Phursday Photos: Wheels

SpiritBlade Underground

Allow me to take this post to apologise for a terrible oversight on my part. I don't think I have made enough mentions of the work of SpiritBlade Productions here, which is really quite poor when you think that the purpose of this blog is to discuss Christian Sci-Fi and Fantasy.

So I guess I'll mention them here: SpiritBlade Productions specialise in full cast audio dramas on CD and download. I've been a bit slack I must admit, and only listened to the first SpiritBlade so far, although I think I'm going to have to dip into Pilgrim's Progress soon...

Anyway, the reason I mention it now is that there is now a SpiritBlade forum... a cool place for Christian geeks to hang out! Yay! Oh yes, and you'll probably have noticed the podcast in the sidebar here, if you're in the habit of scrolling that far.

Was that enough of a plug? Go check it out anyway, and if you like what you see, maybe I'll see you on the forum. You'll recognise me, I'm sure.

Tuesday Tunes: The Kinks Choral Collection

Regular readers of Tuesday Tunes may recall that I'm a fan of the obscure cover version, and of the Kinks. So how could I resist this, Ray Davies performing some of his best tunes with the Crouch End Festival Chorus?

It has to be said that the concept works best on the mellower tunes, and tracks like You Really Got Me and All Day And All Of The Night, while making for interesting arrangements, don't work quite as well as, for instance, Days. On the other hand, Waterloo Sunset, one of the best pop songs of all time, transcends pop songdom by the addition of a choral backing, and Village Green, similarly, highlights just how good Ray Davies' tunes actually are.

And as an added bonus, the Village Green Medley is actually six full songs, rather than snippets as the title might suggest, so rather than the ten (or 11 on the special edition, which starts with Postcards From London with Chrissie Hynde) tracks listed on the sleeve, you get 15.

Basically, I totally love this CD. If you like Ray Davies and the Kinks, or bizarre cover versions, or (it could happen!) the Crouch End Festival Chorus, this is essential listening!

CSFF Blog Tour: Starlighter by Bryan Davis

It is an important and popular fact that I once scored a B in English class for a report on a book I never read. I won't divulge what that book was, in case I am chased down by an angry mob and forcibly removed from the blog tour for my flagrant disrespect for literature, but in order to redress the balance somewhat I am deliberately not reviewing Starlighter by Bryan Davis, which I also haven't read.

What I have read, however, is one or two of the other posts on the tour. See, I'm not a total slacker! And to prove it, here are my personal tour highlights:

Leighton's review in two parts;
Snuffles the Dragon's completely unbiased review;
John W. Otte's geek dad post;
Krystine Kercher enthusing about black dragon's eggs;
an interview by Rachel Starr Thomson;
not to mention the handy list of other links gathered in one place, namely the Galactic Overlord's Blog.
You could also stop by the author's blog, just to see what else is on his mind.

And when you're done, Starlighter will no doubt be available at your favourite purveyor of young adult fantasy fiction.



Those of you still wishing to follow the extended tour, please form an orderly queue and step this way:
Brandon Barr Beckie Burnham Jeff Chapman R. L. Copple CSFF Blog Tour Stacey Dale D. G. D. Davidson Jeff Draper April Erwin Andrea Graham Tori Greene Nikole Hahn Ryan Heart Becky Jesse Cris Jesse Jason Joyner Julie Carol Keen Krystine Kercher Dawn King Leighton Jane Maritz Rebecca LuElla Miller John W. Otte Donita K. Paul Crista Richey SarahFlan Chawna Schroeder Rachel Starr Thomson Fred Warren Dona Watson Phyllis Wheeler Jill Williamson KM Wilsher

CSFF Blog Tour vs Tuesday Tunes

This week your CSFF Blog Tour is looking at Starlighter by Bryan Davis, the first volume in the Dragons of Starlight series. And since we've already covered the Top Ten Dragon Songs, so...
It's the Top Ten Starlight Songs!

10. Savatage: Starlight
Proper 80s rock... these guys sound as scary as their name!

9. Minus 8: Starlight
That's better, this weeks first piece of electronica... not at all scary!

8. Snowgoons: Starlight
Possibly the first German hip-hop outfit to feature in a Top Ten...

7. The Supermen Lovers: Starlight
Possibly the first French act to feature in a Top Ten, with this one-hit wonder from 2001.

6. Indochine: Starlight
Possibly the second French act to feature in a Top Ten, with this combination of catchy chorus and incomprehensible verses.

5. Lou Reed & John Cale: Starlight
Is anyone spotting a theme yet?

4. Electric Light Orchestra: Starlight
I love these guys!

3. Slash featuring Myles Kennedy: Starlight
Nice little slice of guitar tunage here by that bloke from out of Guns n Roses.

2. Dead Composers: Starlight
Nicely chilled out electronica with weird foreign lyrics.

1. Muse: Starlight
And what better way to finish than with some Devon style indie rock.

Here's your Spotify playlist: Starlight Top Ten. As ever, the unSpotified among you will need to skip to rest of the tour:
Brandon Barr Beckie Burnham Jeff Chapman R. L. Copple CSFF Blog Tour Stacey Dale D. G. D. Davidson Jeff Draper April Erwin Andrea Graham Tori Greene Nikole Hahn Ryan Heart Becky Jesse Cris Jesse Jason Joyner Julie Carol Keen Krystine Kercher Dawn King Leighton Jane Maritz Rebecca LuElla Miller John W. Otte Donita K. Paul Crista Richey SarahFlan Chawna Schroeder Rachel Starr Thomson Fred Warren Dona Watson Phyllis Wheeler Jill Williamson KM Wilsher

CSFF Blog Tour: Starlighter by Bryan Davis

A new car, a restless child on a hot summer night, and an impending road trip into wild boar country...

