Because I often enjoy the agony and drawn out suspense of anticipating book/comic/statue releases, I am happy to announce that two books I need are coming out soon.
The first is Skulduggery Pleasant: The Death Bringer.
Whoop. Freakin' Whoop. I love this series! Yes, I do feel sort of bad when I walk into a book store to purchase it and find it in the youth if not children's section... but then I realise that it's a great book and children have great taste. Sometimes. Sometimes I cry when I watch children's programming. It's pretty crap and badly drawn compared to the awesome stuff we had. Poor bastards. *sniff*
I finally remembered to look up the release date again and it turns out it's coming up in September. Pretty sweet. I read a preview on the official site and so far so good. It was a pretty decent preview as well, some books will only give you a few pages of a chapter. Boooo!!!
I started reading the series because my partner took a vacation. We have an unspoken rule that I remind him about a lot - whenever we go to an airport/holiday destination... I get a book. At least one book. Maybe ten books. This holiday to visit family members granted me two books. One was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the other was Skulduggery Pleasant.
Later that year we went on a cruise and I found the second book in the gift store on board. It was pretty hard to choose between reading that and all the Terry Pratchett Discworld books I found in the library. Not that I reaaallly had that much time for reading anyway, haha.
The other book we're excited about is the fourth installment of Eragon: Inheritance. Panda is a huge fan of the series, a bit of a dragon nut but for ages no one could tell us what was happening with this book. Stories of lawsuits and plagiarism and put back release dates..
To be honest, I found Eragon to be a little hard to read. It wasn't bad but it didn't jump out of the page and grab me at all times. I like my books to do that, but it sometimes leads to my own lawsuits. Anyway, even though I haven't read it for a while I do remember the bits I liked about it - the relationship with the dragon, the details of the support cast 'left behind', the elves retreat, when Eragon messes up a blessing..
If you look around the Internet you can find a whole lot of author bagging about the series, mostly about how its a copy and bastardisation of everything in the fantasy world. That kinda makes me laugh. The comparisons to Star Wars? The reason Star Wars was so popular is probably due to it being a fairly basic but interesting story.
The first movie was about a rookie and a rogue who team up to rescue a princess from a bad guy's castle. There's mentors, mystical powers, awesome weapons and blowing stuff up. Oh yeah, and it's in space. You can't really write about anything in the world without maybe being a bit similar to someone else.
Twilight was popular - for some still unknown reason - and a bajillion vampire and/or werewolf books sprang up. Harry Potter is great, and since then we've seen a few witch clubs or magic school orientated series. Lord of the Rings is an epic well known tale - yeah, you know what I mean.
I think fantasy writers have it a bit harder because there's elements they just have to include like quests, magic or a certain race such as dwarves. Similar to werewolf books that HAVE to use the full moon. There's not really a question about it, it's just expected. So much fantasy is entwined in already existing myths and legends.
Oh well. Off I go to sit in a corner and wait for everything I want to come out and give me a brain hug.
.....Damn it.
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