The Wisdom of Zombies
August 27, 2007 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as Pop Cultureby Sara Black
“What’s that on the wall?” I say.
“I have no idea.” Says my younger brother, sitting next to me on the couch.
“Should we go near it?”
“No, let’s go in that door instead.”
We back our character away from the red, pulsing fleshy thing on the wall. It’s the middle of the afternoon and the doors to my apartment are open to allow the sunlight and the sounds from outside in, but we’re nervous anyway. Even after hours of playing we’re still freaked out by the monsters leaping out of the corners, blood smeared walls and corpses discarded in hallways.
When contemplating writing about video games someone suggested Grand Theft Auto to me. I didn’t want to, not because of all the controversy, but because of the plot. GTA is an amalgam of stereotypes from gangster movies strung together to create interesting game play, but not an interesting story.
The plots of Silent Hill II, III and IV are creepy quagmires, with Silent Hill II being the best. In Silent Hill II the main character goes back to the city of Silent Hill to try and find his dead wife after getting a letter from her. Instead he wanders through the fog obscured city and finds a bizarre cast of characters perpetrating unspeakable acts against one another. Things appear to happen for no better reason than to horrify the player, yet a deeper narrative exists.
The thing is, I don’t like horror films. I’ve seen a few, but rarely do I seek them out. I don’t normally enjoy being deliberately scared. Even my foray into another horror style game, Resident Evil 4, didn’t bring the same excitement. Just shooting zombies wasn’t nearly as fun as imagining they unlocked some hidden facets of the main characters psyche.
“I wonder why the telephone doesn’t work.” The main character of Silent Hill III thinks out loud.
“She’s not so smart.” My brother says.
“No, that’s exactly what I’d be wondering if I stood in the middle of a blood drenched hell dimension.” I say.
And despite being a one person game, I find it more fun to play with friends.
Sara Black has a degree in Cinema/Television from USC. She watches far too much television, eats way too much sushi and is always writing a romance novel. This is the fifth in a series of posts on Pop Culture.
She will probably spend this weekend playing more Silent Hill IV with her brother and boyfriend.
A Life Well Lived
August 25, 2007 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as What Inspires Youby Lori Pyne
I sat in the room listening to mourners recounting memories of the life just lost. The picture that grew from the stories exchanged was that of a life well lived. I couldn’t help but wonder how I would be remembered.
Would I also have friends, family and business associates competing to share the best story of my many acts of kindness?
Will my children, both biological and those from my heart, remember my unwavering love? Whatever the challenges faced, will my parental devotion shine through the solutions explored?
Will my business associates compare the many examples of my honesty, my determination, my generosity, my ethics and my morals?
Will my friends, those from birth to those newly made, gather to discuss my giving spirit, my always open door, my ever ready support, my never say die attitude, my big heart?
When I am remembered, will it be for the things I did and the people I touched? Will the world be just a little better because I passed through?
Will those I leave behind remember a life well lived?
How would you want to be remembered?
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Lori Pyne is a member of OCC, and a multi-tasking volunteer. She is currently serving as one of our Online Class Moderators, Guest Reception Coordinator and Coordinator for the Book Buyers’ Best Contest for published authors. She is married with one son, and works full time for an entertainment law firm.
RULES FOR WRITING by Mark Twain
August 24, 2007 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as Keeper Shelf
1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.
2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it.
3. The people in a tale shall be alive, except in the cases of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
4. The people in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.
5. When the people of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk and be such talk as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.
6. When the author describes the character of a person in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that person shall justify said description.
7. When a person talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar friendship’s offering in the beginning of the paragraph, he shall not talke like a backwater minstrel in the end of it.
8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale.
9. The people of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.
10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the people of his tale and their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.
11. The characters in a tale should be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in an emergency.
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Reprinted from the March 1992 issue of the Orange County Chapter Newsletter, edited by Janet Cornelow who writes as Janet Quinn. Original can be found in MARK MY WORDS by Mark Twain
“Ready, Aim, Podcast!”
August 23, 2007 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as Confessions of a Podcast Goddess
by Jina Bacarr
Does size matter?
