Unboxing the Galley Copies of The Changeling King
23 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Lulu, Noor A Jahangir, Paul Davies art, The Changeling King, Trollking
As promised, the unboxing of the galley copies of The Changeling King. The cover by Paul Davies looks even more awesome in print and the overall feel and look of the cover is good. I think we will have the the title text adjusted so that it isn’t so close to the trim. Also, the page layout is off by a page which will obviously be rectified for the retail version.
Paul Davies: Fantasy Artist
18 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: fantasy art, Paul Davies, Ralph Horsley, sf, The Changeling King, wacom
My regular readers and supporters will recognise the name Paul Davies as the artist behind the awesome new book cover for The Changeling King. I thought my followers and fans of fantasy fiction may like to know more about this rising star in fantasy art.
Paul, let’s start with an obvious question, who is your favorite artist and why?
There are many, many artists who’s work I admire, but at the moment I’m really into Ralph Horsley’s work. His use of colour, lighting and composition is striking and inspiring. He is a true master of his trade.
Where do you do your artwork?
Mostly sitting at my desk here at home using a wacom tablet and a copy of photoshop on a 19 inch monitor. I’m currently saving up for a wacom cintiq, an advanced (and expensive!) graphics tablet that allows users to draw directly onto the screen for a more traditional feel.
Do you work from life, or from photographs or from imagination?
It depends on the subject matter but I mostly work from imagination. Over the years I’ve been able to build up a library of references in my mind through study, which helps me to clearly visualise what I want to do when starting a new illustration.
Whenever I need to look up something specific, I usually turn to my ever growing collection of books and photographs. Failing that, I use the artist’s best friend: google image search.
What moves you most in life, either to inspire or upset you?
Sleep.
Not enough sleep upsets me. Give me a good night’s sleep and I’m ready to take on the world!
Seriously though, I’d say friends and family are the things that move me most in life. Working as a freelance artist has its ups and downs. Often I’ll be working in solitude for up to ten hours a day which can be stressful, especially with deadlines looming.
Luckily I have a great group of close friends who I meet up with regularly to relax and unwind. They are all fellow artists and we often share our ideas, thoughts and worries!
Where do you feel your art is going?
I’m always trying to improve my work using whatever means I can. Whether it’s through reading colour theory books or experimenting with new techniques. At the moment, one of the things I’m trying to do is loosen up my style. By this, I mean trying to use more energetic, dynamic brush strokes to suggest shapes rather than trying to render everything in the finest detail. It can be both time saving and aesthetically pleasing when mastered.
Why fantasy and science-fiction?
They’re two genres that have always been a part of my life. I grew up in the 80′s and 90′s when fighting fantasy books were extremely popular. My brother was an avid collecter at the time and he would often leave them laying around the house. I was around 8 or 9 at the time and I used to read them all. It wasn’t long before I was copying the interior illustrations and realising that I could actually draw.
Then in the early 90′s I started collecting a series of fantasy magazines called The Ancestral Trail, illustrated by the brilliant Julek Heller. It was his work that made me realise that fantasy artwork was something I wanted to pursue as a career.
What is your favorite piece that you have worked on?
Hmmm, tough one….
I’ve done so many over the last few years that it’s really difficult to choose just one. Some notable ones that I really enjoyed working on include the first cover I did for IDG’s Warcraft Magazine. It was an image of a night elf that I spent two weeks painting and it went down great with the team. It’s one of my favourite images.
More recently I did a painting two of my favourite female cartoon characters: Jessica Rabbit and Holly Would, you can see it over on my DeviantArt page. I got some great feedback!
Ouch! I was kind of hoping you would say The Changeling King, but I appreciate your honesty. What technique do you use?
I mostly work digitally using a wacom tablet and a copy of Photoshop. In terms of style and technique, it all depends on what the client wants. I can work in a wide range of styles from cartoony to hyper-realism. Every brief is different which helps to keep things fresh.
Which is more important to you, the subject of your painting, or the way it is executed?
Professionally speaking, it’s all about execution. Competition is fierce in the industry and if you want to make living then it’s essential to be at least as technically proficient as your rival artists and have an illustration style that’s popular. The pool of talent out there is increasing daily and if you want regular work then you’ve got to keep honing your skills.
I’ve been illustrating for the best part of eight years and I still feel like I’ve got a lot to learn. It’s a fascinating, exciting, and sometimes downright scary journey but I’m loving every minute of it!
Thank you for joining me today and I really look forward to your future peices. I’m sure there are great things in store for you.
