John C. Wright's Blog, page 74
April 17, 2014
Do I Role Play? Ask Rather, Do Ever I Stop? — Part Three (Edge of the Empire)
There is also a game I am playing, which my best friend Mark is running. Yes, it is a STAR WARS EDGE OF THE EMPIRE game.
What is it like to have a published and professional science fiction author as a player? It’s really annoying, because when inspiration strikes, I write an entire 10,000 word short story to describe my character’s background!
Are you curious? Do you have too much time on your hands? Here it is!!
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Rurra Lya’lya, Lady Scoundrel
Something Wrong with Life
Rurra was raised in the lap of luxury on the vast estates of clan Ilya on planet Kothlis, where acres of the legendary singing grasses emit eerie serenades from their crystal flowers beneath the mingled lights of the seven gem-bright geode moons.
The five thousand year old mansion house was acre upon acre in extent, a massive pile of intricately carved ivory, shining silverwood, polished teak and cherry, a blaze of stained glass windows, and each chimney adorned the air with the many perfumes and incense wafts to which the Bothan nose is particularly sensitive.
Beneath the mansion was an older dwelling place, and endless warren of tunnels and buried museums, domiciles, strongrooms and workshops were the vassal clans beholden to Ilya were dormitoried, the lesser clans of Swy and Vwyl, Lal and Llorl and the hereditary assassins beholden to Ilya, the cunning Yroon.
Beyond the groves of singing trees stretch the pampas which Rurra in her youth loved to ride on her pet human, a tall and athletic steeplechaser named Arno, who would carry her on his shoulders as he loped across the plains of this light and low-gravity world.
The pampas were scarred by deep and narrow arroyos in which the lowest class of Bothans made their homes in the fashion of the beastlike burrowing ancestors: half-buried huts whose thatched roofs were flush with the ground, with tunnels leading through soil and roots. Such huts blended into the soil, and the scent of their owners masked by fragrant grasses and herbs, so that one could ride with a stone’s throw of a village of them and suspect nothing.
In these tall grasses the low-caste Bothan nerfherders would herd their nerfs, lumbering beasts like walking whales from whose ambergris and sweetbreads the perfumers of Ilya extracted essences, and the assassins brewed poisons. Of course, being Bothans, the nerfherders spent their time gambling and smuggling and plying each other with tricks and multilayered deceptions, and trying to get someone else to do their chores.
Only infrequently would the nerfherders trample a rival village under the bellies of their wallowing nerfs, or to celebrate those special holidays commemorating ancestral battles and successful acts of treachery.
It was when she was still a kitten of the Third Season, at the age that in a human would be equivalent to a sixteen year old, just at the dawn of womanhood, when Rurra first became aware of something amiss in the galaxy.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
April 16, 2014
Wright’s Writing Corner –On Judging a book by its cover
The good news, prospective writers, is that it is now much, much easier to get published as an author than ever before in human history. The bad news is that it is much, much harder to find the reader to buy your books. A good cover is crucial.
The beautiful and talented Mrs. Wright has an article on getting a cover that will attract rather than repel the reader:
Commission a cover painting – this is an idea option for many books…but you have to be careful. Bad paintings look worse than anything else, except perhaps bad photoshopping. In particular, human figures that are distorted or not in proper proportion can be really off-putting. So, if you are going to go to the trouble of having a real cover painting, make certain that the artist you pick can produce a pleasing human image.
This last point cannot be stressed too strongly. Human images out of perspective and photoshopping that doesn’t trick the eye are worse–much much worse–than a simple solid cover with lettering on it. Do not pick a cover image that will turn away more readers than it draws!
So…Now, you have a decent cover image. Everything is great, right?
Not quite.
Read the whole thing:
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
April 15, 2014
A Marvel from A.D. 801702
It is discovered that H.G. Wells was wrong in his prediction. We need not wait until AD 801702 to see the English devolve into the troglodyte cannibal Morlock and the effete, pampered frail and helpless Eloi to foolish to realize that they are food animals.
