Hanorah Words

So... I finished the book John Dies at the End by David Wong, editor of Cracked.com .  I promised a friend that once I was finished reading the book, I'd write a review on the blog.  So... here it goes... I honestly don't know what to say. I can't tell you to read the book because once you've read the book, you can't unread  it.  It's one of those books that infects you and you start thinking about soy sauce and meat monsters and bratwurst poltergeists all the time. Well, I'll start by telling you that this book is more than a bit  of a mind screw.  It takes place in our world in an undisclosed town with the action centered around two friends: David and John.  The story is told 100% first person point of view from Dave's eyes. And when I say mind screw, I don't mean the bad kind, I mean slowly making love to all the weird parts of your mind until you can't get enough but you have to stop because there's just so much . This isn

Okay, so Intrinsic is the first book I've ever written and finished writing with the story pretty much complete in my mind... sort of.  I wrote it with the intention of there being a second book that would start up not long after the first book ended.  So, to me the book is finished, but anyone who read the book (read: my family and friends) wouldn't really know what was going on exactly. I felt it was a huge accomplishment. A breakthrough in my writing. I mean, there it was, the finished manuscript, laying there pristine and finished. I knew it would need a lot of work to be publishable.  Work that I was willing--am willing-- to put into the story because it is something that matters to me. See, Intrinsic is the story of a girl with a family who discovers magic and her family simultaneously. I went to this writing conference in Connecticut, the 2011 Unicorn Writer's Conference , to be accurate.  While there, I went to the Scifi/fantasy/horror talk given by Dani

Whenever you hear people talk about writing, they always give the same bloody advice: "write what you know".  Well, I've been writing since I was about eleven and there's a problem with that advice.  I'm not sure if many people have spotted it, so I'm just going to spell it out with a question. How much did you  know when you were eleven about the real world? Yeah. It's a bit of a problem.  You can't write about what you know if you don't know a whole lot.  So... I made stuff up.  I wrote about what I thought  I knew.  I wrote a fairy-tale-like thing when I was nine called "Rosa the Knight" using Storybook Weaver.  That was fun. I've always made up little stories and dramas in my head.  In the beginning, I dramatized them for myself using Barbie dolls.  Then I would play pretend using the mental stories with my cousins in the creek behind our house.  It's amazing what 3 bored ten- to twelve-year-olds and a little sister se

So, I have made my first post on the fictional blog today.  You should go check it out.  It's nothing like what I described doing because I've gone a different way.  Don't worry, it'll still be really awesome and funny in my opinion. You can find the blog at  http://holdthetaintedtacos.blogspot.com/ .  It's about a girl named Caoimhe (pronounce KEE-va) and her friend's Betty and Ash as they come to realize that the world really is extremely crazy.  I'm debating marking it as "Mature" because of language. Enjoy!

Angelic or Devilish?  You decide! Good Omens  is a book by Neil Gaimen and Terry Pratchett.  It was published in 1990 and the two authors were friends before and after they wrote it. In fact, the whole writing of this was done basically to see who could make the other laugh more.  For this reason, this book is comedy gold. Soooo.... What's Good Omens  about anyhow? Well, it's about the end of the world, which will end on Saturday, in fact, "next Saturday... Just before dinner."  The full title is Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch .  The book sums up the events that set in motion the end of the world (the birth of the Antichrist) and then flash forward eleven years to the days leading up to the end of the world.  Most of the time you are either following the Antichrist as he goes about his life or an angel and a demon who are actively trying to prevent  the apocalypse.  The rest of the time, you peek over the shoulders of : th

Today's post is about... Fairies!!! Now, most people, when they think of fairies, think of Tinker Bell from Peter Pan  or the Blue Fairy from  Pinocchio .  In these stories, fairies are generally good beings who sometimes do bad things for selfish reasons. The Blue Fairy is more of an angelic being than any of the stories of fairies out there.  Meanwhile, Tinker Bell is more like the traditional fairy in actions, at least, who does  do some good, but generally acts out of selfish whims.  She'll be your best friend one minute and running off to your worst enemy the next.  In fact, Peter Pan in the original stories acted much like the traditional fae, switching sides in the middle of battles "to even the odds" and then just as swiftly switching back.  Yeah, that's right, Peter Pan wasn't much of a hero in the movies, but he's not a hero at all  in the books. Fairies actually come in all shapes and sizes.  They don't all have wings or pointy ears or

I understand that when you are around a certain animal enough, you begin to understand their behaviors to the point that you feel as though you could hold a conversation with them and it wouldn't be entirely one-sided. If you've never had a pet, I understand why you would look at that first sentence and think I'm crazy, but it does happen.  I am in a unique position because I have owned a lot of animals.  My friends used to call the house I grew up in "the zoo" because my mom and I loved animals and we expressed it by owning as many as humanly possible. We had: dogs, cats, guinea pigs, hamsters, gerbils, ferrets, parakeets, cockatiels, finches, anoles (little lizards), and once mom and I moved to New Vienna, Ohio, you can include a goat, a horse, and chickens to the list. So, I've been around animals enough that I know two facts.  Dogs act the most like humans because they have been genetically adapted by years of domestication to mimic human expressions

