I've been published twice on O&C and I have to say I love this site. It was always well designed, had great content and there was no catch - they both paid their authors and offered the content for free (not to mention the great communication with Jordan and Samantha is always stellar.) I always got the impression that on pay sites it's usually other authors who are buying the memberships, which bothers me as a dabbler. I'd rather suffer through a little advertising if it means people can read my stuff for free.

So after a glitch that I expect knocked ten years off the lives of the aforementioned editors the new site is up. It abandoned the monthly digest format and is now ongoing with new stuff. Not only that, but you now have the option to comment on the content, rate it, and bookmark on del.icio.us & reddit. You can also see how many views an article, etc, has, which as an author I think is fabulous.

But to be honest, I find myself wanting to click away from the site as fast as possible. Why? Because it's just too damned yummy. The colour scheme reminds me of chocolate-covered strawberries. It's the same scheme as before, but for some reason it just looks more delicious than before. That background is like the really good chocolate that comes in the gold wrapper and just melts on your tongue.

*drools*

I'm going to go make a cup of coffee and stir some dark chocolate ice-cream topping in it.

Labels: publications, reading, teh internets

Furthering the geekdom of my last post on Brianna Garcia's Alice/Hatter art, I rediscovered this livejournal, which includes the story I recalled seeing but couldn't recall where. It also gives some background on what the characters are doing in the first place (short version: Alice escapes arranged marriage, goes in search off rabbit hole, ends up in Magic Kingdom working for Belle in her bookstore, becomes object of affection for Reginald the Hatter and eventually attends a dance with the cutest hairstyle I've ever seen on a Disney Princess (or non-Princess.) Includes a cameo by Jack Sparrow.

I'm soon going to need a hobby ... or an intervention.

Labels: teh internets

First of all let me point you in the direction of another Phantom artist I discovered after making my last post: Allison Smith. Her Phantom cartoons are fantastic.

So I'm in the midst of planning a move and my brain has accordingly overloaded with planning before blowing its daily fuse and shutting down. Having given up completely on Atonement I started To Reign in Hell, found it far too complex for my pea brain, and read Cecelia Ahern's If You Could See Me Now instead. It was mush. Lots of mush. And I hope that when Hollywood churns out the version with Hugh Jackman they tear it apart because I was not satisfied with the ending. It was very charming, but for one I wanted the Hollywood ending.

I'm not a romantic person by nature. I crinkle my nose at gestures meant to make me melt and when first getting to know a guy I tend to cringe my way through his grand seduction and patiently wait for things to get casual and comfortable enough to be bearable.

I can't stand mushy music. Celine Dion makes me want to kill myself and while I've developed a weakness for the very pretty Keith Urban listening to that bloody "Making Memories of Us" makes my ears bleed out.

Movies and TV are no different. I'm not a shipper and I'm the asshole who laughed during Titanic. Books will get me, though. No matter how cheesy or epic, I'm a total sucker for book couples and if I think it's going to end badly I'll stop reading immediately (Coleen Gleason's The Rest Falls Away, for example - saw that ending coming a mile away and depressed myself out of reading for a month.)

The ultimate exception to this noromo rule is Disney. I'm such a sucker for Disney Princess movies. My favourite up until recently has been Beauty and the Beast. The prince is the hottest of all the princes, bumping Sleeping Beauty's Prince Philip out of the top spot in spite of the fact that the Beast never slew a dragon. (by the way, Oh Holy Christ have you seen David Kawena's gallery? I so want to do Prince Eric.)

Recently I watched Cinderella III: A Twist in Time. After seeing Bambi II I decided that Disney could be forgiven for their sequel to The Little Mermaid and I must say, it's one of my favourite Disney movies now. One of the things I always hated about early Disney movies was the lack of personality amongst its princesses. Snow White irritated me even when I was little and Cinderella bored me - she didn't do anything but get dressed up and go to the ball.

