BLOGS

What's happening fam :)? My Probe giveaway went very well, so I've decided to giveaway 2 pdf copies of my first novel Immortal. I think it's a great way to generate publicity for my upcoming novels Immortal 4: Collision of Time & The Switch: Clockwork. And I'll be doing some other promos as well :).

So, I'll give 2 free copies of Immortal to the first 2 people who email me at sister24moon@gmail.com.

Have a great weekend!

Hello, everybody!  I managed to catch only a part of The History Detectives last night, but from what I saw, I thought it would make a good, if short blog.

Back in around 1952 or so, Fawcett Books published Romance Comic Books. To tie in with this trend and capture a whole new audience, a white man named Roy Ald created and wrote "Negro Romance," a series that had runs of 100,000 issues each. But due to poor sales and other pressures of the times, only 3 issues were ever produced. Of special interest was the artist, a young black man named Alvin Hollingsworth, who started working at Fawcett while still in high school. He was a jack-of-all-trades around there, and struck up a friendship with Roy Ald, who gave him the job of drawing Negro Romance.

Alvin Hollingsworth was the first African-American artist to be hired by Fawcett. He left the field of comic books in 1955, and went on to become a reknown painter. His paintings and his life were very integral to the Civil Rights Movement. He also had many showcase displays of his paintings at various museums. He died in 2000.

There was also a bit on journalist Orrin Evans, a white man who created what many consider to be the first black hero in comic books -- "Ace Harlan" (sic?) -- a detective or private eye.

Something I either did not know or long forgot was that in 1932, in the Captain Marvel comics, a black character named Steamboat was introduced. As you can imagine, African-Americans, as well as many white people found this character to be insulting. After years of letters and complaints, Steamboat was dropped from the comic in 1945.

I tell you, The History Detectives has become one of my favorite television shows. I wish I had caught the whole episode. But I guess i can always check it out on the InterNet!

Screenwriters!  There is an interview online today with John Truby,  author of "Anatomy of Story."

 

Call: (TODAY!)  Sunday, October 23rd, 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm EST, 4 PM CST

 

Dial:  712 432 0075; Pin#:  4392082#

 

Get on the line if you can!

An erotic, science fiction tale of betrayal and rebirth.

"In the instant
before he lifted her face to his strange puckered mouth she saw them. Stripes of
brown and orange all over his body, and a dozen suction caps lined his chest..."

Allandra has always dreamed of life on other planets. But this mission she'll find more than she ever dreamed of. From the mind of Valjeanne Jeffers, author of the Immortal series, comes an erotic tale that's out of this world.

Good afternoon fam :) I've decided to give away 4 copies of a pdf of PROBE. PROBE is the first installment of a space opera I'm working on. So I'll give a copy to the first 4 folks that email me at sister24moon@gmail.com

Have a beautiful day :)!

Did you know that the game industry is swallowing music and sound design artists? Having you're own record label and selling cds out of car are not the only ways to a be major success in music. As game systems and PCs have become more powerful the demand for talented audio engineers and artists have went through the roof! When you think about it, video games would be pretty bad if there were no sound in them. The beautiful score in the Final Fantasy Series would not be the hit it is today without the talent of the audio team. Also, the so-called geek audio dubbed "podcasting" has shown great progress too! A podcast is a digital audio form that is syndicated via an RSS feed to places like itunes and websites with an RSS feed reader. Podcasting also has an opportunity for money making with subscriptions  and advertisements. As a Multimedia Designer I've seen that sound does not get included in the resume's of many Multimedia Artists. Notice the word "Multimedia"! Animations such as Family Guy or Boondocks sound great when viewed. Listen to the soundtrack and sound design on the game Devil May Cry 4 and hear for yourself.

For more info on music and sound design check out these links;

http://www.gamedev.com

http://podcastanswerman.com/

http://www.avid.com/

http://www.steinberg.net/

War is never the answer. I find peace in uncertainty. My ideals are my rock. My fortitude . . .the river that runs through it. Change is never easy, but neither is love.

African-Americans Wield Considerable Consumer Power
Source: marketwire.com

African-Americans' buying power is expected to reach $1.1 trillion by 2015, according to 
The State of the African-American Consumer Report, released today, collaboratively by 
Nielsen, a leading global provider of insights and analytics into what consumers watch 
and buy, and The National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), a federation 
of more than 200 Black community newspapers across the U.S. This growing economic 
potential presents an opportunity for Fortune 500 companies to examine and further
understand this important, flourishing market segment. Likewise, when consumers are 
more aware of their buying power, it can help them make informed decisions about the 
companies they choose to support.
"Too often, companies don't realize the inherent differences of our community, are not aware 
of the market size impact and have not optimized efforts to develop messages beyond those 
that coincide with Black History Month," said Cloves Campbell, chairman, NNPA. "It is 
our hope that by collaborating with Nielsen, we'll be able to tell the African-American 
consumer story in a manner in which businesses will understand," he said, "and, that this 
understanding will propel those in the C-Suite to develop stronger, more inclusive strategies 
that optimize their market growth in Black communities, which would be a win-win for all of us."

