Category: Ari Marmell

Monday Earworm: David Bowie (Who Makes Everything Better)

On By angeliquejamailIn Ari Marmell, books, David Bowie, literature, Monday earworm, music3 Comments

I first became aware of this song in the movie A Knight’s Tale (which is great fun and uses this song marvelously), and even though I love this song so much I’d never sought out the video for it.

This music video is a touch surreal.

It’s also flavored with some 1930s-era gangster silliness, and I just finished reading the extremely not silly but very, very funny and entertaining Hallow Point by Ari Marmell, and so this is tonight’s earworm.

Hallow Point is A Mick Oberon Job, which means it’s part of a series of books set in Gangsterland Chicago, but the catch is that it’s also urban fantasy, see? Imagine Mick Oberon, this private detective, is also…well…an aes sidhe, an exile from the Seelie court. In the Mick Oberon world, there’s both the Chicago we know and the Otherworld, fae version. If you like your humor sharp and salty, your gangsters authentic, and your protagonists convincingly masquerading as humans much of the time, then you will probably enjoy Mick Oberon.

Just go get the book. In fact, start with the first one, Hot Lead, Cold Iron. I’ll wait.

And while you’re waiting on it to arrive, please enjoy this delightful song.

March Poetry Contest: Short Form Resolutions

On By angeliquejamailIn Ari Marmell, books, contest, haiku, New Year's resolutions, poetry, resolutionsLeave a comment

Remember back in January when I held the haiku contest about New Year’s resolutions?  Zillions* of you submitted entries!  It was awesome!  I had to split it into two contests, though, in part because there were so many entries that I wanted everyone to have a better chance at winning, and I didn’t want the post with the entries to be so long you’d stop reading before you even got to the massive poll.  It was easy to split the entries along the simple line of who had really conformed to the guidelines of the outlined form and who hadn’t.

This is the contest for the people who took more license with the form.

The entries are great, the prize for the winner is a copy of Strange New Words by Ari Marmell, and you have until midnight central time on Sunday, March 16th to vote.  You may vote once a day.  Please spread the word and share this contest with others who might like poetry.

And — especially if your poem is one of the entries here — be sure to keep checking back on this blog to learn the results.  I will announce the winner in a new post soon after voting ends, and the winner will need to contact me by email to give me a mailing address to send the prize to.

Good luck, all, and happy voting!  🙂  Here come the entries…

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by Mystic RK:

think differently,
intent to live;
my life

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by Kuheli (@AamiKuheli):

my new year’s
resolution; pedal out
our sufferings

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by Aaijoni Das:

one resolution;
regular exercise,
an illusion.

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by PURUSHOTHAMARAO RAVELA:

keeping old promises
onto winter winds
new resolutions spring on wings

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by surajvinay:

stroke of midnight..
the year’s last puff with fireworks
is new years first

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by Ajaya Mahala:

resolutions
to clear the cache before
starting afresh

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by B. Lee Brown:

Snow lays like spilled milk
pooled in brown fields. The crows
don’t cry, nor will I.

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by Poornima:

new years morning
I resolve not to sing
your songs

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by Charishma Navneet Gupta:

new year’s eve –
my resolution sets
at sunrise

 

 

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*  Okay, not actually, “zillions,” per se, but a heckuvalot of you — more than ever before — and I do appreciate that.

January Haiku Contest

On By angeliquejamailIn Ari Marmell, contest, cretive writing, haiku, New Year's resolutions, poetry, speculative fiction, Strange New Words81 Comments

Hello there!  I’ve been thinking it’s time to do another haiku contest, and in honor of New Year’s Month, the theme of the contest is New Year’s Resolutions.

Here’s a quick reminder of what the haiku form is all about:  it’s a poem with seventeen syllables divided into three lines offering both description and comment.  The first line contains five syllables, the second line contains seven, and the third line contains five more.  Traditionally haiku often were about nature in some aspect, but within their brief imagery the poet often embedded some sort of opinion (the comment I referred to before).  You can take on as much of that form into your haiku as you like, but for the purposes of this contest, please use the three-line/seventeen-syllable format, as part of the challenge is to express your idea in that tight space.

The subject of your haiku is to be New Year’s resolutions.  The winner will receive the excellent new anthology (in paperback) Strange New Words: Tales of Heroism and Horror by Ari Marmell, celebrated author of fantasy and horror and other speculative fiction.  Anyone who has won a contest on my blog in the last six months is not eligible to win this prize, though you are more than welcome and even encouraged to participate by submitting a haiku for fun and by voting on the entries later.

You may enter as often as you like by submitting your haiku in the comments section of this post.  Please make each entry a separate posted comment; any entries posted together will be considered one entry.  (This just makes it easier to figure out what your intentions were when I’m putting the voting together.)

The deadline is, naturally, the end of New Year’s Month!  So you have until midnight U.S. central time on January 31st to get your entries in.  After that, I’ll put the voting together, and you the readers will determine who wins the contest.

Happy New Year!  I look forward to reading your haiku!

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UPDATE 1/14/14:  There has been such a wonderful response to this contest so far.  Thank you all!  Please stay tuned to this blog for more posts about this contest, for more information about voting, etc.  I intend to communicate with all entrants via this blog as much as possible, but I will also be posting updates on my Facebook author page, which you can get to by clicking on the link in the sidebar to the side of this screen or by clicking here.  Remember, the deadline to enter the contest is January 31st, and the voting will happen soon after that.  Keep checking back — or better yet, subscribe to this blog to get my posts sent straight to your email (and make sure your settings are arranged to get my posts “immediately”).  Thanks again!