Posts with tag John-Zakour

Remember John Zakour? You'll be forgiven if you don't -- it's been a while since we first met the sci-fi and comics writer in a 15 Minutes of Fame feature back in 2009. John went on to become one of our reader judges in the commentated era of Two Bosses Enter, One Boss Leaves, perfectly dividing his insights between the pointed observations of a seasoned player and a certain pulp fiction snark.

Now that WoW has once again sucked the intrepid mage back into its clutches, the characters in his regular online comic have WoW on their minds again, too. Hop over to Maria's Day and Working Daze for a quick smile from an old WoW friend. We expect Maria's recent tangle over WoW with her mother won't be her last!

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From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame.

15 Minutes of Fame tries to feature as wide a variety of WoW players as possible. It's not only about being famous in the real world, or being a somebody in the WoW community, or playing WoW despite some remarkable circumstance. 15 Minutes covers all those things, yes ... But we also try to talk with players who are representative of the typical player experience -- ambassadors of the Folks Next Door, if you will.

But no matter how we try to balance things, we always seem to end up back at another interview with an author. Writers who game are a particular bunch. They always have a lot to say about the fantasy genre and the game lore and way the world of Azeroth is unfolding; it makes for a pretty interesting interview. So when we realized that we'd pretty much overshot the bottom of our dance card despite the line of authors winding past the punch bowl and out the door ... Well, we decided it was time to give everyone a full helping of nothing but WoW-playing writers. With our common enjoyment of WoW and the fantasy genre, we figure most readers will find something from these authors they'll want to curl up with on the couch.

Welcome, then, to 15 Minutes of Fame's list of (Almost) 15 WoW-Playing Authors of Fame.

15 Minutes of Fame is our look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes – from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.

Let's jump right in – because appropriately enough, that's the modus operandi of this week's profile subject, blogger/cartoonist/gag writer/self-proclaimed "older" player/sci-fi writer John Zakour. With a WoW column at Pink Raygun, a daily web comic with some 50,000 readers, a 2180-rated Mage and a steady stream of published sci-fi books, Zakour keeps the one-liners flowing.

A recent review of Zakour's The Flaxen Femme Fatale does a neat job of summarizing his outlook: "I'm always glad to see new books in this series come out, as there's a serious deficit of comedic hardboiled science fiction adventures on the market, and John Zakour has filled that niche quite adeptly," wrote the SF Site reviewer. "It's goofy, it's quirky, it's iconic in its own way, and it's way too much fun. Like the rest, The Flaxen Femme Fatale borders on parody, but maintains enough good-natured charm to maintain an air of legitimacy. It may be a world full of robots, psychics, aliens, genetically-engineered superhumans, and wacky technology, where anything is possible, but it has the internal consistency and earnestness required to sustain such a setting."

How does he manage to stick it all together, with time left over for WoW?