Thoughts and Images

  I.                     Rhetoric and Purpose.                   This is the most old hat section I chew people out about, but it is the core to all storytelling and life in the world. For in the beginning was the word. The word shapes reality, the word is power. Tales shape reality, tales are power. The one who controls the story controls the universe. Coyote sings the world into being. To the Apache stories shoot like arrows reminding you of that reality. They bind us, they lie to us, they remind us, they bring us peace and war, shape our politics, and our beliefs. The world is a conflict of stories. So, in understanding the core and purpose of a story your story is essential to your writing process and makes all the difference in the world.           ...

  Book: Hard to be a God Author: Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Pages: 231 Hard Core Scale: 4/4 Normal Scale: 10/10 Publish Date: 2014 (1964) About: Don Rumata   is an observer sent   from Earth to Arkanar, where amongst the primitive, medieval   humans, there he tries to stop the scholarly and the knowledgeable from grim fate. On top of this he tries to investigate the cause of this political disruption without blowing his cover. For it is hard to be a god. Review: Oh the humanity, chocked full with depth and philosophy. So much to think on. Another masterpiece. Super likeable human character. Again expressing humanity in a less than optimal setting for the human sphere. It is again interesting the political backdrop of when this was written and the change of the authors' opinions of their “communist” home at the same time. Where “Roadside Picnic” contains the intense resentment 8 years later, this book still have very eager hopes in a communist future fo...

B ook: Rusted Sky Author: Nick Whitecomb Pages: 117 Hard Core Scale: 1/4 Normal Scale: 5/10 Publish Date: 2020 About: Lynn, works on a digging team which looks for lost treasure to sell in the dangerous cave systems of her home. Her team gets lost and now fights to survive to make it back home. Short Review: Ok… maybe not piercing the heavens yet. Still leaps and bounds better than the last one. Wrote it all in the wrong tense. Still a lot of the world design issues stack up and hurt the work badly. Some plot elements don’t really have a point. Yet, I have a feeling as a writer they are developing in a good direction. Still, they understood life is not cheap and delivered a very good ending that would have excelled heavily if not for those plot holes.   Rusted Sky Cover, 2012, Book Baby Publishing. Art by Xander Spectrum Shift

  Writing Treatise: Introductus               The point of this treatise is to cover more advanced writing concepts often not discussed. I am old and stuck in my ways with a strong opinion, shaped by my frame of reference, and enculturation. It may not help you get published, publishing is complex, yet at the same time many people seem to be getting through those hoops when their work is in utter shambles. I will not be covering this topic as I have not had fiction published in a long time, but will post a link to an excellent resource of a new writer and his publishing journey and struggles in the modern publishing world (Benjamin Walter Deliver us.) Some of this will also simply be repetitive old hat to those I often critique.                 Again, this is for advanced writing concepts. Writers of any stage can learn from this, but if you...