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Cover Reveal: Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of) New Edition!

1/31/2017

It's here! It's here it's here it's here it's here, and I get to share it with you!

Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of) finally has a shiny new cover to go with its upcoming, independent re-release!

Drum roll, please...

Ooooh! Ahhhh!

Oh yes, and it's also now available for pre-order from Smashwords, release planned for April 4th, 2017.

If you don't do Smashwords, not to worry, pre-orders are coming soon to all platforms, including paperback.

Stand by for cover reveal and release announcements for The Prospero Chronicles soon as well (yes, including a cover and release date for the long-delayed third installment), but for now, in case you missed it in its previous run, here's the teaser for Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of):

The world is Cassie Fremont’s playground. Her face is on the cover of every newspaper. She has no homework, no curfew, and no credit limit, and she spends her days traveling the country with her friends, including a boy who would do the chicken dance with death to make her smile. Life is just about perfect—except that those newspaper headlines are about her bludgeoning her crush to death with a paintball gun, she has to fight ravenous walking corpses every time she steps outside, and one of her friends is still missing, trapped somewhere in the distant, practically impassable wreckage of Manhattan.

Still, Cassie’s an optimist, more prone to hysterical laughter than hysterical tears, and she’d rather fight a corpse than be one. She’ll never leave a friend stranded when she can simply take her road trip to impossible new places, even if getting there means admitting to that boy that she might love him as more than her personal jester. Skillfully blending effective horror with unexpected humor, this diary-style novel is a fast-paced and heartwarming read.

“Heartbreak, humor, a very large number of crushed skulls and even romance ensue . . . . Readers who don’t mind a little brain spatter on the windshield will be happy they took this particular trip.” --Kirkus Reviews.

“You know when you read a book about teens and you think the author just didn’t get it? Well, F.J.R. Titchenell gets video gaming, paintballing, Vespa riding, teenage tomboy angst, true love, the uses of theater paint—oh, and killing zombies.” —Lehua Parker, author of the Nene Award-nominated Niuhi Shark Saga.

“The story is fast, filled with dark humor, and lots of blood and guts.” --All Things Urban Fantasy.

So, feel like claiming your copy on Smashwords now?

Seriously, this announcement comes with a huge thanks to everyone who's helped support Matt's and my transition into independently re-releasing these books, and to everyone who's waited patiently for news of new printings.

This is real!

Also big thanks to Deranged Doctor Design for their great work :)

Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Book Review: Bitch Planet, Vol. 1: Extraordinary Machine

1/24/2017

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Book Review:

Bitch Planet, Vol. 1: Extraordinary Machine

Kelly Sue DeConnick, Valentine De Landro, Robert Wilson IV

Image Comics, 2015

A

The Basics:

In a ’50s retro-styled dystopian future, women are no longer shunned, shamed, undermined, ridiculed, or ignored when at odds with the interests of the men in power. No, they’re much more efficiently shipped out of sight, out of mind, to the penal space colony commonly known as Bitch Planet! But now, a group of new arrivals have been offered the opportunity to win favor by forming their own team to compete in Earth’s most popular sport, Megaton. For amusement and novelty purposes only, of course. Still, with nothing to lose, the women hope to turn this small chance for unity and visibility to their advantage.

The Downside:

Being as concept-centric as it sounds, character development falls mostly by the wayside. In fact, I can and will write this entire review without mentioning a single name. The sports team plot also doesn’t come to much, at least not in this opening volume, and that lack of a satisfying, climactic feeling of fighting back is a bit disappointing.

The Upside:

In spite of the slightness of the storytelling, Bitch Planet shines in the sheer detail of its satire. It more than shines. It sparks and glows and blazes with the heat of a thousand suns. This comic is a finely-tuned, well-oiled, bullshit-calling machine.

Each issue ends with a page of parody oldschool comic ads for things like weight-loss intestinal parasites and agreeability-enhancing drugs, easily the funniest parts but also a sharp calling out of female-targeted marketing and its unending encouragement and exploitation of body hate and any other shred of an inferiority complex it can reach.