Don't worry, that's not the intro to the blurb for Starlighter, it's my excuses for having a rubbish post today.

By way of an introduction, this week the Christian Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog Tour is giving you, the reader, good reasons to part with your hard-earned cash for Starlighter, the first in a four-book Young Adult fantasy series by Bryan Davis.

So, while I carry on dealing with the mundane realities of life (and the wild boar road trip), why not take a look at the author's website, or his blog, and if he seems nice enough, why not even buy Starlighter from a well-known internet bookseller.

What? You want an unbiased opinion of the book? Well, you might try one or more of these links:
Brandon Barr
Beckie Burnham
Jeff Chapman
R. L. Copple
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Andrea Graham
Tori Greene
Nikole Hahn
Ryan Heart
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Jason Joyner
Julie
Carol Keen
Krystine Kercher
Dawn King
Leighton
Jane Maritz
Rebecca LuElla Miller
John W. Otte
Donita K. Paul
Crista Richey
SarahFlan
Chawna Schroeder
Rachel Starr Thomson
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Dona Watson
Phyllis Wheeler
Jill Williamson
KM Wilsher

Friday Review: Vanished by Kathryn Mackel

A terrorist's bomb. A rogue experiment. An impenetrable mist. And no one is coming to help...

Sounds good, right? Like I said way back in the CSFF Blog Tour for the book, it sounds like a Christian version of Lost, something I started work on waaaay before Vanished, or even Lost, were around.

So, 12 months after the tour, having finally read the thing, is it any good?

Well, er, yes and no. First, I have to say that as something marketed as a Christian Chiller, it didn't chill me very much. Maybe that's just the hardened Stephen King reader in me; most Christian readers may well have been scared to death by it. But that, it must be said, is about the smallest problem in this book's marketing.

Anyway, the story: comparisons to Lost are unavoidable I'm afraid, but that's no bad thing. The means by which the characters vanish does seem a little more contrived than a simple plane crash, but lets assume we can all suspend our disbelief that long and get into the thing. After the explosion, the whole story cracks along at a nice pace, showing the aftermath from the viewpoints of a variety of innocent (and not-so-innocent) bystanders, plenty of suspense, weird supernatural mysteries, Lost-y flashbacks, the whole bit. And an underlying thread of hope and faith from a Christian worldview. So far so good.

There did seem, to me, to be something a little wrong with the Christian characters here. It might just be that they're American - that's not me being racist, but the shortage of Christian fiction (especially of the speculative kind) from anywhere else in the known universe gets a little tedious at times - or it might be that writing believable Christians is a difficult thing to do. Maybe I need to revisit the book, not get so caught up in the story, and look specifically at how God interacts with the characters.

And then it ends.

It is literally half a book. It's about 300 pages, which is probably about right for a Christian market novel, but 5-600 pages wouldn't be overly long for a story like this to be done properly. And the end of Vanished couldn't have been more abrupt without actually being mid-sentence. Which is more than a little disappointing.

It's not the author's fault, of course; it seems the publishers pulled the plug mid-project (no mention of a series is even mentioned anywhere on the cover), and book two is still drifting in limbo somewhere until a new publisher decides to put it out. (Didn't the same thing happen to Mackel's Birthright Project? And The Personifid Project would have been the same but for Marcher Lord Press stepping up. I guess the message to Christian spec-fic authors is don't start a series...)

In summary: Vanished is like a Christian take on Lost, but with a less satisfying conclusion.

Why I Don't Write

• Real life gets in the way. Holding down a full time job, being a parent and writing do not naturally work well together. Time management is not a strong point of mine, sadly.
• I'm not very good. This is, of course, a matter of opinion, and subject to the truism that practice makes perfect. It is also, perhaps, something I have led myself to believe following countless rejections and should probably get over. But that's for another post entirely...
• It's a silly act of worship. Surely if it was a valid act of worship it would have been blessed with a multi-pound publishing contract, right? Well no, obviously, but that doesn't stop me having a crisis of confidence over whether to carry on, or what the point in it all is.
• It's what God made me to do. And that, I guess is the bottom line. The work of God's people is opposed, and since completing Countless as the Stars I've been pretty well derailed by all that insecurity, bad time management, and the flat refusal to accept that God wants me to write stories. Which, it could be argued, must mean there's still at least one pretty awesome book inside me. So I guess I should be writing...

Why I Write

• I think better that way. Maybe that means I have a short-term memory problem, but I can type antidisestablishmentarianism with barely a second thought, but stand me up in a spelling bee (not that we have those here) and I'll just forget which 's' I'm on and stand there looking bemused. On the other other hand, I could just have a rubbish short-term memory.
• I learn more that way. Yes, I know learning is related to thinking. But what I'm thinking of here is what I learnt about God while writing Countless as the Stars. I hope that means that the finished product was able to convey something of the nature of God... but I guess that is up to Him. The point here is that I learnt a lot about the nature and person of God in the writing process.
• It's an act of worship. I make no apologies if that sounds weird. For a while I forgot this aspect of the writing process (that short-term memory problem I expect) and got confused about how I, with the musical ability of a demented bee, should worship God. As a Christian my whole life should be an act of worship; musical types use their creativity as a visible outlet, and so should I.
• It's what God made me to do. It's weird, while I was working on Countless as the Stars, I was convinced that God wanted me to write a whole Bible's worth of Old Testament Space Operas. Then of course nobody took any interest in it, and even after getting a short print run made up (mainly so I would stop fiddling with the thing!) I sort of lost heart in the whole project. I've got my heart back now, maybe not for Old Testament Space Operas (at least, not yet) but for writing stories. I have a fresh sense of what it is God wants me to tell the world. So I guess I should be writing...