Sunday Funnies: Ain't Misbehavin'... Well, Maybe I Am.

 

[Link] Ranking The Most Popular and Beloved Books Of All Time

By Jason Pasos

It's hard to say exactly what makes a book great; they are after all, pieces of art that are just as subjective as anything else. However, there are some books that seem to endure for longer and resonate with more readers. Whether or not you're a fan of literature, these are the stories that some might consider required reading. So, did you read all the best ones, and did your favorite make the list? Read on and see!

Read the full article: https://www.drgraduate.com/en/ranking-popular-beloved-books-time

AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTION PRESENTS COUNT ROCHEFORT IN THE SEVEN CIRCLES OF SATAN

From popular writer Frank Schildiner, comes a swash-buckling adventure set in a time of romance and intrigue. The forces of evil assail the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV of France. Devils and demons from the deepest depths of darkness weave their terrible spells upon the nobles of the young King’s court. At the suggestion of his ailing advisor, Cardinal Mazarin, the son of a legendary warrior receives a call to service. The infamous Count Rochefort, son of the enemy of the Three Musketeers, will now battle, The Seven Circles of Satan! 

Artist John Gallagher provides the black and white interior illustrations with Pulp Factory Award winner Rob Davis delivering the beautiful color cover and book design. Here are both familiar and new characters, good vs evil, with a kingdom at stake. Here is a classic adventure with a pulp twist. So grab your sword and En Garde!

AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTION – PULP FICTION FOR A NEW GENERATION!

Available now from Amazon in paperback and soon on Kindle.

The Free Comic Book Day Wrap-Up

Really enjoyed spending the day with folks like Robert Pope (Peanuts, Looney Tunes) and others at the Free Comic Book Day event in downtown Lawrenceville, co-hosted by Galactic Quest. Here are some of the pictorial highlights. 

Not Quite a Booth Babe

Like a Good Neighbor, These Folks Were There

Cosplay Exhibit

Cosplayers

Convention Sketches

Little Red Hot drawn by Robert Pope

Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes (from Robotech)
drawn by Jason Kochis

Thanks again, all, for making it such a fun event!

Sean Taylor Brings the Weird to The Crazy Book Lady!!!!

 

For more info, visit The Crazy Book Lady.

Adult Writers, Child Readers?

For our next roundtable, let's look at being child readers and how, if at all, that influenced us as writers. 

Were you read to when you were a toddler/young child? Do you remember favorites that you continued to read alone once you learned how?

Ef Deal: I wasn't read to, but I learned to read very young, three years. I read in secret by the wedge of light from the bathroom after bedtime. Then I found the town library was on my street and ripped through the children's section in six months. Got a library card before I was five. My dad was a reader -- of trash. 

Elizabeth Donald: I learned to read when I was three (or so I am told), so I don’t have strong memories of being read to, but I know I was. My earliest associated memories are of reading to my parents. In fact, I recall sitting next to my mother reading her a Berenstein Bears book and she suddenly stopped me and summoned my father. I had no idea what was going on and wondered if I’d done it wrong. 

Instead, my mother asked my father to please get the box of Nancy Drew books from the attic. They were her books from her own childhood, those older 1950s blue tweed covers with the silhouette of Nancy and her magnifying glass (which I do not recall appearing in any of the books.) Mom realized at whatever age I was -- 6, perhaps? -- that I was ready for chapter books. I dove into Nancy Drew and never looked back. 

From there I discovered Judy Blume, Black Beauty and The Black Stallion, fought beside Johnny Tremain, explored the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, climbed My Side of the Mountain and attended Sweet Valley High. Then Lois Duncan introduced me to horror, which eventually led to swiping my mother’s Stephen King hardbacks which I wasn’t supposed to read but I left the dust jackets in their places so she wouldn’t realize they were missing. When Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered I was hooked into Trek, and started devouring every tie-in novel I could find. Then it was, “Hmm, I like this Peter David guy. I think I should see what else he’s written…”

Jen Mulvihill: Yes absolutely, my mother read all the horse books to me, International Velvet, Black Beauty, Little Nick, all of them. Then she read all the Laura Ingles books to me. When I got older I started reading L. Frank Baum, I still have not read them all yet.

Scott McCullar: I don’t remember my parents reading to me as a child. Perhaps my Mama did when I was a toddler, but I just do not remember it happening in my life. Instead, she would have conversations with me and would encourage me in my love for art. I know my Mama gave me the Little Golden Books before kindergarten. I think I was more infatuated with the illustrations. 

