The Control Point Diaries Part 7: Fandom

Just because I couldn’t resist: Here are some official fangirl pics:
This little penguin guy is Lt. Commander, trained by the author himself. The other one (same fluffy hair as that rockhopper penguin ;)) is one of those fans who will sooner or later find a character in that series that can be cosplayed….;)

The Control Point Diaries Part 6: Alea iacta sunt – final review

Alea iacta sunt – the dice have fallen. I’ve finished Control Point this morning and it’s got a fulminant ending, making you want to have part two on your desk right now.
We’ve been talking about topics somehow connected with the book for a week now – let’s have a look at the actual book now, shall we?
First, the few negative things: The font of the book is rather small, so it’s not the best choice when you’re half sleepy and want to read in bed. Secondly, you have to get used to the military slang.
But that’s already all that I have to mope about.
The positive aspects are that it’s well written and the language is used beautifully. Each character has their way of speaking, the vocab is chosen perfectly and strengthened by the attitude the characters have.
Seriously, I think Myke Cole has mastered a level of language here that is above average compared to other books freshly published.
The story and the setting itself is rather fresh,too, at least for notorical fantasy readers like me, who usually escape into the medieval setting or the urban fantasy settings in a world that is completely like ours except for maybe the werewolves. Here you find yourself on our planet and yet there is some kind of sphere that is completely different – the magical world. Also, we have some kind of new hero. Whom do we have in other fantasy-sub-genres? We have the ladies who get in touch with sexy, fantasy guys, we have the heroes with a prophecy on their shoulders that they need to fulfill. Here, we get a soldier who is ripped out of his usual enviromnment, put in a world of war and magic and who first of all feels completely lost and not destined for greater thing. We meet a man who is fighting for his own freedom, who wants to fight for good things but simply in the way he wants and not how it is forced upon him. We meet a man who has doubts and worries and fears. We meet a human individual confronted with horrors of all kind and who is struggling to find his place in such an insane world.
A world btw that is developped nicely. The descriptions are clear enough to give you an impression of the surroundings and yet they leave you enough space for your own imagination. There are other races of magical creatures (On a sidenote: Marty is soooooooo cute!…) and the use of magic, that you can totally picture while reading but which, I bet, looks different to everyone.
All in all it’s a great story and I bet all the publishers that didn’t take the chance to have Myke Cole as an author will now be kicking their own asses. But then again, I think the timing for Myke’s books is just perfect – we have had a gazillion of stories with vampires, werewolves, orcs and dwarves. Here comes a new, refreshing side of fantasy literature.
(Also, it’s the perfect gift for everyone who ever joined a military force and likes comics…)

Summing it all up: It’s a book you definitely should consider purchasing. Why? It’s well writing, the story is catching, it’s something you’ve never read before and the author is an intelligent AND sexy fantasy nerd himself. So, ladies, order that book for your boyfriends now and single men: Grab that book and see how cool and manly fantasy can be! 😉

Btw… my cat, too, says, this book is a must-have!

The Control Point Diaries Part 5: Good and Bad

Hi again and first of all sorry for another delay – I somehow fell asleep yesterday before I could even open my laptop.
However, let’s talk about Control Point again, which makes us think about even more metaphysical questions. This time it’s the everlasting question about good and bad.
We already noticed that Oscar is in some kind of inner conflict and actually, while reading, you start to ask yourself similar questions. How much good needs to be done to outwage the bad? Can you redeem yourself from your own mistakes by trying to do good? How should you think about a, for example, governemnt institution, that does horrible things to mankind and other creatures in the name of law and science in order to offer its citizens peace and safety? Is the good intention behind it enough to outrule the bad nature of some experiments? Is there anything good or okay about taking a life or taking away someone’s freedom?
Where does good start and where does bad end? In war, both sides are usually fighting for ‘the good side’ – in their own opinion that looks quite contrary to the other side of the battlefield.
So when can we say something is truly good? We might not be aware of negative side effects and neither do we know what possible future outcome something we do now might have.
That’s what you start thinking about when you read Control Point not only as a distraction when you’re in the subway but when you take a very very close look of what is inbetween the lines.
Myke Cole did a great thing there. He tells us an amazing fantasy story that makes us forget our world for the time we spend reading and at the same moment he gives us the chance to actually think about the very world we live in and the way we actually want to live our own lives.

