H.G. Bells writes around the intersections of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. She has several short stories in print, and is repped by Beth Campbell for her novel Sleep Over, coming soon from Skyhorse Publishing.
My husband, Aaron, has been working hard at making an exciting new project. “Wild Gears” is a laser cut spirograph set that he designed himself, and it’s awesome. He’s been testing prototypes and experimenting with art made with the circles and gears.
I wanted to share some of it with you, because it’s beautiful! Our apartment is rapidly becoming filled with this stuff though, so uh, be careful, it’s addictive.
The actual clear acrylic, laser cut gears! You’re seeing right- pentagonal, square, and triangular gears. He put a of work into getting these perfect, and they’re amazing.
Gears within gears! Everything works with everything else. He’s brilliant.
Weird, right? He’s developed some new technology that allows for the creation of some pretty wonky designs.
And when he uses colour- ah my eyes! Haha, it’s a fine line between mathematical beauty and crying tears of geometry.
SHUT THE FRONT DOOR ARE THOSE PARALLEL LINES
You’re darn tootin’ right they are. This is perhaps the most amazing thing he’s developed- the ability to create parallel lines with a spirograph. It makes for some really interesting pieces.
Another one with parallel lines.
So that’s “Wild Gears!” Thanks for checking it out. The album on Imgur has even more photos, and some descriptions. His video on the Kickstarter Page has even more stuff too!
I just got home from seeing a screening of Prisoners.
Holy smokes, I was not expecting that. It had me on the edge of my seat for almost the whole film. My chest is tight, my heart hurts from living in my throat for the past almost 3 hours.
The performances are excellent, the soundtrack is so unsettling, and the visual storytelling here is just top notch. Oh, but the best thing, the very best thing, is the script.
I am so jealous of this script. I want to give it a read and find out just how it managed to take me on this journey. It had me in the palm of its hand and did things to me… things that films don’t do to me very often. Like seriously, the intensity of emotion they managed to create; the craft level on every aspect of this film is stellar. And like I said, the script-fu is just… damn.
I am a huge Hugh Jackman fan so I basically had to see this film, but it became apparent very early on that I was going to be in for way more than I bargained for.
I am having a hard time figuring out just exactly how to recommend this film; it’s not going to be for everyone. Its pacing was brilliant, but it was slow (although it didn’t feel slow, if you know what I mean). And if you have kids, god help you; I already feel sick to my stomach after seeing it, I don’t know how parents would survive this film.
Been a while. It’s been a little slow going on the writing front; sometimes it’s a slog, and you just have to muscle through it. ._.
I just got back from PAX! Penny Arcade Expo is a huge gaming convention in Seattle, and this year it went from Friday August 30th to Monday September 2nd. Four days of wicked awesome gaming fun with my best friends, and 80,000 other people.
We had an 8 bed room at a hostel. I made a nest up on the top bunk by the window, and it was excellent.
But I’m getting ahead of myself…
This is perhaps the most clutch example of bureaucracy I will ever recount. I still cannot believe it happened. Truly, I am in the luckiest timeline.
9PM the night before leaving for PAX: someone in my group posts on our coordination thread that they just realized that their passport was expired. The rest of us gave our condolences and continued packing.
So at about 9:05PM, the night before we leave, I also discover that my passport is expired.
There was much freaking out, but I kept it together. Discovered that it was possible, though not likely, that I could get a new passport in time to make my 11:30 bus the next morning.
10:05PM: get passport photo taken. Thank goodness for late night convenience stores that take passport photos.
That night I packed and figured out the timeline for the next day. If I got up at 6, I could get in line for the passport office at 6:30. When it opened at 7:30 I was the first in line, of about 40 people. I explained my situation to the teller with a good a mix of urgency, optimism, and cheerfulness, but with an underlying panic that was impossible to conceal.
Longer story shorter, my new passport was handed to me at 11:17AM. I was in a cab at 11:20, and on the bus with all my friends at 11:25.
I cannot believe that worked. The people at the passport office in downtown Vancouver are wizards, literally wizards.
Bonus: my friend who was in the same predicament got his passport as well and made it to PAX in time for An Afternoon With Patrick Rothfuss.
Onto PAX! Here I shall share my top 10 games to check out.
