Archives for themself - Page 7
History Bookshelf – Bookshelves Abound = #Shelfie 02
The History Bookshelf sits next to the Fiction Bookshelf. You can just see it alongside in the photo. Like the Fiction Bookshelf the History Bookshelf is second of the five identical Ikea bookshelves to feature in my Shelfies. History Bookshelf The History Bookshelf, one of five Ikea bookcases This is not the only bookshelf containing history books, most of my bookcases have some history on them. The reason that I've called this one the History Bookshelf is that it has a mixture of themes on it. Most of it is WW2 history, but there are other periods too. The top shelf has a mixture of POW stories, from both British and German points of view. It also has Blitz and National Fire Service histories. There are a handful of other home front books across the history bookshelf too. Further down there is a…
new cover reveal for Themself
Firstly I would like to thank everyone that took time to give me feedback on the design of the new cover for Themself. In particular I'd like to name check Tom Mouat who first suggested a minimalist approach (as did a couple of others). This prompted me to spend some time looking at book covers in the bookshop at London Victoria train station. What I saw there was that nearly every non-fiction book (and a lot of the fiction) had a fairly minimalist cover. Bookshop visit I was sort of surprised by the number of books that have a block colour cover, large text for title & author, and nothing else. Although most of those also had a small illustration on the cover, usually about half the width and a third of the height. Those illustrations were simplified, not photo…
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…
500 Posts on Themself – milestone
Themself passed the 500 posts milestone earlier this week. I've been specifically writing for Themself since 5th July 2006, so it has taken me a decade to write 500 posts. That said, the earliest posts date from 1995, but they were originally written for the Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group newsletter Milmud. Of the posts I've written, 15 were slotted in before the real start of the blog. All of those come from other things I'd written for publication elsewhere. Part of the nature of the very early blog posts was that I didn't have a topic in mind, so they're pretty short and random. These days they'd probably turn up as facebook status updates. Back then there wasn't a facebook (or at least I didn't have an account). What really turned up the heat was doing the creative writing course…