I have about 100 pages left and to be honest I am hesistant to read on – it’s one of those books you don’t want to end because you know you waiting for the second book will be pure torture as there is nothing comparable to read in the meantime…. 🙂

The Control Point Diaries Part 4: The Human Mind

Let’s talk about a more methaphysicla aspect of things now, in the 4th entry of the Control Point diaries.
(First of all sorry for the delay, I wanted to post yesterday but as I am currently stationed in the middle of nowhere and the temperatures are fecking cold internet was being a big douchebag and didn’t work…)
I’ve noticed that Control Point not only makes you a reading addict but also makes you think about certain topics.
When I was reading Chapters 13 to 20 I mostly wondered what’s actually going on inside a human mind.
There is this innerst craving of freedom we all have – that we want to be able to make our own decisions, to go where we want when we want, to live our lives in our own way. And yet we all live inside a social system – a loose one at some parts and a system with more strict regulations on others, like for example in the army.
So what we wish for and how we live are two different cups of tea, not really correspondating well with each other.
But then again we are away that, in order to be able to live within a group, certain rules must be stated.
So we’re in conflict all the time, wanting to be utterly free and get seeing the reason in following rules.
So what happens if the bit of freedom you still have, like in deciding what you wear, what you work and how you talk is taken away from you?
You’re pissed off and you’re in the mood to work against the system, wanting to escape its ways of putting a chain on you.
But what happens when at the same time you notice that maybe not everything that system offers is bad? And that you might actually be enjoying some parts of let’s say, the education, because it makes you stronger and lets you control your abilities in a more efficient way? What if you actually come to like the people you’re working with?
Maybe it’s like an animal in a zoo. You’re imprisoned and yet you love being pampered from the outside.
That’s one of the thoughts that came to me during the last chapters I was reading, inspired by the main character Oscar Britton, a teenage recruit and a witch who’d even kill for her own freedom.

What would you do?
I’d recommend you first of all get yourself a copy of Control Point and start reading yourself. 🙂 It will kidnap you into an adventure AND make you think about life itself. What more can you ask for???

The Control Point Diaries Part 3: Magic

Hello to Part 3 of the Control Point diaries. I’ve reached chapter 13 and I thought we should have a closer look at the magic of the book today. (Without spoiling the plot…it’s gonna be tough but I am trying nevertheless.) While reading the book you – in case you are a little nerd yourself- definitely know that the description of Myke Cole at the end of the book is sooooooooooo true. Especially the part about Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know who of you have already played role playing games – either the videogame version or the good old pen and paper games – but you usually find most parts of the magic featured in the Shadow Ops series there, too. When you find you party in the games you usually combine warriors, thieves and magicians – healers, elemental wizards, black mages etc. They’ve got different names in the book, featuring the Latin/Greek forms, but if you’re a role player you definitely recognize members of magical schools you’d totally want to recruit for your own team. (for the videogame fans here: Somehow Control Point reminds me on a Final Fantasy 8 for the generation 30+ – soldiers who kick ass and have magical abilities.)
I remember one of my first pen and paper adventures. I was playing an orphaned elf black mage, level two and not the most charming person in the party. But the most clumsy one, mind you. So my black mage tried a summoning which was only supposed spy on a village but turned out to be a level 19 demon that I had no control of whatsoever. (the clumsiness!) Yes, I did manage to wipe out my entire party before the adventure could really start.
And that is where we come back to the book. Here,too, the characters first of all have to learn how to even use and control their magic before they accidently make something go kawoom or everyone gets killed in action. So the reader gets a live in-view into the world of magic, its development and its connection to the person carrying it which brings us closer to each character. Shall we bet that at the end of the book we’ll see some great magical firework? 😉
So yeah, the idea of magic might be an old one – after all you find the stories and sagas about magic in every culture on this planet, every country has their own stories about ghosts, mages, gods and magical items, but its set into a new context. While D&D is set in more medieval world and most fantasy roleplay games are set in a world hardly comparable to the one we live in right now (they are usually on another planet or at least somewhere in the past or the idea of a future), Myke Cole’s Shadow Ops series plays in world we can very well relate to. We see the news each day – countries fighting or threating each other, people not going with the system, people easily stereotyped. The thing that divides the book from our world is the featured magic. And that’s one of the reasons why you MUST read it. It’s not only a first hand experience of a soldier’s life (which the author can tell you a lot about!), it’s the perfect combination of the world we know with a world we love to imagine in movies, games and stories, the magical realm.
On a sidenote: Oscar Britton (see entry 2) really kicks ass!I like how you are allowed to know what he feels and thinks and how he stands in for others because he hasn’t switched off his brains and decides for himself what is right and what is wrong, even if there is a system that tries to put a collar around his neck.