Elemental magic is often part of fantasy literature, movies, and books.  Avatar: the Last Airbender and it's sequel series, Legend of Korra , both center around people with the power to manipulate the elements using various Eastern martial arts.  Warriors of Virtue tries to do the same thing, but badly.  Very badly... and hilariously...  Yup.  Someday I'm going to reveiw all three of those.  Though Warriors of Virtue does do something interesting.  They use the Chinese elements rather than the Western elements. Look! Rock! Paper! Scissor! As you can see, it's very different... I'm more for the western elemental system mostly because I grew up with it and the elements correspond to the four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. It doesn't help that it's usually the most used and there are so many variations on the old theme that's available. For example, Avatar: the Last Airbender vs. Charmed .  Now, a lot of people will argue

There are several different elements to any story that is told, sometimes one can be done very well while the rest lay by the wayside and suffer.  The big three are character, setting, and plot.  However, two often overlooked and sometimes ignored elements are conflict and theme.  Now, certain people are drawn to certain elements more often than others, dictating which books they love and which books they hate. For example, I don't particularly like J.R.R. Tolkien's books because they have a heavy Setting element that just bores me to tears.  Stop telling me about the hills and trees and landscape and just tell the story!  In fact, I hit description of scenery and I end up skimming and missing important plot points.  It can get bad. Another good example would be the way the Harry Potter books translated to movies.  The books are heavy on a lot of the elements, that's part of why they appeal to so many people.  However, the first two movies were heavy on the plot elemen

Baccano! is an anime based on a series of light novels written by Ryohgo Narita and illustrated by Katsumi Enami.  The word "baccano" itself is Italian for ruckus which is an apt name if you watch the anime.  The story the anime tells is mostly based in Prohibition era and centered around Mafioso and Camorristi.  The name is apt because the events of the story are told completely  out of order.  You see the ending first and after that, you have to pay attention  to details just to figure out what is going on and when.  There are three main story lines in the anime that happen in three different years. The first story centers around New York, 1930 in which a young man named Firo Prochainezo is being made an official member of the Camorristi.  Basically, the plot is set off when an old man by the name of Szilard finally manages to perfect a potion that will make the drinker completely immortal... and then promptly loses the potion after a fire.  I should note that said

I have a problem.  It has to do with vampires.  Not vampires and romance, though that is a pretty huge problem all on it's own.  Just vampires. See, the problem is that I used to love vampires in high school. I thought they were the best supernatural creature around.  Why?  Because there are forms of vampire-like creatures in most mythologies so there's a lot of history an author can pull from when creating vampire characters.  Is your character more like Dracula?    Or is it more like the vetala , an undead spirit from Hindu mythology that possesses corpses and haunts charnel grounds. Or more like edimmu of Sumerian mythology that sucked the life from the living (not blood)? I looked up all the vampire-like creatures when I was younger and the thing that shocked me most was how much wasn't  used by modern authors who favored variations of Bram Stoker's creation or the sub-creation that appeared in the films.  It's like knowing knowing every candy in the world b

You knew this was coming... Don't tell me you didn't know about this... You know me, so you had  to know this was coming... I haven't shut up about this book series since I first picked it up two or three years ago... That's right... Today, I'm talking about Discworld ! For those of you who don't know me, haven't known me long, or just learned to tune me out over three years ago and haven't bothered listening to me gushing about this book series since then, I must  emphasize to you that my favorite , favorite , favorite  fantasy series is Discworld by none other than Sir Terry Pratchett.  I've read most of the books.  I've watched all of the movies that have reached America (you'd be surprised what you can get off the internet).  I own the bloody children's book .  I have a tattoo  of the Death of Rats (or Grim Squeaker) on my stomach. I know I'm not the first person to love Discworld.  Not even the first American.  With t

When I was little, I saw the movie A Little Princess .  There were a lot of things in the movie that I liked.  However, my favorite parts of the movie were the ongoing story she was telling the other children at the school about Rama and his lovely wife, Sita and how Rama defeats the Demon Ravana.  Now, anyone who knows anything about Hindu mythology knows that I've basically described the plot of the Ramayana .  Now, after hearing me talk on and on about my thoughts on romantic love and such, you're probably wondering what I could possibly love about the  Ramayana .  The answer is simple: The clothes are pretty too.... Yup... the blue guy. I'd heard of people with all sorts of skin colors, but I'd never heard of anyone with a blue skintone.  It freaked me out, stirred my imagination, and intrigued me.  I mean, why not?  They say you turn blue when you can't get enough oxygen, maybe it was the same thing as that?  Or maybe it was just like The Wicked Witch

It used to be... you could go on a fantasy adventure to another world and no one really cared about what happened when you went to that other world.  You'd arrive back at home like you'd never left and no one was the wiser.  Heck, can anyone tell me exactly how many times the Pevensie children went off to Narnia and arrived back home a moment after they left and no one was the wiser or cared anyhow?  I mean, yeah, Diggory Kirk knew where they were going, but let's think seriously about this a moment... The professor knew that the children were going off to a fantasy world that really existed with a real life evil witch and... he was okay with it!  He was all, "Harrumph! I'm British! It's WWII!  Those kids can't get into another war!  Not with that evil witch I set free in there last time! No siree!"  Of course, anyone who's read the books would know he was wrong and those poor kids had to watch Jes--I mean Aslan die. Because Professor Diggory