Against the Wall is a first-person platforming-adventure game set on the side of an infinite wall. You have a weapon/tool equipped to manipulate sections of the wall, pulling them outwards so you can climb on them. This game looked challenging and fun and I look forward to trying it out. (by Michael Consoli)
There was a contingent of Australians up on the 5th floor of the main convention hall, near the PAX10, and I had a brief peruse to see what would catch my eye. Orbiter jumped out at me because of how insanely beautiful it is. It’s a space game where you orbit stars and moons and blow them up for energy. The effects are eye catching and the soundtrack is great. Just a beautiful game that I look forward to playing more of. (by Tim Stasse)
This game was eyecatching- everything in it started hand drawn on paper. The concept was neat and challenging- little beasty-dude can teleport to where your mouse cursor is. I had a tough time picking it up, but that was mostly because I was exhausted by the time I got to it. This is one game I will be playing again, when I have skills like basic hand-eye coordination, and brain function once again. A neat game.
Cannon Brawl is out right now. My husband plays it a lot. He was very excited to meet the creators of it; he made a shirt and they were pretty thrilled to see how into their game he is. They signed it for him, and played the game with him. The creators are super cool, and their game is absolutely fantastic. Think Worms Armageddon meets tower defence, with real time zeppelin warfare and destructible terrain. It’s super fun! Check it out, and get your Cannon Brawl on.
The next three on the list are all about sound. Visuals and gameplay are great, but mostly it was the soundtrack that drew me in.
It’s like asteroids, but you can bend time. Oh and also the soundtrack sometimes kicks into reverse, and so does everything else but you. It’s hella cool, and free to play.
Sidescrolling 2D platformer that has a kickin soundtrack to accompany you on your perilous journey. The look and feel is really great. Bought it when I got home.
This is a fantastic concept that’s so well implemented I could have played this game all day. You move to the beat of the music to keep your combo multiplier going, and it rocks my socks. This had such a crowd around it, mainly because they had a DDR pad hooked up to it, so people had to get their feet moving to the beat to dodge skeletons and fight dragons in this roguelike rhythm dungeon crawler. No picture could do it justice; you have to hear it to believe it, and everyone watching was bobbing their heads along to this awesome game.
This game was round 2 of the Omegathon, and boy oh boy was it fun to watch. It’s like Smash Bros, but with more game types, and with the cute factor pumped to 500%. Customizing your little battle dudes before the fight is super fun; there’s a jillion different heads to get. I bought it when I got home, and have a stoic lion head as my mug of choice. Want a party game? This is the one. Epic fun times ahead with Battleblock Theatre.
Holy moly this was fun. Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime at the top of my list for sure: it’s beautiful, sounds amazing, and is so inventive I fell in love with it immediately.
It’s two player co-op. You and your partner are manning a ship, and there are four guns, a shield, a giant space lazer, and thrusters, and you have to operate the ship in real time while being assaulted by space aliens, and simultaneously trying to save whole planets that are being attacked. It’s super fun, and I cannot wait to play more of it.
But wait there’s one more: it was the most hilarious thing to watch and then to play. Octodad: Dadliest Catch is a game where you play an octopus in disguise as a normal human dad, trying to fake his way through normal human stuff without letting on that he’s an octopus in a suit. Controlling the jelly-noodly-flip-floppy-cephalopod resulted in constant laughter. Having to do such mundane things as “Get your daughter the milk” and “Make coffee” resulted in near catastrophe as my flailing tentacles sent things flying around due to my inept control. It was so, so funny, and I will make everyone that comes into my house play it, so that I can laugh at them.
So that’s *my* PAX10. PAX11 I suppose. There were so many games, and even more that I list here that I’m looking forward to. The final round of the Omegathon was “Spy Party” and I think I’ll get it and play the heck out of it, and I will learn a new meaning of the word “subtlety”.
(My lanyard by the end of the con!)
That’s all for now folks! Thanks for checking it out. I hope I’ve inspired you to take a look at a few of these games and see if you like them.
I received an email from the Nicholl Fellowship today.
Every year, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences picks five writers and pay them, based on the strength of the script they submitted, to produce another feature length screenplay.
I didn’t make the cut for the Fellowship, but my script scored in the top ten percent!
7,251 entrants, and I’m in the top 10%? Pretty awesome, but of course, disappointing not to advance.
Ah well, I’m hoping I can find someone out there as excited about the story of the first genetically engineered dragon as I am! Perhaps this will help me along. It will make a killer film.
Congratulations to everyone that is advancing. I’m sure there are some amazing scripts, and how they’ll ever pick just five is completely beyond me!
In other news, I received my second ever royalty cheque! Seems that A Quick Bite of Flesh is still selling. Want some zombie flash fiction? Then this book is forrr yoooouuuu!
I am waiting on an awesome agent for a new book I’d like to see in print. Paranormal romance/urban fantasy here I come! I’m well into the sequel already, and hitting short stories out of the park on a daily basis.
