Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 248

Alchemical Journey: Review of 'The Fire'

Katherine Neville's The Fire (Ballantine Books, 2008) is an adequate, multi-storied sequel to the author's stunning chess-and-alchemy 1988 page-turner The Eight.

The "current day" story focuses on Xie, the daugher of Catherine Velis, the protagonist in The Eight. While Catherine was a take-charge heroine in solving the alchemical mysteries of a chess set that once belonged to Charlemagne in The Eight, Xie--for all her spunk--is swept along by events orchestrated by others. Her best friend Noko...

Goodreads Book Giveaway

One copy of my novel "Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey" is available in a Goodreads book giveaway that runs until September 15th. You need to be registered with Goodreads to enter. Good luck!

When nineteen-year-old David Ward climbs the sacred mountain Nináistuko seeking a vision, the golden eagle of earth flings him back onto the prairie and the black horse of dreams shows him the future. Though his eyes are opened, fate hides exactly what he needs to know. The spiritual journey that follows...

Hero Path: Change begins with the ashes

"At the beginning of every spiritual realization stands death, in the form of 'dying to the world'…At the beginning of the work the most precious material which the alchemist produces is the ash." –Titus Burckhardt

As an author, I'm fascinated with change: what facilitates it and why people resist it. Change is the soul of storytelling. Resistance and delay are the stuff of page turners. If there aren't any problems or dangers or intrigues, then we don't have much of a story—or even a joke to ...

Pending Divorce: a 'Garden of Heaven' Excerpt

My protagonist, David Ward, and his wife have finished discussing their pending divorce in this snippet from my hero's journey novel Garden of Heaven.

He stood up and stretched, and when she made no move to stop him, he went upstairs and stepped out on the deck with a glass of red wine to watch the stars. Did he love her when they met ten years ago? Yes yes, otherwise he was a fool then wasn't he, but now the memory sickened him. Of late, he cursed that day, the expressions on their faces, th...

Knowing what one does not know

Writing is a journey, some say, and/or a process of discovery, others say.

During this journey, we intend certain things. We decide to write a novel about a young man in the mountains. Then we ponder what he might do there, whom he will meet, and what the terrain looks like.

Hemingway advised writeers not to talk their stories away. I take that to mean that in the planning stages--and during the first moments of creation, the story is rather like an innocent child who is not quite formed, not q...

Yahoo News Department: You Need an Editor

Quite often, I see major Yahoo stories quoting random bloggers as news and opinion sources. But what really stands out, though, is the lack of headline editing.

This headline was on my Yahoo home page today:

VATICAN ISSUES SEX ABUSE GUIDELINES

OMG, the headline says the opposite of what was done. As written, the headline implies that the church issued guidelines for conducting sex abuse rather than for investigating it.

A good copy editor would never let a headline like that slip into a newspaper...

Hero's Journey: Belly of the Whale

"Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights." -- Book of Jonah 1:17


Belly of the Whale is one of the stages of the classic hero's journey, or heropath, popularized by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

Some refer to this stage as the hero's lowest point, a view that one might easily take of Jonah while he pondered and prayed for three days in the stomach of the giant fish. Others describe it as a...

Books = Christmas in July

The postal delivery carrier rang the doorbell today with a stack of boxes taller than she is. (In a small town, they don't sling them on the front porch and run).

Here's what I found:

An review copy of John Atkinson's Timekeeper II, due out this fall from il piccolo editions. I enjoyed Atkinson's Timekeeper and Dark Shadows Red Bayou and am really looking forward to this one.

Charmaine Gordon's To Be Continued. Charmaine's another Vanilla Heart Publishing author. I've been hearing about this boo...

Are you signed up for THE INFLUENCE PROJECT?

FastCompany Magazine is using social networking to learn more about Influence. (Story is here).

Once you sign up, you get a unique URL and you send that around in blogs, tweets and facebook status updates to see how many people will click on it and also sign up. Obviously, the more people who click on your link to the project, the more influential you are. Participants might just end up with their photo (I have a feeling it will be part of a collage) in FastCompany Magazine this fall.

So, are y...

Wednesday Miscellany

Thank you to Dianne Salerni ("We Hear the Dead") for her Had-Me-Laughing-on-First-Page Amazon book review of "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire." Her review also appears on GoodReads.

Amazon has activated the search inside feature for the print edition of "Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey." Now you can sample the book before buying 100 copies for your top friends on Facebook. :-)

Readers and authors with a fascination for the hero's journey will enjoy Jodi Lorimer's exploration of the origin...