When conference goers at the recent Romance Writers of America convention in Dallas, Texas talked shop, the question “Does size matter?” came up at frequent intervals, especially at the Passionate Ink luncheon (RWA Chapter of erotica authors).
They were comparing megapixels.
Megapixels? What the heck is a megapixel? you ask. With the explosion of digital cameras available on the market, it’s a hot topic and one you can’t ignore when choosing a camera. My first digital camera was a cumbersome Sony 1.3 megapixel, which used 3 ½ inch floppies to record pictures. Imagine stuffing your purse with twenty floppies. Not fun. Now I use a Canon PowerShot SD600 that’s small and light and weighs less than six ounces. I love it.
So what is a megapixel? Here’s my interpretation: Digital camera images are made up of rows of colored dots, something like the Impressionist painting style known as Pointillism. These colored dots make up a canvas or rectangular grid that gives you the whole picture when you look at it from a distance. If you’ve ever stared at an Impressionist painting in a museum, you know what I mean. Up close, it resembles a bunch of colorful dots (black was not included in the Impressionist palette), but viewed from far away it becomes a breathtaking panorama of the artist’s vision.
When you shoot a picture with your digital camera, you are the artist and these same dots are called “pixels.” Each pixel used in a digital camera is either red, green or blue (usually with twice as many green pixels). How many dots or pixels are on a page? Rows and rows, like wildflowers swaying in a field. For example, an picture of you at the RWA conference on a web page might be made up of 500 rows each with 400 pixels in each row. The total number of pixels is 200,000. That’s a lot of wildflowers.
According to experts, these pixels contain a number of different brightness values, usually 256 in screen displays (I prefer 1024) or 4096 in camera images. Because digital camera images are generally larger than this, we talk about their sizes in terms of Megapixels (Mp). 1 Mp = 1 million pixels. So the 200,000 pixel image of the hunk you want to use for the hero in your next book is 0.2 Mp.
Want to make your pictures smaller? This is one time it’s easier to drop a few pounds, I mean, pixels, than it is to gain them back. To increase the pixels or dots, you have to guess the values of the extra pixels you need. Some software programs claim to do this, but like fad diets, they’re not always successful.
So, how many pixels do you need? If you’re buying a camera to view your pictures on your web page, you’ll need fewer pixels–1.3 will suffice. If you want to print them on standard 4×6 prints or make postcards of your latest bookcover, you’ll need at least 1.5-2.3 Mp; for enlargements of 8×10 for your author head shot for your press kit, you’ll need 4-5 Mp.
Although I primarily use my Canon Powershot for my website images and video, I bought a 6 Mp because I wanted the option of changing the size of the images. I usually shoot 1600 by 1200 so I can reduce and crop to a smaller size.
Now if could just figure out how to drop 5 pixels, I mean pounds, with the click of a mouse…
Jina Bacarr spent many hours studying the size of…hmm…pixels in Impressionist paintings for her latest Spice book, NAUGHTY PARIS, a time travel about the raucous and erotic world of 1889 Paris.
Research Book Sale
August 22, 2007 by A Slice of Orange in category Archives tagged as Reader Review
Have You Read This One?
TOWN AND COUNTRY BY MARK GIROUARD is another of the books donated for OCC’s September meeting’s Research Book Sale–and it’s another book, that it’s going to be hard for me to let go.
I enjoyed several of the chapters in this book, especially Chapter Three, which talked about John Chubb, who “with a sharp eyes, a genial wit and a skilled brush set out to put on to paper, the people of Bridgwater and its neighborhood in the last decades of the eighteenth century.”
Reading about Chubb and his observations was fascinating but what really made me smile are Chubb’s sketches, several of which are shown in this chapter including one of the biggest and liveliest of Chubb’s drawings which, according to Girouard, shows Lord Perceval, eldest son of Lord Egmont, “dressed in the height of fashion and seated at the reins of his phaeton, with a lapdog on his lap and a favour in his hat.” (And doesn’t the dog look like Mindy Neff’s little Harley? 😉
This is a great book. All I can say is if it makes it out of my house to the Research Book Fair, then it will be a testament to my strength of character.
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Sandy Novy-Chvostal (aka Sandra Paul) is a recovering bookaholic, a published author, and 2007 Co-President of OCC/RWA.
