Now this is the point. You fancy me mad.

 Art, Fantastic Authors  3 Responses »
May 162012
 

You guys always like the weird stuff I post, so here you go. It doesn’t get a lot weirder than this.

 From The Atlantic:

Somewhere between Henry Holiday’s weird paintings for Lewis Carroll and Edward Gorey’s delightfully grim alphabet fall Harry Clarke‘s hauntingly beautiful and beautifully haunting 1919 illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination—a collection of 29 of Poe’s tales of the magical and the macabre.

They are really, really, really disturbing.

You can sate your creepy curiosity here for the full monty. Everyone likes to be scared by Poe, though. Right? I mean, that man invented nightmares.

 

 

 

Happy Halloween!

 Friday Ephemera, Things Worth Sharing  6 Responses »
Oct 312011
 

 

My favorite holiday of the year is just about over and it doesn’t seem like I took nearly enough advantage of it. Cybils has eaten up most of my spare time and our weather has been so weird – very cold at night and near 80 degrees during the day. The leaves don’t even know what to make of it so half of them up and died over night and the other half are like “wait, aren’t we supposed to be changing color now?” Weird.

I’ve gotten through something like 45 books for Cybils so far, 8 of which I didn’t finish, 5 of which I intend to go back and finish when it’s all over.

Tomorrow begins NaNoWriMo, my second favorite time of the year, and I’m head over heels for it. While I am not officially participating (not starting anything new and not pushing myself like whoa because Cybils comes first) I have already marked my calendar for several write-ins in my home town. (Have you signed up yet? WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR)

Tomorrow also kicks off my November NaNoWriMo posts. Like last year, the posts are short, inspirational, and if you don’t have time to comment, don’t worry about it. These posts are for you, not for me, so enjoy them and write  your heart out. We’ll touch base again in December.

I do have an Insecure Writer’s Support Group post scheduled for Wednesday though.

Feel free to email me during the month of November if you’d like to chat, and while I might be somewhat missing from the blogosphere, I will do my best to keep making the rounds and paying special attention to the NaNoers listed on the linky below.

With no further ado, here are some links I wanted to leave you with last week, a link to the MonsterFest 2011 participants which you should totally go check out, and viola! Let the spookiness begin!

————————————————————————————————————-

Get Your Hands On This!!!!

My secret sister Margo Lerwill has released another short story called KEEP and I’m just crazy about the cover. It totally gives me shivers.

Summary: It awakens. It cannot remember what it is. It cannot recall how long it has slept. Yet it knows a trespasser has breached the defenses of this frozen keep, the most ancient structure known to a land held prisoner by winter, buried in ever-snow. The creature and its impish minions are ready for the hero, be he a warrior prince, a fabled mage, or a priest determined to cleanse the evil of the keep from this beleaguered land. The true question is whether the guardian is prepared to defend itself from someone who is less than he appears.

Keep is available at:

Amazon

Amazon UK

Smashwords

Barnes & Noble

 

 

NaNoWriMo Posts

My very favorite TL Conway is hosting a blogparty called Write What You NaNo starring some of my other very favorite bloggers. These posts are all about NaNoWriMo. You can read my post on November 3rd.

Week One
Oct 24: TL Conway  – Here
Oct 25: Alicia Summers  – Here
Oct 26: Adrianne Russell  -  Here
Oct 27: Sarah Ahiers  -  Here
Oct 28: Claudie A.   -  Here

Week Two
Oct 31: TL Conway
Nov 1: Margo Berendsen
Nov 2: Steph Sinkhorn
Nov 3: Sommer Leigh
Nov 4: Alex J. Cavanaugh*

Halloween

  • Take Back Halloween! A costume guide for women with imagination.
  • Nova Ren Suma, AMAZING AUTHOR OF AMAZING BOOK IMAGINARY GIRLS, has a fantastic series of posts called “What Scares You?” and lots of awesome people participated. Check it out!
  • One of the best Halloween dinnerscapes I’ve ever seen. From the imagination of The Happy Heathen.

Things Worth Knowing

MonsterFest 2011

Get the whole list here. Did you have a favorite? A monster you didn’t know existed? Thank you EVERYONE who participated. I’m still getting through all the posts myself, but I will get through them all, I promise. Next year I plan to do this again but with a little more coordination and UMPH on my part.

 

Are you participating in NaNoWriMo? Sign up on the linky so that I (and others) can come cheer you on throughout the month!

NaNoWriMo Cookies: Day 30 THE END with Neil Gaiman

 Comics, Fantastic Authors, NaNoWriMo 2010, Story Inspiration, Topics in Writing, Videos  2 Responses »
Nov 302010
 

Day 30.

