Of Elsewhere
You may recall I wrote at some length about William Blake’s Four Zoas, so I’ll keep this fairly brief: I just read the whole shebang from start to finish in a few days! I find completing two books in a week, even if one (the Blake) is only 100 pages long, an auspicious beginning to […]
So, I’ve already broken my promise a little—but perhaps only a little. I don’t have deep close reading in this entry. What I’m offering instead is some observations on my responses to Night the First of The Four Zoas (outlined in more detail here). Those who read my last blog posts on Blake will notice Blake’s […]
TL;DR A being who is part of William Blake and all people, Tharmas, takes in the wives/significant others and creations of other self-components. Tharmas’s own wife/SO Enion becomes jealous and kills them (at least, so we’re told later). Tharmas disintegrates and Enion tried to weave a covering for her sins, but a part of Tharmas […]
Today I have been trying (and mostly but not entirely failing) to rewrite a bit of Evernost. I know the problem (my main character bores me and so does the storyline) and I think I know the solution (write it anyway, trying to make it as smart as I can, because neither is inherently boring […]
So: I loved Inside Out, the Disney-Pixar film in which the five basic emotions have to help their person, a girl named Riley, navigate a move to a new city. It was great, but I confess I loved it especially because I wanted passionately to imitate it. I was a bit annoyed it had beaten […]
I enjoyed the class on allegory (traditionally defined as extended metaphor) I took in college, and I’ve thought about allegory directly and indirectly for awhile (I also want to write an allegory–not just as in “a book that has definite themes that form a sustained second layer of meaning” but as in “a book in […]
As you may know, Brandon Sanderson (author of the Mistborn series, among other great work)writes about hard magic, the kind with rules, and soft magic, the kind that’s unpredictable and mysterious. He prefers to write the former and argues that problems should only be solved by magic when the magic makes sense, so that the author […]
This is the twelfth and final installment of Duessa, a 12,000-word allegory. The rest can be found here. Thank you for reading and happy New Year! This woman on the other side of the glass must be the one he had thought she was, the one whose body she had taken. Thinking of him, she thought, What […]
This is the eleventh installment of Duessa, a 12,000-word allegory (of sorts). I’m posting a new installment on each of the twelve days of Christmas, wrapping up on January 5th. See the previous ten here. After shedding a few tears, she set herself moving toward the brighter lights Now she found two people in the mirrors, alternating. […]
This is the tenth installment of Duessa, a 12,000-word allegory (of sorts). I’m posting a new installment on each of the twelve days of Christmas, wrapping up on January 5th. See the previous nine here. It was a different bed, her twin-size from high school. The ratty comforter she’d sewn herself from the most beautiful cloth she’d […]
Of Elsewhere 