Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 398

To The Dragons

Some of you — cough Eamon J. Cole cough — asked about this novel To The Dragons that I’ll hopefully be writing in the later half of NanoWrimo. It’s actually a trilogy To The Dragons, With The Dragons, For the Dragons. I am not proposing to write those three in two weeks, but maybe I can finish it over the holidays?

Anyway, for the subscribers, yes, I’ll be posting more on it, as I finish it, you get first peek. But so everyone else doesn’t think I’m even crazier than usual (or perhaps has his/...

November

November used to be my favorite month, because it was the month of my birth and because it was the time the lights went up for Christmas in the city of Porto and also because it was cold but not really cold, so the sort of enjoyable cold that makes it pleasurable to curl up by the wood stove with a cat or three. (Grandma had a big armchair by the stove, and I read in it and the cats slept on me.)

The lights were important because dad used to take me out to the city for a whole day. We usually...

Moral Lepers

So, yesterday I had a comment I had to think about before I approved.

I always think about approving new commenters before bed, because this gives them free rein to scat all over the threads before I wake and usually before the Huns are active and neutralizing. So this comment made me hesitate.

First there was the name. The name was Ele. Now that means “he” in Portuguese. It could also arguably be a diminutive of something like Giselle. OTOH it’s also a misspelling of Elle – French for “She” wh...

There’s A Critter in My Fiction! – Alma Boykin

There’s A Critter in My Fiction! – Alma Boykin

So you want animals in your story, or animals wander into your story, and you need to decide what to do with them. Not microbes, but visible animals, pet-sized or larger. I’ll be the first to say that I am not an expert on critters in fiction, or fictional critters. However, I’ve found a few things while writing and researching both fictional and real-world animals that you might find helpful (or cautionary). You’d think something as simple as, oh...

The Opposite of Creative

The opposite of creation is not destruction. Destruction, however much easier than creation, however much detrimental to society and to self is at least an action: you do something.

The opposite of creation is a sort of sterile, puzzled nothingness.

I’ve been observing this lately among the Social Justice Warriors (and btw, you should totally follow that link and read that article.) They acclaim a certain type of “art” (for lack of a better word) which is not even the type of creativity you see...

When I Think Back on All The Stuff I Learned in School

Sometimes I feel like Stranger in a Strange Land. I’m of this place, but not of this place. And by this place I don’t so much mean the US as the current mode of Western civilization, say, the last 300 years or so.

You see, I can’t exactly claim to have been born and raised in a village that time forgot. I mean, the village I grew up in was ten miles from the second largest city in Portugal, and could be visited in 20 minutes by train.

On the other hand, other than the five or six kids per year...

Encroachments of Power -Cedar Sanderson

Encroachments of Power -Cedar Sanderson

About two hundred years ago, a British jurist named Albert Venn Dicey coined the phrase the Rule of Law. The idea behind the phrase extends back as far as written history, however, with the tablets of Hammurabi that laid out the laws of a long-vanished society, and the even older Code of Ur-Nammu (Kramer). The Rule of Law holds that not only one person ought to be obedient to the laws as recorded, but the governing body must be equally constrained. The o...

Taking the Centipede for a Walk in the Dreamtime

Yes, I’m still stuck with Through Fire. These things are sent to try us. Actually the book is turning unholy complex and no, don’t worry about it, it’s not complex on the surface.

Lately I’ve been writing these short stories – and I think the same is happening to this book – where there is layer upon layer of build, done so subtly that until the end upends everything you thought you knew about the world and the people, you don’t realize it’s all there.

This is not on purpose. In fact, most of i...

Have You Seen the Well To Do?

A friend sent me the following, yesterday and I liked it so much I stuck it at the end of the Friday Bookplug, which, btw, is here. It sort of fits if you squint.

What it does fit is the modus operandi of the SJWs with their continuous whine and claims of being discriminated against and suffering micro-agressions.

Robbing the Midlist

Have you seen the well to do?

Walking down Marx avenue

Crying that everything’s unfair

While their butlers do their hair

High-toned, caterwaulers

Condoned with lots of d...

They’re Baaaaaack

The Gods of the Copybook Headings – Rudyard Kipling

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,

I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn

That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:

But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,

S...