Autumn: The City

Somewhere, not quite before the first installment finished, Autumn: The City, picks up the story following a group of survivors that converge at a university and struggle with the same uncertainty and fears.  This story is equally as dark as the survivors find themselves in life or death situations with the loss of resources and the threat of the increasingly aware undead.  Some give in to their fear and despair, others find whatever they can cling to as a reason to go on living.

World Encyclopedia

My notes for my stories are pretty messy (yes I do more than just read).  So I've decided to catalogue all of my stuff here.  Then I can put it in a nice order later on, if my penchant for perendinating doesn't get the better of me.  And, to avoid confusion, I'll stick to doing it for one story.

One of the first stories I started writing; I was about ten when I first began working on this story; it's evolved a lot since then.  Now it's just a vestige of the original story.  I'll embarass myself for a moment and share what it was about.  Originally it was about six kids who get trapped in a magical world; that evolved from some mortifying Xena.  I called it S.U.I.T.S, Secret Unified Interdimensional Travel Society.  And it was about these kids that had the power to travel between dimensions.  Basically and learn how preserve the laws of nature (matter cannot be created or destroyed) using that rule, one could not take stuff from one deminsion to the other unless it was designed for interdimensional travel.  Anyway, so there were people who would take stuff like gold across dimensions and they had to be stopped.  

I scrapped that story because the premise, in my opinion is pretty dumb.  But I kept the characters and consolidated them with many others from previous incarnations of the story.  With that I begin my world Encyclopedia.

White Writers and Effective Black characters

I am midway through the book House of Discarded Dreams by Ekaterina Sedia.  The full review will come when I finish it, but I would like to discuss how brilliant a writer Sedia is.

The story is told from a first person perspective by a black American girl of Zimbabwean immigrant parents.  The author effectively captures her struggle between two cultures and the struggles of being black in an academic environment.  After researching the author, I was surprised to discover that Sedia is very white and very Russian (though she now lives in the States).

Sedia is one of the most remarkable writers for this reason alone.  She created a very real black character.  Many white authors who create black characters that are principal to the story don't write from that characters perspective.  Most who do write from the perspective of a black character, write a black character in the same way they would a white character.  (Justine Larbalestier is another notable exception) They write very "colorblind"; their black character's blackness is something easily forgotten and overlooked especially when it's not central to the story.  When their blackness is central to the story; it's still central in a very disconnected way.  The only problem is; the way things work for a white person do not work the same for a black person.  Blackness is not something that a black person forgets.  Writing from a realistic black perspective means the author should not let readers forget.  Others who write from a black perspective create characters that wear their blackness like it's black face; their characters' being black is constantly thrown in the readers face as if being black is the only thing a black person thinks about.

It is this lack of true understanding of blackness and internalizing the black experience that make white writers rarely able to have a character that is black and is real.   Sedia has enough talent that she could create a character that felt the black experience; and remarkably does it so well that it is as if she herself were black, dropping insights on such things as white indifference and shying away from black culture, literature and history.  Hopefully Sedia will have many more novels to come.

Autumn by David Moody

David Moody, author of the brilliant Hater writes a fantastic story of the undead.  In an age of zombie action novels and movies with strong and fearless protagonists who pack big guns, Moody takes us back through his channeling the ghost of Night of the Living Dead.

When a strange illness takes hold and leaves the majority of the population dead, a handful of survivors make their way to a dilapidated community center for fear of the disaster outside. And as they hide out in the building, three of them Carl, Emma and Michael realized that they need to get past their sorrow and terror to survive.  And when the dead rise again, they decide to find themselves some place more isolated in a quest for some sense of security.  All with the undead becoming increasingly alert, and increasingly aggressive.

The very heart of the stories is the characters and their response to the sudden collapse of society and they world they knew.  These are not three strong willed top notch action heroes.  They are very flawed, often weakened and paralyzed by their fear of this new world.  They struggle to find a reason to continue and with the memories of their lives before.  And their tension lends itself to creating a fantastic portrait of people faced with disaster.

This is the first in a series.   

Comic Books!

Current Series of Interest:

1) Incorruptible: I know it came after Irredeemable, but I do like it more.  It's the story of Max Damage, former super villain and arch nemesis of the Plutonian, the world greatest superhero.  When the Plutonian snaps and goes berserker on the world, Max Damage reforms himself to take on the role of a new superhero.  And as bad as he was is as good as he's become.

2)Irredeemable: The sister series of Incorruptible. When the world's greatest superhero turns into a weapon of mass destruction world wide, his former teammates are left to pick up the pieces and descover who the Plutonian was and what led him down the path to evil.  All the while they are still aware of him as very real threat to their existence.

3)Locke & Key

An intriguing fantasy/horror series.  After the murder of the husband and father of the Locke family, the mother relocates with her three children to the family estate the Keyhouse.  The place has some strange things going on.  Including a door that can turn anyone who walks through it into a ghost.  However, there is evil at the house and evil that has followed them to the house.

Darius Logan: Super Justice Force by DF Walker

This book combines the best traits of comic book storytelling and novel storytelling and puts the readers in the perspective not of the superhero, but of one of us readers.  It's the story of Darius Logan, a boy, made criminal by circumstance and given a second chance in a program of the same name.  In Second Chance he gets an opportunity to work with the superheroes he's idolized all his life and make something of himself.  However, certain things are not working in his favor and he'll have to do all he can to keep in the program, out of trouble and fight against a growing threat.

Walker has created a vivid world miraculously fleshing out a full superhero universe in one novel.  For the few flaws...I found it odd that there were a few,   (a least one) inexplicable instances that story switched from Darius' perspective to that of another character; it was distracting and pointless to the crux of the story.  Also Darius while it's debatable how likable Darius is, (I found him quite childish and whiney), it's easy to empathize with his awe and amazement, to feel his burdens and to experience his journey.  And where Darius could get tedious, the other characters were more than fabulous.  Walker also successfully created an odious villain, almost unbearable to read for the frustration he created.

I'm hoping to see more from this world Walker has created.

All in all he's reminisce of Jason Todd...in a good way.  And for anyone who loves superhero comics and novels, this book is totally worth it.  Book Details