Song Title Challenge #59: Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice

It’s time for this week’s Song Title Challenge.

Write a short piece of fiction, around 300 words, using the song title as your story title but don’t listen to the song.  You can pick your own genre or use the one suggested to me.  Remember to link back to this post so I can find yours.

If you would like to suggest a song title for a future post, you can do so from the challenge page.  You can also leave a suggestion on the Facebook page.

This week’s song is Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice and was suggested by bumblepuppies.  Genre is Historic Fiction.  (At this point I want to remind everyone that under the terms of this challenge I reserve the right to slapstick any genre suggested to me.)

Ice Ice Baby

Continue reading “Song Title Challenge #59: Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice”

That was interesting…

A little over two hours ago my desk started shaking.  Then I realised our entire building was shaking.  So this was how it was going to end?

About twenty seconds later the Earth stopped moving and two seconds later was trending on Twitter and South Africa experienced a sudden spike in online activity.  Someone needs to do a study on what this says about us as a species.

Anyhow, according to the USGS the quake measured a magnitude of 5.3 at the epicentre which is a little under 100km away from us.  No damage here, but closer to the action at least one person was killed when a wall collapsed and an as-yet unknown number of miners are trapped underground (oh, yes, the epicentre is in a major gold-mining region).  It’s also not known yet whether mining activity could have triggered the earthquake.

Those of you interested in this type of thing can find more information here.

P.S.  Did I say no damage?  Not quite accurate.  My chess set was massacred.

A lone tower remains standing

Featuring Karlboesman

You know those days when you’re constantly busy and find yourself exhausted by the evening, but you wouldn’t be able to tell someone what you did with your time if someone were holding a gun to your head?  Yeah.

As a result, I’m postponing this week’s Song Title Challenge to tomorrow as I simply don’t have the mental fortitude to deal with one of bumblepuppies’s hare-brained title-genre combinations (and lately he’s taken to ignoring my given genre options to suggest his own…I don’t think I’ve even ever read a Latvian folk tale.  How on Earth am I supposed to write one?!)

But I’m not leaving you empty-handed.  The Song Title Challenge originated on a blog started by our writing course class as a place to easily get feedback from each other on our work after the online forum for the course was shut down.  After a strong start it has become mostly inactive, but a few people still do a song title there once in a while to spark their creativity.

And so I want to introduce you to my good friend and fellow aspiring author, Karlboesman (who also sometimes dons a dress and attends romance conventions as Dame Barbara Cartland, or Damebabs to us).  He published three incredible stories this weekend which is most definitely worth reading.  Here they are:

Also check out The Capital in Chaos which was written by his nine-year-old daughter.  Clearly a chip off the old block.

Until tomorrow then 🙂

KokkieH Reviews A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K Le Guin

The Earthsea Quartet by Ursula le Guin
Cover Illustrations by David Bergen
Publisher: Penguin Books

One cannot mention the great names in fantasy fiction without including in the list Ursula K. Le Guin, and in particular her Earthsea novels.  I had long been on the lookout for her novels when earlier this year I discovered this omnibus of the first four Earthsea books in a second-hand shop.  I read A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan back-to-back and decided I’d do a joint review of the two.

Continue reading “KokkieH Reviews A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K Le Guin”

New Books!

I just thought I’d introduce you to the latest additions to my bookcase.  I ordered them a few weeks ago during the school holidays, but they only arrived today.

Death Masks, American Gods and Blood Rites
Death Masks and Blood Rites by Jim Butcher and American Gods by Neil Gaiman

This does not bode well for the studies…

P.S. Tune in tomorrow for my review of Ursula le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan.