Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Paying it Forward in Blogland
Paolo Bacigalupi, author, and Brian W. Dow, artist, are both reluctant bloggers who have been making an effort to post with more regularity in recent days. They are also both very talented individuals whose opinions and respective offerings I respect highly. Paolo's blog is WindUp Stories and Brian's is We Grow Great By Dreams... Everybody go give them some comment-action love.
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8 comments:
Lou,
Thanks for paying it forward for these two guys. Brian's art first really caught my eye on the cover to Prodigal Troll, and caused me to put aside my anti-troll-fantasy-novel bias long enough to read a few pages and get hooked on the book. The painting itself -- colors, style and placement of figures -- has a somewhat pre-Raphaelite feel to me. Except for the troll-wrestling, of course.
Paolo's "The Calorie Man" really whacked me upside the head...felt like an alien world that turns out to this world...it's an example of "If this goes on..." going on in all directions. You're droppped into the story in media res -- no convenient infodumps to orient the reader. I had to pay attention -- and *wanted* to. Not to mention that I'm a sucker for any story set on the Big River.
Robert
Hey Robert - very glad you appreciate both of their works, and your summation of what they each do is so elegant I have naught to add but this - there's such a category as "anti-troll-fantsy"? Really?
Lou,
Perhaps it's only my own personal category...or perhaps overexposure a number of years ago to a certain pun-drenched fantasy series that begins with an "X" and ends with an "h." Or maybe I'm mixing up trolls with ogres --- god knows what *that* would produce...
Robert
Trogers?
To jump to a non-troll conversational track, I found Paolo's story for FF1 -- "Small Offerings" to be almost unbearably powerful. Think it was just as long as it needed to be; any longer and it would have been unbearable. And that's praise, not criticism...
Robert
I had already (over)filled the antho when I made his acquaintance and realized I had to have him in it. So told him it couldn't be longer than 3k, a constraint that gave him fits but ultimately let him shine. My wife was pregnant with our child when that came in, so I didn't even discuss it with her.
I can see why you didn't. That story touches a very primal place. Think any mother might find it difficult to read.
Reminds me -- I recently viewed the Body Worlds 3 exhibition here in Phoenix. Part of the exhibition included a display showing the develpment of a baby...from fertilized egg to just prior to birth -- using real fetuses in varying stages. I went with a friend who's a mother, and that was her favorite part of Body Worlds. My sister-in-law, though, couldn't bear to view that part.
Robert
I couldn't handle the cross-sections of a real human body on a school trip to the Smithsonian, so a girl I had an unrequited crush on and I snuck off to a dinosaur exhibit and hung around in a park. This was decades in the past, but don't know how I'd do with fetuses.
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