You can read the review here. In fact, you should read it, right now. It's a great review.
Many thanks to Becky for agreeing to feature my book on her lovely blog, and to Rachel for doing the reviewing.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
On This Day In 1983...
Sally Ride becomes the first U.S. woman to go into space!
Where, according to Wikipedia, she also became the first woman to operate the space shuttle Challenger's robotic arm, using it to retrieve a satellite. So basically she got to play a super-epic scaled-up version of that stuffed animal claw game from the carnival in space. And got paid for doing so. No wonder every kid wants to be an astronaut.
Also, reporters at the time apparently saw nothing wrong with asking her dumbass questions like, "Will the flight affect your reproductive organs?"
Really, reporters? REALLY? You meet the first woman in the country to have a career piloting awesome space-robots, and all you can think to say to her is that idiotic string of words? You might as well have said, "Durr hurr hurr, yer a gurl! In space! Gurl in space funny! Durr hurr."
So here's to you, Sally Ride. You broke barriers, and you never once* punched out a stupid-question-asking 1980's reporter.
*That I know of, anyway.
Where, according to Wikipedia, she also became the first woman to operate the space shuttle Challenger's robotic arm, using it to retrieve a satellite. So basically she got to play a super-epic scaled-up version of that stuffed animal claw game from the carnival in space. And got paid for doing so. No wonder every kid wants to be an astronaut.
Also, reporters at the time apparently saw nothing wrong with asking her dumbass questions like, "Will the flight affect your reproductive organs?"
Really, reporters? REALLY? You meet the first woman in the country to have a career piloting awesome space-robots, and all you can think to say to her is that idiotic string of words? You might as well have said, "Durr hurr hurr, yer a gurl! In space! Gurl in space funny! Durr hurr."
So here's to you, Sally Ride. You broke barriers, and you never once* punched out a stupid-question-asking 1980's reporter.
*That I know of, anyway.
Monday, June 16, 2014
Music Video Monday: Tattooed Millionaire
Ever watch a music video made between 1980 and the first few years of the 1990's?
If you like weird imagery, bright colors, and flashy costumes, and also just hate it when things make sense, then you really ought to watch a few. Trust me, that weird shit will be right up your alley.
Case in point: "Tattooed Millionaire"* by Bruce Dickinson:
What Happens In The Video:
Bruce Dickinson, Iron Maiden frontman, successful solo artist, pilot, and creeptastic peeping tom, has decided to take some time off from being an awesome international superstar and spend a nice relaxing day spying on the citizens of Los Angeles from a submarine.
If you like weird imagery, bright colors, and flashy costumes, and also just hate it when things make sense, then you really ought to watch a few. Trust me, that weird shit will be right up your alley.
Case in point: "Tattooed Millionaire"* by Bruce Dickinson:
What Happens In The Video:
Bruce Dickinson, Iron Maiden frontman, successful solo artist, pilot, and creeptastic peeping tom, has decided to take some time off from being an awesome international superstar and spend a nice relaxing day spying on the citizens of Los Angeles from a submarine.
.png) |
| That is not the hair of someone who does not spend an unhealthy amount of time watching his neighbors have sex through a high-powered telescope.
He probably immediately regrets his decision, as the first thing he sees is the shoddily bandaged victim of some unlicensed back-alley plastic surgeon:
He's so LA! Probably also so infected with every strain of hepatitis.
Then Bruce wanders around the city surreptitiously gawking at people for a while, getting a visual overload of brain-melting weirdness. It starts off with relatively harmless stuff like a douchey rocker dude pretending to drive his red sports car while a tow truck hauls it away and a politely applauding studio audience with spoons hanging off their noses.
Then there's stodgy-British-banker-on-stodgy-British-banker knife violence, and people wearing unsettling African masks stand near a stately white-pillared building looking like members of some secret cult of congresspeople. Then we see the rocker dude again, and discover that he and his hot wife literally live in three feet of raw sewage. And they don't seem to care one bit:
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Also their closets are infested with fat 80's businessmen. Which happens when you don't lay down traps** for them.
Then, after bravely putting up with a few more scenes' worth of men wearing shoes on their heads, money being flung carelessly into the air, and women walking down the street in fur coats and lingerie, Bruce packs up his submarine and leaves our shores for the safety and sanity of his native England.
And that's the video. I'm sure it's all very artsy and symbolic of how shallow and materialistic late 80's/early 90's LA was.
What I Think It's Really About:
Bruce Dickinson heard a lot about this super-popular "Los Angeles" place on the west coast of the US and came to check it out. When he got here, he discovered to his dismay that it was overrun with criminally insane lunatics and hightailed it back home. If we're lucky, maybe he won't return with that submarine of his packed with water-to-land torpedoes and a burning desire to cleanse the city of madmen with fire.
