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Quick Update: Totally Pretentious Podcast and Blog Feeds

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If you’re a subscriber of The Skiffy and Fanty Show, which David and I are both a part of, you’ll have heard about the weirdness going on with our Feedburner feeds.  Though Totally Pretentious was not nearly as affected by S&F, there still may have been some changes or weirdness happening with the feeds. So, to clear all that up, there are two feeds: The Full Blog & Podcast Feed The Podcast Only Feed The latter feed funnels podcasts into iTunes, though whether iTunes will register it properly is up in the air (it’s not registering Skiffy at all, so I’m probably going to contact support for both podcasts to make sure they are reading correctly).  The former gives you all of the content on the blog, including the podcasts.  If you use some kind of podcast catcher, you’ll want to use the second feed; just make sure to subscribe to the full feed in Feedly or something so you can get the awesome blog content, too. Hopefully, this won’t be a big deal for Totally Pretentious.  We’re still pretty small, after all. Thanks!

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5 Films to Complement Ian Sales’ Apollo Quartet

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The movie list game with Ian Sales continues.  I have been challenged to come up with five movies to complement his Apollo Quartet, as the concluding volume of that series, “All That Outer Space Allows,” hit stores in late April.  The following list of 5 is my attempt to come up with a few good films that fit the bill. First, a few “rules”:

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Book Review: The Copper Promise by Jen Williams

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Sebastian and Wydrin are mercenaries and adventurers, longtime friends and partners, doing jobs for coin in a way and manner familiar to a lot of sword and sorcery fiction. Sebastian is the big guy, a defrocked paladin of a mountain god. Wydrin is an infamous rogue of the port city of Crosshaven known as the Copper Cat, deadly with two blades. The opening of the book starts off straightforwardly enough, with the pair hired by a deposed noble to break into a magical vault. A magical vault that contains a long imprisoned scaly God and followers that the pair inadvertently free. Oops.

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“On Game of Thrones and Gritty Fantasy: Why does it sell?” by Clifton Hill (Veil of a Warrior)

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Visceral, terrible, gut wrenching, laden with death and loss. Why does it sell? And why in the genre of luminescent fairy wings, immortal wizards, and chivalrous knights that cannot die? Why do we want to bring in the grime, the stink of malice and the cut of despair? In an industry dominated by the One Ring and a boy wizard — where there was death and violence, but only to an extent — it seemed that Fantasy was a soft genre. There was the thrill of discovery, strange wondrous new lands…and magic! So what made The Game of Thrones rise so high? Perhaps because it was more real. The setting is not one of wonder; it is one terrible and dirty — where people die. A world where a single man rules with the authority to kill on a word, where political factions scheme for power and survival:  the landscape of influence can change in a heartbeat.

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Interview w/ Jennifer Ellis (Author of A Quill Ladder)

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For this feature interview, I contacted Jennifer Ellis by email with some questions pertaining both to A Quill Ladder and the Derivatives of Displacement series in general, on writing YA, and on her perspectives as a successful indie author. Here, then, are those questions and her wonderful responses, including information on what she has in store for the future: DPH: The YA category has changed a lot since either of us was younger, and the SciFi/Fantasy offerings have exploded. In what ways did you try to make these middle grade novels balance between the classic and modern worlds? How do you balance between revealing things to the readers (and characters) and holding things back for maintaining the drive of the series?

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Book Review: A Quill Ladder by Jennifer Ellis (with an Interview)

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For my May contribution to this year’s focus on female writers, I wanted to feature two young adult SciFi/Fantasy titles written by women authors whose work I enjoy and initially discovered by happenstance:  Jennifer Ellis and Frances Hardinge. Even if you don’t typically read YA, you certainly know some children or young adults who are looking for good reads in the genre, and both of these writers deserve plenty of appreciation. First up for this post is Jennifer Ellis. Ellis is an indie author from Canada who writes both middle-grade science fiction/fantasy novels and adult dystopic novels featuring elements of adventure, romance, and environmental themes. I discovered her work through a Goodreads giveaway listing for her adult novel In the Shadows of the Mosquito Constellation. It looked potentially interesting to me, but looking at her website and blog really sold me on taking the time to check out the novel. Though I didn’t win the giveaway, I was able to get an electronic version directly from her; immediately upon starting it, I was drawn in and impressed through the end.

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