Netflix has announced the cast of "Shadow and Bone", an 8-episode TV series adapted from Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse fantasy novels - "Shadow and Bone" and "Six of Crows". Cast includes Westworld's and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian's Ben Barnes (as General Kirigan), Pennyworth's Freddy Carter (as Kaz Brekker), Jessie Mei Li (as Alina Starkov), Archie Renaux (as Malyen Oretsev), Amita Suman (as Inej) and Kit Young (as Jesper Fahey). The star of the show, Li, appeared on Ivo van Hove's stage adaptation of "All About Eve" and is set to appear in Edgar Wright's Last Night in SoHo film (2020). Anyway, the Netflix series is produced by Eric Heisserer (who wrote the screenplay adaptations for films like Bird Box and Arrival) and directed by Lee Toland Krieger.

The movie adaptation of the Eisner-winning comic series by David Petersen, Mouse Guard, has been cancelled.

According to several news sources from here and here, the cancellation was confirmed by director Wes Ball in a tweet, which had originally included a walkthrough video (supposedly a pre-visualization of scale models and concept art meant to illustrate how the movie will "feel", but not how it will "look". It was meant to be recreated by WETA Digital with photorealistic computer graphics thereafter). Ball, known for directing the film The Maze Runner, said in his tweet that 'Seems it's too big a risk. It's a damn shame really'...before ending with 'May the Guard prevail!'

There's a scene, early on in the beginning of the film John Wick 3: Parabellum where Wick (played by Keanu Reeves) fights a bunch of Asian gangsters in a narrow knife collectors' shop using just blades - knives and axes mostly. The fight scene has been praised for its intensity and choreography.

Yet, just a year after the first John Wick film burst into the scene in 2014, there was one Chinese film, The Final Master, that had an amazing knife/bladed weapon fight scene (also along a narrow corridor), where Grandmaster Chen (played by Liao Fan) has to defeat eight masters of Tianjin's nineteen martial arts schools, using a dual-handed bladed weapon known as the 蝴蝶刀 (hudiedao or butterfly knife). 

Critical Role Dungeon Master and voice actor Matthew Mercer ran a special one-on-one one-hour Dungeons & Dragons adventure for talk-show host Stephen Colbert. He led Colbert, who played Capo, a half-elf bard with a pet bee named Eric, through a special quest to investigate mysterious disappearances in the Menagerie Coast in Wildemount.

The show was part of Red Nose Day 2019 donation run, where donors chose Colbert's character class, his companion, the legendary weapon to be sought and the villain that Colbert's character faced. Colbert has not really played D&D since he was a teen (he's 55 this year), but he recalled his early days including owning a signed copy of the D&D handbook by Gary Gygax.

Watch out Facebook groups, there's a new alpha/beta reader matchmaker in town! Well, that is, if you've written a novel, novella, short story, poem, etc. (either complete or a work-in-progress) and would like to swap reads with a few other like-minded writers/readers. The site itself, CritiqueConnect.com, lets you set up a profile, talk about what projects you would like others to read and how you can be contacted, etc. The key part however is the ability to filter the list of readers and/or writers based on whether they're paid critiques or volunteers. Most of them will eventually come with testimonials and one-word-based ratings of course.

George R. R. Martin has posted a blog entry titled An Ending. It's to cap off more than a decade of his involvement in HBO's Game of Thrones eight season series with show-runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Apparently, in his blog post, he mentioned that Benioff and Weiss already knew who Jon Snow's mother was when they sat down for lunch/dinner at the LA Palm. Confidential much? Hope the diners seated nearby weren't listening then.

Allastria.com has officially launched on 23 April 2019. It's also the official release of her Facebook page here and Twitter channel here. On and off, I will update the site and its social media channels as regularly as I can - preferably on a daily basis. I'm working on my next novel, so yeah, will juggle between the two. 

I've just gotten accepted into several fantasy writers' groups on Facebook today. Most of these groups will accept you if you read their house rules, obey them and answer a few questions related to being a fantasy writer or at least a fan of fantasy writing. The great thing about being in a closed-group writers' community is that you can ask questions related to your work, writing, characters and get honest feedback as just about everyone else in the group are writers. The key part about posting a snippet of your writing is to keep it short and succinct, so that the group can read it without having their eyes glazed over (yelp! walls of text!). Here are links to the three that I've joined.

• Fantasy Writers Support Group
• Fantasy Writers forever!
• Fantasy Writers