And who will get this profit.....them or us???


This is still the challenge of the Black Age. To break the boycott and secure victory in the war for minds and market shares.
How many of us here buy Black on purpose? Sell Black on demand? Praise Black on recognition?  

To this end ONLI STUDIOS is bringing its Chicago centric distribution experiment to a conclusion. It has been a success and will be re-organized 
to a more official practice over the next six months. We gratefully appreciate the few indie publishers that allowed us to purchase their products wholesale to test in this situation.
We recently re-organized our annual Black Age Convention to a partnership with the DuSable Museum which gives direct support to the Black Age products we sell there and has it as a feature in its annual Arts & Crafts Festival. The DuSable Museum hosts thousands of paying visitors from around the world weekly. We will win the war for minds & market shares!!!

www.blackageofcomics.com

www.onlistudios.com

www.dablackage.blogspot.com

"Indie today: Black Age forever!!!!!!"  

There is no power in this game like a rack dedicated to the Black Age! When was the last time you were able to spin through a rack of 
Black Age greatness and then go look at the works of the so out of styled mainstream? Talk about a let down.

We feature racks in NY Harlem at the Hue Man Book Store

Chicago at the DuSable Museum of African American History along with several other locations.

Punkin

BLACK SUPER POWERED ADVENTURER

 

Adobe has pulled out all the stops for there flash player 11! The major news is there cool support for hardware focused 3D Modeling. This is awsome news for a lot of flash animators and developers.

"Stage 3D, previously codenamed "Molehill," is a new method/model of 2D and 3D rendering developed by Adobe and supported with a new Stage3D APImdash;a set of low-level GPU-accelerated APIs enabling advanced 2D and 3D capabilities across multiple screens and devices (desktop, mobile, and TV) through the Adobe Flash Platform runtimes." Check out the site @http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/stage3d.html

If you would like to see the painting process , please visit my blog.

The story goes like this:

In the age of flight schools there were communities that taught young people of
all tribes and ages. At these schools they learned about science, problem
solving, mathematics, our story, art, spirituality, and magic. When an outside
visitor and his cohorts threatened to destroy these schools of progressive
thought and action, the students sought to defend it. And defend it they did,
using all the elements of the earth at hand. Some flew on air and land, others
flew on water. Descendants of one of planet earths most ancient tribes;
"Sena" the oldest of the girls in her surfing class and "Galbadon"
who was in the beginning boys surf class escaped a major catastrophy in the
northern temple. They were to become the new guardians of the sacred water
stone............

-Robert Trujillo (Illustrator/writer)

My peace is found in action. My stillness always moves.

Can one ever rest in peace?

My action is in the silence.

i have been creating for myself and other professionally  for over 15 years now, primarily in the pen and paper role playing gaming business. i have had the opportunity to be exposed to a great many artistic styles over the years from 70's sci fi to steampunk and I have taken pieces from them all to create my style. I happily include anime and manga in my bowl full of influences as I have been reading and watching since the early eighties. 

However, over the last few years, I have noticed that young people have increasingly incorporated the Japanese Aesthetic into their art. This in and of itself is not a problem, as I have clearly illustrated, we artists incorporate a great deal of what we have picked up through observation into our work. My issue lies elsewhere and it is a problem I have on the Macro with a great many of us black creators and on the Micro specifically with the black anime and manga crowd. A have observed that lot of us black artists tend to gravitate toward a few mindsets.

1.Either we reject our cultural artistic heritage in favor of a more eurocentric asthetic." MACRO"

2.We celebrate the aesthetics of asian artists, particularly the Japanese "MICRO"

3. We overcompensate by Egyptifying our work, when Egypt was just one of the great many advance African civilizations

4 We use the urban expressionism and the visually artistic elements of  hip hop culture to express ourselves. 

While I have either large or small issues with each one these manifestations, I find our celebration of all things Asian, TO THE EXCLUSION of our own culture ghastly to say the least. II have meet very well respected artists of African decent who have extolled the artistic and social virtues of the Japanese the exclusion of all others. Some I have talked to have visited Japan , basically, as tourists or in finite programs. So they ultimately have no idea what day to day life is for people of non Japanese decent. 

