite topics, medieval hand to hand combat! Nothing like a good war hammer to the head. Shuts ’em up quickly, does it right.
Computer and Video Games recently ran a piece on the Naughty Dog as a company and its pedigree of great games.
Founded by aspiring game developers Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin back in 1986, the pair knocked together a number of little-known titles on the Apple II and Amiga before changing their company’s name to Naughty Dog. …a four-game deal with Universal Interactive Studios, starting with Way of the Warrior – a Mortal Kombat-style fighting game for 3DO created using footage crudely filmed in an apartment [led to] none other than Crash Bandicoot on PSone.
…
The original Crash Bandicoot was one of the most important games on the original PlayStation. Not only did it give the then faceless platform a much-needed mascot – and one with bags of charm – but it also really showed what this powerful new CD-based console from Sony could do.
…
Naughty Dog, it seems, is as good at dreaming up new blockbuster adventure franchises as Sony is at making consoles. Fast forward to the present era, and although both of its founders have moved on to new ventures, Naughty Dog remains the name on the box of one of the PS3’s biggest exclusive franchises. Uncharted’s unrivaled cinematics and truly breathtaking set-pieces demonstrate a fantastic developer working at the absolute peak of its creative ability.
Location: 7271 Woodmont Avenue, Bethesda, MD 20814. 301.913-0003
Date: November 29, 2011
Cuisine: Spanish Tapas
Rating: Fun Tapas Bar
I’ve reviewed a lot of José Andrés restaurants on the blog, seven I think. This is een the second Jaleo. The Bazaar (REVIEW HERE) and his high end Saam, but also brunch at Trés, lunch at Trés, and to é by José Andrés and Jaleo in Vegas and Zaytinya also in Washington. Back to Jaleo, the restaurant at hand. It’s basically a straight up Spanish Tapas place but with a slightly modernized and enlarged menu.
The menu.
One annoyance of this particular branch — and not the restaurant’s fault — is the Maryland law against corkage. They have a fine list, but I had brought an amazing Spanish wine 3,000 miles! Parker gives it 91 points. “The 2008 Termes offers up a sexy perfume of cedar, spice box, violets, incense, espresso, and blackberry. Savory, concentrated, and well-balanced, this flavorful effort will benefit from several years of additional cellaring but can be approached now.”
“Gazpacho de remolacha con queso de cabra y naranjas. Chilled red beet soup with goat cheese and oranges.” I’m a total José Andrés gazpacho whore. I even make it at home home.
This is a different variant, kind of gazpacho meets borsch. It was fantastic. Beety, with that vinegary tang. Delicious.
“Dátiles con tocino ‘como hace todo el mundo. Fried dates wrapped in bacon.” Really how can you beat fried dates wrapped in bacon? Yum yum.
“Ensalada rusa. The ultimate Spanish tapa, a salad of potatoes, imported conserved tuna and mayonnaise.” The Spanish love potato salad.
“Aceitunas rellenas de anchoas y pimientos del piquillo. House-made stuffed olives with anchovies and roasted piquillo peppers.” This is another classic, and these are a really good implementation.
“Jamón Ibérico de bellota Fermin. Cured ham from the legendary, acorn-fed, black-footed Ibérico pigs of Spain and miscellaneous other Spanish meats like chorizo.”
“Pan con tomate. Toasted slices of rustic bread brushed with fresh tomato with Pasamontes farmhouse Manchego.” Basically Spanish bruschetta.
“Salpicón de cangrejo. Jumbo lump crabmeat with cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, cauliflower and Sherry dressing.” While Spanish in flavors I suspect this a bit of a nod to the Eastern shore. Big lumps of crabmeat too.
“Pan de recapte con anchoa. Traditional Catalan bread with peppers, tomatoes and salt-cured Spanish anchovies.” I really wanted Fresh Spanish anchovies, marinated (Anchovies en Boccerones) but they didn’t have them. These weren’t a bad substitute.
“Espinacas a la catalana. Sautéed spinach, pine nuts, raisins and apples.”
“Vieiras con romesco y mojo verde. Seared scallops with romesco sauce and mojo verde.”
“Lomo de buey. Grilled hanger steak with piquillo peppers.”
“Arroz con costillas de cerdo Ibérico de bellota. Made with the famous Ibérico de bellota pork ribs.”
“Arroz Mediterraneo. Made with porcini mushrooms, mixed vegetables, green and black olives and thyme.”
The dessert menu.
“A classic Spanish custard with creme and oranges.”
“Dark chocolate mousse with sponge cake and hazzelnut ice cream.”
“Various fruit sorbets.”
