October, 2011

And In Even More Immediate News

According to Irene Watson, the managing editor at Reader Views, Amazon has made more changes to their reviewing policy. Recently, “they removed Reader Views’ reviews saying ‘We found your reviews to be in violation of our guidelines and have removed them. Because of these violations, we’ve removed your reviewing privileges from your account.’ This happened to Watson despite her reviews being approved by Amazon’s own staff. If you review books for Amazon and wish to keep your full privileges, you might want to check what Amazon’s current policies are.

For me, this probably means I will no longer review books on Amazon’s website and I have to wonder if that’s not their intent. Which is too bad. I appreciated the ability to write about my favorite books, but if anything I say could be removed, why waste my time? What do you think?

What’s Happening In The News

In a move that will bring its manga program very close to simultaneous English and Japanese publication, Viz Media plans to launch Weekly Shonen Jump Alpha, a weekly digital serialized manga anthology. The new weekly digital anthology will debut in January 2012 and eventually replace Shonen Jump, the popular U.S. monthly print manga anthology Viz launched in 2002, which will be phased out in March 2012.

Rainmaker Entertainment and Jane Startz Productions are teaming up to bring us The Tiger’s Apprentice by Laurence Yep. The movie will star Asian-American teen Tom Lee, orphaned when his grandmother is killed, who is protected by a mystical tiger and three other creatures from the Chinese Zodiac.

And in other Asia-centric news this week, Flavorwire showcased “10 contemporary South Asian writers you should know… from the already much-lauded to the fresh faced and new on the scene.”

Pay It Forward

Well, thanks to follower, friend and critique buddy Janet Johnson, I have a blogging award to pass on.

According to Janet, the idea is “to share three under-the-radar blogs that I love and then visit the blogs everyone else mentions,” that is, the blogs of your visitors.

Well, I am definitely under-the-radar and nichey. LOL There’s no way around that. I’m not sure you can call Catwood’s blog “under-the-radar,” but she’s rebuilding her site. If you’ve ever done that, you’ll know you lose a whole bunch of followers, so I thought I’d post her link.

Hot Curries & Cold Beer is an excellent food blog by Rashda Khan, also known as Mina Khan, author of the Djinn’s Dilemma that I mentioned in my last post. She’s got more than one blog, but I do enjoy the food one and it’s deliciously a little under-the-radar. Yum. 🙂

Jeannie Lin’s blog is far from under-the-radar, but it is still related to my topic and therefore nichey. Head over there today. She’s got a great post on one of the differences between Western and Asian lit.

Supernatural Creatures and Other Delightful Subjects

Thanks to an interview with author and friend, Mina Khan about her upcoming book, The Djinn’s Dilemma, I’m pondering supernatural creatures.

My favorite when I was a child were unicorns. I even created five tribes of unicorns for my first book. Fortunately, that’s almost all I remember of that literary travesty, though I did finish it. LOL

Mina’s interview made me ponder what supernatural creatures I’m interested in now. I used a ghost in my last work. For a future series, I think I’ll look up the difference between a Djinn and an Iffrit and possibly use one or both. I think I’ve looked them up before, but don’t recall what I discovered. (I blame old age.)

Are you interested in the supernatural or faerie creatures? If so, which ones?