Piles and piles of news, just like last time. New story, of course… but also new art, new narration, new merchandise, and a a gigantic amazing holy crap new art challenge for you to participate in! Read on!
City of Angles //010 Continues
The manhunt is on. Well, Marcy’s there too, so it’s a manhunt plus womanhunt. Let’s rejoin our friends Gus and Marcy as they flee the strangely single-lettered salvager gang that’s hot on their heels. Will there be tense action? Maybe! Will Gus be told how the City of Angles works? Probably! Will secrets be revealed? That would be telling.
It’s only two scenes, but they’re pretty beefy scenes overall. Next week, our heroes will start taking some action beyond just running for their lives and pondering the futility of existence. Oh, and to help you visualize, there’s also new official artwork of Gus Zero.
As always, if you’re keeping current on the series, your feedback is awesomesauce.
More Read-Aloud Funtimes!
Here’s Omahdon’s next forays into reading my stories aloud. It’s proof that my stuff is very hard to read aloud without mistakes, and I should probably do something about how awkward my narration can get.
Merchandising! Merchandising!
I’m pleased to announce the official opening of the City of Angles Merch Store, conveniently located on the same page as the VIP club and the future book store. Here, you can buy cheap items like stickers, buttons, magnets, and keychains… or bigger ticket items like t-shirts, hoodies, and bags.
There’s plenty of focus on characters, but also wherever possible I’ve tried to make items that actually exist in the series. For instance, there’s Dave’s t-shirt and the Ghostwriter hoodie, and a keychain that’s appopriate to the Heart of the City. If you’ve got any suggestions for other things you’d love to see, let me know.
I don’t actually make much money off any of this stuff — if you’re looking to directly pour money down my throat, the VIP Club’s your best bet there. The merch exists less for profiteering and more for folks who really crave some City of Angles merch and wanna wear it loud and proud. For those folks, your ship has come in.
The Create-a-Thing Challenge!
Hear ye, hear ye, creative persons of all stripes — it’s time to make stuff! Full details are on the art gallery page. Everyone who submits a fan work for City of Angles before June 29th will get free copies of all the anachronauts bonus stories, and if they’re keen, a chance to win a free video game!
“But I can’t draw!” you may say. Ah, but this goes beyond visual art! You could write. Or sculpt. Or dress up like your favorite character and snap a photo. Or make a cardboard box diorama, like you did in third grade. You can do just about anything, provided you do it with passion (and it’s related to City of Angles, of course).
I can’t wait to see what you make! This is gonna be awesome — but only because you, yes, you are awesome. Thanks for your ongoing support!
FYI: The “read the first story” and “about the City of Angles” links at the top both 404. I think this is because they have a Templates/ in the URL they shouldn’t have. This is on both //010 and //009.
Really wish I had the time or talent for the contest. ~.~; Loving the series so far.
Thanks for the tip — fixed. As for the art challenge, I decided to open it WAY wider than just “people who can draw.” If you can do anything creative you can enter!
In regard to the spoken narration thing:
I will admit that hearing our friend having difficulty reading aloud material that I had read silently with pleasure gave me pause. It made me speculate whether we have moved into a post-verbal world, one in which stories are not told, but written.
C.S. Lewis, in his An Experiment in Criticism made the point (he was discussing J.R.R. Tolkien’s work) that for some stories, the writing doesn’t matter. They are so basic — so attuned to the core of what human beings recognize as a fundamental Story — that whether the writing is good or not is secondary. I mean, think of the story of Odysseus and the sirens. Do you really need Homer’s poetry to see in your mind’s eye the man strapped to the mast listening… listening… and straining to go to the beautiful voices that call him? Lewis coined the term mythopoeic for such stories.
But while I don’t think you’d MIND being a mythmaker, I also think you’d like your stories to read well. Fortunately, there’s an easy cure. You have functioning ears, and a mouth, and you know how to punctuate. :) It’s not so much a matter of word choice as it a matter of where to put the commas.
Exactly. Honestly, all it takes to smooth out the bumps is a complete re-read, looking for moments where I use a redundant word, or include too many commas, or phrase something awkwardly. I can do better. It’s very time consuming so I tend to go AAWWWWMAAAAN I DUN WANNA but it should really be done.
I do believe that sometimes a story just isn’t crafted with voiceover in mind, though. Like Unreal Estate. I wrote that to be deliberately painful if read aloud, with a narrator that favored run-on sentences and crazy word play. It fit the story I was trying to tell about an amusingly mixed up universe and a boy with zero life experience trying to soak it all in. Compare that to Sailor Nothing, which was comparatively smoother to read aloud because it spoke in plain and serious tones.
Wow. So, 30 years can make a bon vivant into a self destructive murderer.
“It’s all just a little bit of history repeating…”