Children's Books

I found The Dungeoneers, Sidekicked, and Minions at our library. They were all written by John David Anderson and seem very troperrific. The Dungeoneers is a fantasy story and the other 2 are superhero/villain stories.

edited 24th Nov '15 1:59:37 PM by lalalei2001

I added to my Samantha Stone liveblog! Now she enters the fantasy world itself.

Also, watching that Star Darlings cartoon, it's interesting to see cel-shading like that. Cel-shading still needs to get better, as there's still moments where the lines aren't drawn correctly, but it's a neat technique, and it mostly looks great - just a little "off".

Are the books as "cartoony" as that cartoon? Or do they take themselves more seriously?

edited 4th Dec '15 10:27:21 AM by BonsaiForest

They take themselves more seriously. The web series seems to be side-stories set during/between the books, I think.

That's good, because that web series felt very generic. Like, unwatchably so!

I wish more people would read my liveblog. I enjoy this book, but not getting feedback is reducing my motivation to keep going. I plan to finish it anyway; it's not that long of a book, after all.

edited 4th Dec '15 11:49:40 AM by BonsaiForest

My liveblog of the fantasy epic continues!

This time, Samantha arrives inside the land of Aerynon and is immediately attacked by randomness!

The madness continues as I continue to cover the strange Samantha Stone.

The "Mermaid's Quest" is yet to be seen.

Part 8 of my liveblog is up.

We meet our Big Bad, and it looks as if Samantha's suddenly moved to North Korea or something.

It's been nearly a month? Well, part 9 of my liveblog is up. Marvel as our hero starts to become a Mary Sue! And see the origin story of the land of Aerynon itself.

I wonder what was going through their minds when they were writing the book. It seems to switch tones a lot.

Oh yeah. It's so weird. The narrator also stopped being Lemony! No longer making all those weird asides and remarks. I don't even know what to make of it.

Sorry it's late! I've been busy and forgetting to get to the liveblog, but here's the newest part.

I get the feeling that they started and stopped writing it at different points, which may explain the tonal shifts.

You know what, I was thinking kinda the same thing! Although I was thinking more like the author really struggled with portraying different types of scenes, but maybe it's both.

This actually reminds me of something. Someone online I talked to years ago told me about the Grey Griffins series. I read the first three books, and found them mockable yet likeable. They had serious flaws, but were also a lot of fun too - it was a matter of opinion whether the good outweighed the bad, but I had fun, so that's the important part.

Anyway, the fourth book in the series took longer to come out than the first three, and when it finally did, well...

It lost its way. It lost its tone. The guy I talked to said that the characters talked "like superheroes", rather than like kids, and that the playful banter that I liked so much about the books was gone. Since the characters no longer felt believable, the book just wasn't fun.

Skills, you use them or you lose them!

I'm trying to continue my liveblog, but with the new site redesign, adding new liveblog entries doesn't work!

I made a bug report about it.

I typed it up and everything. Good thing I hit copy/paste before I tried to add it. I really want to continue this!

Finally, liveblogs work again!! And I added part 11 of my Samantha Stone and the Mermaids Quest liveblog, covering 3 chapters!

The 12th part of my Samantha Stone liveblog has a kidnapping, and the bad guys turn particularly brutal.

Wow D: The fact that they didn't say how they were killed makes it worse.

And the kid's ten! Along with the main character. I mean...

Well, honestly, as a kid I had a violent and morbid imagination at times, and I was well aware of some of the unspoken "rules" of books and storytelling in general, and was always shocked whenever I saw them broken. But one rule I never saw broken as a kid was "Do not kill kids". It's shocking whenever it does happen.

Made a fledgling page for Gordon Korman's Masterminds series.

Pretty fascinating idea. Though I do wonder how much could be done with it. There are a lot of neat "what if?" ideas that seem like they'd be neat, but I wonder about the storytelling potential of such ideas.

It sounds like quite the Town with a Weird Secret.

I really like the worldbuilding in the first part of the book. Worldbuilding is fun.

What is done with the "clones of criminals" concept? That's what interests me the most.

Just got done reading The Wind in the Willows for the first time. I found it strangely soothing.

That name sounds familiar, but I never knew what it was about.

As a kid, I didn't care for all those serious drama books that everyone wanted us to read. All the "important" books were drama drama drama. Serious issues. I wanted fun, excitement, adventure! And also humor.

Even though I loved adventure and suspense, my list of favorite books as a kid doesn't really reflect that:

• The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks (unaware of the sequels, never read them)
• A Spy in the Neighborhood
• My Teacher Is an Alien (started out adventurous and suspenseful, but later turned preachy and became more of a travel story)
• Nothing's Fair in Fifth Grade
• Maxie, Rosie, and Earl—Partners in Grime
• The Choose Your Own Adventure series

As a kid, I recognized that killing a kid in a book was taboo. Yet, Choose Your Own Adventure did it all the time, and I didn't think anything of it. Maybe because the kid killed was the main character, and no others. It's not like other characters who you'd gotten to know were killed later on.

edited 29th Mar '16 6:23:49 AM by BonsaiForest

The latest part of my liveblog is up. See Samantha Stone escape her captors!