I’ll keep at it until- BWA HA HA YOU CAN’T STOP ME
Thanks for stopping by.
Oh what’s that? This is my 100th post?
Hurrah!
Oh man, if I’ve been this into my small successes so far, when I get my first novel picked up I’m going to be happier than a kitten with a feather. More excited than a porcupine with a banana. You do know porcupines love bananas, right?
Anyway, thank you for stopping in and staying with me on this long, long journey to authordom.
I’m just keeping on keeping on. Written another book. Am having another go at finding an agent for “Luka and Iso”, the tale of the sentient genetically engineered dragon. I really hope I can get that one represented; the time is right for the story, and it needs to be told. All the fuforah about GMOs lately is wild. There’s some great opportunity for marketing, and great potential for cross talk when stories about GMOs and advancements in genetics come up.
Glow in the dark monkeys, anyone?
Meanwhile, my new project is going over well with an army of anonymous beta readers. It’s nice working with people I don’t know, and that don’t know me; they’re giving me good, honest feedback. …And a lot of it is positive. They already want the sequel!
But I’m sticking to my guns about not writing more than one book in a series until the first one gets published.
So I’m starting yet another one. While I polish the new book, I’m outlining the next, which will be my fifth novel. A fun sci-fi, inspired by a short story I wrote last year called “The First Gentlemen’s Galactic Scavenger Hunt”.
Short stories continue to be sent out, rejected, accepted. The latest is in the upcoming “Zombies Gone Wild II”, for which the cover was just sent to me. I think it’s hilarious.
So that’s me lately. It’s been interesting trying to temper my least favourite part of the process (trying to find an agent) with my most favourite (writing); the new projects pull me along even as I drag my heels cold-emailing amazing agents who I would absolutely be ecstatic to work with.
Oh, and I’ve levelled up my procrastination skills. Whenever I finish a major project, there’s a decompression that happens afterwards. So far it’s been things like fill a sketch book or write a zillion short stories, and my latest: watch all of The Office. Seriously, I’m almost done. This has been the least productive of my come-downs, but man is it good.
Thank goodness for the Self Control app, which I use to block out every distraction, but leave the rest of the useful internet free for research.
So, onwards I go. Book after book, I’m going to just keep ’em coming, until I find an agent that’s into one of them. And then we’ll really see what I can do.
It is at once exciting and frustrating to see my sci-fi future coming to pass. Exciting to see how things are progressing down the path I speculated they would- nice to know I can see into the future somewhat correctly sometimes. Frustrating because, well, once all the things happen, my book isn’t going to be as topical. I want it out in the wild soon, to stir the pot with all the questions that we’ll have to be asking once things get really serious.
And they are getting serious! Check it: “Scientists want to bring 22 animals back from extinction.”DE-Extinction. I can’t wait! I know I know, it’s going to be years, decades, before things start actually showing results. But I’m still pretty excited.
And here’s the thread on Reddit about it (ignore all the “comment removed” posts; memes and jokes are simply not tolerated in the science subreddit).
So, I hope I can find someone to help me sell my book, and get it on the shelves, while its content is just starting to make it into the public awareness. Also, it’d be pretty sweet to have current affairs to help me out in the publicity department… 🙂
Right! Well, onwards. I’m going to write a children’s short story tomorrow, one about dragons, for Spellbound. And then, thinking of the next big project. Something that’s started to just peek into my conscious thought is this desire to put my fantasy series on the big screen… and I have to resist for now.
…Because I’ve decided not to continue writing anything that could be a series until I sell it. If I write the first book in a series, as I’ve done twice now, I will leave it be until I can actually publish it, and there’s an audience who wants more.
This is great, it’ll mean I can keep breaking new ground with new ideas and characters, and have the benefit of creating a huge body of work that I could continue at any time. Once I “make it” I’ll have several series that I could choose to continue if there’s an audience for them.
I leave you with this picture, from another planet! It absolutely blows my mind that we have something on another planet, and it’s sending us back pictures.
I have it down pat by now. Though I think this can be a problem; this insidious expectation of rejection has effected me in a way I didn’t anticipate. I have four things that I’m really excited about right now: my novel got a full request at an agency I would love to work with, my screenplay is being considered for the Nicholl Fellowship, as well as a contest to get me into Pitchfest, and also a short story of mine has been shortlisted for an anthology I’m excited for.
This is a lot of excitement.
Usually it’s just a lot of little things, various stories out for various anthologies, and the trickle of rejections come in steady and constant. No big deal (anymore).
So when I actually have things to be excited for, I realize how oppressed this expectation of rejection was making me.