The Control Point Diaries Part 2: Meeting Oscar Britton

Alright, yesterday we talked about the author of the Shadow Ops series…now let’s have a look at the main character, Oscar Britton. I’ve started reading last night and are about to start chapter seven, so I already got an impression of the protagonist. (well, at least about who he is in the beginning of the story…) We meet him and his team right in the moment when they are doing their job and carrying out a mission. A mission however, that gives the team and also the reader some kind of moral trouble. We find ourselves on earth, the planet that we know, but at the same time it’s extremly different to what we are used to. Magic has found its way to our world and people are coming out with different magical talents – pyromancy, necromancy and so on. But it’s not like everybody’s happy about that. Magic is used for military reasons and people with ‘good’ magic are to be recruited. Others however… well let’s say they don’t really have the time of their life. The thing is that it isn’t up to you if your own magic is ‘good’. It doesn’t matter what kind of person you are…if you have some sort of prohibited magic you are fucked. Doesn’t sound quite fair to you? Well, then you can relate to Oscar Britton, who, usually a faithful servant of the system, begins to doubt if they are doing the right thing. He’s someone who’d give you a chance to explain and calm down, who’d actually look behind the official name of the magic you are carrying to see what kind of man you are. Sounds like a cool guy, huh? Well, the world he lives in has a different few on that. Especially when it gets obvious that the soldier Oscarr Britton has quite some magical talent, too. A talent that scares him and makes him the target of the service he has been working for all his life. As a reader you get the full experience of the mental rollercoaster he is forced to ride and you have to make this journey with him. You know he isn’t a bad guy but at the same time his life is totally out of control.
He’s a man who deeply cares for his teammates and who respects them deeply. A man who always did his duty and whose priority is saving lives rather than shooting blindly only because you got the order to.
A soldier with a mind of his own? Yeah, it’s a good question if that can work out when the law system has to be followed very strictly but at the same time we cheer for Oscar because we can understand his trail of thoughts so very well.
I am very curious as to how his story will continue and how much it will actually make me think about ourselves and our way of thinking and considering things.

Before I am ending this second entry I want to say something about the style,too.
To be honest, it took me quite some pages to get into Myke’s way of writing, mostly because I am not used to the vocab he uses (that’s the hard thing when you are female and usually don’t deal with military terms other than the rank and order system on Star Trek’s Enterprise….), but once you get used to it (and have read the glossary at the end of the book) you totally get into the flow of reading. You all know I read a lot and the people close to me know how much I’ve been complaining lately that most authors don’t use a nicely developped sentence structure anymore. “She noticed he was a vampire. She was scared.” Those short sentences, even if they make it very simple to read a book in no time, are driving me insane. I love literature and language itself and a sentence can be as beautiful as a nicely arranged flower bouquet in the eyes of a book lover. Reading Control point gives you that experience of language used with intelligence and with a certain touch of art. Well…you might not want to compare a military fantasy novel with a flower bouquet but I hope you know what I mean. 🙂

So see you soon, I need to go back reading the book!!!!

The Control Point Diaries Part 1: Myke Cole

Let us begin this with a yell: “OMG MYKE’S BOOK IS FINALLY PUBLISHED AND AVAILABLE!!!!”
Yes, Control Point, first book of the Shadow Ops series is finally out. Maybe you already remember me presenting the homepage a while ago. So, it’s time to celebrate!