Meanwhile, the main storyline calls out not only the unfair, belittling social standards for what a woman should be (“Skinny!” “Deferential!” “Nurturing!” “Accommodating!”), but also the shifting, contradictory, no-win nature of those standards. Written into the charges briefly attached to each introduced inmate, charges including not only “infidelity” and “marital withholding” but “wanton obesity” and “seduction and disappointment,” mini-stories are succinctly told of women sent to Bitch Planet for being undesirable, for being desirable and willing, and for being desirable and unwilling, among a host of other offenses.

In the first few pages, and through a deliciously Twilight Zone-esque expectation fakeout, we’re even introduced to a woman condemned to Bitch Planet on an rush emergency warrant so that her husband can marry his much younger mistress, protesting all the way that she did everything right.

As one member of the new Bitch Planet Megaton team notes, about the sport but clearly not about the sport, “They change the rules when it suits them.”

Just like in real life, no matter how low the women are willing to stoop, no matter how many absurd double-standards they meet, there’s no surefire way to avoid getting sent to Bitch Planet. They’re sent there for any reason and every reason, but always ultimately for the same reason: because it’s convenient to someone more important.

While there’s certainly no pretense of subtlety to the commentary (and none needed), Bitch Planet completely avoids the common pitfall of “message” pieces, in which characters so often monologue at length about complex real world issues in painfully trite, oversimplified, and out-of-character ways. It barely discusses misogyny at all, in so many words, but has the restraint and artistry instead to show it on every page, starkly, honestly drawn out to its logical sci-fi conclusion, and the effect is glorious.

Yes or no to reading on in the series? With fingers crossed to see some characters properly blossom in this finely crafted universe, definitely yes.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Book Review: Saga, Vol. 1

1/17/2017

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Book Review:

Saga, Vol. 1

Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples

Image Comics, 2012

A+

The Basics:

Starcrossed lovers, Alana and Marko, are doing their best to raise their infant daughter, Hazel, while on the run from both sides of an endless, futile, intergalactic war. Officials of the various interested governments and a payroll full of mercenaries, all with their own agendas, pursue the fugitive family. And then things get weird.

The Downside:

Is flat out difficult to find, other than having the most undeservedly generic title imaginable. Unless perhaps you find the extent of the weirdness distracting, because it’s admittedly really, really weird. And while it’s not a downside for me, if you have any sort of distaste for any form of graphic content even when intelligently handled (as it is here), for the love of god, be advised, this is not for you.

The Upside:

The weirdness manages to be nowhere near as distracting as it probably should be. We’re talking rockets that grow on trees, spider-centaur bounty hunters, a guy named Prince Robot IV of the Robot Kingdom with a TV for a face sitting on a toilet in 18th century French military garb reading romance novels weird. But it all feels utterly natural, a fully formed, functioning universe that has no need to overexplain its minutiae. The most absurd images can’t help but feel normal when they’re normal to a cast of characters who are so vividly alive.

Alana and Marko’s love is passionate and steamy, but also frustrating, funny, and utterly undignified in ways anyone who’s ever been in a long-term romantic relationship will appreciate. They don’t love each other in the perfect, distant, abstract sort of way that so many fictional romantic figures do, but with a familiarity and intimacy that’s palpably captured.

As compelling as the stars are, the ensemble effect is even more impressive. Every thread, every mini-cast of characters bent on thwarting the central family’s happiness is set up with a level of detail and intrigue capable of carrying a solo series, with all the players convinced, as they should be, that the story is theirs.

The narration device, presenting Saga as a family history told by a grown up Hazel, successfully delivers the kind of thought-provoking one-liners that most narrator characters only embarrassingly and hollowly attempt, and maintains a steady level of suspense over who else, if anyone, will survive the story.

This is the part of the review where I’d usually conclude whether or not I’m interested in continuing with the series, but the answer is such a resounding “Oh my god, yes!” that in less than the week it took to get around to posting this review, I’ve already finished the other five volumes currently available and marked my calendar for the seventh. It’s seriously that good.

