I haven’t done a post today yet, so I thought I would bring up something that’s been on my mind ever since I started working on my fantasy novel – the dreaded fantasy cliche. Just to start things off, here are a few lists of fantasy cliches I found on the Internets: The Grand List
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The Award-Winning Book and the Ghost Writer

[Update: 12 November 2011 -- Anh Do's new book, 'The Littlest Refugee' is coming out and this ghostwriting controversy is still around. According to Do, the book's publisher Allen & Unwin hired a proofreader to compare the manuscript Do wrote against the one written by Visontay, and found that less than 10% of Visontay's sentences
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Battle of the Biopics: The Iron Lady (2011) vs J Edgar (2011)

I’ve been thinking of ways to hasten the catching up of my movie reviews, but at the same time it didn’t feel fair to put some of the higher profile films in a four-film blitz. So I came up with a compromise. A head-to-head between two of the biggest biopics of 2011, Meryl Streep’s The Iron
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Toasteria Cafe (Taipei)

I love a good toasted sandwich or panini, and Toasteria Cafe reportedly has the best there is to offer in Taipei. Owned by an Israeli dude who lived in New York then married a Malaysian woman then moved to Taiwan, Toasteria is a mix of all those cultures — Middle-Eastern (Mediterranean), American, Malaysian and Taiwanese. It’s quite
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