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Hi there! Wow, a month and a half sure flies by, doesn’t it? But I think I’ve given Pee-Wee Herman the top spot for long enough. More long-form content will appear on Medleyana soon, but in the mean time I haven’t been idle. If you missed it, you can catch up on Tune in Next Week, my ongoing series at The Solute in which I’ve been writing about the 1939 Buck Rogers serial one chapter at a time (and the most recent installment of which was just published yesterday). With only two chapters left to go, I’ll soon have a little more time to write over here.

Another project that has occupied me this spring is putting some more of my compositions on my long-neglected YouTube channel. I haven’t posted everything, but the pieces that are up represent a good cross-section of my output, including some of my ragtime piano, wind band, and electronic compositions. The big one is my symphony Carnival of Souls, recorded by the Wichita Wind Ensembles Professional Band in 2012.

If you haven’t already done so, I invite you to subscribe to Medleyana and/or follow me on Twitter to get instant notifications of updates and announcements. Thanks!

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It saddens me to say that The Dissolve, my favorite site on the Internet for the last two years, is closing up shop. The whole thing happened rather suddenly, but has been confirmed by an announcement from Editor Keith Phipps. I’m saddened to lose the insights of Phipps and the other writers for the site, but I’ll also miss the lively discourse among the commenters and the general culture of sincerity and encouragement. Despite The Dissolve’s official focus on movies, subjects under discussion often ranged widely both in the regular articles and in the comment sections. There are at least four articles on this blog that got their start as comment-section projects (my Lovefests on Addicted to Love and Cowboys & Aliens, my Scarefest on The Visitor, and my tribute to former Dissolve writer Nathan Rabin, Guardian of the Gods). That’s not even mentioning The Solute, the site launched as both a tribute to and an extension of its parent site. I’ll continue to post over there, and if the current influx of commenters over there is anything to go by, it may well end up being a continuation of the lively forum we had at the Dissolve; I invite you to read wallflower’s memorial, which eloquently sums up the feelings of so many of us.

R.I.P. The Dissolve, and good luck to its staff as they move forward.

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It’s been a while since I’ve been able to offer an update on The Lost Worlds of Power, the fan-written collection of Nintendo game novelizations of which I’m honored to be a part. However, I’m told that the October 31 release date is still firm! The book will be available as a free download that day, so be on the lookout for that!

In the mean time, I am pleased to offer the illustration for my selection, “Legendary Wings,” by cartoonist Ron DelVillano:

Legendary Wings

When editor Philip J. Reed sent it to me as part of a bundle with the other illustrations, he noted:

Just so you know, I didn’t give Ron any guidance on what your stories were actually about…true to the Worlds of Power spirit! I only told him the games. In some cases, he actually ended up with some coincidentally appropriate details, which I love, and in other cases
the illustration is totally irrelevent, which I love even more.

How accurately does Ron’s illustration reflect the contents of my story? I’ll leave that for you to judge, but for the record, I think it’s awesome! More information will be forthcoming as I have it!

. . . And as a bonus, here’s another of Ron’s illustrations that is perfect for getting into the Halloween spirit:

Monster Party-01

The title? “Monster Party,” of course.

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I’m excited to announce that I am contributing to a brand-new website for discussion of film and related topics, The Solute. The Solute is, in the words of founder Julius Kassendorf, “a brainchild collective emerging from the commentariat of The Dissolve,” the same website on which I posted my reassessment of Addicted to Love last spring. Right now, I’m only represented on the site as part of a roundtable discussion on the state of theatergoing in 2014, but I’ll be posting reviews and longer articles as it moves forward. I’ll have a longer post soon that addresses how that will affect Medleyana, and I’ll post links here whenever I publish an article at The Solute. In the mean time, I invite you to check it out and explore the diverse range of writers who will be sharing their thoughts; if it’s anything like the conversations at The Dissolve, I expect it to be fresh, varied, and entertaining.

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Last week, Philip J. Reed of Noiseless Chatter invited me to write a little about my contribution to The Lost Worlds of Power during the lead-up to publication, and it’s available to read now. While avoiding spoilers for the story itself, I zeroed in on the relation of fan fiction to the descriptive manuals that often accompanied video games in the early days, and the ways in which the illustrations could suggest a more detailed setting than the graphics of the time allowed.  (That wasn’t as much of a problem by the time my selection, Legendary Wings, was released–it’s graphically quite impressive–but I guess it was on my mind, and I can never resist the opportunity to travel down memory lane.)

Those hi-def screens reveal a lot of detail, don't they?

Those hi-def screens reveal a lot of detail, don’t they?

Check it out, and consider following Noiseless Chatter while you’re there, won’t you? Updates on The Lost Worlds of Power appear there regularly, although the release date hasn’t been finalized as of this writing.

 

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I’m very pleased to announce that my adaptation of the classic video game Legendary Wings has been selected for inclusion in the upcoming anthology The Lost Worlds of Power, edited by Philip J. Reed of Noiseless Chatter.  My story will be one of twelve novelizations of games for the Nintendo Entertainment System™ written in, er, homage to the original Worlds of Power series, which often had little to do with the games that were being adapted.  The anthology will be available as a free eBook when it’s done: I believe I’ll be able to host it here, but I will definitely include links if not.  More information, including a release date, will be forthcoming as it develops.  I’m very excited to be included, and I can’t wait to read the rest of the stories in the volume.  The complete announcement can be found here.

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