My beloved Philips GoGear MP3 player has died. It was suffereing from a lingering illness for some time now, showing boxes instead of words on the screen, but it still played. Now it is gone. I’m going to get a new player sometime soon. I’m not sure which one I should get. I could get one comparable to the old one for a fraction of the $229 I paid for it, or I could spend another two Franklins and get an iPod Touch which will play games too. What do you think?
If you’ve been reading my entries for a while, you’ve seen covers of The Steel Dragon and His Robot Girlfriend. I still hope to find a publisher for The Steel Dragon, but His Robot Girlfriend will be self-published (and freely distributed electronically). The covers shown were made with Book Cover Pro software. For anyone wanting to self-publish more than one book and has even a modicum of layout talent, this is a great investment. Since even the simplest custom covers will cost close to $100, this investment of about $180.00 will pay for itself.
Well, we’ve just had another staff development day, and since I teach at an N5 school (listed as needing improvement for five years under the federal NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND Act) we spent most of our time trying to figure out how to improve our students’ performance on the standardized tests. Unfortunately, we are spending a great deal of time trying to figure out how to fix a problem that we can’t even touch. The students have no motivation to pass the tests. Most of them don’t even try to answer the questions. They sit and randomly bubble answers. What happens to them if they don’t pass? Nothing. The school fails, but it doesn’t affect them at all.
There are a number homages hidden within the text of The Steel Dragon. I think most of them are so well hidden that a reader wouldn’t notice them. Here are some of them.
Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias: I love this poem, so in the third book of the series, I had the characters come across an ancient monument with a very similar inscription.
The Lord of the Rings: There are several little tributes in the story, the most obvious is the title of the third book– The Two Dragons. Besides being obvious, because there are two dragons in the story, it is a tip of the hat to the second volume of The Lord of the Rings– The Two Towers.
Stephen King: I wanted a little Stephen King in my book, so I added him. Most of the characters are not patterened, at least physically, after any particular person. I used Stephen King’s picture as a reference for one character– a wizard.
Honor Harrington: I love the Honor Harrington books by David Weber. I had already created two characters named Hero and Hertzal, so when they needed a sister, Honor seemed a perfect name.
The Princess Bride: I added one word as a tribute to this great movie– Inconceivable!
Hamish Macbeth: This great British show was a source of inspiration for my characters who were police constables. Because of this, I added a little dog, like Wee Jock, to the story. I of course named him Hamish.
Nellie Bly: The girl reporter Nellie Bly is a hero of mine and I used her last name as the last name for my main character. If I write a fourth book in the series, I plan to have a character who is a girl reporter.
Edgar Rice Burroughs: There are dinosoaurs in the story. If that’s not enough, I had a character read a book that was very much like an ERB story.
Sherlock Holmes: There are a string of murders in the book. I set one on a foggy waterfront as a deliberate tribute to A. Conan Doyle’s hero and I gave the inspector a double-billed hat and a pipe.
E. Gary Gygax: I plotted out all three books together as one continuous story. I only added one chapter and that was a dungeon crawl. This was a tribute to the creator of D&D.
William Shakespeare: I have loved the name Hero for a woman ever since I watched Much Ado About Nothing. I had decided I would name a character Hero. The fact that she is a twin is also due to my love of the Bard and his penchant for twins.
Tom Swift: I used the Shopton as the name of the town where some of my characters lived before the story begins. Shopton, NY was the home of Tom Swift.
City of Amathar 