While it is fine to like an aesthetic, it is my personal belief that no aesthetic holds rank superiority over another.So when these individuals essentially viliify anything not having to do with ASIA artistically, they not only pigeon hole themselves as artists, they fail to see what their own culture contributes to the artistic mix. Thus these people are just as maliformed artistically as a guy who thinks that western art styles are the end all and be all. Or a black guy who feels he has to create a black version of the popular white superhero.

We should sit back as artists and examine what truly motivates us. We as black people suffer from Stockholm Syndrome and it is no surprise that we don't like anything that looks like us  but gravitate towards things created by people who  look totally opposite. 

We just have to be honest about this as artists, so we can use our art to examine who we really are. 

I always considered myself more of a fantasy writer than sci-fi, but that doesn't stop me from writing and submitting sci-fi stories for publication.

Fortunately it has paid off. I have 2 sci-fi short stories appearing in magazines this month.

"Decontamination" takes place in the future, where the world responds to an outbreak of a deadly virus by quarantining infected individuals. One of the infected people is sick and tired of being locked away and demands answers. It's available in the new issue of Genesis Science Fiction Magazine.

"Becoming Historic" is about a man and his partner who use time-travel as a short cut to change their future and become heroes. The piece might be familiar to some members, because I had it posted in one of the workshop groups (I think it was the Anvil). I made some changes, and it appears in issue 5.3 (Fall 2011) of Black Magnolias Literary Journal. I'm pleasantly surprised my story was accepted, since it is a lit mag, not a genre mag. Just goes to show that just because it isn't a speculative fiction journal doesn't mean it won't consider your speculative fiction piece.

Thanks to the editors at Genesis Science Fiction Magazine and Black Magnolias Literary Journal for choosing my work.

It’s a trying day when your thoughts of superiority are proven false. When your races ego is crushed in an instant with just one message. It went to the United Nations during a meeting of the general body. How they knew when to send it is beyond me but of course these are smart creatures remember. The actual contents of the letter were never revealed but the gist of it was released by the media. It appeared that the Congress of Intelligent Life Forms (CILF) was going to annihilate all indigenous life forms on the planet earth in order to make way for the Intergalactic Monument for Interspecies Peace and Coexistence. Though as done in the case of their previous projects and the ecocides they would pick the top five species on each planet and relocate them to a reservation on another planet. The species would be judged on criteria of intelligence, efficiency, level of civility, and complexity. The leadership of humanity sat comfortably knowing full well that mankind was the most dominant of the species on earth and that the humans would no doubt be picked. “Why who else would they chose?” the politicians chuckled. Imagine their surprise when the listings were finally released.

Superior species:
Ants, bees, elephants, grass, trees…
No human beings

All of humanity was outraged and soon afterwards a committee was formed to appeal the decision from CILF. Not long after the committee who submitted the appeal, the committee disappeared and was never heard from again effectively ending all attempts at diplomatic solutions. The only thing left to do was for humanity to prepare to defend itself. Humanity prepared to do what it did best, fight. War, is mankind’s favorite pastime. As you would expect the atmosphere was rather giddy as soldiers were trained and planes were and tanks were built. Mankind actually looked forward to it. “If they weren’t going to live they weren’t going to die without a fight” they thought.
As time passed earth came to one-hundred percent military readiness. They were ready for the attack and waited for the fateful day in which the proof of their superiority or the their annihilation would come from one bloody battle. But to the humans disappointment the battle never came. The CILF knew the human strength was in was and even though they could still easily defeat them they decided on a different approach. Instead of using the power of war to whip out humanity why not the power of love? So one day while the humans sat around patiently cleaning their guns waiting. CILF fire a single barrage of missiles into the earth’s atmosphere. The missiles glided through the sky releases behind it a stream of gas. No one knew what the gas was until a strange thing start happening… people began to make out.

Oxycotin gas
In the air guns drop
so do pants

That is right CILF released a concentrated human love hormone into the atmosphere inducing a lust like trance in which humanity would never recover from. That is right CILF made mankind sex itself to death and sex itself to death mankind did. The whole affair was video documented by the CILF war cancel for future analysis of sex based warfare. The documentary was viewed by the public and was nominated by the Academy of Sensual Species for the award for best full participation orgy of a now extinct species. The documentary can still be viewed at the Library of Interspecies Coordinated Killing or your local intergalactic adult film store.

Aliens questions
War library or sex shop?
Will wife want to watch?

                                                            12.12.12.

The New Deal!