When I was a little older in kindergarten circa 1976, my Daddy started buying me comic books as an incentive to help me learn how to read. At that point, I was this little blonde-headed kid with freckles from Tennessee living in California who still retained his thick Southern accent. The school out in Fresno wanted to put me into speech therapy classes to lose the accent. The other kids in class made fun of me constantly with my Southern drawl – especially when it was time for me to read the “I See Sam” yellow children’s books. I was so infuriated at the time at the other kids that I refused to talk in class and it impeded my reading development at that time. With that, comic books solved the problem and I became a voracious reader. By second grade, I was reading biographies of historical figures like Babe Ruth, Davy Crockett, Abe Lincoln, and others. 

John Morgan Neal: I have no memory of being read to. First reads were Batman comics. And S.E. Hintons's The Outsiders.

Gordon Dymowski: My parents instilled a love of reading from an early age - according to family legend, my father purchased a copy of ONE FISH, TWO FISH, RED FISH, BLUE FISH the day I was born. Not only was I read to, but I was encouraged to head to the local library when I was a kid. Between Chicago Public Library and my Catholic school, I read several series multiple times: Alvin Fernald, Danny Dunn, Tom Swift Jr...and eventually, Sherlock Holmes.

Bobby Nash: I don’t remember being read to as a kid. I probably was, but don’t recall. My mom did like to read so that got me interested in reading. She used to get the Reader’s Digest collections. It was there I read my first novel, The Snowbound Six. I was hooked. From there I went to Han Solo’s Revenge and comic books. Plus, The Monster at the End of this Book with Grover was a favorite.

Brian K Morris: Yes, my mother read an assortment of Golden Books to me. My father tried to read some of my comics to me, but he grew bored with the task. I don't recall any of the books from back then, aside from The Night Before Christmas (which I own several editions of), but I loved them a lot.

Sean Taylor: Absolutely. Both my Mom and my MeMe (grandma) read to me. And they were both always buying my books. I was fortunate in that all my sets of parents and grandparents (as a child of divorce and remarriage I had "bonus" grands) supported me in being a reader from an early age. When I was able to read for myself, I always went back to the ones I remembered most and best -- The Pokey Little Puppy, Never Talk to Strangers, The Sailor Dog, and How to Make Flibbers, etc. : A Book of Things to Make and Do. I still own each of them, and they are still barely holding it together after all the years of love I gave them. I hope to pass them down to my own grandkids and build memories of reading them together. 

Susan Roddey: My mother read to me every day until I learned to read. It was always my favorite part of the day. My absolute favorite book was called "There are Rocks in my Socks," Said the Ox to the Fox. I bought a copy of it for my own kids... they were not impressed.

How often did you read as a child? Where were you on the spectrum that goes from "lock me in my room with my books" to "please don't make me read"?

Bobby Nash: I loved to read. Comic books became a huge favorite. Spider-Man, G.I. Joe, Space Family Robinson, Star Trek, and the big treasury editions of Captain America, Battlestar Galactica, and Star Wars were constant companions. I read novels. Those small paperbacks of the 70’s were a big influence on me.

I hated being told what to read. That’s probably because I don’t like being told what to do.

Brian K Morris: I grew up in the country, so books, comics, and TV were my real friends back then. I learned to read when I was three so throwing me into my room with my reading material proved to be no punishment for me.

John Morgan Neal: All I needed was to be in my room with my comics and my toys to reenact or create new stories from the characters I loved. School introduced me to The Outsiders, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty Four, and such.

Gordon Dymowski: I read voraciously as a child, and my parents encouraged this habit. I read everything from catalogs and newspapers to books and comics. If there's a statement that describes my youthful reading, it would be "Go find a book and entertain yourself." (Keep your minds out of the gutter, people)

Susan Roddey: I started reading early, and have been a voracious reader ever since. I was the kid they punished by telling me I wasn't allowed to read.

Scott McCullar: After discovering comic books in kindergarten where I learned to read and moved on to other “real” books, I became a lifelong reader. I didn’t have to be “locked in a room”, I just instead took books with me wherever I went. To the living room on the couch. Outside under a tree. On the bus with me to school. Wherever I walked.

Jen Mulvihill: I read all the time. I would sneak books in school instead of doing my school work. I didn’t have many friends so I would almost always be reading. You could usually find me in an apple tree eating green apples and reading.

Elizabeth Donald: So I was the bookworm, the kid who had a book hidden in her lap for those long stretches of math class (and got yelled at by my third-grade teacher in front of the whole class for READING when I’d finished the math assignment. “You spend your whole day with your nose in a book!” It did not occur to me for years to question her priorities.) My parents gave up grounding me, as I didn’t watch much television and ordering me to stay inside and not go out to play? Gee darn. Being a shy bookworm with unruly hair and thick glasses, naturally I was a target for bullies (mostly male, the girls just ignored me). So hiding in the storage closet during recess (with a book) or staying inside instead of going to the park (with a book) was definitely me. Instead, if my parents needed to ground me, they grounded me from my books, which got my attention. 

