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The Mark of the Dragonfly is Middle Grade Steampunk Wrapped in Fantasy Clothing

The Mark of the Dragonfly is Middle Grade Steampunk Wrapped in Fantasy Clothing

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The Mark of the Dragonfly-smallThe Mark of the Dragonfly
Jaleigh Johnson
Delacorte Books for Young Readers (March 25, 2014, 400 pages, $16.99)

Thirteen-year-old Piper has two goals: make enough money to get away from her impoverished scrapper town and to see the world. She knows it’s unlikely to accomplish either by selling the trinkets that periodically rain from the sky. She’s never known anyone who got rich selling the assorted mysterious artifacts that found their way from other worlds to hers via unexplainable meteor showers. Instead, Piper earns money by working as a machinist. She can fix anything anyone brings her, even objects that other machinists deem beyond hope. She makes enough to survive by fixing mechanical oddities, but she knows that she won’t realize her dreams doing that, either.

When Piper finds a girl with a Dragonfly tattoo on her arm after a meteor storm, Piper believes she has found her ticket out of town. The tattoo signifies the girl — Anna — is protected by the King of the Dragonfly Territories, and so Piper assumes there must be a reward for her return. They escape the scrapper town by jumping aboard the 401, a train that Piper has always dreamed of riding. Once it becomes apparent that Anna isn’t who she seems, Piper must decide which is more important — living her own dreams or protecting a girl with dangerous enemies.

Full disclosure: Johnson and I are both members of the All Rights Reserved writing group. I’ve loved this book since it was nothing more than a map and a vague concept about trains and otherworldly treasures. I’m happy to report that reading Dragonfly in its published form is even more captivating as the first read through.

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Kidnapping, Murder, and Disrupting Traffic on Public Roadways: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter Three: Time Bomb

Kidnapping, Murder, and Disrupting Traffic on Public Roadways: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter Three: Time Bomb

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Adventures of Captain Marvel Part 3-smallToday, before the lights go down and our show begins, we have a brief public sevice message. No, it’s not about the YMCA car wash or the Friends of the Library book sale. It’s about where you can find The Adventures of Captain Marvel for your own viewing.

The serial was last released on DVD in 2003, but is now only available used — the Amazon marketplace has several copies available. They can be a bit pricey, however; the serial was ten dollars ten years ago, when I bought mine new, but now the cheapest copies on Amazon are twice that.

A true hero never despairs, though, and there’s good news for those who want to experience serial thrills first hand, instead of just hacking their way through my breathless prose descriptions. The Adventures of Captain Marvel is available to watch on YouTube, along with many other classic (and not so classic) serials. It’s a great place to get acquainted — or reacquainted — with this kind of storytelling.

If online serial watching whets your appetite for more Saturday matinee thrills, I enthusiastically direct you to the Serial Squadron, a great group of people who seek out and restore serials — many of them rare or even thought to be lost. You can visit them at www.serialsquadron.com. They make remastered copies (often with plenty of great extras) for sale on DVD and also make them available for free viewing on their own YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/user/serialsquadron.

Now, sit back and let the wizard Shazam transport you to a world of action and excitement where evil keeps things interesting but justice is bound to prevail!

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Doctor Strange Gets a Director

Doctor Strange Gets a Director

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Strange Tales 110 Doctor Strange-smallI’ve been getting cranky waiting for progress on Marvel’s Doctor Strange movie, and as the wait has stretched out, I’ve been getting progressively more pessimistic (see my March post, Hurry Up With That Doctor Strange Movie, Marvel.)

The property has enormous potential to be something completely original in the superhero genre — namely a faithful rendition of Steve Ditko’s playful (and totally bonkers) inter-dimensional setting, which is what first blew away so many readers of Doctor Strange in the 1960s. A hero whose adventures routinely took him to gorgeous, bizarre, imaginative, and frequently monster-filled realms where normal concepts of space and distance were useless was something totally new, and readers thrilled to it — and it took Ditko’s unique genius to really make it work.

However, Marvel Studios took a huge step forward this week, announcing that they had selected a director for the film: Scott Derrickson, writer/director of the terrific little horror film Sinister, perhaps the best horror flick of 2012. Derrickson has an impressive resume as a writer/director, including The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) and the upcoming Deliver Us from Evil (July 2014). He was also the director of the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

If you’re getting a strong horror vibe off  Derrickson’s resume, you’re not alone. Matt D. Wilson at Comics Alliance did a fine job of articulating my own feelings on the announcement yesterday:

Seriously, though, that’s pretty interesting, considering that Doctor Strange has never been what I’d call a horror character, despite his many dealings with supernatural forces, demons, dark magic, and so forth. But his stories have always tended to be more fantastical, while other Marvel characters, such as Son of Satan, Werewolf By Night, and, you know, Dracula, have tended to be more horror-focused. The decision perhaps suggests a tone that won’t necessarily please Doctor Strange fans, but may be very palatable to general movie audiences, who made the low-budget Sinister a surprise hit back in 2012.

