Yup he did it again! SD Gundam has a TCG!

Saturdays my hubby works out of a different Costco than his usual store. Well when he was at his lunch he went out and wandered over to the local TRU and guess what he found?  Yup that is right, a SD Gundam trading card game.

Now most of you out there have heard of things like Pokemon, Magic and some of the other more famous trading card games.  You get characters and you battle, generally one on one to see who will win. This game he found is based on one of the earlier SD Gundam shows.

There are commons, uncommons and of course rare foil and gold cards. We haven't played it yet but it looks like a lot of fun for sure.

We currently have just booster sets but we are waiting for the started decks that he ordered. Usually I don't play these games much anymore.  See my hubby is a wizard at these games.  You can beat him a couple of times but usually by the fifth game he is trouncing you so often that it just isn't worth playing anymore.  But well I really do want to make him happy and these cards are fun, so I am looking forward to it.

Here are some of the cards...the rare ones that is!

Robin Hobb, a really good writer

Over the past week or so I have been down sick.  Sick enough that even trying to watch tv has been a pain, so I dug out some of my older books to read.  Six of the books I read were from Robin Hobb. This talented fantasy author wrote a series, well two series, dealing with a very different character.

FitzChivarly Farseer is a bastard. Not in personality, though he can be at times, but in the traditional sense of being born out of wedlock. In today's culture it should not matter at all (yeah it can sadly enough) but in a world that is the fantasy version of the middle ages, it is a big thing.  His father was the King-in-waiting, Chivarly Farseer. The King-in-waiting is basically the next in the line for the crown.

The first book starts with Fitz being brought to where his father is by his maternal grandfather and foisted off on the first person there.  Thus begins a series of books dealing with magic, majesty, power, monsters, good, evil and everything that makes fantasy the genre it really is.

There are two series and they are the Farseer Trilogy and the Tawny Man Trilogy. The Farseer trilogy deals with Fitz from the age of six till about twenty.  He goes through so very much.  From growing up learning to be a hidden man, a spy and assassin, to discovering he has no one but two types of magic in his blood. 

The first being the Farseer magic known as Skilling.  Basically this magic is a lot like psychic ability. There was telepathic contact and far seeing (thus the family moniker) but as the series evolved other things showed up. Like healing, again psychic.

The other form of magic was called Wit.  This was from Old Blood, a group of people who can bond with animals, speaking to them and seeing through their eyes.  While Skilling is considered a good thing, having Wit was considered horrible.  Misunderstood by most, anyone found with Wit were shunned and in many cases killed outright.  Fitz bonded three times in the first series.  First with a puppy that his guardian sent away from him before they were bonded too closely, second to an animal that died and finally to NightEyes, a wolf cub and long time companion for our hero.

This first series deals with the Red Ship Wars and the forged ones.  Fitz has many adventures, many highs and many lows.  Told as a series of remembrances, the books are less action and more characterizations.  Something that I adore. This is not a series of books I would recommend for immature readers.  You need to have the ability to understand that good does not always triumph and that the hero can do bad things and still be the hero to read these books.

The sequel series, The Tawny Man, picks up years after the end of the first series.  Fitz is now calling himself Tom Badgerlock. As the Witted Bastard, FitzChivalery Farseer, is thought to be dead and buried, it was a wise thing to do.  He settled down, built a life in the woods with Nighteyes and had even taken in a boy, Hap and raised him as his son.  Life is good, if simple for him when he is dragged out of his simple life and back into the world of the FarSeers. Expected to train the young prince in his Skilled magic, he finds that there are more conflicts and battles waiting for him.  He is now 35 and still a youngish man.  He is not recognized by the people of Buckkeep, which is a good thing because of how he is considered dead by most people.  The second series immerses us yet again into a world of intrigue and politics, of hatred and racism yet holds up moments of utter beauty and love. Dealing more with Fitz and his relationship with the Fool, these books move strongly into the future that the Fool has seen.  We learn much more about that very interesting character and just why he has spent so much time with Fitz.

If you have a time where you want to be totally enthralled by a series of books I recommend them.  Robin Hobb is a very talented author and I am now trying out her Liveship books.  Set in the same world but with different characters.

Posting my titles on Google Play or what the heck am I doing?

Yeah I found the page to list my links but I am not sure how to market these.  Google play is basically a way for those who read on their phones to access amazing new titles (like mine) to read on their google phones.  So I have doing my best to figure out how to market over here

.To Save Face or Family, a novel on Google Play

So far I have only two of my titles up but I hope to have the rest up by the end of July.  Not the simplest thing to do but the more places people can buy my work the better.  In fact as a shock I found I had two sales over on the Kobo Writers Life page.  I don't get a lot of sales on Kobo and in the past year the majority of them were titles on my D2D or Smashwords books, so it was nice to see.  So if you can go check out my titles on GooglePlay

Alone: an Acrostic poem | Lisa Williamson | Sad | Poem | Storyenet.com

Alone: an Acrostic poem | Lisa Williamson | Sad | Poem | Storyenet.com

Look what I got for my anniversary?