Sean Taylor: I read every time I could. I would spend hours in my MeMe's front bedroom (we spent a lot of time with her) reading. The books got more complex and longer and I branched out more in non-fiction too. I would read every book I could get my hands on about sharks, snakes, spiders, or dinosaurs, and I devoured my set of Childcraft Encyclopedias too. And I went from re-reading the children's books to reading the illustration and abridged versions of classics (not to be confused with the Classics Illustrated comic book though I read those too) with an illustration every other page. I particularly enjoyed the Verne and Wells abridgments. That's also when I found my favorite book that I probably read at least 200 times between the time I was 7 and 15 -- The Adventures of Monkey by Arthur Waley. I was very much into adventure stories at the time. 

Mari Hersh-Tudor: We had a big family so we got sent to the library a lot to keep us out of mom’s hair. Alone with a book was infinitely preferable to getting bullied by sibs. I was reading Asimov and Tolkien by age eight. 

Did those early experiences help to instill in you a love of stories, and how did that reading stories bug transform into a telling stories and writing stories bug?

Susan Roddey: I've always loved everything about the written word. Even before I understood how to write stories, I would pretend to be a writer. It's always been a part of me.

John Morgan Neal: Not sure instill is the most accurate word. Awoked. Revealed. Because I think it was always there.

Brian K Morris: Being in the country, the only companions I had were imaginary. That's who I read to when I was younger. And the storytelling bug is still strong in me.

Mari Hersh-Tudor: Dr. Seuss first showed me what imagination can do. My imagination always took anything I read and made whole universes out of it. And never stopped.

Scott McCullar: By fourth grade, I was writing my own stories. I won a “Young Author’s” contest at school for my first story “Mice Wars” which was loosely based on the historical story of The Alamo with a cast of characters that were all mice. I would continue to write stories here or there in my spiral notebooks, but my other interest wanting to illustrate also pushed me in the direction of wanting to be a comic book creator who handled both the writing and art chores in his own work. 

I just loved storytelling in all forms. Whether it was books, comic books, illustrations, television, film, or even audio-only sources such as radio dramas, records, or listening to someone speak in a lecture, interview, or tell a tale around a campfire, etc.

Elizabeth Donald: I have always been a storyteller, in any form. From my very early childhood I was writing, way back to early-80s Smurf fanfic. I was never going to BE a writer, mind you -- you needed Dumbo’s magic feather and to live in New York for that, or so I believed. But books were absolutely integral to my childhood, developing my imagination, and entry drug after entry drug kept me in fictional magic. I wrote my first novel in high school and it was terrible, as most first novels are. And I rewrote it a couple of times in college, and it was still terrible. I wrote plays as a theater major and they were terrible. But that’s the gig, isn’t it? The more you write, the less terrible your writing. Every word you write -- and every word you read -- makes you a better writer, in tiny increments. Those baby steps start with the Berenstein Bears and Nancy Drew and end up with your name on the cover displayed in the front window at Borders. 

Jen Mulvihill: I really think it did have an impact on me. Especially when I became a teenager and started reading Science Fiction, I could not get enough. But now I see in my writing a little bit of influence of a mix of Baum and Heinlein. As a child and teenager, I used to make up all kinds of stories in my head, sometimes I wrote them down and sometimes I didn’t. I still have an old suitcase full of old short stories, songs, and poetry.

Bobby Nash: Oh, yeah. I started thinking of ways to do my own stories. I studied the books and taught myself how to write, how to create stories and characters, etc. That urge has not diminished over the decades.

Ef Deal: I couldn't separate reading from imagining, so I began writing early, and yes, because I was an avid reader.

Gordon Dymowski: Since I grew up as an only child, I relied on my imagination and curiosity to provide entertainment. One method was drawing stories on scrap paper my mother brought home from work. I think that experience shaped my ability to tell stories since I knew I could take characters from comics and translate them into rough narratives. It wasn't until college that I started writing short stories...and developed a large collection of rejection slips.

Fortunately, the past eleven years as an author helped me realize I have a knack for this whole writing thing. It's still a learning process., but I feel more confident in my abilities now than I ever did in the past.

