Make Comics like the Pros by Greg Pak & Fred Van Lente

So when I got this book I wasn't a hundred percent sure how I was going to blog about it! Fact is I gravitated towards this book because I write novels & I write comics. Novels I have been working on for quite some time so the factors that go into it & how to get on the shelf is easier for me. But when I got into writing comics it was trying to find that balance & I was just lost so I wrote it out as though it was a short story. 
This book made me breath easier. It is a step by step guide filled with examples. Love it & recommend highly! 

I received this book free from Blogging for books to read & review

Full dark, no stars 1922 & Big Driver review

I finally added this to my collection after seeing the movie A Good Marriage which is the last story in this book of shorts. The story Big Driver is the second story in here & it has a movie coming on lifetime this Saturday. You are probably thinking the way I am, Stephen  King on lifetime whattttt??? But I will watch it then blog about the book vs the movie after. 

For now however, I have finished the first two stories in here. 

The first being 1922.

It is a story about a man that has murdered his wife & the consequences that proceed. 

It starts with Wilfred Leland James, known in the story simply as Wilf. He is in a hotel room & he is writing is confession. The date is April 11, 1930. He is in the Magnolia hotel in Omaha, Nebraska and he writes "how in June 1922 he murdered his wife Arlette Christina Winters James and hid her body by tupping it down the old well." 

He also states that his son Henry helped after he cozened him for 2 months. Henry was only 14 at the time & it was a regret that Wilf still holds to this day. 

He writes this confession as he hears the scurry of the rats in the walls that he coinciders his judge & jury & they have found him here in the hotel & plan on bringing him to justice. 

So what brought about this murder? Land of course. It's a farmers bread & butter & Wilf owning 80 acres that had been passed down from generation to generation was hoping to add the 100 acres in Hemingford home, Nebraska that had been willed to Arlette by her late father. 

Arlette on the other hand wanted to sell the land to Farrington's Hog Butchery & Wilf did everything in his power to stop her. Eventually she threatened to take over his farm & sell it to them as well. 

Wilf would die before handing over his land which seemed his death would not be a problem for her & so the plan was devised. 

Wilf had dreamed about how easy it would be to end her life but as in real life he learned it was not so easy & his abilities were not for anything other than farming. It was a messy situation but in the end Arlette was no more. 

What came next would ultimately ruin the life he has known. The next eight years would bring destruction of the world he knew and the consequences of his actions would lead him to no alternative then to sit in a hotel seeing his dead wife and hearing his jury coming for him. 

Even as a short story Stephen King brings his brilliance & visual mastery of a man who has done a bad deed & yet you feel sorry for him as you read his world crumbling like a decrepit building the tears stream down your face as you can not bear it. Proof that he is a master storyteller & not just a horror writer. 

The next story is Big Driver: 

This story is about a writer named Tess who sees success with her book series called The Willow Grove Knitting Society. The series consisting of twelve books so far follows a group the solves murders. 

She takes speaking engagements to build up her nest egg but only ones that she can drive to & does not stay overnight more than a day so that Fitzy her cat would not be alone. 

She gets a email from Ramona Norville who is the head librarian at Chicopee Public Library and is writing as the president of Books & Brown Baggers which puts on a noon lecture each month  with people encouraged to bring their lunches & she states how popular the event was. Originally Janet Evanovich had been schedueled but need to cancel so could she fill the spot & she was offered an honorarium of fifteen hundred dollars. 

 It would be a quick in & out for her & it was close enough to get home the same night. 

Tess agrees & spends the day speaking, mingling & signing autographs.

After all is done Ms. Norville hands her the money & gives her directions for a short cut that would save her a lot of time. 

After plugging the address in her gps she heads away seeing the sign for I84 but passing it in lou of the shortcut. 

She heads down Stagger lane which is a deserted dirt road ignoring all the horror cliches in her head. 

With her mind elsewhere it was too late for her to notice the pieces of broken wood with the nails all over the road till one ended up in the front wheel of her expidition & she ended up with a flat tire in a ditch. She sees salvation coming her way in the form of a white van that belongs to a rock group called the zombie bakers only to watch helplessly as the swerve to avoid all the broken wood, kicking up dust & heading off down the road never seeing her on the side. 

She decides to pick the pieces of wood up & toss them aside so the next person to come along would not be the same fate. 

Of course there is no service on her phone so she has to wait for the kindness of strangers which comes in way of a guy in a blue ford 150 pickup who pulls over to help the damsel in distress. 

The man is a massive presence standing well over the six feet mark with a faded hat & bleach splattered overalls. Causing Tess to be uncomfortable but his happy go lucky attitude changes her tune & she feels bad about his truck door being open & the possibility of his battery dying while changing her tire that she goes to shut it but notices the broken pieces of wood (the same that caused her tire distruction) in the back seat. As it's clicking in her head she turns to find him hovering over her. 

