June | 2012 | Sunhi Mistwalker

Archive | June, 2012

Ray Bradbury On Writer Hygiene

Colin Marshall did a great summary of the video so I won’t rehash it. Here’s a little of what he said below. If you want to read more, check out Open Culture.

Don’t start out writing novels. They take too long. Begin your writing life instead by cranking out “a hell of a lot of short stories,” as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; he claims that it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row. He waited until the age of 30 to write his first novel, Fahrenheit 451. “Worth waiting for, huh?”
You may love ‘em, but you can’t be ‘em. Bear that in mind when you inevitably attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to imitate your favorite writers, just as he imitated H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and L. Frank Baum.
Examine “quality” short stories. He suggests Roald Dahl, Guy de Maupassant, and the lesser-known Nigel Kneale and John Collier. Anything in the New Yorker today doesn’t make his cut, since he finds that their stories have “no metaphor.”
Stuff your head. To accumulate the intellectual building blocks of these metaphors, he suggests a course of bedtime reading: one short story, one poem (but Pope, Shakespeare, and Frost, not modern “crap”), and one essay. These essays should come from a diversity of fields, including archaeology, zoology, biology, philosophy, politics, and literature. “At the end of a thousand nights,” so he sums it up, “Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff!”

Get your copy of my newest book “After The Darkness” now. Both episode 1 and 2 are available.

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Tags: fiction, writing, writing life

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Categories Writing Life

A Secret Guide To Our Frozen World

19 Jun

Much of the world worries about global warming. Some people focus on preventing it, while others aim to discredit it. But 200 years from now, no one will know what it is. And if they do somehow find an ancient bite of data that speaks of the Kyoto Treaty or the imaginings of global warming alarmists they will simply laugh and consider it a great work of fiction. Or maybe they will cry, not because there was no need for alarm. There was a need for alarm — but for something entirely different. You see, no one saw it coming. While the world did see the catastrophic changes in the planet’s weather, they were unable to see the dangerous cliff at the end of the tunnel. They overlooked the gradual dimming of the sun’s rays. Better yet, they misinterpreted it.

When the skies first began to darken and cool the earth’s surface, scientists hypothesized that the planet was correcting itself, while religious leaders declared it was a sign from a merciful God. It’s even rumored that the U.S. government took matters into their own hands to hasten the cooling of the earth by blocking even more of the sun’s rays. But none of them imagined that 120 years After The Darkness, warmth would become something people prayed for and that the powerful could buy, bargain with and steal it.

But wait, I don’t want to talk about that. For my world, our future world, none of that matters now — it cannot be changed. My concern is for a young girl, Nadia Comani. You see, Nadia doesn’t know anything about global warming, nor is she versed in the true history behind the planet’s dark, frozen condition. She was born into the world as it is. The only light and heat she has ever experienced comes from the corporate-military heating complex that controls the City of Calcane. As a level 5 she’s never had to worry about much, especially not the matters of warmth, food and safety. Unfortunately, that’s about to change… Someone is coming, I will try to tell you more later…

–Unsigned–

Get your copy of “After The Darkness” now.

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Tags: fiction, science fiction