Sean Taylor: I don't think there's any denying how important the stories I read were to making me want to tell my own stories. I did it with everything from paper to pencil to playing with my action figures. I never played with them correctly. Luke and Leia were never Luke and Leia. Nope, Luke was a swashbuckling hero while Walrus Man wore the Jawa's cloak and became an evil wizard who captured Leia (I was a kid. I hadn't learned yet women didn't need us men to save them.) and foiled Luke's plans with his giant robot (Mazinga) while keeping hidden in my Fisher Price castle with the secret trapdoor. That play became stories that still influence me to this day, hence my love of adventurous tales of heroes and heroines in outlandish situations. 

Motivational Monday: Up a Tree

 

Sunday Funnies: Running Out of Victims

Happy Free Comic Book Day!

 

Don't forget to visit your local comic book shop today for free books!

Also, if you're in the area, visit me at Galactic Quest Comics in Lawrenceville!

Jim Beard Read Every Issue of The Brave and the Bold… So You Don’t Have To!

Breaking Bold and Brave: A Fan's Journey Through One of Comics' Greatest Titles 

For immediate release

From 1956 to 1983 The Brave and the Bold stood as one of DC Comics’ core titles, a series that spanned multiple eras and popularized the very concept of the “team-up,” the joining of forces of superheroes, monsters, and more! It also introduced such superstars as the Silver Age Hawkman, Metamorpho, and the Justice League of America! It was a magazine like no other!

Now, writer-editor Jim Beard offers up observations and opinions on the book fans fondly call “B&B” as he journeys through every story, character, and creator of its legendary 200-issue run! Be prepared for fun, facts, and whatever strikes his fancy on a very personal and personable comic book odyssey!

Breaking Bold and Brave includes dossiers on all 200 issues of The Brave and the Bold plus Super DC Giant #S-16 and DC Special Series #8, as well as essays on many aspects of the book’s history, such as eras, editors, try-out team-ups, and, of course, Batman and Bob Haney! It also features a Foreword by comics legend and B&B scribe Paul Kupperberg and a Q&A with B&B writer Alan Brennert! B&B SEEING YOU!

Cover by Sean E. Ali

Interior Formatting and Design by Maggie Ryel

Now Live on Amazon! 

Happy Birthday to me! (And I'll cry if I want to)

Today I celebrate another trip round Apollo's stomping ground.

Another year older. Another year wis-- uh, just older. 

Want to make my birthday really rock? 

Pick up a copy of one of these books. 

(Book title is the link.)

Show Me a Hero

A Crowd in Babylon

The Corpse Delivers the Eulogy

Celebrate Free Comic Book Day with me and Galactic Quest!

Join me and other special guests at Galactic Quest Comics in Lawrenceville on Saturday, May 4th for free comic books and fascinating panel discussions as we celebrate Free Comic Book Day together!

Help! I'm Stumped and I Don't Know What To Write!

 

We've all been there. You sit down to write, and your poor little brain shuts down. I'm not talking about writer's block. I'm talking about feeling like writing and wanting to write, but not having a single idea of the story you want to tell. 

You've worked your way through your backlog or story ideas and nothing is needed for a publisher. Nor are you happy with any of the previous ideas in one of your little notebooks with story nuggets that may or may not still make any sense to you. 

What do you do?

Hi. I'm Sean, and I'm glad you asked. Because, well, I have answers. 

Writing Prompts

What you need is a prompt. You're not facing writer's block (because that doesn't actually exist -- it's always something else, but that's an article for another day). You're just needing that one idea that gets your brain excited. 

A prompt is exactly what it sounds like. It's something that PROMPTS you to write. You can find lists of these things all over the Internet, and every writer has a few that he/she/they use as their go-tos and stand-bys to break through the silence and start making story noise again. 

These are just a few of the ideas I use to remind my brain that I have stories to tell. Maybe they'll work for you too. 

My Quatrain of Cheat Codes

Here's my #1 brain trick. Ready? It starts like this:

What if...

I've written an entire tutorial on using "what if" questions to launch stories so I won't go too far into it here. But it's where most of my best ideas have come from. 

• What if... the mirror in Alice in Wonderland was the same mirror as the one in Snow White? (that one became the story "The Fairest of Them All" from Required Reading Remixed (originally released in one volume as Classics Mutilated)
• What if... a woman had an accident that made her a superhero but it also made her so dangerous that she left her family behind? (that one became the multiple stories of Starlight from Show Me a Hero)
• What if... the KKK killed a black jazz musician in the 1930s, only it wasn't really the Klan and actually solving the crime could potentially destroy a white detective's relationship with his black lover? (that one became the cover story for The Ruby Files Vol. 2, "A Tree Falls in a Forest")

Here's another I particularly love. It's great for when I need a less traditional, more right-brained, out-of-the-box approach to coming up with story ideas. 

