Analysis

Thimbleweed Park

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More video game reviews can be found here.

Genre: Point & Click, Mystery, Adventure
Developer: Terrible Toybox
Release Date: March 30, 2017
Platform: Nintendo Switch

Thimbleweed Park coverStart Date: February 25, 2018
Finish Date: April 23, 2018
Playing Duration: 57 days

Thimbleweed Park is a point & click murder-mystery adventure that winds up being much more than just your run-of-the-mill “who done it?”  Two federal agents, Ray and Reyes are dispatched to the small, titular town to investigate the murder of a foreign businessman, but each of them has an ulterior motive for being there.  Ray, the senior agent, is snarky and sarcastic with no time for rookie Agent Reyes’ overly enthusiastic attitude.  She wants to get in and get out as quickly as possible, and it’s clear early on how much she hates both the town and its residents, especially the irritating and unhelpful sheriff/coroner.  The rest of the town’s residents vary in their degrees of helpfulness, and as everything comes together, more than a mystery will be cracked wide open.

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Paper Mario: Color Splash

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More video game reviews can be found here.

Series: Mario, Paper Mario
Genre: RPG
Developer: Intelligent Systems Co., Ltd
Release Date: October 7, 2016
Platforms: Wii U

Paper Mario: Color SplashLet’s Player: Olizandri

I’d heard some pretty scathing critiques about this latest Paper offering’s battle system. but it’s still a Paper Mario, still a Mario RPG, and I wanted to see if the mechanics weren’t too wonky to overlook or if the rest of the experience would override an overly complicated card clash.

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The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare

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Title: The Winter’s Tale
Author: William Shakespeare
Date Added: August 24, 2014
Date Started: August 14, 2017
Date Finished: September 11, 2017
Reading Duration: 28 days
Genre: Drama, Tragedy, Comedy/Romance Classic

The Winter's Tale by William ShakespearePages: 171
Publication Date: May 15, 1611
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Media: eBook/Kindle

One of Shakespeare’s later plays, best described as a tragic-comedy, the play falls into two distinct parts. In the first Leontes is thrown into a jealous rage by his suspicions of his wife Hermione and his best-friend, and imprisons her and orders that her new born daughter be left to perish. The second half is a pastoral comedy with the “lost” daughter Perdita having been rescued by shepherds and now in love with a young prince. The play ends with former lovers and friends reunited after the apparently miraculous resurrection of Hermione.

The cover I used above is not the cover of the version I read, but since that one is boring (it’s just the play’s title and the Bard’s name on white a green.  Oh hell…

The Winter's Tale (boring cover)See.  Boring), I decided to use a festive piece.

The Winter’s Tale has a tragic/dramatic beginning and a comedic end, comedy, in cases like this, meaning there’s a happily resolved romance, as opposed to his more famous Romeo and Juliet, which while possessing a romantic element (if you want to call it that…), is generally classified a tragedy.  I’m unsure how comedy and romance became conflated, but in examining The Seven Basic Plots, that is how it’s described.

Hero and Heroine are destined to get together, but a dark force is preventing them from doing so; the story conspires to make the dark force repent, and suddenly the Hero and Heroine are free to get together. This is part of a cascade of effects that shows everyone for who they really are, and allows two or more other relationships to correctly form.

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Gaslight Hades by Grace Draven (The Bonekeeper Chronicles #1)

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The Bonekeeper Chronicles

Gaslight Viduus (TBK #2)–>

Title: Gaslight Hades
Series Title: The Bonekeeper Chronicles
Author: Grace Draven
Date Added: June 11, 2017
Date Started: July 2, 2017
Date Finished: July 12, 2017
Reading Duration: 10 days
Genre: Fantasy/Science Fantasy, Paranormal Romance, Supernatural, Steampunk, Gothic

Pages: 117
Publication Date: March 10, 2017
Publisher: Self
Media: eBook/Kindle

Shares Paradigms With: Final Fantasy VII, SOMA, Lovecraft, Frankenstein (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley), Wraith Kings, Dracula/Castlevania, The Raven (Edgar Allen Poe)

Nathaniel Gordon walks two worlds—that of the living and the dead. Barely human, he’s earned the reputation of a Bonekeeper, the scourge of grave robbers. He believes his old life over, until one dreary burial he meets the woman he once loved and almost married.