No, the subhumans in England this day in 2014 combine both the anthropophagic viciousness of the Morlocks and the dainty weakness of the Eloi at one and the same time!
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Do I Role Play? Ask Rather, Do Ever I Stop? — Part One (Roling and Writing)
A reader asks if I still play Role Playing games. Indeed I do.
Let me count the ways. This will take more than one post. Let me here mention the rpg’s I have played in the past which influenced my writing; then I can talk about games I am running or playing in now.
AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND was written because while I was still in school in the 1980s I had moderated a role playing game I invented based on Roger Zelazny’s JACK OF SHADOWS. Because I thought the Dung Pits of Glyve were not sufficiently horrific as a place to go when you die, I decided to place the Last Redoubt from William Hope Hodgson’s THE NIGHT LAND at the West Pole of the tide-locked and unrotating world inhabited by the Jack of Shadows magicians. I decided that Origob, the evil god from the planet Tekumel invented by MAR Barker and Cthulhu were one and the same, and that they were behind the Great Watching Things besieging the pyramid, and that the psychic vibrations of the Last Redoubt created the citadel of Kadath from H.P. Lovecraft’s DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH in the mass subconsciousness of the humans living nearer the Terminator, the lands of eternal twilight nearer to the sunlight. Consequently, I had an enormous amount of material invented about the people of the Last Redoubt, but after the game ended, I put the thick folder away sadly.
Years later, my wife brought to my attention a tiny notice in a trade magazine asking for stories in the Hodgson’s Night Land. An editor named Andy Robertson was soliciting work. I had met Mr. James Stoddard at a Science Fiction convention at about that time, whose book, THE HIGH HOUSE, by pure coincidence, I happened to have found and read that week before. It turned out that he knew Andy Robertson, and was able to introduce us, and inspiration struck, and I wrote my first short story for him. The rest is history, but it started with a role playing game.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
April 14, 2014
Time for a BOOK RIOT!!!
The esteemed and inestimable Larry Corriea, Monster Hunter, who is clearly my Siamese Twin severed from me at birth, is organizing a what we members of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame call a ‘number storm.’ He volunteered to do this on my behalf with no prompting from me. The words below are his:
Today we are Book Bombing John C. Wright’s Awake in the Night Land
Many of you already know John for being an awesome sci-fi writer. Personally, I found him because of his blog. http://www.scifiwright.com/ Like me, John is an out of the closet conservative. Only where I am blunt and sometimes crude, John is eloquent and intellectual. I’m a tetsubo. John is a rapier. I’ve got a lot of respect for his writing, and I don’t say this lightly but I really do believe he is our modern C.S. Lewis.
For example, this is the first thing of his that I read: http://www.scifiwright.com/2014/01/restless-heart-of-darkness-part-two/
Seriously… I was shocked to discover that A. This guy was on my side. B. He gets away with that while writing for Tor!
This new book is a collection of 4 interconnected novellas. However, it isn’t from Tor, it is from a new publisher, same place that did Kratman’s Boys Don’t Cry, and this house is run by somebody who is even more hated in left wing sci-fi than I am, so that is just icing on the cake.
The purpose behind a Book Bomb is to get as many people as possible to purchase a book on the same day. This causes it to move up the rankings until it gets on the different daily bestseller lists. The higher it gets, the more people who notice it, the more attention it gets, the more new readers the author picks up. All that means the author GETS PAID! And you guys get a really good book to read, so everybody wins.
Right now it is sitting at:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,504 Paid in Kindle Store
I want to bump that up higher because I think John is a great writer and a voice of reason in the wilderness. So please tell your friends, repost this on your FB or Twitter or whatever you are in to.
Amazon used to update differently and book bombs would see movement in the first hour, but now it takes a few hours before there is anything significant. So I’ll update the number during the day.
Extra points for anyone who can tell me who the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame are, or what a number storm is.
And here is the link for Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/JohnCWright
and for Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Awake-Night-Land-John-Wright-ebook/dp/B00JM98V60
UPDATE: at the moment, this book is #8 in Dark Fantasy: http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/9803/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_b_1_5_last
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Blood Moon in Holy Week
NASA reports that a total lunar eclipse will be visible from the East Coast of North America, lasting from 2.00 in the morning to 3.00.