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The How’s and Why’s of Outlining

The How’s and Why’s of Outlining

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Outling your novelHello everyone. I’m Jon Sprunk and I’m an outline-a-holic.

I used to be a write-by-the-seat-of-my-pants – or pantser – once upon a time. After many false starts, I even managed to finally complete a novel manuscript with that method, although it took me nearly four years to revise it into something I could submit.

So that’s my first reason. Outlining has greatly cut down on my revision time. When I was pantsing it, I never had much idea about where the story was going beyond a vague notion about the main characters and their basic conflict. And so, after the first draft I had a huge pile of… well, stuff… and my next job was to sift through it for a coherent and consistent story. I had many scenes I couldn’t use, at least not in their original form, and many spots where I needed to go back and write new scenes to fill crucial gaps in the story. Not that I don’t still need to do those things as an outliner, but far less often.

The second reason is work ethic. Part of the reason it took me so long to finish projects as a pantser was that I’m the type of person who needs a plan in order to stay on-task. When I was just winging it, it was too easy to blow off the writing on any given day because it felt like an endless project. I need to see my progress, and word count is too abstract when I have no idea if my story would end up being 50,000 words or 500,000.

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New Treasures: Two Serpents Rise by Max Gladstone

New Treasures: Two Serpents Rise by Max Gladstone

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Two Serpents Rise-smallYou know what irks me? Writers who write faster than I can read, that’s what irks me.

A few years back, I got all excited by Max Gladstone’s debut novel, Three Parts Dead, which I described as “a high-stakes tale of dead gods, necromancers, and dark dealings in a richly-imagined urban landscape.” Apparently I wasn’t the only one — last year Gladstone was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and Tor moved quickly to snap up his next novels.

Recently, Tor announced that Full Fathom Five, the third book in what’s now known as the Craft Sequence, will be released on July 15, 2014, and Gladstone has already contracted for a fourth, Last First Snow, plus at least one more. Here’s how Gladstone summed up the deal on his blog back in February:

The big news hit Publisher’s Weekly on Friday: Tor Books has bought two more novels in the Craft Sequence! So, after Full Fathom Five, I get to play more in this world of creepy lawyers, boss skeletons, existential uncertainty and gargoyles and undead gods. The first of the pair is done already — in fact, this morning I finished the fourth draft, a bit ahead of schedule.

Wait, what? I don’t even have a copy of the second one yet!

A hasty trip to Amazon rectified that and yesterday Two Serpents Rise finally crossed my humble threshold. It sounds pretty good, too.

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Hiking Along Hadrian’s Wall

Hiking Along Hadrian’s Wall

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The Roman fort of Segedunum, Newcastle, as seen from a viewing tower attached to the museum.
The Roman fort of Segedunum, Newcastle, as seen from a viewing tower attached to the museum. The large square building in the foreground is the commander’s villa. Behind it was the fort’s HQ. The narrow buildings on the left are barracks. The start of the trail can be seen as a break in the trees.

The United Kingdom has dozens of great long-distance hiking routes. From easy country strolls to rugged treks across the Scottish Highlands, they offer it all. One of the best things about hiking in the UK for the history lover is the number of historic and archaeological sites you can see along the way. Perhaps the best route for this is the Hadrian’s Wall Path, which runs 84 miles along the entire length of the wall.

When I hiked the path, I decided to start at Newcastle upon Tyne and walk the entire way west to Bowness-on-Solway, on Solway Firth, thus crossing the country and seeing every bit of the wall. One advantage to starting in Newcastle is that you get to see the Roman fort of Segedunum to give you a taste of what’s to come. Once you get out of the urban sprawl, you have nothing but nature until Carlisle.

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Ancient Worlds: Talking to Yourself Again?

Ancient Worlds: Talking to Yourself Again?

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The lady has her own chariot. Pulled by dragons. BY DRAGONS, people. Why this isn't called "Medea and the guys she got a ride from" instead of the Argonautica...When the Argonauts land in Colchis, Jason makes a novel suggestion.

“Hey guys! Let’s, like, NOT storm the castle and steal what we want. Let’s go up, ring the doorbell, and ask politely! What’s the worst that could happen?”

To which King Aeetes responds, “Golden Fleece? Sure you can have it! All you have to do is plow a field with a plow pulled by fire breathing oxen, plant a few acres with dragon’s teeth, wait til those dragon’s teeth turn into fully grown armed men, and then kill them all before they get you. Do it myself all the time.”

It’s a folklore classic: the impossible task. Our hero gets the prize of his dreams (princess, kingdom, unimaginable wealth, golden fleece) as soon as he does something that no human being can possibly do. And then s/he does it.