Book Review: City of Bones by Cassandra Clare
05 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
in Books Tags: book reviews, cassandra clare, City of bones, mortal instruments, Noor A Jahangir
City of Bones by Cassandra Clare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
City of Bones is the first book in the successful ‘The Mortal Instruments’ series by Cassandra Clare. The cover art features a city skyline representing New York (that is where the story is set), with the muscular torso of a man in the background. There are suggestions of angelic tattoos on his skin. The cover gives a fair clue of what to expect in this book.
The story opens with Clary, the protagonist of this novel, and her friend Simon trying to get into a night club called Pandemonium. There they encounter Jace, Alec and Isabelle, three Shadowhunters, descendants of the original Nephilim, i.e. part-man, part-angel, out slaying a rogue vampire. The next time Clary encounters Jace, she recieves a concerning phone call from her mother telling her to stay away from home. Of course, Clary doesn’t listen, legs it home only to find that her mother has disapeered and their home has been ransacked. There she is attacked by a demon, which she manages to slay through dumb luck but is poisoned. Jace arrives on the scene and takes her to Shadowhunter HQ, the Institute. Here she learns that her carefully constructed view of the world is false and that the world is made up of three species, Mundanes (humans), Downworlders (vampires, werewolves and other part-demons) and Nephilim. She also learns that her mother has been kidnapped by a fascist Nephilim called Valentine, who everyone thought was dead but isn’t and wants to wipe out all Downworlders, and that he will eventually kill Clary’s mother (who also happens to be his ex-wife) unless he gets his hands on the Mortal Cup (not the Holy Grail). Clary’s mission then is to find the cup first and try and get her mother back.
Now as I said before, this is a hugely succesful series with a big following so obviously Cassandra Clare is doing something right. Structurally and grammatically it is well-written though there seems to be a terrible case of Theasaurus raiding going on. This is supposed to be aimed at the YA market and yet a lecturer in English (or a writer in my case) would struggle with some of the words that litter the book. Luckily, I have a built-in dictionary on my Kindle app and was able to negotiate my way through, though these slight but often detours threw me off from getting into the story proper. As a result, the dialogue comes across as a tad unnatural, with the teenage cast mixing slang with six syllable words.
The lead characters seem like they’ve been lifted from Twilight, with Jace coming across as Edward Cullin and Alec and Isabelle as his snooty sister and her boyfriend. Plus, apparently, werewolves and vampires hate each other, almost as much as they hate Shadowhunters. The plot also resonates with Percy Jackson and there is a reveal towards the end that stinks of Star Wars (check one of my earlier comments if you want to spoil it for yourself) that made me groan aloud. Aside from the conceptualisation of the Nephilim/Shadowhunters, there doesn’t seem much that is original (despite what Stephenie Myers jacket quote states). Tim Waggoner does the whole demonic world thing better in his Nekroplis. There is plenty in the way of plot going on, but those clangers don’t help situation and I didn’t ever feel the burning need to pick up the story and read it.
My honest opinion is that there is plenty of independantly published novels out there that are better than the City of Bones, as well as a stack of traditionally published YA novels that are more worth your reading time. But then there’s still that big huge following that this series has which may suggest that I’ve got it wrong. I guess you’ll have to make your own mind up.
New Cover Art and Print Version Announcement
01 Feb 2012 1 Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, Noor A Jahangir, Paul Davies, Smashwords, The Changeling King, Warcraft
Dear Readers,
I thought I’d give you a little break from all the book reviews that I’ve been doing recently and share some real, exciting news. First of all I’d like to share with you (to the left, to the left, to the left) the brand new cover art for The Changeling King, by Paul Davies. If the style looks a little familiar, its because Paul has done quite a bit of work for the World of Warcraft, with several Warcraft magazine covers to his credits.
The cover art features a scene from the book set at the end of the Age of Alvor, when the Trollking laid siege to the Alvor city of Ranush. The dude in the armour, carrying the T-blade sword is the changeling who became the Trollking, mounted on a nicor (a wingless dragon that inhabits the marshes and rivers of Kryllon). Needless to say I love this cover and really hope that you will too.
Why does The Changeling King need a new cover? Well, as much as I’m a fan of ebooks, the world is still (me included) very much in love with the traditional print book and it would be stupid therefore not to make The Changeling King accessible to as many readers as possible. Along with the cover art, the text will be revised too (because there are still mistakes in there that I find annoying). The book is going to be a trade paperback, i.e. its going to be as big as a hardback but with a softcover. Its going to be about 250 pages long and depending on printing costs, will retail for about £11.99. The ebook version will retail at about £1.90. I’m aiming to launch the print version sometime in the summer, with a number of local book signings. The ebook should be available sooner from Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and Diesel books. The print version will be available at online stores Lulu, Amazon and Barnes and Noble, but will also be available to order from your local bookshop. Keep an eye out for competitions for free book giveaways through Goodreads and the Facebook page.
