Book Review: Unexpected Destiny by Ariana N. Dickey

I meant to have this posted ages ago. My, how time flies. Anyway, here's my first (and so far only) review for Self-Publishing Review, which describes itself thusly:

Self-Publishing Review is a central site devoted to self-publishing news and reviews. It is also a social network where writers, readers, and everyone can join and connect. . . . The aim of the site is to improve the attitude toward self-publishing and help authors find readers.

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Book Review: Unexpected Destiny by Ariana N. Dickey

First impressions are vital with self-published books, especially first novels with few user reviews. Unexpected Destiny has a fairly bland cover, rendered unfortunately dark and murky by Lulu's printing process. The interior layout is mostly professional-looking, with a few odd formatting choices (most notably in the way non-human dialogue is set, which is not only strange, but inconsistent). Typos are mercifully few, and though I did notice a slight increase the farther I got into the book, I've seen much worse in mass-market paperbacks from top publishers.

But I don't expect you really care that much about the physical book, as long as it's not distractingly badly done. You probably really want to know about the story, the characters, the writing. Curiously, those things, the things that make you want to read a book or not, mirror the book's physicality. By which I mean, there's a lot of heart in Unexpected Destiny, but it's very apparent that this is a first novel.

Ms Dickey has no lack of imagination. The pages of this book are bursting with colorful characters, made-up fantasy species (and some that are more obviously based on myth or folklore or previous authors of high fantasy), and lovingly-imagined locales. The plot proceeds at a breakneck pace, sending the three main characters off on a quest and putting them in harm's way immediately--a different sort of harm on every page, it sometimes seems.

Our three heroes, Ely, Colin, and Faythe, are the latest reincarnation of the Blessed Ones (yes, in caps every time). It is their destiny to free their world from its tyrannical king and the depredations of some nasty gods and their even nastier minions, or to die in the attempt. Which makes me wonder exactly how their destiny is unexpected, since we (and they) know about it in the first chapter. The heroes have a magical map they must follow in order to meet said destiny, and it takes them from place to place where they save people, get attacked by people, kill a lot of people (both on purpose and by virtue of others trying to help them and dying), and learn how to harness their Blessed powers. It often feels like the writer also had a map, or a plot outline, that she followed from incident to incident, in as much of a hurry to get to the next plot point as her characters are to get to the next location on their map. Quite often, I wished she would just slow down, breathe and enjoy the journey.

Unexpected Destiny certainly isn't a bad book, but I can't quite say it's a great one, either. I give it 3 out 5 stars because though there's a lot of promise here, it's promise a good editor could have gone a long way towards bringing out. The writing is grammatically competent, but there are too many stock phrases and clichés, too much telling and not enough showing, for it to ever become truly absorbing. And though the story does reach a sort of resting place, it's not over, as this is the first in a series. To get the whole story, you have to read the rest of the series, which isn't out yet. I certainly wish Ms Dickey the best with her writing, as I think she could produce some fine stories if she's willing to put the work into developing her craft.

[BFG] Latest PSP Writing

Something bizarre is happening with my internet access. At first I thought it was just Firefox conflicting, for some unknown reason, with WordPress (which my work blog uses) so that whenever I tried to publish two posts in a row, the new one would copy over the old one, even though they had different file names. But then Safari did the same thing. In fact, it not only deleted the first post when I published the second, when I tried signing out and back to see if it would help, it deleted the second post as well. Eventually I got them both posted, but not until I wasted a lot of time. I'd assume it was a WordPress problem, but other sites have been loading with images in weird places, or hotlinks unlclickable, or assorted other weird things. Grrrr. I dumped the caches on both Firefox and Safari, to see if that might help, but I haven't seen any reports of similar things online. Tonight I think I'll shut down the Macbook instead of just putting it to sleep to see if it makes any difference.

Anyway, here are my most recent blatherings about the PSP:

• How to Convert Homebrew Files to KXploit Form
  
• The PSP and Other Handhelds, A Visual Comparison
  
• Is it Possible to Run Homebrew on PSP Firmware 1.51 and 1.52?
  
• Where Can I Get Free PSP Demos?
  
