Wednesday, July 15, 2015

A Cool Week so far! Reviews of Gravitas, Basking in the Spotlight!

This has been quite a week. And it's only Wednesday, Jessica Wren cast a spotlight on Gravitas and on Facebook she also mentioned the free short story! Happily basking in the light! Jessica her review began by saying:

Have you ever traveled to a foreign country? If so, do you remember how different it felt, and some of the local customs felt strange? Imagine visiting a foreign planet. In Lynne’s Murray’s novel Gravitas: Valkyrie in the Forbidden Zone, which is a science-fiction comedy with just the right amount of erotica, Val-Sybilla (better known as Sybil) finds herself in that very situation.

While making a trip to transport a shipment of “Gravitas,” a powerful aphrodisiac within the Ritual Jewelry that the powerful women of the planet Valkyries wear, she and her companions stop at a market, where, to her horror, she finds her first (and favorite) husband Josu, chained and being offered for sale. Determined to find out the truth about what happened to Josu, she enters a ritualistic meditation state to conjure up the three (very interesting and diverse) “demons” who live in her head. When her meditation is interrupted by Gelbraves, a loutish delegate from a rival planet, they both, along with Josu, fall into a portal that makes them crash-land in the Forbidden Zone (known to us as “Earth.”

The whole review is at Spotlight: Lynne Murray

Monday, a great review of Gravitas from The Reading Bud made me feel validated. We all endure the bad reviews but when someone says, "I loved the cover, I beginning/the end," it is massively encouraging, and courage is essential to live the writing life!

But enough about me. Yesterday, I was able to cast some light from a Body Impolitic blog post on Joseph P. Eckhardt's Living Large, the story of little-known silent film star, Wilna Hervey, and her life partner of 59 years Nan Mason.

I explain in the blog post how I went on a quest to find Wilna Hervey, and found the just-published biography of the woman who made many silent films as The Powerful Katrinka. The book is charming, as witness this "discovered by the moviemaker" scene--take that Lana Turner, famously "discovered" sipping a soda in a Hollywood ice cream parlor. Could she lift a trolley car?

Wilna Hervey would long remember the interview in New York that changed her life. She arrived at her agent’s office to find him engaged in conversation with another man, who was impatiently pacing up and down. As Wilna entered the room, the pacing stopped and the man looked up. “My God!” he exclaimed. “She is the original Katrinka!”Expressing his astonishment—and delight—was the noted cartoonist Fontaine Fox, creator of the Toonerville Trolley cartoons, which were then syndicated in several hundred newspapers around the country. One of the most popular of Fox’s inventions was the character of Powerful Katrinka, a massive young woman of superhuman strength, and limited mental range, who was capable of lifting the trolley off the tracks. … Properly casting this role was essential to the success of the proposed Toonerville films. The actress needed to be enormous and very strong, as not all of the feats of strength would be sight gags.

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