You can check out more of Paul Davies art at http://www.pdportraits.co.uk/index_files/Gallery.html
Review: The Ancients by Nick Marsh
23 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Books Tags: fantasy, nick marsh, reviews, the ancients
The Ancients by Nick Marsh
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The Ancients is a fantasy novel with an element of science fiction thrown in. The setting is the aftermath of a civil war, with the king captured and his former advisor and friend installing himself as the Lord Protector. The last of the Royal Guard, Dazlar, returns home to his village of birth. Just outside his village, he discovers the body of a dead woman on the side of the road. Hoping that someone will recognize her in the village, Dazlar takes the body with him, but then the body comes back to life. After a short homecoming, Dazlar agrees to take the woman, who has no memory of who she is, to the nearest large settlement. The problem is that the woman is of interest to the Lord Protector, because of her link to an artifact left by the Ancients, beings of great power who created the world and ruled over them for centuries before mysteriously disappearing. Legend has it that the Ancients will return. The Lord Protector thinks that this woman is one of them.
The cover of the book has an interesting composition, featuring a number of the characters from the book. The artwork is of a decent level, but palette is rather dark and difficult to make out as a thumbnail.
The characterisation and dialogue is functional, the amount of description is adequate. Word confusion, typos and clumsy sentence structure plague this book throughout, to the point that it was becoming annoying. The story feels a little ponderous in the middle with world-building that isn’t always relevant to what is happening now or not driving the plot forward. The build-up of the romance between Dazlar and the leading lady is handled clumsily to the point that it seems to come out of no where. The rivalry between Dazlar and his former colleague Ellis, isn’t given a proper showdown and I felt more sympathy with the villain, the Lord Protector, instead of feeling disturbed by his slow descent into madness.
I’ve recently reviewed a couple of novels that use gaming as a way to set themselves apart from the crowd. The science fiction element of The Ancients tries to the same with subtle hints of the ‘game-world’ suffering synching problems, like in the Assassin Creed games. Although this aspect of the plot is essential to understanding the motives of the Lord Protector, it feels contrived because it almost feels as if the author wants to keep it a secret, but it comes across as the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about.
The premise of the book isn’t bad but I find I struggle to wholly recommend this book. This is the author’s third book and after reading the first chapter I had high expectations, which unfortunately weren’t met. Therefore this book scores only 2 stars for me.
Book Review: Frags by Thomas K Carpenter
19 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Books Tags: frags, Freeland, Gamers, LifeGame, thomas carpenter
Frags by Thomas K. Carpenter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Frags is the sequel to Gamers, a book I recently reviewed. It continues to follow the adventures of a former high school student as she traverses a post-apocalyptic dystopian world in search for information that will help her locate her friend, Zaela. Gabby, the heroine of the series and her new friend Mouse have joined the Frags, a disparate group of survivors who operate in the wilderness of the GSA. Together they make a break for the Freelands with the hope that others who have escaped the GSA have information on what happens to those who fail in the LifeGame.
Gabby sums up this book early on with a statement, ‘This is not LifeGame.’ This was a big concern for me because I enjoyed the freshness and originality of the artifice of LifeGame. I needn’t have worried. The cool skin-web can be upgraded with whatever interface is used in any particular area of the Freelands. The downside is that you have to accept the rules and the reality of each area and as such Gabby and the Frags are constantly running into trouble.
The writing is actually a little stronger than the original and the characters are strange and diverse enough to keep the book interesting. Take example the Collector, a man who runs the Game Train, which runs across the length of the Freelands but to ride it you must strike a bargain with the Collector and play the games. If you win, you get off at your stop. If you don’t, well, its time to pay the Collector his due.
This is a solid 4 stars and I highly recommend the series to young adults and fans of steam and cyberpunk.
Book Review: Gamers by Thomas Carpenter
14 Jan 2012 1 Comment
in Books Tags: Carpenter, Dystopian Future, fantasy, Gabby, Gamers, LifeGame, LifeScore, MMOs, Science Fiction
This is a story about a high school girl that wants to graduate with good results and get her best-friend in the the same University as her. The only difference between this girl and any other high school girl is that she lives in our future when everything is hidden behind layers of augmented reality. Even the world itself is edited and controlled by a government agency. Oh, and everything is a game and can be played. Welcome to LifeGame. Reality starts breaking down when Gabby learns that her personal files, literally her identity has been hacked by dissidents calling themselves the Frags and that the government wants to check what they have altered. Gabby can’t let them do this because then they would find out that she has been hacking LifeGame to help her friend improve her scores.