• Shadow of Destiny Review
  
• Shadow of Destiny Screenshots
  
• Sony's PSP and Nintendo's Game Boy
  
• Can the PSPgo Run Homebrew?
  
• Can Homebrew Save the PSPgo?

So that's what I've been up to. next up for reviews is a not-quite-new release, Pangya Fantasy Golf and a PSP mini, Hysteria Project, plus I hope a first-impressions review based on the demo for Mod Nation Racers.

[BFG] Latest Videogame Writing

Once upon a time, I started trying to cover more homebrew on my work site, About PSP, but I eventually gave up because it's so easy to get confused. I did succeed, however, in downgrading my PSP (an old PSP-1000 model) to firmware version 1.50, the best version for homebrew.

Lately, I've given it another shot, and started a series of articles on how to run homebrew on verious firmware versions and models of PSP. Here's the series so far, with many more to come in the weeks ahead.

• How to Run Homebrew on a Firmware 1.00 PSP
• How to Run Homebrew on a Firmware 1.50 PSP

I've also returned to a series of very fun, but perhaps not very traffic-attracting, articles on classic handheld gaming consoles. To make them suitable for the site, of course, I can't just write little historical sketches for each one. Instead, I have to relate them to the PSP, which has actually turned out to be a fun challenge, and I think may have resulted in somewhat better articles than I might otherwise have written. Here's that series (so far).

The PSP and the History of Handheld Videogaming

• Introduction to the Archaeology of the PSP
• The PSP and Milton Bradley's Microvision
• The PSP and Epoch's Game Pocket Computer

And in yesterday's mail I got a review copy of Konami's Shadow of Destiny, a remake (or maybe just a port, I'm not sure) of a 2001 PS2 game. That'll be my next review, sometime next week. My last review was Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which I loved so much I'm going to download the original Silent Hill PSOne game to my PS3, and start playing through the whole series.

[BFG] Video Game Art Review

Video Game Art by Nic Kelman. New York: Assouline Publishing, 2005. (Cover image copyright Assouline Publishing and Konami.)

Being poor and a lover of books, I often find myself shopping in the remainder (aka "Bargain Books") section of Chapters, even though both Chapters (big box store for books) and the idea of remaindered books are a little dubious. Still, it's possible to get fantastic deals there, especially in art books.

Anyway, on my most recent trip, when the boy and I went after the holiday rush was over, one of the books I brought home was Video Game Art by Nic Kelman. I picked it up mostly because I'm interested in the whole phenomenon of digital art, and it's nice to have mementos of well-designed games that I'll probably never play again (for the same reason, I have art books from Gadget, Myst and Syberia--and the Syberia one is in French, of which I can read only a very small amount). The cover of the book does not inspire confidence, featuring a tacky lenticular image as it does, so I wasn't expecting a whole lot more than a superficial look at the art design of games coupled with some nice pictures.

So I was pleasantly surprised to discover a very readable scholarly essay on why we should count video games among the media allowed in the hallowed records of art history. The author placed particular emphasis on how games reflect myth and the heroic journey, which is a strong argument. It would be interesting to compare some video games with Joseph Campbell's hero's journey (even though I think Campbell vastly oversimplified mythology, he's very popular in film scholarship).

This book would make useful reading for game designers, as Kelman points out some of the ways game design has become codified (or petrified), and how it could venture into new territory. The emphasis is primarily on games with narrative structure, though there is some discussion of non-story-oriented games, too.

My primary quibbles with Video Game Art are physical. The gimicky cover I've already mentioned. The paper was also a little problematic. Though the heavy, smooth stock that the publisher chose was really good for reproducing the images, the book is not particularly large for an art book, so the stiffness of the pages made turning and holding them for reading more awkward than it should have been.

The really big issue was a printing problem. In at least three places, when a sentence broke off at the end of the page, it simply vanished and was never completed. And the last time this happened, instead of picking up at the next sentence or paragraph, the opening paragraphs of the chapter were repeated. Add this to the rampant minor typos, and the copyeditor in me was continually jarred out of the joy of reading the otherwise well-written prose.

Anyway, problems aside, Video Game Art is a useful addition to the so far scarce scholarly literature on video games.