Book Review: Hard Luck

This is an exceptionally fun tale that does a little bit in the way of a genre-blending two-step.  The characters are lively, animated and personable.  It is through those characters that the beautiful setting is painted.  There will be a few things that take the reader by surprise, elements that one doesn't expect to run across in what seems to be a traditional fantasy piece, but these elements do nothing but add to uniqueness of the piece.  Very much so, this book is a fun little romp and the series promises to be an increasingly fun and dramatic ride.

Energy Crisis Stuff

Electric Cars

Electric cars have been a big thing by the environmentalist and conservationist sorts for quite a while and the concept is very exciting.  In truth, completely electrical cars are not a new thing, back in the early days of automobiles, internal combustion was competing against electrical cars and only won out when they added a small electrical engine to supply power enough to start the engine without requiring a person to crank the engine up.  At the time, electrical cars were incapable of providing enough power for the cars to be of much use for anything beyond a curiosity and only lasted a short period of time.  The technology was re-opened recently in the light of the dwindling supply of fossil fuels and the industry has produced both hybrids and the true plug-in sort of electrical cars everybody associates with the term.

Random Rant: Faith in General

I was having a discussion regarding the Grimm's Fairy Tales with a co-worker.  This is a reasonably intelligent person I've worked with in the past at this job, a test-scoring facility here in San Antonio.  She's educated and well spoken and knows at least one more language than I do because English is her second language (I tend not to count my limited French and Korean as 'knowing' a language).  At any case, I started to discuss this one Grimm story that involves the Virgin Mary taking a child up to Heaven and taking care of her.  My co-worker interrupted me and asked me to clarify that the story was about the Virgin Mary, and I commented that it was, but that a lot of the old European fairy tales were pre-Christian stories that had become Christianized afterwards.

RP Memories: Call of Cthulhu

I'm having troubles remembering my earliest gaming events.  I vaguely remember starting up playing a character based on a werewolf idea in a Champions game.  It was sometime when I was in Junior High, and thus well before I developed my tendency to play female characters.  Since then, I've had much more memorable events, role-playing wise.  However, I think I will start with one of my RP stories from around my high-school time and around when I started playing female characters.

Book Review: Kyrathaba Rising

This story draws from a lot of different directions.  It is a not so much a post-apocalyspe story as it is a story of an apocalypse in the final stages.  Virtual Reality, nuclear holocaust, aliens, robots, limited cybernetics and massive underground bomb shelters all feature in the story.  On first glance, it sounds like a lot to fit into one story but the author manages to put it together into a rather enjoyable tale.

Review: Kindreds: An Alliance of Bloods

This book presents a number of debates and meditations on a variety of philosophical, existential, moral and ethical concerns within the overall framework of a push to overturn an existing political system.  Each chapter seems to have at least one dialogue or monologue relating to some discrete conflict in one of two major forms: either a debate between a well-thought position and a strawman argument or else an internal monologue exploring some concept, often related to an earlier debate.  Most of the arguments are of a rather streamlined nature that peel some of the complexities of the various issues with some being more thoroughly discussed than others.

Government and Currency Rant

So recently someone on Facebook posted a quote from Frank Herbert, the author of the Dune series, that ran like this: "All governments suffer a recurring problem: power attracts pathological personalities.  It's not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible."

Three Paragraphs - Dialogue

The third sort of paragraph necessary to writing fiction is dialogue.


Dialogue is a strange and fragile thing.  Except in a few instances, it can't quite stand on its own.  There needs to be a little bit of action or dsecription in order to at the very least identify who is speaking.  However, too much of either will bury the voice of the character under the voice of the narrator.

Three Paragraphs - Action

Action is the second sort of paragraph necessary to writing fiction.  Unlike description, the moment you start writing action sequences, time is passing in a story.  Action usually comes in after description and shows the changes of status and position of a character.  The reader uses the previously established description and takes that avatar, to use a computer gaming term, through the manipulations described in your paragraph in order to picture the action of the story.

Sing the Midnight Stars by CMJ Wallace

This book is mis-advertised as a detective thriller. It certainly has aspects of that, but it is more appropriately categorized as a story of intrigue. The killer mentioned in the blurb falls increasingly into the background as the book moves around. Which is not to say that his or her presence does not continue to be felt. Regardless of this, the book is a very intriguing run, pun unintended, and has kept me interested throughout.

Three Paragraphs - Description

In writing fiction there are, essentially, three separate types of paragraph: description, action and dialogue.  The proper use of these paragraphs is one of several essential basics required to write a successful story.