The cover art features the face of a young lady with her LifeScore superimposed beneath her left eye. Its quite catchy except for the typography which cheapens the overall impact. The blurb and the opening chapter is intriguing and had me reading the first three chapters even before I had considered reviewing it.
The concept isn’t a new one, with Hollywood already having given the game world encroaching on reality the big screen treatment, e.g. Tron and the now retro-looking Running Man, amongst other more recent efforts. But Carpenter’s take on it is refreshingly modern and applies the rules of Massive Multiplayer Online (MMOs) games like Second Life and Playstation Home, with mini-games adding to an overall score and customisable wardrobe and living spaces as standard. He also captures the obsessive behaviour of MMO players of squirrelling away every spare minute and immersing themeselves in marathon-length sorties into the game world through the addition of LifeScore, with the students seeking every opportunity from brushing their teeth to doing homework to get points. There even is a school league table to show whose currently on top and who is below the required level to qualify for university. The world of LifeGame has its own slang too, just like in the world of Harry Potter, which is a very nice touch, even though some readers may initially find themselves as at a loss to understanding what buffering is.
So why didn’t this book get four stars? The occasional word mix-up or confusing sentences on their own don’t overly take away from this story and the writing and language for most part is good, but the pacing of the narrative and the individual components of it don’t quite sync. Also, I found the ending rather unsatisfactory, even though there is still plenty of story to carry on in a sequel, I think it could have been handled better and kept the reader more on edge for the next installment. Another issue of concern, though it doesn’t affect how good this book is, is the use of the names of existing or former game developers for school names, especially considering how touchy corporations are about thier IP and branding.
Gamers scores a very good 3.75 and I do recommend that you read this book to experience the trippy world of LifeGame.
Book Review: Blood and Fire by Carrie Clevenger and Nerine Dorman
03 Jan 2012 1 Comment
in Books Tags: blood and fire, carrie clevenger, crooked fang, inkarna, just my blood type, nerine dorman, xan marcelles
Blood and Fire is the new Xan Marcelles short story and the second collaboration between authors Carrie Clevenger and Nerine Dorman. Xan is a self-proclaimed dude who happens to be a member of Crooked Fang, a rock band who play out of the Pale Rider, a back country tavern in Colarado. He also is a vampire; a fact that has caught the attention of an Egyptian cult of sorcerors leading to his present adventure.
This story allows us to get past the cool, leather-wearing, whiskey drinking womanizer to learn more about who Xan is. We are also introduced to Ash, an Inkarna, basically a body-thief who has magical powers and was a woman in his first life. Incidentally, both characters are going to recieve the novel treatment later this year respectively, Crooked Fang by Carrie Clevenger and Inkarna by Nerine Dorman.
One of the things I liked about the original story, Just My Blood Type, was the fact that it was near impossible to tell where one author’s work began and the other’s ended. That is not the case in this story as there is definately a sense of a different flavor for each of the perspectives provided. The story is written in first-person and chapters alternate between the two characters. Also missing is the sexiness that simmered just beneath the surface of the first story, but this is made up for with plenty of action. But that in itself is a good thing as the authors dish out a fresh experience and refuse to tread old ground. What this story does have in common with the first is the exciting prose that pops write off the page and reanimate in your imagination. This is a must for vampire-rocker groupies.
……..More
2011 in review
02 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: annual report, blog, excerpt, helper monkeys, san francisco cable car
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 22 trips to carry that many people.
Christmas Message
19 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
So . . . 2011 . . . What a year, right? The year started with funding cuts and job losses in the public and third sector, with only the Royal Wedding to distract us and lighten the mood. Natural disasters seem to have become a permanent annual fixture. News of a single, white, male at the center of the Norway Tragedy rocked the world and made us reassess the public perception of what a terrorist looks like. Famine has returned to Africa, whilst the rest of the world is being punished for over-indulgence with economies teetering on melt-down. The News of the World has closed shop following the whole wire-tap Murdoch Affair. The Middle-East has always been a troubled part of the world, but with the Arab Spring Uprising, dictators have been toppled by their own people, whilst our own cities so rioting and open looting on the streets. The 00’s look almost peaceful in comparison. With all this discord and chaos in the world, I think we need these holiday weeks to meditate and reflect on what is important and how we can bring some harmony back into the world. Start small. Don’t just do your bit for the environment, but be conscious and considerate in how you impact the world and people around you. Educate your children on the responsibility we have towards each other and this planet that we are custodians of. Those of us who are lucky enough to hot food on the table everyday and warm and comfortable shelter to reside, spend of your money in aiding those around the world who lack even clean water. Many take the easy way out and blame God for our troubles. But if you look carefully, it is we who are to blame for the neglect. Therefore it is we who must seek to remedy the situation, through prayers and action.
