This Is Not the Blog You're Looking For

Greetings, I have moved my blogging efforts off to a new locations galacticlore.blogspot.com head on over to learn about what's going on with Starfire, my novel that will release April 1, 2009 through Marcher Lord Press.

Marcher Lord Press Has Launched

Go and find the novel(s) for you.

Hero, Second Class
Mitchell Bonds

Hero, Second Class is the story of Cyrus Solburg, a young man who dreams of being a hero in a fantasy land in which Heroes have guild fees and Villains are not allowed more than one solar eclipse per quarter.

Follow Cyrus’s quest to become first an apprentice to a hero—the righteous Hero named the Crimson Slash—and then ultimately a full-fledged Hero. Well, a Hero, Second Class, anyway.



The Personifid Invasion
R.E. Bartlett

In the future, you can transfer your consciousness into an artificial body—known as a personifid—and cheat death indefinitely. But human beings aren’t the only ones who want those bodies—Interterrestrials have found that personifids will house them very well, too.

Ashley is trapped in San Edhem, a city where Interterrestrials and humans struggle for control of the personifids. Can her siblings, Aphra and Antha, rescue her before she is lost to them forever?


Summa Elvetica: A Causitry of the Elvish Controversy
Theodore Beale

For centuries the human race has lived alongside Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, and other "demi-human" races. Each race has carved out its own lands, through bloody wars and ancient hatreds.

But now, through ecclesiastic curiosity and perhaps shrewd maneuvering, it has pleased the Sanctiff to mount an expedition to investigate whether or not Elves may be considered to have eternal souls and thus become a missionary field for the Church. Human strongmen line up on both sides of the debate, for if Elves can be considered not to have souls, then they will be rendered animals—and anyone will be justified to invade their lands and plunder their amassed gold.

More Creature Videos

Here are a few more crazy creature videos:

Hoymanator


Lumbard


Centrod

The Creatures are Coming

The Spore Creature Creator has proven to be a quite powerful tool. In just the last seven days over twelve thousand new creatures have been uploaded to the interesting Sporepedia™.

Here are some of the creatures I've made with the free trial version (containing only 25% of the full version's creature parts).

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Here's one my wife made in about 10 minutes:

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I haven't made any creatures specific to my writing yet... waiting on the full version before attempting that. But I'll post here as I continue exploring this fun tool.

You can learn more about the creature creator at www.spore.com

Spore: Creature Creator

Now here is something that is right up my alley.

I've been following the development of a game called Spore for a few years now. This is an open-ended game that lets the player take a creature of their own creation from a single-celled organism to a galaxy roving civilization.

But what excites me most about this game is that later this month (June 17th), a stand-alone module is being released. The Creature Creator. This will be available as a free download (with partial content, about 25%) or as a $9.99 retail package with all the creature creation tools and parts.

I look forward to this as a tool to help me visualize and bring to life some of my own creations. They have some examples of fan created creatures that the developers re-created with the creature creator here (half-way down the page).

Check out this video of the tool in action.

A New Face in Christian Fantasy

This October Marcher Lord Press, a new publisher specializing in Christian Speculative Fiction, will be launching it's three inaugural titles.

The first of these is the Fantasy lampoon,
Hero, Second Class by new author Mitchell Bonds.

Hero, Second Class tells the tale of a young Hero's apprentice named Cyrus, who's apprenticeship just happens to fall during a True-Crisis, an time full of incredible opportunities for an "ambitious hero-in-training". But Cyruses plans are complicated by "wise-cracking dragon, a self-narrating knight, a droll zombie, and an attractive young woman who also happens to kind of be a cat."

Click Here to see the cover.
Click Here to read the prologue.
Click Here to read an interview with Mitchell Bonds.

This is defenitely one to watch.

Getting back in the wierd of things.

I'm slowly getting back into the flow of writing and getting a steady pattern going. Finished one scene of my current WIP this week (which is also the one that finaled in the ACFW Genesis Contest). I'm hoping to get it done by September so that if the story manages to end up in the top three I can maximize the exposure as much as possible.

Though already the story took a somewhat unexpected turn. The scene featured one of the major supporting characters rescuing some others from a cursed village. Originally this scene was simply to be there for showing the rising stakes in the world, and just how bold the evil forces were becoming. However one of the characters being rescued seemed to be a little more important than I was expecting and the focus of the scene shifted to highlight that, costing the other two characters their lives.

I was a bit sad about that, but this new path ads a whole new sub-plot and depth to the story. One that I think will play out a theme of emotional healing and strength. It will be interesting to see just how this new character develops.

Have you ever had one of those twists jump up in your writing? Or do you have a favorite twist from a novel or a movie?