The danger of getting excited is that it makes the rejection just that much worse. I’m finding this creeping into other aspects of my life; I’ve stopped getting excited for movies (movies that I would have gotten excited for in the past!) because of past let downs (not a rejection, but the same feelings are at play).
Last week was the most difficult I’ve found meditation. My mind kept racing forward to the future, and I’d have to pull it back. Sit. Stay. Not terrible, but it got me to realize just how much I’ve been not been letting myself get excited.
So I’m excited. Even if none of these four amazing things happen, it feels good to have so much possibility laid out before me. And even if a single one does happen? Well damn. Things are pretty swell.
Silly kitty. My own is hiding under my blankets, scared of the wind.
Right! So, hope all is well with you, dear reader.
As you may know, I enjoy participating in the various gift exchanges through Reddit Gifts. It’s like doing a secret santa, only with thousands of other people, and for specific categories of things.
I was so pleased to open my Coffee Exchange parcel yesterday! My package came from Macedonia– and contained Turkish coffee! I tried making a cup this morning, and it was delicious (Without cream?! Amazing.). Very flavourful, and unusual.
In writing news, my short story “The First Gentlemen’s Galactic Scavenger Hunt” has been shortlisted for the World Weaver Press anthology, “Far Orbit- Speculative Space Adventures”. I’d be super happy to see this one in print; I feel like it’s actually a project I’d like to expound upon a bit. A scavenger hunt in space: what’s not to love?
I have also entered my screenplay in a contest to win tickets to PitchFest, where I would get a chance to hook a studio. That would be totally mathematical.
Currently, I’m continuing a read-through of my Spell Carriers series, and I’m into the second book. The first book took me three days, though it would have taken less if I weren’t making edits here and there. It was a pretty easy read. Trook Hunters starts off more complex, having had book one to set it up.
Anyway! Enough ramblings. What’s important here is seeing how they did the Arc Reactor makeup for Iron Man.
Painting on the latex.
A lot of latex.
A good sport.
Different colours for the different layers.
Airbrushed to make it look real!
They can peel the latex back and make it look like skin.
Final effect: amazing.
And, seeing as I have duck brining in the fridge, this:
:O
Well, I’ll keep you posted. I hope one of these days to have some truly excellent news for you. For now, I’ll keep at it. I know that one day all this work I’m doing will pay off. I hope it’s soon, but I’m in it for the long haul. 🙂
I get so focused on writing that I forget to see what else is going on. There’s a ton of great blogs out there, and I don’t read them as much as I should (if you’re reading mine, you have my deepest thanks).
So I was doing some catching up, and found the following:
And as for me, well, I’ve spent the last three days reading over my first novel, book one in the Spell Carriers series, a fantasy epic. I am so pleased that it is not terrible! My writing has evolved, for sure, but it still flows, and holds me in a way that surprises me- to not be able to put down a book that I wrote? What is this fresh narcissism? I genuinely enjoy it, and am really relieved to see that it holds up against my newer works.
And it’s the first time I’ve read it in my new program, Scrivener. I had to teach it all the new words, all the new names. And that first time I right click a name and say “learn spelling” is rather magical; for I can see into the future of the characters, and know what a journey they have to come, and it’s wonderful.
Characters I introduce in book one go on to have major parts in book two, and to see their conception, when I didn’t even know how great they would become, leaves me glowing.
So yes, reviewing, and removing one’s head from the sand. I will try and do this more; there’s a lot of great stuff being posted about this great and mad endeavour of writing.
Last night, I had a culinary experience. My brother-in-law and husband arranged a dinner for four as a birthday present for our bff (my bro’s beau, if you will), and I was the fourth. We went to Pear Tree, an award winning gourmet restaurant.
We had five courses over two and a half hours, and it was spectacular. I had something happen that’s never happened before. When I had the bite of creme brûlée with the bit of pear with it, tears, actual tears, came to my eyes. I love pear. And this was a taste of heaven, elevated to the highest of heights. It was wonderful, and to share it with three of my favourite people in the world, well, it was just incredible.
I’ve been checking in with my writing friends, and I was so pleased to see that one of them, a screenwriter, has obtained representation in LA. Big time! This is incredible. The novelists equivalent would be scoring an agent in New York, which I hope to do soon. It’s really nice seeing other writers have some success.
Meanwhile, I read my past works. My first book has held up surprisingly well, even though I’ve evolved as a writer quite a bit since its completion.
And for some reason, this comic came to mind, and made me chuckle. Oglaf, often NSFW, is hilarious, and this is my favourite one: http://oglaf.com/labyrinth/
H.G. Bells 