*By the way, if you want to watch this video without the sound on for some reason, don't do it late at night. Without the nice upbeat music to put things in context, it looks super-creepy in places.
**To catch 80's businessmen, bait your traps with money, real estate, and copious amounts of cocaine. Be sure to include the money and real estate or you might trap Steven Tyler by accident.
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Thursday, June 12, 2014
I Did Stuff! (Part II)
You know how some books have pictures?
You know how some books don't have pictures and you have to (groan) pay attention to the description and (uuuungh kill me now) use your imagination to picture what all the characters and places look like?
I kid, of course. Using your imagination is great.* But in case you don't agree, I've made reading my book just a little easier on you:
I made a web comic to go along with my book! You can view it on my website here. The comic begins where the book leaves off and continues the characters' adventures, but you don't have to read the book to follow the story.** I post a new strip weekly on Thursdays.
By the way, many thanks to my excellent artist, Candace Ellis. Check out her deviantART page:
*I like doing it so much I wrote a whole book while doing it.
**I can't imagine why you wouldn't read it, though. Free ticket to heaven, remember?
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
I Did Stuff! (Part I)
So I dropped out of the blogosphere for a while.
Don't worry, I haven't been neglecting my blogging duties because I don't like you anymore. I've just been busy with some big, busy-making stuff:
Don't worry, I haven't been neglecting my blogging duties because I don't like you anymore. I've just been busy with some big, busy-making stuff:
- In early February, Technomancer and I threw all our stuff into boxes, put most of the boxes into a moving truck and the few that remained into our car, and drove right the hell away from the east coast before another nor'easter or freak hurricane decided to fling ALL THE TREES at our house for funsies.
- We took our stuff out of the boxes and put it in a house in Michigan, safely out of hurricane blast radius.
- And finally, the biggest news of all:
I published my book!
I published my book!
Yeeehaw! I published my book!
Ahem.
Anyway, this is what the cover looks like:
And you can buy it here:
And here:
And here:
And here:
As I mentioned in my previous post, my book is about a demon named Cain Pseudomantis who rises to hair metal stardom in the early 1980s, and I strongly believe that you should read it. It's made of concentrated awesome and epic guitar solos, and everyone who reads it automatically gets a free ticket to heaven.*
So...that's half the good news. I'll tell you the rest tomorrow.
*Rock and roll heaven, that is. Readers looking for admittance into hog heaven, doggie heaven, that nightclub in London called Heaven, etc. should seek supplementary reading material.
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Devil Music Web Comic?
I wrote a novel!
It's about a half-demon named Cain Pseudomantis who becomes a hair-metal rocker in 1980's Los Angeles along with his three super-powered human friends. It's pulse-pounding, hair-raising, a whole slew of similar book reviewer's favorite catchphrases, and...you can't read it yet. I'm still searching for a publisher.
I'm also hoping to create a supplemental web comic to chronicle the further antics and drama of the band. I'm in the process of writing up the first batch of comic strip material.
Of course, web comics aren't just text; I'll need to throw a few pictures in there too. They won't be my pictures. I can't draw. That is why I'm looking to hire a part-time web comic artist on contract for the first year. I would like to have one (1) web comic created and posted per week.
To apply, please send an email to me at carlyorosz@gmail.com with:
If I like what I see, then I will commission you to do some test work. If that also goes well then we can work out the contract for the first year (52 pieces). The test work will be:
I am looking for a cell-shaded, moderately realistic style. Think along the lines of GU Comics, Ctrl+Alt+Del,
or Questionable Content.
I'll update this post when my search is complete.
P.S. This is also posted:
It's about a half-demon named Cain Pseudomantis who becomes a hair-metal rocker in 1980's Los Angeles along with his three super-powered human friends. It's pulse-pounding, hair-raising, a whole slew of similar book reviewer's favorite catchphrases, and...you can't read it yet. I'm still searching for a publisher.
I'm also hoping to create a supplemental web comic to chronicle the further antics and drama of the band. I'm in the process of writing up the first batch of comic strip material.
Of course, web comics aren't just text; I'll need to throw a few pictures in there too. They won't be my pictures. I can't draw. That is why I'm looking to hire a part-time web comic artist on contract for the first year. I would like to have one (1) web comic created and posted per week.
Application Submission Process
To apply, please send an email to me at carlyorosz@gmail.com with:
- "Web Comic Artist Application - Your Name" as the subject
- A short (2-3 sentences is fine) introduction to you and your work
- A link to or standard images (JPEG, PNG, GIF) of your portfolio
- A description of your past experience with producing web comic art, if any (i.e. resume. You can attach an actual resume if you want, but if you don't have one lying around, something less formal is fine)
If I like what I see, then I will commission you to do some test work. If that also goes well then we can work out the contract for the first year (52 pieces). The test work will be:
- a 1200px by 1800px 2-character image, one character in front of the other, fully colored, no background
- a test comic strip
I am looking for a cell-shaded, moderately realistic style. Think along the lines of GU Comics, Ctrl+Alt+Del,
or Questionable Content.