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… and Miniature Figures

… and Miniature Figures

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grenadier1After its initial release in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons enjoyed several periods of mainstream popularity, even faddishness, the largest of which was undoubtedly between 1981 to 1984 or thereabouts, which coincided with the release of not one but two different Basic Sets aimed at younger players. I myself benefited from an earlier surge in interest in the game following the widely publicized disappearance of Michigan State University student James Dallas Egbert III in August 1979. Though the mystery surrounding the young man’s whereabouts was ultimately proven to have nothing to do with D&D, early speculation suggested otherwise, both because Egbert was a player of the game and because it was a game unlike any familiar to most Americans at that time. Playing up the role – no pun intended – supposedly played by this “weird” new game was a great journalistic hook that probably sold a lot of newspapers and magazines.

My father was one of those who, thanks to those newspapers and magazines, became fascinated by the Egbert disappearance and, by extension, Dungeons & Dragons. I also recall that, a couple of years later, he read two novels inspired by these real world events (Rona Jaffe’s Mazes & Monsters and John Coyne’s Hobgoblin), neither of which engendered any interest in me, unlike the news stories, which I followed almost as avidly as he did. It was this fascination on my father’s part that led to my mother’s purchase of a copy of the 1977 D&D Basic Set for him, a set I eventually inherited due to his disinterest in actually learning to play the game itself.

Thirty-five years on, what I remember most keenly about those sensationalist articles is how often they were accompanied by photos of college or high school kids sitting around a table in the center of which were painted miniature figures. In at least one case, I recall a very detailed photograph of an armored humanoid creature – an orc perhaps? – and seeing that image enchanted me. Like most children, I’d played lots of board games, but none of them had playing pieces that looked anything like that one. What kind of game was this Dungeons & Dragons that it had such terrific pieces?

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To The Dark Tower He Came: Warlock of the Witch World by Andre Norton

To The Dark Tower He Came: Warlock of the Witch World by Andre Norton

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oie_305718ZdC2d7IWIn my previous reviews of Andre Norton’s Year of the Unicorn and Three Against the Witch World, I wrote how exciting it was to discover that a series I had long overlooked was so much fun. I am happy to report that with Warlock of the Witch World (1967), things get even better.

In Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Reginald, Menville, and Burgess, Andre Norton wrote that “the background of most of [Witch World] is based on Celtic and early English folklore. Warlock of the Witch World is a retelling of “Childe Roland.” In the original Scottish ballad, the children of the queen are playing ball. When the daughter, Burd Ellen, dances widershins around the church, she vanishes. Her four brothers learn she has been taken prisoner by the King of Elfland. One by one, her brothers set off to save her, each disappearing in turn until only the youngest brother remains. Armed with a magic sword, he undertakes the quest — his siblings’ last hope.

In Three Against the Witch World, the three children of the dimensionally transported American, Simon Tregarth, and a Witch of Estcarp, Jaelithe, have escaped their homeland to the hidden land of Escore. There, the arrival of the triplets — warrior Kyllan, scholar Kemoc, and witch Kaththea — reawakened dark forces long asleep and reignited a war between the forces of Shadow and Light. By the end of the book, the stage for a final confrontation was being set. Allies for the armies of Light were being sought and marshaled in the magically protected Valley of Green Silences.

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A Page-Turning Creepy Thriller: A Review of Authority by Jeff VanderMeer

A Page-Turning Creepy Thriller: A Review of Authority by Jeff VanderMeer

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Jeff VanderMeer Authority-smallAuthority is the second novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, which has a very aggressive 2014 publishing schedule. I recently reviewed the first volume, Annihilation. Though I loved the first book, I also found it incredibly frustrating in that it stacked up a lot of mysteries providing little to no answers. As I had hoped, the second volume, Authority, begins to shed some light on some of these mysteries.

The Southern Reach Trilogy centers upon a government agency (i.e. the Southern Reach) that is responsible for investigating, and containing, Area X, an expanse of (presumably American) southern coastland that has been “captured” (in some strange way) by some sort of unexplained anomaly. Whereas the first volume Annihilation centered upon a seemingly doomed expedition that went into Area X, the second volume Authority centers upon the Southern Reach agency itself outside of Area X, out in the real world (presumably our world).

Our main viewpoint character is John Rodriguez, a fairly young bureaucrat and ex-spy, who is the new director of the Southern Reach. Rodriquez goes by the code name “Control,” which is ironic given that he seems to have so little of it throughout the book. We slowly learn that Control has a somewhat tainted vocational track record and that his new appointment to the Southern Reach is perhaps his last chance to redeem himself. But this government job is like no other that Control has had before and he may very well be in too deep for his own good.

Authority seems to pick up where the last book left off. The Southern Reach has recently picked up three survivors from the last mission — which in itself is puzzling since Annihilation seemed to end with possibly only one survivor. Control attempts to piece together the disparate threads of this last mission as well as various other endeavors that the Southern Reach has also been attempting. The revelations we get — what few we do get — are far from satisfying, much less reassuring, for Control.

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