Author - Artist - Voice Over Actor

Tag: Doctor Who

Favorite Reading

When I was a young kid, elementary school age, as mention in a previous post, I had trouble reading. My parents took me to a special extra-curricular study place called The Reading Game.

It is no longer there. The building torn down and replaced by a multi-use apartment complex for students and others from the nearby University.

Reading their remedial booklets went on for many money, I no longer remember how long I attended there.

Then one day I picked up a comic book (I’ve already written about How I got that first comic), and it all changed. I was enjoying reading.

My parent’s asked the instructor if it was okay for me to be reading comics. The response was simple. If he’s reading, done stop him. Encourage him. And so, I have been reading comic books my entire life.

The next thing that got me further into reading was a series of books called: Choose Your Own Adventure. They were fantastic, especially as you could read it three or four times and get an entirely different story each time. Probably the only regular books I checked out of the school library.

(My relationships with libraries is a story unto itself.)

Comics would remain my mainstay reading content.

The reading material assigned to me in class, continued to be a struggle, hard to remain focused on whether it be elementary, junior high, or high school. It would be these outside sources, especially comics, where I could grow and learn.

If I could read something at my own pace, I could enjoy it. If it was an assigned book or chapter, I’d force my way through it but it was always a struggle, and I didn’t always learn anything from it unless the topic was of great interest to me and brought me enjoyment.

I’d later learn to enjoy doing research, but I had to find something interesting in it, something that was fun, in order to devote that much time to it. Otherwise, it was a real struggled.

The first real novel I thing I read was HG Wells’ The Time Machine.

I eventually discover the short stories and novels of Ray Bradbury. Then I found the essays of Harlan Ellison. So you know my creativity and learning process was growing.

Again, it would take an interest to get me to start and then complete reading of a book.

I remember reading a Shakespeare play in high school and enjoyed it, followed by Arthur Miller’s play the Crucible. Probably reading these in script format was probably easier than a full out novel.

During college and friend introduced me to two book series. Since I enjoyed Watch Doctor Who he thought I would like Douglas Adam’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Which resulted in my writing several stories for class in Adam’s voice. I don’t think my teacher appreciated it.

He then introduced me to Steven R Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle. Looking back, I am still surprised by how fast I read through these books. They were heavy novels (figuratively and literally). I greatly enjoyed the books.

Over the years I would become more and more of a reader, but finding the books that appealed to me, that I enjoyed wasn’t always easy.  The number of books I have read, per year, has been relatively few.

Sometimes it was the type of book, the type genre.

“So, what’s your favorite fiction genre?”  – Here we are back at this question again, remember my last post.

As to Genre, I think the answer is the same as my “Doctor Who” answer previously:

I will admit I don’t like Horror, but when it comes to the rest of the genres.

“I like the one I am currently reading.”

I grew up on super hero comics, which lead into science fiction and fantasy, and especially mystery/detective fiction. Plus, over the last decade or so I’ve discovered a love for romance novels.

The first romance books I read were fantasy romance, about dragons.

Then I discovered a series called Once Upon A Con by Ashley Poston, starting with Geekerella. Telling a story that took place around a Comic Con, you had me, but these were fantastic stories, and I’ve been all of Poston’s books since.

Because of Poston, I’ve discovered other great romance authors.

Since the start of this year, I have read more books than I have in any full year I have ever had, and they were all Romance novels. Sure, they were all light novels, but still, it’s quite different for me.

Will Romance remain my Favorite Genre? Probably not, I’ll shift back to Mystery and Fantasy, Science Fiction, and shift back around again.

Looking back that the little kid I was, I am still so surprised by how much I am currently reading.

Reading is fantastic. Enjoy it.

What’s your favorite…?

It is a question that gets asked a lot, ever since childhood you are asked this question …
Who is your favorite teacher? Your favorite friend? Your favorite ice cream, and so on. Then there is the flip of that when a kid asks their parents about their siblings “which one of us is your favorite?”

Anime: Voice Actors/VTubers

Thoughts on two anime series my wife and I have been watch. It’s not a review, just expressing enjoyment:

VTUBER LEGEND:
HOW I WENT VIRAL AFTER FORGETTING TO TURN OFF MY STREAM
And
MANY SIDES OF VOICE ACTOR RADIO

HALLOWEEN – I’m dressing up like a Missed Deadline

Do you remember the very first costumes you wore for Halloween?

I’m not meaning the ones your parents may have put you in when you were an infant. “Oh, isn’t that a cute little pumpkin.” The ones you chose yourself.