I'll update this post when my search is complete.
P.S. This is also posted:
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Dr. Seuss Panic Attack: Jibboo, Be Not Proud...
Once upon a time, when I was but an impressionable little child, I was innocently flipping through a Dr. Seuss book when I came face-to-face with death.
Don't believe me?
Remember this question?
"And what would you do if you met a JIBBOO?"
This enigmatic, vaguely racist-sounding query comes from the book Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! and it is accompanied by one of the most terrifying pictures it has ever been my misfortune to encounter in a children's book.
I won't post it here. Yes, I still find it that unsettling. Google it if you want to give yourself nightmares for a week.
No mere description will ever capture the utter creepiness of this image, but I'll try: Imagine a street running through an abandoned town. This street is lined with the empty, decaying shells of ghostly white houses, and a pale sliver of moon glints weakly down from the night sky. At the far end of the road stands the dark silhouette of a young boy, frozen with fear.
He is frozen with fear because of the thing that awaits him at the other end of the street.
The Jibboo--gaunt, stark-black, beaked like a vulture*--has him in its sights. It advances on the boy, this boy who is the in-story avatar for the child-reader, with its long neck thrust eagerly forward. It raises a long spidery arm in ghastly greeting. There is nowhere for the boy to hide himself from its cold embrace; he is as naked and exposed in this blasted landscape as the single sickly dying plant that struggles out of the otherwise bare dirt road.
What makes this scene especially frightening is its radical shift in tone from the rest of the book. The "story" is actually a series of imagination-inspired vignettes, and all of the previous flights of fancy involved things like floating swimming pools and cute purple elephants. The only other remotely scary things in these pages are the grumpy walruses glowering at Peter the Postman as he delivers mail to the igloo village, and even they look more like your curmudgeonly old neighbor than a genuine threat.
Then, with the flip of a page, you're staring directly into a gut-wrenching existential crisis.
And then, just to crank up the jarring factor to eleven, the narrative promptly returns to cotton-candy-sweet thoughts of pretty white horses galloping through candy cane forests. I guess because Dr. Seuss understood that if you stare into the horror of your own mortality long enough, it stares into you.
*Incidentally, when I read The Last Battle--the final entry in the Narnia series--I realized how very much the evil god Tash looks like a de-Seussified version of the Jibboo and got traumatized all over again. Screw you, C.S. Lewis.
Don't believe me?
Remember this question?
"And what would you do if you met a JIBBOO?"
This enigmatic, vaguely racist-sounding query comes from the book Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! and it is accompanied by one of the most terrifying pictures it has ever been my misfortune to encounter in a children's book.
I won't post it here. Yes, I still find it that unsettling. Google it if you want to give yourself nightmares for a week.
No mere description will ever capture the utter creepiness of this image, but I'll try: Imagine a street running through an abandoned town. This street is lined with the empty, decaying shells of ghostly white houses, and a pale sliver of moon glints weakly down from the night sky. At the far end of the road stands the dark silhouette of a young boy, frozen with fear.
He is frozen with fear because of the thing that awaits him at the other end of the street.
The Jibboo--gaunt, stark-black, beaked like a vulture*--has him in its sights. It advances on the boy, this boy who is the in-story avatar for the child-reader, with its long neck thrust eagerly forward. It raises a long spidery arm in ghastly greeting. There is nowhere for the boy to hide himself from its cold embrace; he is as naked and exposed in this blasted landscape as the single sickly dying plant that struggles out of the otherwise bare dirt road.
What makes this scene especially frightening is its radical shift in tone from the rest of the book. The "story" is actually a series of imagination-inspired vignettes, and all of the previous flights of fancy involved things like floating swimming pools and cute purple elephants. The only other remotely scary things in these pages are the grumpy walruses glowering at Peter the Postman as he delivers mail to the igloo village, and even they look more like your curmudgeonly old neighbor than a genuine threat.
Then, with the flip of a page, you're staring directly into a gut-wrenching existential crisis.
And then, just to crank up the jarring factor to eleven, the narrative promptly returns to cotton-candy-sweet thoughts of pretty white horses galloping through candy cane forests. I guess because Dr. Seuss understood that if you stare into the horror of your own mortality long enough, it stares into you.
*Incidentally, when I read The Last Battle--the final entry in the Narnia series--I realized how very much the evil god Tash looks like a de-Seussified version of the Jibboo and got traumatized all over again. Screw you, C.S. Lewis.
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