WATWB – Your Monthly Shot Of News That Doesn’t Suck

Okay, so I’m late this month. Technically, this post was supposed to be up Friday at midnight UTC and now Damyanti’s gonna have my legs broken. In my defense, I’ve got two things that prevented me getting it out on time. 1, I’ve got a new book that just came out (link over there to the right, Roadside Attractions. Great book. I’m very proud of it). 2. I’m lazy. In fact, I just now got around to putting the link to Roadside Attractions over there even though it’s only, like, a two-minute process.

What was that title? Oh, yeah, Roadside Attractions. Jeez, talk about your gratuitous plugging.

Anyway, I went back and forth on what to write about. On the one hand, Kuwait has relaxed its book censorship laws, so that’s a good thing. On the other hand, women in France are eschewing bras. Which is also a good thing. But, considering the coming civil war in America, I decided to stick with the homefront and remind everyone that it’s, like, totally okay to not be a dick.

If you live in an area where you can get on Nextdoor, you’ll find it’s something of a mixed bag. For those of you not in the know, Nextdoor is an app and website where everyone in the neighborhood keeps an eye on things. That’s a good thing. Unfortunately, a lot of folks on Nextdoor have nothing to do with their lives, so their posts consist of, “OMG, strange man walking down the street! WTFBBQ!”

For a country as xenophobic as America, strange people can raise our blood pressure to dangerous levels that can only be alleviated with automatic weapons and cheap beer. So, given that mentality, when a man sees a kid constantly riding a bike in his driveway, you can imagine what comes next.

He draws the kid a race track in chalk on his driveway. And updates it frequently so the kid has a new track every now and then.

See, just because someone’s reading something you don’t like or going around braless, or riding their bike on your driveway, doesn’t mean you need to haul off and be an ass about it. Sometimes, just drawing a chalk racetrack is the best solution.

Read the original story here.

If you’d like to connect your blog and help spread a little joy (or snark, like I do), it’s easy to sign up. Just ask and ye shall receive. Or go check it out here: here.

