THE SIMPSONS NEWS

So of the time of this writing, the news broke out about how Fox is asking the actors to take a pay cut. I would like to say that the studio is “all abuzz” with the news, but we’re not.  It’s kinda, business as usual.  Naturally there’s some tension. We ALL want to keep working on the show. We ALL want to keep our jobs. We ALL want it to continue.

Everyone is keeping an eye on the situation but we know we can’t do much about it. Worrying about it, isn’t going to help. The word around the more optimistic artists at the studio is that things will work themselves out for, at least, two more season.  Just so that we could hit season 25 and maybe THEN the show will end.  If the show HAS to end, this is what we all hope for.  Especially since, if it ends now, this way, the show wouldn’t end on it’s own terms and it would be a pretty lame way for the longest animated TV show to go.  We’re hoping that we will get a chance to end this historic show with some dignity.

BOOKS/FAMILY

My wife’s book is up on Amazon for Print and digital download on Kindle and or Kindle App. The book is called:

Here’s what it’s about:

On her last spy job for the Allies, the wizard Isabella George (codenamed Emelie) must extract a deadly warlock from Nazi occupied France to prevent his alchemical weapon from devouring the continent.

However, a few things stand in her way– betrayal, a vampiric Cruenti warlock bent on draining her powers…and the realization that wizards of the Gray Tower, the very people who trained her, may in fact be her greatest enemy.

I really like what she did here.  Here’s how this novel came to be:

I was going home from work when I started thinking about Role Playing games. I had tried, unsuccessfully, to get a play-by-email role playing game going with a few people.  They were unsuccessful, for the most part, because I promised people a fun time and then just gave them homework to do, which is not fun.  I’d pitch the person how easy and fun the game would be, and how little time it would take to play, only to then throw them in the middle of character creation and world building (which is a lot of work and not fun for many people).

So then I thought, my sister might like to play a game, but having learned my lesson, I wanted to offer her the fun I’d offered others WITHOUT the work.  The world building would be done, the character creation would be done and most importantly, the world was catered, inspired, and created for her. I thought long and hard, trying to come up with an original idea that would have the same fantasy elements that she seemed to like (Harry Potter) but which would be as fun and adult as other urban fantasy settings (Jim Butcher‘s Harry Dresden stories).  So I started thinking,  and I thought about the Dresden books and thought they were cool and fun and they had a wizard in it.

Well, how about if Harry (Dresden not Potter) was a woman? Since my sister is a woman, it would be more comfortable to play one. Well, that didn’t really make things interesting enough. At least, not for me, since I was going to have to develop it. I thought how, when my sister was younger, she really liked spies, so what if the wizard was a spy?  That DID make it more interesting but I still though it needed something else. What WOULD make it really interesting for me is if it took place in World War II fighting occult Nazis. Then it’s would have a lot of flavor and it would be fun to play.

Having had that idea, I started trying to come up with a scenario to have my sister play through with this concept. It ended up being too much work for me at the time just for a game, so I thought it would be better to put it off for a while.  I never even pitched my sister the idea.

A month or two later I was driving home thinking about stories. This time around, I thought,

“Boy, vampire romances are all the rage right now, even though they’ve been around forever. I wonder what the next big thing will be…Wizard romances?”

That’s when I remembered that wizard thing I had come up with for my sister. What if there was a big underling romantic arch in the story about this female, Wizard, Spy?  THAT might be appealing.  The more I thought about it, the more I liked it.  Later that day or perhaps a few days after, I told Alesha, that perhaps “Wizard Romance” novels would be the next big rage and pitched her the concept of a World War II female spy, that happened to be a Wizard.  She liked the idea so much she said she wanted to write a story about it.  Next thing I know, she’s coming up with a plot and started writing the manuscript.

I helped “edit” the book and gave her my two cents but I thought what she came up with was fantastic. The Romance elements are there too.  It’s cool.  There’s Nazi creatures and vampiric Warlock, double crossing spies, suspense, heists, magical battles and even a sword wielding magical Catholic priest.   I’m very proud of what Alesha did here.  It was really fun to see this universe come to life in a way I would have never done it and yet it still hits all the things I like in a story. Which is perhaps the best part of all.

It’s ironic that the book wouldn’t have existed if I hadn’t been doing something for my sister that I never did and she never knew I didn’t do it.

I think, next week I’ll start posting up excerpt from the book.  If you can’t wait till next week though, go to Amazon and click “Look Inside”. You can read the first three and a half chapters there right now. Or better yet BUY THE BOOK!

You can see what Alesha is up to on her site: http://www.aleshaescobar.com/

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