As this book, even if I haven’t read it yet, already means a lot to me, I have decided to write a reading diary, so that you can follow me while I can finally soak up the lines I’ve been waiting for for quite a while.
But first of all I want to explain, why this book is something very very special.
It has a lot to do with the author, a certain man called Myke Cole.
Let me tell you a little story about that rather handsome nerd.

How I met Myke Cole.

I was still working in the bookstore, roaming around, when it happened. A man came up to me, asking me about a certain book. He was speaking English, which was not really surprising as we have the US Army kinda next door. Unfortunately we didn’t have it in store so I had to order it for the next day.
So the next day that man, who had introduced himself as Myke Cole, was back at the bookstore and to my surprise he gave me the book that he had ordered the day before as a present. (Well yes, I guess it was obvious I was a fantasy-nerd myself.) Of course I asked why and I was totally flabbergasted (I hadwanted to use that word for so long…) Turned out that the author of the book, Peter V Brett, was Myke’s buddy and Myke wanted the whole wide world to read his friend’s book!!! Isn’t that great? Who would ever do that? Go into a bookstore in a foreign country, give a book to a bookseller you don’t know and have the faith that this certain bookseller will do exactly what you had wished for? And all that for a friend? (Well in this case I had to say that I absolutely LOVED the book, The Painted Man btw, and made it my own mission to sell it to everyone who looked anywhere close to a fantasy-reader. ) So what I learned first about Myke Cole was, that he was the best friend you could ever have with an absolute love for literature, fantasy and dogs. You know, meeting Myke in that bookstore was one of these things in one’s life that you’d call destined. During that year he was staying in our city for some days because he had some Coast Guard business to do in Grafenwöhr, so we were able to spend some time together. Walking through our small town, I learned about Myke’s obsession for dogs. Every dog was being cuddled down – no matter how stunned the owners were. It made smile when I saw how happy those furry animals could make him and how easily he got in contact with people without actually speaking their language. (He reminded me that communication is more than simply words.)
We actually decided we should have dinner together. When I told my mom and my stepdad they decided to come along, being friends with the owner of the restaurant. I also had told them how absolutely cute the dog-obsession was. Which is how my mother got to know Myke Cole. (she actually asked me to tell that story,too, because she is very fond of Myke.) She was sitting in a café in town and suddenly noticed a man with a backpack who was cuddling a dog, while the owners were obviously staring at him as if he was crazy. That was the moment when she knew she would be having dinner with this guy.
Oh yeah, I also found out that Myke was a writer himself, hoping so much to be published one day.
We had a great time with Myke here in Germany, he’s a wonderful, funny and intelligent company and he can pronounce German words just perfectly without really knowing what they mean. (Btw Myke, do you still have that weird German book I gave you that only learns you how to swear??? ;))
I wish I could tell you how great Myke Cole is. We’ve met a few times and have been in contact since that one fateful day in the bookstore, we have been on the ‘Promote Pete’-mission together, handing out bookplates and since the day I have learned that his greatest dream is to be an author and have his books published I have cheered for him and prayed that his dream will come true – because you know what? If someone deserves that all his dreams come true, it’s Myke Cole. He’s fought wars, he’s fought for our environment, he is the best friend you can imagine and he has never ever stopped working hard for his wish. I respect him very deeply because he never ever gave up. Most people have dreams but they always pray to a god and hope that maybe their dream will come true.
Myke Cole has found the power within himself.
That is why I am simply glad to finally hold his book in my hands, Control Point.(And there will be more, YES!)

If I was asked to write a blurb for his books I couldn’t do it. There is so much to say! I couldn’t decide if it is his dedication for language and style, his imagination, his strength or his sexappeal (mind you, a handsome fantasy author!Fangirls get your cosplays!) which should be mentioned…

Well, if you have survived my fangirl-introduction of him now I hope you’ll be following my blog about the actual book,too, starting tomorrow. I’ll try to see it as neutral as it can and give you a good impression of the series without spoiling the plot.

Let’s end this blog with another squeal: “OMG! MYKE’ BOOK! I AM SO HAPPY!”

Please also visit http://mykecole.com/ or find him on twitter and facebook!

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