“Vanilla ice cream and grapefruit sorbet.”
“Chocolate ice cream.”
Jaleo is like a good Tapas place in Spain but a little slicker, with perhaps more consistant quality. And they don’t have fresh anchovies! It is also a little (actually more than a little) more expensive than a typical Spanish tapas place in Spain. But considering the scarcity of good tapas places in America… worth it.
I’m experimenting by allowing a guest post/interview by a fellow author. The novel, The Gaia Wars eBook edition has dropped to just 99 cents this week. So not much to lose by checking it out.
— Andy
About The Gaia Wars: DEADLY SECRETS have been buried in the Cascade mountain wilderness for centuries. Hidden. Out of sight and out of mind. Until today… Warren Wilkes, age 13, doesn’t like what a greedy housing developer has done to his peaceful mountain community, so he vandalizes the developer’s property, flees into the wild, and stumbles upon an ancient human skeleton revealed by torrential rain. More than old bones have been exposed, however, and the curious artifact Warren finds makes him question his own identity, and his connection to an ancient terror. A terror destined to rise again and annihilate all that Warren loves. He must fight or see his whole world destroyed. Get it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
About Battle for Cascadia: When Warren Wilkes, age 13, stumbles upon a mysterious relic deep in the Cascade Mountains, wonder reigns. Brimming with secrets and sentient energy, the relic leads Warren to a fantastic chamber, and to shocking revelations about his identity. Now wonder has turned to dread. A forgotten terror—a demon that knows Warren better than he knows himself—has risen again and is assembling an army; gathering power with a singularly evil goal in mind: to capture and enslave the wild spirit of the Earth itself. As war erupts and the planet slips into chaos, Warren embraces his destiny and finds help where he least expects it. Get it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
About the Author: Kenneth G. Bennett is the author of the Young Adult novels The Gaia Wars and Battle for Cascadia (the second book of The Gaia Wars), as well as the forthcoming Exodus 2018, a paranormal thriller set in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. A wilderness enthusiast who loves backpacking, skiing and kayaking, Ken enjoys novels that explore the relationship between humans and the wild. He lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and son. Visit him on his website, Twitter, Facebook, or GoodReads.
Where did you find the inspiration for this novel?
The idea began with an article I read about The Gaia Hypothesis. This hypothesis, proposed by NASA scientist James Lovelock, says, in brief: “all organisms and their inorganic surroundings on Earth make up a single, self-regulating entity.” In other words, the Earth itself is a living thing. A vast, “super-organism.”
I love this idea! And when I first read about it I wondered how it might be woven into a novel. In my imagination, and in conversations with friends, I took the Gaia Hypothesis one step further. “What if Gaia (the Earth) is not simply alive,” I asked, “but also sentient?” It occurred to me that a lot of so-called primitive cultures believed this very thing. Understood it in their bones.
Then I was backpacking with my son Eli (age 9 at the time). After a few days in the wilderness, feeling more connected to the land, perhaps, I started to tell Eli the story of The Gaia Wars. He loved it. It took me about a year to write the book and refine it.
Warren Wilkes is quite the unexpected hero. Tell us about him. Is he someone you’ve met before, or is he completely fictional?
My son and his friends are all pretty outdoorsy kids. They’ve backpacked and skied and kayaked and climbed since they were really little, so Warren (a sort of feral, wilderness boy) is probably a composite of the kids I see every day.
This story’s setting is incredibly vivid. How did the Cascade Mountains influence your writing? Do you believe you could have told the same story in a different setting, or would it have been missing something otherwise?
North Cascades National Park is one of my favorite places on the planet, and I go there often. It’s easy to find inspiration in the ancient forests and high-alpine meadows of that region. I’ve also been heavily influenced by Olympic National Park, and by wild areas in Alaska, where I spent much of my childhood. The landscapes in the book contain elements of all of those places.
The Mendari aliens and their organic droids, the Fabrinels, mix-up the story in a way nothing else could have (not even the irksome Mr. Finley). How did you go about creating these other races and defining their culture and behavior?
The Mendari are fantastically advanced, technologically, but suffer from a civilization-wide melancholy. They have every device and contraption imaginable, but in the process of acquiring all this stuff, they’ve nearly destroyed their lovely planet and suffocated their own wild souls. They venture to Earth out of desperation, and with newfound humility, hoping to regain the wisdom they lost millennia ago. The Mendari race is basically the Human race in a few hundred years—if we don’t get our act together in terms of taking care of our planet.
Gaia, or Onatah, is the living embodiment of the Earth Mother. Without giving anything away, tell the readers how she fits into the story.