He hits her & she blacks out. When she wakes he is raping her on the floor of a broken down store & as she tried to get away he strangles her. Eventually she playes dead & finds herself being dragged into a culvert & left. She isn't the only one in there finding another two victims who had indeed been killed. 

She listens for him to leave & runs away. Running down the road she ducks out of sight at every headlight that passes for fear that it is him coming back after her. 

When she finally makes it home she realized the woman she was is not who she is now & she starts plotting her revenge. 

It is a story about what lengths one will go to when the person they know gets violated so violently that they disappear from exsistance and are replaced by a stranger. 

As you read you cheer for her even though you know it's leading her down a dark path. 

In conclusion even if you have never read a Stephen King book it would be worthwhile to pick this one up. I look forward to reading the last two stories when I am finished with my next blogging for books review. 

Stay tuned for my book vs movie review of Big Driver after Saturday & my follow up of this rest of this book. So far I am rating this 5 stars! 

Dark Eden by Chris Beckett

So when I was picking my next book from bloggingforbooks.org I decided from the little snippet I read about this book that I would enjoy it. 

My frustration started when only the ebook was available & so I was taken to a different site to purchase it. Still it wasn't too bad when I had to download the adobe digital reader instead of it just being able to be saved & me add it to my nook. This part was railing on my nerves because it did not go smooth but either way I finally got it on my nook and was looking forward to reading it 

Unfortunately I found things right away that I wasn't happy with. 

In reading some of the reviews before purchasing the book I already knew that the characters in it were limited in their vocabulary. So right away it was double words. Big big, small small, dark dark & so on. This drove me insane because the rest of the story did not support it. 

Eventually I got over it & just tried to get into the story. 

It took me quite a long time to read it just for the fact that I was not getting into the reading & the characters but I pushed ahead anyhow & started to pick out little things to get my brain to turn it's wheels about what was going to happen next. 

The book itself is about a group of people that consider themselves "Family". They have story times and Any Versires as they call it about how their Mother & Father come to Eden from Earth along with three other companions. 

The three companions choose to leave & try to make it back to Earth but Angela & Tommy choose to stay and in turn start to build a family that would eventually reach the 500 people who now reside in Eden at this time. 

However "this time" is what is confusing. Even though they call some of the vehicles and artifacts they find by the proper names, but not spelling, the time line just doesn't fit. 

In my reading I gathered that the original ones went through a worm hole then they crashed on Eden. 

Ultimately it feels as though they came from the future but the characters that exsist are more like the Indians making their own hunting equipment, living in little families under one big family. 

The majority of them have the same first name that was taken from Mother & Father. They have last names such as Spiketree &  Redlantern that have been named for the various trees & lights that they give off. But then there is London & Brooklyn named for Earth places.

The main character is John Redlantern and as a "newhair" he killed a leopard and brought it back to family instantly becoming a hero & as any young person he took it & ran with it. 

John always questioned was was beyond the Circle of family but no one would listen. We he speaks out of turn at one of the story times, the council quickly dismisses him & has his family head Bella deal with him. 

One of the oldest is named Mitch and he is the poster boy of how we view older people. Being treated like a child just because he has lost some of his senses. It goes to show that just because one can't hear or is losing their vision does not mean the brain is gone. 

Gerry is John's cousin (though you come to realize the entire colony is more like brothers & sisters) and he, like any younger family member, idolizes John. He was there when John killed the leopard & was the first to boast to anybody he came near. 

When John uprises against the ways of what they have been told & chooses to dismantle the original circles of rocks that were put there for when Earth returned for them he is thrown out of Family & was told never to return. 

After his group gives him provisions to help him out he leaves & heads out as far as possible to see what Eden had to offer outside the little forest that his family lived in. 

Eventually his love Tina Spiketree realized that change is coming to family & not for the better she choses to go in search of John & his cousins Gerry & Jeff tag along. 

Jeff, the youngest of them has one of the wisest minds and soon they capture a young Wollybuck to try to train it to be a horse like back on Earth. 

As time goes by more & more newhairs join them and they start to make a new family but John is never happy in one place & continues to make the group move on & on. 

Even Garry who thought that John was always right starts to question him causing a rift between the cousins & John wanting to venture on his own. 

With the death of one of their group by a snow leopard most turn on John for bringing then out there and soon the group splits into two different parts.

John & his group keep moving on looking for that perfect place but never being happy.

In the end they find something that tells them Earth is never coming for them & so they have to enjoy what they have not what they think they need. 

As I was reading I was getting the sense of a John being Peter Pan & not wanting to grow up & face reality as his companions long for home. 

All in all I give this 3 out of 5 stars. There were things I didn't like & just couldn't get behind but then something would happen & I'd be pulled right back in! 

I must say I did get this free from bloggingforbooks.org to read & review and I think that is one of the reasons that I finished it since it was touch & go for awhile but I'm glad I stuck it out. 

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