On the final day of NaNoWriMo I want to share my hero with you. I discovered his writing through a comic book/graphic novel series he wrote and from there I gleefully hunted down his novels, his weird and wonderful graphic novels, and all of his brilliant essays. I chased down hard to find novellas on ebay and I devoured every word he ever wrote. He was the sort of author I wanted to emulate. His dark, beautiful world was the sort of world I wanted to play in. I wanted to try out a hundred different forms of storytelling, just like him.

Neil Gaiman is a legend. He’s done comics, essays, movies, novels, sequels, children’s books, plays for voices, and television shows. He’s collaborated with musicians and artists, sculptors and producers. He’s brilliant and funny and humble and real. He gives great advice.

His essay Some Strangeness in the Proportion: The Exquisite Beauties of Edgar Allan Poe is about the way Poe influenced and mesmerized him which, as it turns out, is nearly word for word the way I’ve felt about his own writing since I was a teenager. I think we all have author heroes, authors we want to be like, and they invite us to experiment with words and worlds and ideas in a way we may not have ever given ourselves permission to do without them quietly influencing us.

Maybe this would have been a good cookie to start out with on November 1st, but what I think we really need is to give ourselves permission and find inspiration to continue exploring the boundaries of our talents and ideas and to push beyond November. NaNoWriMo may be over, but the spirit of creation and imagination doesn’t have to be. Give yourself permission to tap into the excitement of November whenever you need to. Give yourself permission to be awesome. Give yourself permission to suck. Give yourself permission to just see what happens.

So I’ll leave you with Neil Gaiman reading his poem “Instructions” about how to make it through a fairy tale (advice I think we could all use), and his essay on Poe, and it may inspire you or it may not. If it doesn’t, I invite you to find something of your own author hero and post it here. Share with everyone what inspires you so that it might inspire someone else.

I’ll see you all at the finish line at midnight tonight.

-Sommer Leigh

Poe’s stories — even his humourous tales, even his detective stories — are populated by amnesiacs and obsessives, by people doomed to remember what they desire only to forget, and are told by madmen and liars and lovers and ghosts. They are powered by what remains untold as much as by what Poe tells us, each of them split and shivered by a crack as deep and as dangerous as the fissure that runs from top to bottom of the gloomy house inhabited by Roderick and Madeline Usher. -Neil Gaiman

October Blogfest: Crafty and Creepy and Cool

 Art  2 Responses »
Oct 142010
 

One of my favorite parts of Halloween are the decorations and the crafts that get magiced into the world this time of year. There is something about the connection of creativity and Halloween that I just love. Here I’m sharing some of these amazing crafty creations I’ve collected across the internet. Not all of them are Halloween specific, but they all share that wonderful thread of the macabre.

Enjoy!

Sommer

p.s. Can you guess which is my favorite? If you guessed the monster hunting kit invitation, you’re right! It makes me think that when I sell my book, I’m going to throw a big party and this will be the sort of invitation I send out.

1. Over at the blog Brooklyn Limestone, a very creative mind is throwing a Halloween party and these are the invitations: Boxes with a stamp and address on the top and inside a booklet invitation to the Halloween party, plus a stake, holy water, matches, and silver bullet for you know, monster hunting. Honestly, if this isn’t the coolest thing in the whole world, I don’t know what is. Like I said above, when I sell my book, this is the sort of invitation I am going to send out (Zombie themed, of course.) I stumbled across this blog because of stumbling across photos of the awesome invitation, but now I’m also a fan of this blogger, invitation or no.

2.

More wicked lovely Halloween invites over at Biplane Press. A little on the pricey side (Sorry, they are though) but very beautiful. I love the red against the white. These awesome invites make me think they probably don’t get too many “No” RSVPs.

3.

Tag Team Tompkins is another awesome Etsy seller like Biplane Press (less pricey though) and sells cards. Not all of the cards are Halloween themed, but they are all very awesome. There is something quite beautiful about the stark black and white with the cut silhouettes and quotes from favorites like William Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe.

4.

Jaime Best over at BestArtStudios2 does some really beautiful things with paint. I’m proud to say I own a 4 piece set of her work (hanging in my living room) and one other I have framed but currently not hung in my office. Her art work, particularly the use of color and light,blows me away. It is not Halloween inspired, but there is something beautiful, haunting, and Tim Burton-esque about everything she does.

5. The following are 2 YouTube videos. The first, Paranoland, is a story in visuals (and my favorite of the three.) I love the silhouette artwork and the creepy twist at the end. The second is called Morsure (Bitten) and is a foreign movie clip about zombies. It isn’t long, but demonstrates highly effective story telling in a visual medium when you have to tell a whole story in only a couple of minutes. I do not believe this was ever made into a full length movie. I think this was it, but I could be mistaken.

*Sorry today’s post was so late. :-(