Lenore Kenward stands at her father’s grave, begging the protection of the mysterious guardian, not knowing he is her lost love. Resolved to keep his distance, Nathaniel is forced to abandon his plan and accompany Lenore on a journey into the mouth of Hell where sea meets sky, and the abominations that exist beyond its barrier wait to destroy them.

*****Some minor spoilers for the narrative in discussion.*******

Grace Draven shows off her ability to subvert established narratives and tropes in this Victorian steampunkish tale of stolen bodies, a Lovecraftian portal, lost loves, and the resurrected dead.  The author also draws from her prior series Wraith Kings (linked in the Shares Paradigms With section above) in ways that though numerous are neither tedious nor redundant.

In Nathaniel Gordon’s case, he was denied even the chance at love with Lenore Kenward before perishing in an airship accident, nor was he allowed to lay unmolested, instead he was forced to inhabit the form so graciously revealed on the book’s cover.  A transfer of  consciousness from broken body into a new, binding all together with gehenna, which proves its meaning of “a place of fiery torment for the dead” in what our hero suffers upon revival.  By the time he’s past the agony, Dr. Harvel, the depraved scientist who made him, is dead, slain by Gideon, his original creation, and Nathaniel is in the first Guardian’s care, slowing recovering from death’s transition to a semblance of life.

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The State of the Writer: 7/9/16

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<–The State of the Writer: 7/2/16          The State of the Writer: 7/16/16–>

A weekly post updated every Saturday discussing my current writing projects and where I stand with them.  This will include any and all work(s) in progress (WIP) be they creative writing, essays/analyses, or reviews of any type.

Content Warning:  Mentions/references to rape in the quote.

Project: Story
Title: The Broken Rose
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Type: Fanfiction (FFVII) Novel
Current Word Count: 275,045
Prior Word Count: 274,512
Word Difference: +533
Status: Editing
Progress: 1st Edit of Chapter 2

John Bunyan Quote Macro

Additional quote for the story

I am in the midst of the edit for Chapter 2, which is 22 pages long.  It took me a week to edit Chapter 1, which is only four pages, so this doesn’t bode well for my chapter a week goal nor my end one of finishing the edit before Christmas.  I also had to go back and do some fixes on Chapter 1 when I was in Chapter 2, so I’ll need to at least read through that again *sigh*

In regards to this week’s picture, I was going to talk about this quote in terms of Chapter 2 in my Editing Notes, and I realized it would make a great one for that chapter, but as I’m not doing chapter quotes, I had a dilemma.  I really love this quote for this story, but I also love the Mary Fahl one that I’m already using.

“I’ll bind your wounds and comfort you,
‘Cause I know who you are.”
-Mary Fahl “Gravity (Move Mountains)”

It’s more aligned with Aeris and Sephiroth’s relationship.  He knows her and she knows him (though he doesn’t know that).  Knowledge, and the lack of knowing about knowledge is very important in their relationship and a grander scale in the original narrative of VII itself, so there’s no way I can’t use it especially along with the “bind your wounds.”  It’s.  Perfect.  But the John Bunyan quote speaks to a connection with our own world, especially considering the heartbreaking image of that kitten.  I hope the person he’s leaning against immediately picked him and and took him away to be forever cared for and loved…as I do in this story.  I wound up making this the additional quote to The Broken Rose underneath the Mary Fahl lyric.  I’m satisfied that that’s the way things should be shaped.

I don’t have a picture for this chapter yet or even potential candidates.  I would love to find one of Sephiroth holding her wrapped in his coat, but I don’t think one such as that exists.  I may go for a picture of a luxurious bedroom with a canopied bed where the view is looking out a window.  I have an image in my head of what Aeris sees when she first wakes up, and it’s the diaphanous drapes of her new bed through which she can see the window to the balcony.  The confusion and still terror for her is heartbreaking to think of, but she is completely safe at this moment…she just doesn’t know it yet 😦

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