A link to one of my No Flying No Tights reviews – one of the more critical ones, actually – has gone up on blog billing itself as “News from Japan.” Possibly they have a very broad definition of “Japan,” e.g. one that includes New England.
Blog
They Sure Like Pokémon . . .
Another of these lists has mentioned my recent No Flying No Tights reviews. Coolio!
What I’ve Been Writing Lately . . .
. . . has been partly No Flying No Tights review – the last Pokémon one just went up – and partly the next bit of Looking Like Lani.
Am having an interesting time of it because I keep realizing that I’ve made some assumption that doesn’t actually make sense for the culture in which Lani lives. Basically, most of my fantasy stories take place in the same world, but the others are all on one continent with cultures that do vary, but aren’t nearly as different from one another as they all are from the continent on which this story occurs. So I’ll catch myself picturing, say, an inn, the way it would be on the first continent – which, being based loosely on medieval Britain, feels pretty familiar to me anyway. And then I’ll go, “Wait, this building wouldn’t be made of wood,” or, “They wouldn’t actually put in interior walls here.” It’s kind of fun, actually, to keep rethinking these things.
Otherwise, doing lots of reading and lots of working, and all is going pretty well.
Not ANOTHER One . . .
Author Bill Wallace has died. I liked his books a lot as a kid – after reading Watchdog and the Coyotes, I doodled coyotes inspired by the book on all my school assignments for, like, a year. I also did an oil painting once, as a pre-teen, of a scene from his book Snot Stew (which is not at all about what it sounds like). And poor Mr. Wallace was only sixty-four. He will be missed.
And Another!
Another review on No Flying No Tights, that is! With another listing on MangaBlog!
In other news, reading a popular YA novel and having some doubts as to whether it’s possible to foreshadow the identity of a character who has amnesia without telegraphing said identity. So you have a young man who doesn’t know who he is and has only brief flashes of memory from his childhood? And you also have the oh-so-brief mention of a prince who *mysteriously died as a child*? Nice try.
[If he turns out not to be the prince, I will issue an apology. Also, pigs will take to the skies and the mythical netherworld will experience a cold snap.]
Follow-Up Woo
The No Flying No Tights review I mentioned last post is listed in the links of this post at MangaBlog. Coolio!
Graphics
. . . and graphic novels! No Flying No Tights has posted another of my reviews. It’s more Pokémon manga. And it’s not the last of them. (Bwahaha?)
In other news, I’m using GIMP and my* tablet to work on the illustrations for The Book of Foxes. I wish I knew how the illustrators of, say, Diary of a Wimpy Kid or The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian or the Training Your Dragon series handle the technical side of combining drawings with text. I was drawing and scanning the illustrations, but now I’m trying out just drawing them in GIMP. This is nice because it completely eliminates the kind of smudge-and-debris marks you sometimes get with scanning, and it makes it very easy to correct mistakes. So we’ll see how that goes.
My Teen Services Librarian job here in MA is awesome! Since I also handle the library’s publicity, I’m doing a lot of press releases and posters right now, but I have a Year of the Dragon-themed teen program coming up at the end of the month. Woo!
*borrowed from my brother with no intention of ever returning it
Yay Lemming-ing!
I have, at long last, joined Twitter. Don’t know how often I’ll be using it – the Internet eats my life as it is – but I’m @AnicaLewis. Feel free to tell me about anything cool I should follow, especially if it’s writing-related.
Florida and Massachusetts
No Flying No Tights has posted my review for Troublemaker, books one and two, by Janet Evanovich and her daughter. Fun story set in Florida. Where, by coincidence, I currently am, vacationing with my family.
When we get back from vacation, I’m headed north to Massachusetts, where I’ll be starting a fantastic job! I will be the Teen Services Librarian at the Brewster Ladies’ Library. Planning and running teen programs, collection development, and making and distributing promotional material – woo! I’m all kinds of excited.
In the meantime, continuing to work on Looking Like Lani, and life is just generally snazzy.