Help me pick a Title Font for my new book cover
I need your help to pick the title font for my new book cover. I'm in the process of re-designing the cover for the paperback version of Themself. My work in progress cover is a choice between either a photo (see below) or a minimalist plain cover. I'll survey on that in a little bit when I have more time to produce the full minimalist cover. Pick Themself's Title Font Right now I need some quantitative help with choosing options on the title font. I need something that speaks to people as 'creative writing' and works. So can you please do this one question surveymonkey to help me out, and share it around as well please? Thanks. Draft Cover for Themself in Paperback Here's what the new cover looks like so far. This isn't the final version, it needs some more…
Horror Movies – What Makes Them Properly Scary?
The Blair Witch Project (Photo credit: Wikipedia) On the way to school this morning Alexander was asking me what makes the Blair Witch Project a scary horror movie. He hasn't seen Blair Witch, but he has read the article on the sequel in the current Empire magazine. Ever since he has been obsessed about knowing how the Blair Witch Project went. Horror or Splatter? One of the things we talked about was whether or not you really need lots of blood and gore in a horror movie. There's certainly a visceral horror in seeing injured or dismembered people. But it is quite hard to get it right. We're good at understanding that it isn't real. If we don't think it is real then we cannot be truly terrified. Gore in a horror movie is like slapstick in a comedy. It…
Secret Hitler from Kickstarter has arrived
I backed Secret Hitler on Kickstarter a little while back, and it finally arrived! I'm really looking forward to playing it, but it might be a while as it is a five to ten player game. Secret Hitler - what's in the box? Here are a handful of pictures of what is in the box. The box, two of the three double sided tracking boards, the places for the President and Chancellor, voting cards and policy tokens. The back of the Chancellor's placard, with a summary of the relevant game rules on the back. It's sitting on the liberal party's board, these are all identical on all three game boards. On the other side are the fascist policy tracker boards that depend on the number of players. The back of the President's placard. As you can see the President has…
Visiting Berlin – first impressions from a family holiday
I've had a fascination with visiting Berlin since my early teens, if not earlier. I did German at secondary school, and the class had a map of Berlin with the wall in 3d. The exchange student, Frauche, was a west Berliner. The city was firmly divided back then, I was at uni when the wall finally came down. Somehow it took me about thirty years to get round to visiting Berlin for the first time. Visiting Berlin Visiting Berlin was a family holiday, so I had both children and my wife with me. The kids are 4 and 10. Berlin isn't that child friendly, it was hard to find things for the little one. My elder was OK most of the time. I think we broke them both with walking about, even though we made an effort to use the…
Writing Good Living History Characters for Re-enactors
This second post in the living history series is on creating good living history characters. The previous blog post was on the five steps for scripting living history events, of which creating your living history characters is the fifth step. Cooking snacks for soldiers at a living history event Living history events are a sort of promenade theatre with a lot of improvisation. Re-enactors are often mingled with the public, and many will be answering questions one to one. So living history characters need to be more robust than if you were writing for another medium. Here's what you need to do: Outline the scenario Work out what characters you need for the scenario Provide background for each character Define limits for improvisation Cast people as your main characters & brief them 1. Outline Your Scenario Mass-produced colour photolithography on paper…