Do you remember those plastic sheet costumes? Even as a little kid I thought they were dumb (forgetting itchy and hot). I wanted to be Superman, not wear a picture of Superman. The plastic mask was bad enough, with that dry rubber band to hold it on. We all knew it would never survive the night.

Even though I had seven years of marching in my elementary school’s Halloween costume parades, I only remember maybe three of the costumes from back then. I was Dracula twice, (and a magician using the same outfit), and The Mummy.

After Elementary school I don’t believe I put on another costume. I was picked on enough in High School; I didn’t need another reason, (see last week).

But I did go to one Halloween party during college dressed as Doctor Who. Or as close to being dressed as Doctor Who as I could.

(Has anyone else noticed how writing about Doctor Who confuses the grammar checker in your word processor?)

Back then I was a big Tom Baker years fan of the show but also liked Sylvester McCoy. So my costume, which was thrown together from clothing I had, became a merger of the two. I even took the time to draw red question marks on my shirt collars as was worn by Peter Davidson, Collin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy. Really wish I could have had McCoy’s umbrella. At the time that would have been cool.

No one, absolutely no one, knew who I was dressed as. And so ended my Halloween costumes.

Now I keep thinking about being invited to a Halloween party and dressing up. Times sure have changed since school.

Back in school, High School and even college, no one would have shown up with a Superman t-shirt, and yet now its very common to see such a shirt around town, or a Batman, Flash, or Green Lantern (even a Darkest Night) shirt. For girls the Supergirl or Wonder Woman logos aren’t all that rare.

On top of that dressing up as different characters isn’t all that rare.

When I first began to attend the San Diego Comic Con, there would be dozens of people dressed up for the Saturday night Masquerade. Now those costumes are out the entire con every day.

Not only at the Con but also because of Anime strong influence on American popular culture, cosplay has become a regular part of lie as well. I’ve seen girls wearing catgirl hoods around town.

Then there is Steampunk, which I’m only beginning to learn about, but has some of the most fantastic costumes. Though based on a alternate world where technology took a different turn, there is still something solid and real about the costumes. As wild as the costumes are, they might be something I’d be interested to slip into sometime, if I could afford it.

If not that then I might dress up as Doctor Who again, this time David Tennant or Matt Smith. I think I look like Tennant when he was wearing the pajamas.

Or I’ll just dress up like this Deadline I’m just barely going to make.

One last thing before I sign off.

The webcomic I write with Shannon Muir: FLYING GLORY AND THE HOUNDS OF GLORY, is included in a collection that is published. “Webcomics: What’s Cooking” Is a cookbook produced by webcomic creators and it will feed the hungry in both Canada and the U.S. Preorders open up Friday October 29, 2010. http://tgtmedia.com/

Help Flying Glory save the world in a real way.

Trick or Treat

Kevin Paul Shaw Broden

The Headache that Ended the World

This blog should have been posted early this afternoon, and it’s almost 9pm and I’m just now writing it.
I have been working on other things today; penciling the latest page of FLYING GLORY AND THE HOUNDS OF GLORY (www.flying-glory.com), as well as writing more of my novel and starting a new story I’m hoping to post online soon.
But all of that got side tracked by a headache that hit me this morning and hasn’t really gone away tonight.
I threatened on Twitter to write about my headache if I couldn’t think of anything else…

I got that close to writing about how I have suffered with it for years, but I won’t go into that.

What I will do is go back to what I’ve been talking about the last few weeks. Taking things that life hands you and turning them into stories. The headache is one major example of this.
I’m really into time travel stories (a major Doctor Who fan, in all his incarnations), so I built this who epic story based around time travel. In this story my main character had to travel back a few days, during which he already existed. What would be the repercussions of such an event.
The easy out was that the time traveler could not be seen by his previous self, but he also had memories of an extremely bad headache a few days earlier and now discovered he had that because he was very close to himself.
So I always imagined that the reason I suffer such terrible headache is that sometime in the future I’m going to have my own time machine and come back and try to visit myself.

Okay, that was really silly and probably a waist of your time, would you like to have a time machine and go back and prevent me from writing this? Maybe you already did and that’s why I have this blasted headache. Thanks a whole lot.

Hey, at least I’m keeping my promise to myself and writing a blog every week. Doesn’t have to be good, does it? Going to go rest this head now.

Kevin Paul Shaw Broden
“Four Names You Need To Remember”

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén