October 24-26, 2014: Literary guest (confirmed) at Spooky Empire Ultimate Horror Weekend in Orlando, Florida.
We’re also putting together what may be the BIGGEST Ultimate Occult Showdown we’ve ever done; just waiting on word for day and time. Fingers crossed for the BIG room!
See highlights from my past guest gigs on the Appearance Page.
As a few of you know, I am married to a wonderful horror author, Linda S. Cowden. Her book about the Grim Reaper called Grimmie is an awesome read, so last October we shot several still photos with a small cast to create a book trailer based on the opening chapter.
Here it is: shot, scored & cut by me!
Enjoy, and feel free to spread the love around!
“Just when you think you know what to expect from a sequel, Kevin A. Ranson completely shatters predictability with The Matriarch: Guardians. The perfect pace and continuity of the different subplots fuse together seamlessly (to) deepen the pull into each character’s motives.
“Allow yourself to become emotionally charged in this modern-day vampire thriller. It is so tangible and believable that you might even second guess the intentions of every administrative professional that you put in charge of your loved ones. You might also start to desperately want to find the quality care of a qualified vampire. I now see the situation as being a Win/Win…just don’t ask too many questions. Although the first book The Matriarch delivered a dark and intense sojourn, the sequel has managed to launch the story out of the atmosphere!”
~ by Kimmie Chameleon for DarkMedia.com
I get this question all the time. A LOT.
Fox Mulder inspired my preferred answer…with a heavy influence from Bela Lugosi.
The Matriarch: Guardians is available NOW, but here’s a “mood trailer” for you with bits of dialogue lifted from the text. Enjoy…and feel free to comment and share!
Extra fun bit! If you have a cool sound system or really great headphones, you’ll get a bit of a treat; I put a lot of cool and creepy stuff into the soundtrack that you’ll miss on a teeny phone speaker. Turn it up!
It took over a year to capture the original pictures and longer still to process them into a storybook format. I’ve had to learn a few new music and media skills to get this far, but this trailer is 100% created by me. PLEASE let me know if you do or don’t like it; any and all feedback will help me improve my work in the future. I hope you enjoy it.
Lend me your ears…that’s disgusting; take those back this instant!
After taking a year off to concentrate on my burdening…no, bludgeoning… wait, *burgeoning* writing career, I’m a guest at this year’s Ancient City Con at the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront on July 18th-20th, 2014. I’ll be bringing a bunch of books: copies of The Matriarch and The Matriarch: Guardians. If you already have one or both, bring them by to get those dead-tree editions signed at no charge! There will be panels…oh yes, there WILL be panels…including an all-new edition of The Ultimate Occult Showdown with myself and Brett Link as your enforcers…whoops, I meant “hosts!”
C’mon down, get a hotel room right on the waterfront, and party with us for the eighth-annual Ancient City Con this mid-July. Seriously, there’s nothing else to do that weekend in Jacksonville…I promise. Would I lie? I mean, when it’s important?!
See ya there!
A friend pointed an article my way called “We’re losing all our Strong Female Characters to Trinity Syndrome,” citing a concern that, while storytellers in film have come a long way in empowering female characters, those characters are often reduced to mere plot devices.
There is an essential truth to this: they ARE plot devices.
And the reason for this is just as true: secondary characters support the Protagonist’s story.
Before we crawl under the hood, understand that I am not advocating the treatment of Strong Female Characters in many works – the author of the article makes a fair point of this – but we’re not talking about Ripley from Aliens or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” because those are their stories. We are also not talking about “Women In Refrigerators,” a trope concerning violence against women in comics as a plot device to “hurt” Strong Male Characters.
The article outlines eight questions writers should ask themselves about Strong Female Characters, everything from “(can she be) seamlessly replaced with a floor lamp with some useful information written on it” all the way to “deciding to have sex with/not have sex with/agreeing to date/deciding to break up with a male hero” pointlessness. The article contends that writers should rise to the occasion to create someone worthy of the name Strong Female Character, but these could all be reduced to a single, far simpler question: Can your Strong Female Character be seamlessly replaced by a Strong Male Character? If yes, all’s good; if not, why not?
Continue reading “Are Strong Female Characters in Supporting Roles Mostly Useless?”
In the wake of a Slate blogger YA-shaming adults (backlashes are occurring everywhere), I’d like to weigh in on why *I* dabble in “childish fiction.”
Complexity isn’t reserved for the old; it’s often a mistake that, too often, many adults forget how smart they were as kids and underestimate young adults. The difference is experience, not intelligence. Also, the point of view of a child isn’t any less interesting than an adult – or an alien, a monster, an animal, an addict, a plumber, or an artificial intelligence. Stephen King’s Stand By Me aka “The Body” has an all-child cast; It is born of childhood fears and has one leg in. Very few will argue that John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In is “for children.”
An interesting thing about YA is lessening the importance of sex in the story; the definition of adult (aka “literary”) fare seems to be that everything must be ultimately motivated by your crotch – music, film, poetry, whatever – because everything adults do in life must lead to something naked and primal. Kids also have the advantage of being blind to society-imposed gender roles rather than be pigeonholed in the way many adults classify things. The whole “put away childish things” and “know your place” is something children are taught, not something that just happens.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion; unlike facts, opinions are never wrong. If you like books about complex feline societies masquerading as a social commentary on the human world, enjoy. YA is just another classification to help readers find what they’re looking for, no different from sci-fi, horror, romance, thriller, superhero, or whatnot.
The truth is this: a good story is a good story. Don’t feel guilty…just enjoy.
Hero’s Journey is the classic stock-plot framework; it works and you can build upon it in infinite ways. From a three-act perspective, this sets up our narrative and story, but it often all hinges on a single decision – an unhealthy one at that.
This is the moment where many viewers/readers will say, “Why didn’t they just do THIS?” The easy answer is “because then we wouldn’t have a story,” but the trick is to make the audience feel enough for the character to go along with it and propel the story forward…not always an easy task.
This setup also plays strongly into the ending; if the journey and character growth promised at the start isn’t clear, any ending – no matter how many explosions and cool character deaths take place – will fall short and leave the audience feeling unfulfilled by the experience. A solid story needs to provide what was promised, even if it’s not exactly in the way the audience imagined it.
Listen to Pixar’s Michael Arndt, screenwriter for Toy Story 3, explain first-act methodology (it’s cooler than it sounds) with examples from The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and the original Toy Story.
Got all that? Now, get back to writing!
Kevin A. Ranson 