Great read. Reminds me of books I read 30 years ago. It starts off with a bang — given that the first chapter features a naked seventeen year-old girl!
This is a very likable teen romance about an Idaho girl’s first real relationship and of course… how she lost her virginity. It’s sort of like Judy Blume’s Forever, but updated and minus the good sex.
I stumbled upon this independent and self published author who is selling very well (mostly on Amazon) with no prior print history. This is a fun book. But it’s an Indy book. It’s professional, but it’s also the novel equivalent of a B movie. Written quickly, revised quickly, and sold cheaply. The author has enough talent to shoot higher.
Interesting how a good TV writing team can really spruce something up. The book is good — particularly the voice — but the show is amazing.
The Spirit Thief straddles a fairly unique line between totally straight up 80s fantasy and comedic fantasy the likes of River of Dancing Gods or Myth Conceptions. It’s not however as totally comic as those, and somehow seems a bit smaller and lighter (if that’s possible).
Line editing and polish is an interesting part of the process of professional writing. It bears a lot of similarities to optimizing code as a programmer, but more fun. One of the weird things is that no mater how many…
Hmmm. The voice is engaging, and it’s certainly easy to read. The idea is great. The characters fine, not good but fine. The writing is stiff, and the plotting… oh the plotting is pretty awful. I really don’t understand why it sold so well.
A bit of a silly high concept dystopian future, where at 16 teenagers get an operation that promotes them from “uglies” (normal people) to super improved “pretties.” However, the voice is solid and captivating and the action well written.
This is the kind of film they rarely make anymore where it’s essentially a character movie woven around a romance. The script is great, the acting’s great, and the direction is great. It’s a funny movie, but not in the laugh a minute kind of way, but in a wry more or less real way.
Retarded title aside, this is a pretty good film. Caveats, however, abound. If you haven’t seen all the previous installments or read the books — forget making sense of it. But then again, who hasn’t?
The good news is that the comments from my Nov 13 draft came back Tuesday and they were very positive, and a lot less extensive than the previous three batches. So hot off an intense 8 day mega redraft, followed…
For early 80’s television, the show holds up amazingly well. Sure the picture quality of the DVD transfer is mediocre, and it would’ve benefited from wide screen shooting, but it’s still better than most TV today. Some of the acting, particularly reaction shots, still retains that 70s/80s cheese factor. But the 2 hour pilot plays more like a movie, a Michael Mann movie, in fact.
This afternoon I finished the rough cut of my 7th major draft of my novel, The Darkening Dream. In my process, a rough cut is a draft (in this case v4.55 — yes you can tell I’m also a computer programmer)…
Superficially this book might seem very Hogwarts, a young girl’s parents die suddenly, and then she is bundled by her mysterious grandfather off to a creepy gothic prep school in Maine. But it’s anything but derivative.
Everyone must have thought: With the little half-length first season, and such a strong second season, that Buffy season 3 was heading toward a huge sophomore slump. But no, this season is even better than the second.
This is the sequel to Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades. It’s just as easy to read and picks up with the same two main protagonists. John Perry narrates in first person as he did in the first novel.
This isn’t a film for everyone, certainly not for most women. Like the original Predator, it’s a guy’s film. Set in Northern Britain, this is the story of a bunch of Roman soliders on the run from a group of Pictish warriors (old old school Scotts) who want nothing better than to hack off their heads and carry them back to their village. Now, you actually can’t totally blame the Picts, they have their reasons.
The Buffy pilot is a work of art. In just 74 minutes, it manages to effortlessly introduce a big cast and a complex setup. But it’s the dialog that sells the entire series, and how that manages to consistently characterize a big cast of very funny, yet very real people, caught up in ridiculous situations. There’s a rhythm to it, capturing natural teen dialog, self referentially referred to as “buffy-speak.”