Our lovely and talented hosts this month are: Lizbeth Hartz, Peter Nena, Shilpa Garg, Roshan Radhakrishnan, Sylvia Stein.

~~~GUIDELINES~~~

1. Keep your post to below 500 words, as much as possible. (Wow, I totally missed that mark this time around).

2. All we ask is you link to a human news story on your blog on the last Friday of each month, one that shows love, humanity and brotherhood.

3. Join us on the last Friday of each month in sharing news that warms the cockles of our heart. No story is too big or small, as long as it goes beyond religion and politics, into the core of humanity.

4. Place the WE ARE THE WORLD Badge on your sidebar, and help us spread the word on social media. Tweets, Facebook shares, G+ shares using the #WATWB hashtag through the month most welcome. More Blogfest signups mean more friends, love and light for all of us.

5. We’ll read and comment on each others’ posts, get to know each other better, and hopefully, make or renew some friendships with everyone who signs on as participants in the coming months.

6. To sign up, add your link in WE ARE THE WORLD Linky List below.

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And now your moment of Zen.

Book Review – Beneath A Fearful Moon by R.A. McCandless

I’ve always felt the novella doesn’t get enough love. In this day of digital and on-demand publishing, there’s really no reason to focus exclusively on massive tomes just because they’re easier to run through the printing press. Not every story needs to be four hundred pages long and trying to stretch a shorter tale into a full-length novel just gives you Star Trek: The Motion Picture. A story should be precisely as long as it needs to be and no longer.

Returning to Aqualine in the form of a novella was a good thing. It’s the perfect length for the story it’s telling. The story is clever and handled well and, thankfully, didn’t get dragged out into 400 pages of extraneous details. McCandless aims the story right at the point and stands on the gas. What comes next is a short, intense read that builds on his work in The Clockwork Detective.

And just like Clockwork Detective, Beneath A Fearful Moon is a great example of blending two genres to come up with something new. Part steampunk, part urban fantasy, Moon is a story that straddles worlds without letting the setting be overbearing. Imagine clicking gears and the so-perfect-they’re-alien Fae. Sundry things like steam-powered tree strippers meet fantastic water dryads. Nature buts up against iron technology. Even Aubrey, our protagonist, is a study in straddling worlds.

If you like steampunk or urban fantasy or just want to see what happens nine months after they get drunk and have a torrid affair, check out McCandless’s Constable of Aqualine series. Both The Clockwork Detective and Beneath A Fearful Moon are available on Amazon and both are well worth the read.

Constable Aubrey Hartmann did her duty, fought for the Empire and lost her leg in the process. All she wants is a quiet life, and the chance of some fun, romantic entanglements in the frontier town of Aqualinne.
When bodies start turning up, slashed from head to toe, she’s duty-bound investigate. As the clues start to point to the reclusive and deadly Fae in the prohibited Old Forest, Aubrey must rely on her war-forged nerves and her trusty Manton pistols. The challenge isn’t just to solve the case, but to survive it.

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Book Review – The Man Without Hands by Eric Malikyte

Traditional narrative structure follows a three-part process: Introduce the characters and the plot, drop the characters into the worst possible place, Salvage the situation just before everything goes completely to shit.

Both of you longtime readers out there know I’ve reviewed Malikyte’s books before. Both Echoes Of Olympus Mons and Mind’s Horizon were clever, well-executed books that took horror into some amazingly fun new places. Rather than simple hack and slash, put on the hockey mask and kill some teenagers having sex, both books added a sci-fi spin to horror. They both had a brooding sense of “something is terribly wrong” that lurked in the narrative like an overbearing lover looking in your window.

The Man Without Hands has some elements of Echoes and Horizon – you can sense the DNA in the stories – but is very different beast. While the celestial horror is still there, The Man Without Hands is more both more exploratory and more action-packed. This is Malikyte taking his time, building worlds and giving us hints at a lot of back story that hopefully will be fleshed out in future installments.

At its heart, The Man Without Hands is about rebellion. All the magic and action and high-powered fighting serves to emphasize the differences between the protagonist on one world and everyone else and the antagonist on a different world and everyone else. And through the threads of the narrative we see the similarities between the protagonist and antagonist and begin to wonder if our initial assessments of “good guy” and “bad guy” are accurate. Which, frankly, is no mean feat and shows that Malikyte has a big idea brewing in his head.

As usual, Malikyte spends time developing his characters. They’re not two-dimensional cutouts, there’s a richness to them that makes them pop off the page. Even the minor characters have enough quirks to make us feel something for them. For some of them, it’s concern. For others, it’s an undeniable desire to punch them in the nose.

The Man Without Hands is book one in a series. Book two, The Rise of Oreseth, is available now. The Man Without Hands serves as step one of the traditional narrative; we get a good idea of who the players are and what’s at stake. I’m expecting book two will take the characters we’ve come like and drop them into the meat grinder.

The last war is on the horizon…

On an alien world, beneath an alien sky, deep beneath the mountains, the last remnants of a doomed people are preparing to go to war. Their enemies rule the humans of the world above like gods and command the power to reshape the planet itself.

The High Elder has declared that all Sulekiel youth must enter the Trials, giving them months to prepare for a deadly test of strength and otherworldly power when they should have had years. For Sage, the son of a traitor, it is a chance to prove himself to those who never trusted his tainted blood.

But none of the Sulekiel are aware of the power sleeping inside of him—or that one of their brethren has traversed the veil between universes, traveling to a place called Earth on a reckless quest to fulfill a bargain with an Eldritch god, leaving a trail of death and destruction in his wake. As the consequences of this traveler’s doomed bargain reach across worlds, powers beyond comprehension stir. The fate of both worlds might just rest in the hands of the traitor’s son and a desperate small-town cop.

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