Category: On Writing

Long Form Literary Discussions While-U-Watch

Sat down with Red Pilled Fiction Factory, a literary YouTube channel dedicated to the best of non-converged fiction, for a lengthy interview. Richard Nichols is a great interviewer, with an insightful and easy-going style, and mostly just gets out of the way. However, he does make some great observations...

Two Important Reads

I’m still processing.  Two writer blogs that you should be frequenting are The Dacian and A Hellene Author.  Yesterday they published blog posts that touch on the same topic – the death of our culture. From the former: We are twenty-one years into the 21st Century but culturally we...

News (And Reviews) You Can Use

Things are changing.  More and more people are turning their backs on established corporate offerings, and that includes the bigger social media platforms and news sources, to start their own.  If you are into good fiction written from a classical American perspective, you should add UpstreamReviews to your daily...

Baby’s First Long Form Fiction

Writing terrible screenplays taught me how to write incredible novels. The kind of boilerplate, structure-heavy, paint-by-numbers writing advice powered me through the first quarter of a million (unread and unpublished) words of writing. Screenplays are blueprints. They must be written for a lot of different audiences – everybody but...

An Interesting People

Apparently, I am one of them. Who knew? Alexander Hellene, a fine author in his own right knew. He wrestled me to the ground and wrung some deeply introspective thoughts out of me. There are multiple blog posts worth of content here, content that needed his probing and incisive...

Regressing Harder: Post-Colonial American Lit

Those Americans who paid attention in high school carry around in their head an understanding of early American literature built upon a foundation of two works: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, The Scarlet Letter (1850), and Edith Warton’s, Ethan Frome (1911*).  Both fine works, but both on the heavy side for high...

Essentials of Fantasy

There aren’t any. Sure, there may be a pretty hefty list of really important books in the fantasy genre.  Books like Starship Troopers, Lord of the Rings, and Harrison Bergeron should be on everybody’s reading list, but the genre is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big...

The Music of the Ainur

Listening to the Silmarillion on audiobook, and something occurred to me. The three themes of the Ainur presage the three ages of Middle-Earth.  From the Tolkien Gateway: The Ainur’s flawless Music satisfied even Ilúvatar during this early stage. The Second Theme was “like and yet unlike” the First; it...

CoronaChan Lives!

Today, I’d like to share with you a nice little review of the Amazon top title, CoronaChan: Spreading the Love, by Aaron Giddings over at Sticks, Stories, and Scotch.  This really is a great collection of works by authors with considerably smaller audiences than they deserve, and the fact...

Book Clubbing

Alexandru over at The Dacian has a cunning plan.  Every two weeks he will pick a short story worthy of discussion and give the stalwart Old Guard fans a chance to read and discuss across blogs.  In his own words, he hopes to: foster an environment rich in community...