Yup I have been happily married now for four years.  My sweet hubby decided when he was in Toronto for business to pick me up a new little kit to put together.  If you had told me four years ago that I would actually be happy to receive a gundam to put together i would have given you the old stink eye but these guys are actually kinda fun to put together.

Now this little kit was on the easy side for me.  As you can imagine after building these for the past year with the hubby I am getting better at them.  I didn't need any help putting it together and managed to do it in about an hour(ish). This was one of the simpler kits I have done and I actually didn't mind that at all.  As you can see by the photos, he is a zaku style SD in green with some fun pop on armor...and I do mean pop on.He was very simple to put together with a minimum of stickers and joints.  Mostly a pop me together little guy.

Not the best pics I have taken but well you can see that he is a little guy.  That is the salt shaker from my dinning room table next to him.  He is just about four inches tall and he has this huge battle axe that makes him almost tip over when you put it into his hand.  Simple, silly but sweet, IMO.  I enjoyed taking a break from being a mom and baker to make him.  Hopefully next week I will finally sit down and work on the 1/144 models that Fox set aside for me.  One of them is so old that we have to actually use glue with it.  And that is why it isn't done yet.  That glue gives me a headache pretty quick.

So enjoy my little friend here and hopefully soon i will have some more...and of course someday soon I will do a little action battle type photo series of my little guys playing.

Read a biography or hey I do read other stuff!

During the past week or so I have of course read a lot of things.  From my usual fantasy to paranormal romance to a biography...yes I said a biography.

See we had a day where storms rolled through and power was very iffy.  What is a woman to do but pick up an actually hardcover that has been sitting around on the shelf since I moved to Canada.

That book was I am Jackie Chan.  Yup that Jackie Chan.  See my hubby is a huge fan of the man, as am I.  We all know his amazing movies and I used to own some of his earlier works before i moved to Canada.  So I thought, what the heck and i dove into the book.

It is filled with lots of photographs from his life and it is told from his point of view. You learn all abut his growing up in Hong Kong and in one of the troops of the Chinese Opera.  Now this tale really starts in 1956 when his parents signed him over to the school he was to spend the next ten years at. Times were very different as was the world he was living in.  Mr Chan was not a scholarly child, a bit of a brat by his own telling and a boy who needed to move. 

The school he entered was a very harsh one.  In the world of today he would have been considered abused horribly by the school and his parents would have been brought up on charges but in China at this time they were doing there best to give him a chance at a better life.

While the book needs the steady hand of a good co-writer and editor to match today's standards, this book is actually quite enthralling.  You find yourself gasping in horror and rooting for the young Jackie and saddened at times by the losses in his life and cheering at the good things.  Unlike reading fiction, this book it true.  The master actor/comedian/stuntman and more lived this life and this book makes you believe it.  It is a snapshot of a world that very few know of.

I am told that the book out there now is very different from the copy I have.  It has been rewritten and edited but I wonder if it lost the feel of reality that this copy has?  Sometimes editing and rewriting should be avoided.  This book is one man's view of his life, from a point of view very different than the westerners who read it.  This westerner felt that disconnect but still could not put down the book.  It is a great read and made me glad i knew these things about a very fine man.

Re-reading a master

While I have spent a lot of time reading the new and amazingly talent crop of indie authors out there, I do from time to time, pull out some of the older fiction.  Over the past week I have been working my way through Roger Zelanzy's Chronicles of Amber books.

Now anyone who knows these series, knows that it is one of the very best written bits of fiction out there.  There is political intrigue, back biting, fantasy creatures, magic of a type not commonly seen, religion and a whole lot of other things that make series great.

The first five books of this series are from the point of view of Corwin of Amber.  One of a dozen or more brothers and sisters who are heirs to the throne of Amber, which is the center of all reality.  It starts off with him not knowing who he is and we are taken through a lot of ups and downs and confusion as he learns who he is, where he belongs and just who should be the kind of Amber.

He father is missing, the magician who was both tutor and master of the courts is rumored to be mad and is also missing.  Everything to drag you along into a world that is rich and well written.

While it has been well over a decade since I last read the series I found myself pulling for Corwin and really interested yet again in the mechanization that the brothers and sisters go through in these books. There are parts that drag to me and they did drag in the first reading way back when but they don't distract from a masterful telling of these interconnected books.  If you are a fan of fantasy you really should pick up these books and read them.  There is a reason that he was considered a master and this book series is it.

Now I am currently reading the second series of the Amber books.  This time the main character is Merlin, Corwin's son.  We met him literally at the end of the first series of books and here we find that Merlin is facing a lot of the same things that his father did.  There are forces outside of Amber this time that want to destroy the kingdom and we get to meet other relatives that we did not know about before.  It seems that this family is more twisted than even the family we see on Game of Thrones.  So folks, do yourself a favor, pick up all ten books and settle back for a wild ride through Shadow.