In Cinderella III she kicks ass. She's like Cinderbuffy. All by herself she manages to get out of a jam and fight for her man. It's got a great scene where she's trapped in a disgusting, rotten pumpkin coach driven by a human Lucifer and she kicks her way out of it and ends up saving her little mice friends before riding the horse back to stop Prince Charming from marrying an impostor. Not to say Prince Charming doesn't get his opportunity to redeem himself from being completely wooden in the first movie. After getting a few chuckles by talking to the mice he races off to save Cinderella from being banished via ship (or, in my mind, eventually sold to white slave traders as a sex toy, but let's forget I said that ...), leaping from his horse, over a cliff, onto the boat to save her. Yay!

Plus, look at the way the princesses looked in the golden age compared to now. Cinderella's face is pretty much looking the way a face is supposed to look. Her eyes aren't huge and her body is fairly natural looking with wide hips and chunky calves, and when she's mussed up she looks all sexy.

So I'm getting to my point, which leads me back to Deviantart. A little while ago I was on Livejournal when I came across this post, which led me to Brianna Garcia's gallery on Deviantart. I've always loved Disney's Alice In Wonderland. It was hands-down my favourite Disney movie when I was a kid, so I did a double take when I saw her Alice and The Hatter romantic-comedy style cartoons. Squee! A new Disney heroine and hero!

From what I can gather, Alice and The Hatter, Reg, came about when Garcia saw the character actors at Disney interacting with one another, bickering and whatnot, or maybe dating (I saw the story on one of her sites but for the life of me I haven't been able to find it) and inspiration struck. I'm pretty sure the concept is that Reg & Alice aren't in Wonderland but actually at Disneyland, thus allowing for other Disney characters to make appearances. Now she has a huge following and has turned me into a ridiculous fangirl who checks her gallery every day hoping for new posts.

She's also inspired other artists, like Lily Fox, who also has an amazing Labyrinth & David Bowie gallery. Since these artists can't actually sell their Disney art without risking having the bejesus sued out of them, I had to print up a copy of her Down at the Penney Tea Supply because I thought it would look so great in the kitchen.


To show how much of a fangirl I've become, while at work this week I checked her gallery on an hourly basis to see the latest in a three-part serial in which Alice falls through the ice while skating. Today it finally appeared (left - love the Alice cheek-pudge).

Every time I see a new work by either Lily Fox or Brianna Garcia I also get bummed because this amazing storyline will forever be in still/comic form. Of course, Disney could probably rip it off and get away with it but they won't, because it's not canon. Disney's Hatter is not a young man, and Alice is still a girl. But wouldn't it be great? They have that great chemistry I loved from Beauty in the Beast ( if the Beast had ADD, that is.) And he's a little goofy looking, infuriatingly immature, and really sweet. Kind of like Mr. Bean only with boyish good looks.

In spite of the fact that I've written (and published) adaptations, I've never been able to get behind fan fiction - I'm also the asshole who cheered Anne Rice's hissy-fit over fanfic - but basically it's stuff like this, and like the artists from the previous post on Deviantart, who have made me change my tune. There's a lot of crap out there and it's hugely popular to the extent that fan-fiction for public domain works gets published and makes scads of money, but there are also some real gems out there if you find them, or they find you.

As someone who dabbles in writing, there's something to be said for looking at someone's work and developing your own ideas about where these characters are going or where they've been, but what usually is done is using it as a jumping off point for a whole new story and new characters. In the news just this week was an article on a new adaptation of the Anne of Green Gables story. My initial reaction was to scream and run from the room when I read this, but when I recalled how outstanding Road to Avonlea was I forced myself to open my mind (the same cannot be said for the upcoming film version starring Barbara Hershey and Shirley MacLean.) While I tend to be wary of adaptations to books I adore, I find myself surprised by what I find. Lin Haire-Sargeant produced an adaptation of Wuthering Heights involving the years in which Heathcliff is away from Wuthering Heights and I applaud the result. I have yet to bring myself to read adaptations of DuMaurier's Rebecca or even the Gone With The Wind sequels, but I'm working up to it.

Unfortunately once you've read a bad adaptation you can't undo the trauma, whereas the multitude of fanart can be very forgettable or unforgettable and you can just click away, like the examples I've linked to, and there are stories I'd like to see re-imagined, secondary characters or even main characters I'd like to get more of. If something is done well, whether it be fanart, fan-fiction, authorized sequels/prequels, I'm willing to give it a chance.

Labels: reading, teh internets