Separate reviews to follow for the subsequent volumes of this better-than-the-best-of-both-worlds lovechild of Star Wars and Game of Thrones that you absolutely must read now!

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Book Review: All-New Wolverine, Volume 1: The Four Sisters

1/8/2017

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I’m finally going for it. Up until this point, I’ve primarily kept the reviews on this site to novels and screen adaptations of novels, with the occasional exception for other major geek movies, short story collections, and miscellaneous.

I have not regularly reviewed my comic book reading, mainly because I consider prose novels more my specialty, being, y’know, a novelist and all.

However, with a decent amount of comic geekery also under my belt, and with much of my recent and planned near-future writing being superhero satire collaborations with my husband (Matt Carter of Almost Infamous: A Supervillain Novel), and with a giant stack of comic books from under the Christmas tree likely to fill my recreational reading schedule for some time, I’m taking you guys along for the ride!

Heads up, I read by the volume, or occasionally the compendium, not by the issue, and with my storytelling expertise generally resting in a far less visual arena, I won’t emphasize the artwork heavily in my ratings, unless something strikes me as mind-blowingly good or bad.

So let’s get started!

Book Review:

All-New Wolverine Vol. 1: The Four Sisters

By Tom Taylor, David López, David Navarrot.

Marvel, 2016

A-

The Basics:

Laura Kinney, aka X-23, has taken up the Wolverine mantel from Logan, the original Wolverine and her clone-dad (because chromosomes and DNA are completely extricable in superheroland; go with it). When she discovers that more clones of her exist, and have escaped from their lab to wreak havoc, she sets off to track them down and defuse the situation before they can be exterminated by one organization or another that assumes they’re inhuman monsters.

The Downside:

Pause, time-out, and cue obligatory dialogue on the common practice of creating female versions of popular male superheroes:

Some women (not unreasonably) celebrate this kind of fast-tracked inclusion into the recognizable super pantheons and the much-needed representation it adds, while some argue (also not unreasonably) that the assumed need to piggyback on a male character’s legacy in order to be noteworthy is insulting. Some fans of the copied male characters argue (not always unreasonably) that the female versions tend to be written as pale imitations and end up sounding or feeling inadvertently sexist for favoring the male originals, while multitudes of assholes (completely unreasonably) hide behind this guise of loyalty to the originals in order to be definitely sexist and rail against the concept of female characters who function as anything other than prizes existing at all.

It’s a shitshow of an issue, and it has many full articles devoted to it, and it deserves many more.

So let’s skip the big picture for now and focus on the story at hand and its individual effectiveness.

Anyone expecting Laura to be Logan will be disappointed. As she’ll tell you herself, she’s not. She’s not the same over-the-top killing machine he was either. But that’s not a bad thing.

Back to our regularly scheduled downside. The twist-cliffhanger of this volume could have been better set up, and the simple fact that much of the cast is made up of clones makes it a little difficult to keep track visually of who’s where in some of the faster action scenes.

The Upside:

Laura’s an instantly likeable hero, and the challenge of establishing a character born in a beloved older character’s shadow combines beautifully with her nature as a weaponized clone (now one of many), to create a well-fueled tale of identity crisis and self-discovery.

Logan and Angel are also enjoyable in their brief roles, acting as a refreshingly positive mentor and boyfriend respectively, without hijacking the story, and Doctor Fate’s appearance is a comedic highlight.

Altogether, while the clone conspiracy plotline is duly serious, it’s the self-aware humor and believable affection between the characters that makes this series opener memorable, and makes me look forward to more.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Cover Reveal: Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of) New Edition!

Book Review: Bitch Planet, Vol. 1: Extraordinary Machine

Book Review: Saga, Vol. 1

Book Review: All-New Wolverine, Volume 1: The Four Sisters

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Cover Reveal: Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of) New Edition!

Book Review: Bitch Planet, Vol. 1: Extraordinary Machine

Book Review: Saga, Vol. 1

Book Review: All-New Wolverine, Volume 1: The Four Sisters

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