Thoughts and Images

Book: Fangs of K’ath II Guardians of Light Author: Paul Kidd Pages: 337 Hard Core Scale: 2.5/4 Normal Scale: 7/10 Publish Date: 2005  About: Raschid and his family have lived in relative peace. However, from the northern steps a great Khan and his horde begin moving on the world threatening all Raschid has built, worked hard for, and loved so dear. Review: Paul’s clockwork plays out again. However we now removed from Rashid and Sandhri’s story. One can argue about a sequels purpose when a work wraps up perfectly fine and well. Escalation is usually the answer and it is not healthy. This is a different story about a fight for the world. A lot of beauty is lost here in none stop ugliness of war (one could argue that is the point, but in the intense action there is little pause for breathe or reflection). The fairytale sense is gone. The plot hole of the first book is answered here, the hole is plugged. For someone like me starring at the hole still questions the sealant a ...

XI. The Nature of Ends:                 And so here we are at the end of things. Every story needs an end. However, the truth in endings is there is no such thing as an end, as in real life everything keeps trucking.   Yet, our books need an end. Thus, it becomes a balancing act of providing author’s promise of a story to end, and yet providing that sense of continuation without subjecting sequel baiting. It’s very easy to write off with “the end” without thinking on it. Endings are what the audience leaves with. What do you want the audience to leave with emotionally and thought wise? Where do you want to leave your characters and settings? The book and its conflict have gone a long way to get here so what now? What was all of that for?                 Think on that nature of your conflict. Think of your beginning? Think o...

IX. Defending Purple Prose and Writing with a capitol W:                 So, there is a story of why I am bringing this up. Once there was a terrible story in my review slush pile, and I mean incredibly terrible. It was already published, but here it was in my review slush pile. It was extra insulting to my senses because it was in a shared universe started off by a majestic, master writer many decades ago who had lost his right to the universe due to some copyright fiasco and here was this stinking mass of pure excrement in that legacy. Now, I make many friends with my editors, a good thing to do. So I grabbed several writers’ old manuscripts that wrote in this shared universe and sent them to such editor so we could despair at what had happened. At the same time, since this freighting editor never gave me the freight, and only ever said good things about my works I secretly slipped a story of my own into ...