Gaia, the Earth Mother, represents the wild soul of the planet. She’s the wellspring of all life; the source of the DNA that animates everything from bacteria to redwood trees to homo sapiens. But we humans have reached the point where we think maybe we don’t need to be connected to this wild soul any longer. We see ourselves as separate from the natural world. I think this kind of hubris is a huge mistake, and that’s reflected in the story.
How much research did you have to do in order to learn about the Denelai people’s folklore and nature rituals? How did you find this information?
I love to learn about Native American culture, modern and ancient, and have read a lot about what North America was like prior to European contact. I’m steeped in that history, but the Denelai culture is entirely a product of my imagination—not based on any one people or tribe.
Your cast of characters has very interesting names—ones I suspect were not chosen arbitrarily. Please tell us how you came up with the names for Ina, Mirra, Uhlgoth, and the others.
I greatly admire the name-inventing abilities of authors such as Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling, Ursula K. LeGuin and (of course) J.R.R. Tolkien. I worked really hard to come up with names that fit the various characters in The Gaia Wars.
You leave The Gaia Wars off on a very big cliff-hanger. What made you decide to take this gutsy literary move—channeling Warren, are you?
The Gaia Wars ends at what felt to me like a natural stopping point (or at least a “pausing” point)–A slight break in the action before all hell breaks loose in Battle for Cascadia.
Battle for Cascadia picks up where the first book leaves off. What can we expect from the sequel? Are there any major ways in which the style or plot line is different than The Gaia Wars?
Battle for Cascadia is a direct and immediate continuation of The Gaia Wars. Many of the storylines begun in Gaia draw to a conclusion in Battle—but not all of them! There are a lot of mysteries left to unravel in those rugged North Cascade canyons.
You’re going to give us more Warren Wilkes, right?! Please tell us you’re planning a third book in the series, and if you can, give us some clues about what happens next.
Absolutely! Warren and company find themselves in a very dangerous place and in very perilous circumstances at the conclusion of Battle. There’s a whole lot of story left to tell.
Title: Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1
Director/Stars: Kristen Stewart (Actor), Robert Pattinson (Actor), Bill Condon (Director)
Genre: Fantasy
Watched: December 3, 2011
Summary: Cringe, Laugh, or Barf
Besides the shameless grab at our wallets (splitting the movie into two parts) BDP1 is certainly the most cringeworthy episode yet. First of all, from a structural point of view, the first half has no conflict. Therefore no plot.
It’s not that nothing happens. We have a lovely wedding video and then a fully censored honeymoon. But plot requires conflict, and the only two bits of that we have here are a brief Jacob/Edward chest thumping and Edward’s steadfast foot dragging at the notion of banging his wife more than once. This section of the film is pure wish fulfillment again. The perfect wedding, the perfect honeymoon. Plus a few bruises and one unwanted demonic pregnancy.
But the second half is perhaps even worse. Here we have manufactured wolf/vamp conflict that really no one cares about and a bit of a minor quandary for Bella and Jacob. Edward (and pretty much everyone else in the film) just does their thing. The inciting incident occurs at the midpoint. And the entire movie, BTW, lacks a villain. Unless you count the very weak antagonism of Jacob’s pack leader Sam. Yeah, no villain.
I’m not sure what the second half is. Special effects allow Bella a credible impersonation of a pregnant concentration camp inmate. Edward frets. Jacob does a lot of running back and forth in the woods listening to the CGI call of the wild. The birth was disturbing, but also felt censored.
Kristen Stewart, however, does a pretty impressive job with this role. Even more than the previous films this one focused on her. We have long, long shots just of her face — like walking up the isle — and she manages to bring Bella’s character to life. I’m not sure I want Bella to be alive, but it’s actually a really solid acting job considering the script. Oh, and she’s looking even better in this film (first half). Bikinis in Brazil are better than jeans and hoodies in Forks. Way better than the Twiggy-supreme look.
Love the claw prints!
Let’s see, can we list some of the more amusing moments: Edward breaking the marriage bed. His cheesy confession to having killed in the “old days” — except wait — it was only molesters, rapists, and murderers. He’s just too pure for any genuine vampire feasting. The way the Brazilian house keeper is magically an expert on vampire babies, even though none of the vampires know anything about them. The wolf voiceover argument and growl fest. That one really takes the cake. The Volturi camp at the end of the movie. And so, so many more.
I was enjoying myself during the film. I laughed a lot. A real lot. But it was “at” not “with.”
And it’s worth checking out this Cracked magazine review of the whole series too.
Read my Twilight review or New Moon or Eclipse or BDP2.
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