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/OH2014.html
Meanwhile, the Good Book reports that
“And I will show wonders in the heavens, and in the earth, blood and fire and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the coming of the great and awesome day of Jehovah.” Joel 2:30 -31
“The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before that great and glorious Day of the Lord.” Acts 2:20
I have heard (but cannot find a confirming report) that there was such an eclipse during the Passion of Our Lord.
Holy Week is a fine time to repent, go to confession, and get clean. Fasting is good to tame lust and gluttony, almsgiving to tame greed and avarice, and prayer to tame pride.
If anyone tells you that Easter Eggs is a pagan survival to worship the great goddess ‘Oestre’ — this is a lie. The habit in the older times was to give up eggs for Lent, and the children would celebrate the end of the strictness of 40 days of Lenten fasting by eating eggs. ‘Oestre’ just means ‘Spring’ in the some Northern European languages. I am sure you can find a goddess named ‘Spring’ somewhere in some pagan mythology — even though I have never heard of her, outside arguments like this, despite my years of study in mythology and folklore — in the same way you can find gods named ‘Sky’ such as Uranus and goddesses named ‘Earth’ such as Erda. In any case, if Easter were a survival of Oestre-worship, why is the word for Easter in all the romance languages named for the Paschal Feast? (Italian=Pasqua; Spanish=Pascua; Pascques)
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
April 11, 2014
Read Matt Walsh
Simply a suburb article today by Matt Walsh.
As you might imagine, I was recently reacquainted with the rather sickening idea that I have a duty to show reverence for a political office, when I wrote a post last week where I merely called the president a liar. Indeed, anytime you criticize the president with an intent more serious than playfully teasing him for picking the wrong team in his March Madness bracket – anytime you attack authority, particularly presidential authority, particularly THIS president’s authority — the ‘respect the office’ propagators will come streaming in, fingers-a-wagging and heads-a-shaking.
‘Respect the office,’ they gush. Noticeably, the folks most concerned with respecting Obama’s office weren’t to be heard from during that certain eight year period where Bush was daily cut down as anything from Hitler Incarnate
Read the whole thing here.
http://themattwalshblog.com/2014/04/11/i-dont-respect-the-president-or-his-office-and-neither-should-you/
I disagree with him on one technicality: officers in uniform must properly salute the Commander-in-Chief and proffer other signs of subordination and respect as military discipline requires. Otherwise, I agree wholly. As civilians, we need only proffer signs of respect for the Constitution that the President serves and we obey. Our respect for him is the minimum requires to maintain public order, and is abrogated when he acts against the office and the Constitution.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
And More Pictures!
After posting a number of pictures of eye-candy, I should also show you some pictures which excite me even more.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Would You Like a Slice of Cheesecake?
Allow me to present some pictures of the lovely Donna Reed, to which a reader brought my attention:
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Night Land Day APPROACHES!
Here is the link: http://www.amazon.com/Awake-Night-Land-John-Wright-ebook/dp/B00JM98V60
Monday, the Feast of Saint Bezeret, is the official day for AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND to go on sale, but for you, my cherished readers, here is preemptive early roll out.
To my fan: use the link! be the first to write a flattering review, before the hate-filled Lefty trolls roll in and smear the page, as they did on my Goodreads page. Amazon never removes any material, no matter how vile, false and rude.
AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is an epic collection of four of John C. Wright’s brilliant forays into the dark fantasy world of William Hope Hodgson’s 1912 novel, The Night Land. Part novel, part anthology, the book consists of four related novellas, “Awake in the Night”, “The Cry of the Night-Hound”, “Silence of the Night”, and “The Last of All Suns”, which collectively tell the haunting tale of the Last Redoubt of Man and the end of the human race. Widely considered to be the finest tribute to Hodgson ever written, the first novella, “Awake in the Night”, was previously published in 2004 in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection. AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND marks the first time all four novellas have been gathered into a single volume.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
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