Pick three things

It's that simple. Just pick (or have someone pick for you) three unrelated things. This works great if you are in a conventional panel or at your table and ask people for random lists of three things to save for later. Perhaps my best story to come from this method is one called "Lake Jennifer Blair" from Show Me a Hero. I was in a story funk, and I randomly jotted down three items: a Coke can with ants crawling all over it, a duck with a blue goatee, and a cell phone. That it. Then I figured out a story that put all those elements together. Even though they had nothing to do with the plot, just figuring out why they were there and why they would have been there to begin with gave me the rest of the tale before I could finish the first paragraph. 

This little trick comes from the legend about Checkov in which he boasted he could write a story about anything. The story goes:

“. . . when asked how he wrote his stories, Chekhov laughed, snatched up the nearest object—an ashtray—and said that if Korolenko wanted a story called "The Ashtray," he could have it the next morning.” [And he did.]

So what if I stole the idea and added two more objects? It works for me. 

What's this character doing now?

Since I end up writing a lot of the same characters over and over again (it comes with the territory when you write superheroes and pulp characters), I have to always have the next story in my head ready at the helm. A lot of times I create these while I'm writing the previous story simply by throwing in some detail that most likely seems extraneous, but it becomes a kernel, a nugget to prompt that C-plot the won't be revealed until the next story sees print. The danger of this is to be careful not to add stuff that is just fluff. It still has to make sense in the context of the story it appears in, whether it initially feels "extra" or not. 

Often though, when I'm asked to revisit a character hadn't planned to write again, I just reread the stories I have written and look for some small thing to jump out at me. 

When that doesn't help, I just ask the question directly, "What's this character doing now?" That's where my Rick Ruby and The Fool stories came from (The Ruby Files and Show Me a Hero, respectively). I sit down with my brain and say, "Hey, brain, how are Rick and Evelyn doing right at this moment? Are they happy? Why or why not?" Or maybe, "Hey brain, is The Fool getting any better at being a costumed vigilante yet? What's holding her back?"

Reframe a classic

I love this one. It's a trick that many folks don't realize is common in the big world of publishing and movies. It goes like this: Think of a classic. Let's go with Alice in Wonderland. Now put it in a different setting. Okay, how 'bout an urban landscape? Okay, now tell me the story from a different character's POV? 

Whoa?! What?!

That one I just described is the wonderfully decadent film Malice in Wonderland. Some aren't so obvious though. 

Did you know that Star Wars is basically a re-skin of Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress? Or that Jane Smiley's neo-classic novel 1000 Acres in just Shakespeare's King Lear set on farmland and told from the POV of one of the "bad" sisters?

You don't even have to re-skin completely to trigger some ideas. You can simply re-theme the tale. Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves" from her collection The Bloody Chamber asked what if the story of Little Red Riding Hood was really about one girl's sexual awakening, and bam, the story took form. 

It also doesn't have to be a classic story. Reframe a song if you like. I've done that several times. Prince's "The Beautiful Ones" became a story idea about four aliens living as women in the big city. Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer" became a Poverty Row thriller story idea about a trumpeter whose horn is in hock at the pawn shop to pay off a gambling debt while his new wife waits tables at a diner frequented by the gangsters he owes. 

This is also a fun, creative exercise just to loosen up your brain even if you don't use the ideas that are dreamed up. 

More Prompts

As I mentioned above, the Internet is filled with pages upon pages of writing prompts, some from individual writers, others gleaned from publishing houses and magazines about writing. Here are just a few you might want to take a look at:

• https://blog.reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts/
• https://www.writersdigest.com/prompts
• https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/500-writing-prompts-to-help-beat-writers-doubt/
• https://www.servicescape.com/writing-prompt-generator
• https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/
• https://www.pw.org/writing-prompts-exercises
• https://squibler.io/learn/writing/writing-prompts/writing-prompt-for-adults/

Well, if that's enough to help you break the silence and get writing, I don't what will do it for you. And as always with the best writing tools and tips, steal freely and make them your own. 

Motivational Monday: Be

 

Bonus Post: The Indie Bookstore Day/Crazy Book Lady Photo Wrap-Up

Had a blast hanging out with folks fellow writer-folks like Bobby Nash, Jessica Nettles, and Juliet Rose this past Saturday. It was also nice meeting Stacy Olsen (THE Crazy Book Lady herself) in the flesh! 

Here's the proof!

Me and Bobby McG... well, Nash

The Neighbors

The Calm Before the Storm

Thanks again, all for making it such a fun event and special thanks to The Crazy Book Lady for hosting the excitement!