Categories
My Geekdom

My Geekdom 04: Marvel Comic Books

geekdom2

Pins from Pinterest that inspire me and indulge my geekness. http://pinterest.com/toinette_thomas/my-geekdom/

Please do not copy this image. Click this image to visit Pinterest and share, share, share 🙂

The Marvel Universe is more of my style of fantasy (even though I LOVE D.C.), but it’s also scary enough that sometimes, it’s too much for me. Marvel blends fantasy and reality. These superheroes interact with real people and visit real places as well as take on fictional people and places. I do, somewhere in the back of my little geek mind, sometimes worry about will happen when Apocalypse comes to claim the earth, but I know that the mutants, the radioactively altered, the genius minds, and other world gods are just waiting to come to our rescue.

Heroes with flaws seemed silly in the heyday of comic books, but now perfect super heroes just can’t be taken seriously. Marvel was the first company to really embrace this idea and increased their popularity with it. Other companies, including D.C., have also embraced the flawed hero idea, and the world of comic books and storytelling is all the better for it.

In Eternal Curse all my characters good, bad, male, female, super, or not have flaws. In some cases the flaws are actually a blessing, but I don’t have time to get into that now. In any case, flaws add a human factor to story-telling that makes the impossible seem believable.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. If you like it let me know and share it with others. See you next time, Toi Thomas. #thetoiboxofwords

Categories
EC: Giovanni's Angel Excerpts Fun Hops

Souls Around the World Blog Hop

Giovanni knows what goes “bump” in the nightmares of his mind; an excerpt from
Eternal Curse: Giovanni’s Angel, by Toi Thomas

Cover

He looked down toward the ground and saw an attractive young woman carrying a large pail into a barn. Her skin was freckled and pale, and she had rosy cheeks. Her hair was long and straight, and it was black like the night. She seemed so familiar to him, but he didn’t know her. Giovanni watched as the young woman filled feeding troughs with water to be cleaned. As she reached for a scrubbing brush, Giovanni could see that someone or something was following her. He sensed that trouble was on the way. He tried to call out to her, but she could not hear him. His voice made no sound. Giovanni left the tree and swooped down to the ground to get a closer look.

There he saw a creeping perpetrator bouncing from beam to beam in the rafters of the barn. Drool slipped from the monster’s mouth while it hovered over the unknowing young woman. Giovanni tried to fly up to see this fiendish stalker, but he couldn’t get his feet off the ground, and his wings would not flap. Giovanni knew something bad would happen, he could feel it in his heart, but it seemed he could do nothing to stop it. He did not understand. Why was this happening? How could he appear to be so powerful, be so angelic, and not be able to help someone in need?

Giovanni refused to give up his pursuit. He pushed his body forward and went from door to door, and window to window, trying to get in to warn and protect the young woman. Looking through a window, Giovanni finally saw the villain’s full horror. He got a clear vision of the attacker as it was leaping down from the ceiling toward the woman. It was the most hideous monster he’d ever seen, much worse than his own reflection.

It was a twisted and mangled troll with charcoal for skin on its hairless body. It had empty holes carved out of its skull where eyes once were. There were two large dull spikes protruding from its hunched back, where it looked as though wings had been violently ripped from its body. Its hands were made of jagged bones held together with rotting ligaments, and its feet crackled as it moved along the floor.

In the troll’s hands were two long golden rods that whipped back and forth like lassos. Each rod was attached to the end of a large iron spike that punched through the shoulders of a young man’s dying body. They were holding up the young man’s body as though he were a puppet. To the young woman, the troll simply appeared as a shadowy figure lingering around the painfully disturbed and ailing young man.

The troll maneuvered the young man’s body around the girl, delivering blow after blow.  The monster had taken this young man’s life; he was using his body as a weapon to attack this poor girl for what seemed to be the sheer enjoyment of it. It laughed a loud cackle as it threw the girl down to the ground, tearing her raggedy dress. Giovanni could see the girl’s anguish and could hear her screams, and he could even feel her pain, but Giovanni could do nothing to stop it.

Eternal Curse: Giovanni’s Angel Copyright © 2013 Toinette Thomas, pending release.

*New editions of the above and below featured books are now available.*

companion guide

For an in-depth, informative, and entertaining looking into the background, development, and tidbits of Eternal Curse: Giovanni’s Angel, please try my companion guide, 40 Days and Nights of Eternal Curse. This is a FREE ebook with promo code GW22H at Smashwords.com until the end of December 2013. However, if you wish to purchase a paperback copy of this book, please click on the following link. *Also, if you’re not Smashwords savvy and would like to purchase a Kindle copy of this book for $2.99, click on the link provided.

40 Days and Night of Eternal Curse Copyright © 2012
Toinette Thomas

Check out the amazing Rafflecopter giveaway for a Sony Touch E-reader with a bunch of pre-loaded ebooks. The winner will be announced November 1, 2013.

**Some sites contain Adult Only content** To each his own as they say, but since I know some of my viewers are underage and I was unaware of the mature nature of many of the blogs on this hop, I will try to update this post with the numbers of blogs not containing the “Adult Only” content. See the comments for updates.

Visit all the stops on this blog hop by clicking here.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. If you like it let me know and share it with others. See you next time, Toi Thomas. #thetoiboxofwords

Categories
Mira's Closet

Mira’s Closet: 9/30/13 : Seeing Imagination

MClosetMira’s no fashionista, but she definitely has her own sense of style…
And now here’s an update on just that.

First an observation: I’ve noticed that when I write a story and I do all that I do to develop my characters, I don’t spend a lot of time on their attire. It seems that what my characters are wearing from scene to scene is one of those things I’d rather leave to the imagination of the reader. There are times, though, when what a character is wearing is very important or vital to a scene and therefore must be described. I’ve determined that because I’m such a visual person, anything that I can’t actually see, I’d rather imagine…Wonder how others feel about that?

Now here are some style tips from

Tori

my own personal fashion guru, trainer, and my physical inspiration for Mira.

This archived data has been removed, site under construction. 🙁

From the Daily Dish 09-20-13 white, alternating bottoms, accessorizing
images provided by Tori Jones

For more on style and fashion check out:

Celebrity Trends at WhoWhatWear: http://www.whowhatwear.com/

Fashion Medley: http://thefashionmedley.com/ (content advisory)

A Beautiful Mess: http://www.abeautifulmess.com/

My Style Pinboard: http://pinterest.com/toinette_thomas/my-style/

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. If you like it let me know and share it with others. See you next time, Toi Thomas. #thetoiboxofwords