Introducing the Cursed Mage trailer and other fun bookish tidbits

It’s hard to believe that it’ll be just one month before my first-ever “big project,” Cursed Mage, is out and ready to roll. I wrote the first draft of this paranormal/occult fantasy back in the early spring of 2023, so it’s making full circle here in 2025 and it’s taught me a lot.

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For one, I proved to myself I could write more mainstream genre fiction as opposed to the niche works I started off writing, even if my dark epic fantasy that I’m currently rebranding, Spirit and Fire, gave me a few signs.

But I wouldn’t have made it this far without having read some awesome books that inspired it, mainly E.E. Holmes’ Gateway Trilogy. I’ve been talking a lot about Spirit Legacy and Spirit Prophecy lately, and there’s a reason behind that, given the Holmes’ classic’s direct influences on my work.

That said, the Gateway Trilogy is just a speck of dust in terms of influences, something I wrote about in an earlier post. But anyway, enough about Cursed Mage. I also wanted to take this time to share a few more fun, book-related tidbits that you might get a kick out of. Nothing Cursed Mage-related, by the way.

Dirt Town’s the toughest read lately, but not for a bad reason

I mentioned the book Dirt Town recently, one that’s written by a mother-son duo. Pretty cool, if you ask me, but wow, it’s so hard to read fiction from my computer screen. Especially these days, when I’m old school and insist on reading at least paperbacks.

In that earlier article, I mentioned this one would be 50-50, as it’s a work about class differences. Of course, every time we see something like that, it always makes me wonder whether the authors’ purposes here were to spread the ill-fated yet still oft-endorsed Marxian ideology, or if this was a political/cronyist class going against the masses.

If there’s any solace, it’s that my own work, Spirit and Fire, also talks about class differences. But I think you can safely assume there’s not a drop of Marxist ideology to be found.

I’m nothing, nothing, Nothing but the Truth…

I’m very hard at hearing, so I probably didn’t get those song lyrics right from that episode of Hey Arnold when Arnold and Gerald dialed up a song using Dino Spimoni’s (I probably botched that name, too) lyrics and his music partner’s melody.

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Anyway, I’m not entirely old school, I guess, since I’m currently listening to Nothing but the Truth by Avi on Spotify and I’ve since uncovered a hidden message in the work. It’s written in an 1,100-plus-word article I already drafted earlier this week, so stay tuned for it.

Let me just say that, if you don’t like government schooling, you’ll love this review more than anything else. No, the protagonist isn’t the most likable, and he definitely deserves a lot of flack here. But it doesn’t diminish the one hidden message I found, and one that my eighth-grade teacher - who preferred to play online poker during class than teach - would’ve spoken about.

If you ever read this book that was published all the way back in 1991, you may’ve had a vendetta against Philip Malloy and sympathy for the antagonist, Margaret Narwin. While you’ll still have that antagonistic sympathy because Narwin really isn’t a bad person, you’re also about to feel for Philip after I’ve had my say.

From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun

Thanks to Jon Miltimore’s Substack, The Take, I was introduced to Jacques Barzun’s magnum opus, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. It’s “required reading,” per Miltimore, so late last year, I decided to pick up a copy.

Since the book is so long - about 800 pages - and the writing is so small, I thought I’d turn this one into a year-long odyssey throughout the greatest civilization that the world has ever seen. That said, I’m reading only a few pages a day, and I should have it finished up by December 31st of this year.

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And yep, you’ll know when it’s done since I’ll have a full review on what has so far been a very, very interesting read.