Posts

Hey folks. I am heading out of town next week to a place with no cell/internet service, so I will not be posting. Regular posts will continue next Tuesday. See you then!

A month and some change later, and I’m back. Am I ready to be back? That’s a different question. I have pondered the idea of extending my hiatus, but that way lies inertia, and I have enough issues with that these days, thank-you-very-much. So every concern must be dismissed. My buffer is still unsatisfactory…but what would be enough? Noriama still little better than a second draft? Let it be seen anyway, warts and all.

I swear I didn’t plan it this way. I wouldn’t have if I could have; I’m put now in a somewhat difficult position of wrapping up both The Poems of Madam Albithurst and The Watch in the Sand in one post. I’d rather do it over two, but time and tide wait for no one; So… The Poems of Madam Albithurst Did my experiment work? It’s obviously not my place to say.

Due to a brief jaunt to Ohio to view the Eclipse, there will be no post on Monday. Instead, there will be a double-post on Wednesday! Thank you for your patience, and I’ll see you then!

About Ozzie Fitch was a bit of an experiment with language, to see if I could tell a story about a person using not-quite-MLA-standard-language. It was interesting, to say the least, but from there I moved on to my next experiment: telling a story with not-quite-standard-structure. The Poems of Madam Albithurst is not a story. Does it have beginning, middle, and end? Of a sort, but in my exploration of the written word, I have come to appreciate that the distinction between prose and poetry is a bit more of a spectrum than a binary — as most everything is.

The End Did I succeed in my efforts with The Raiselig Dossier? An interesting question to think about, for me. A lot of my intent was to play around in a world, to take a specific “what if” and drag it to its logical conclusion. What would a magical fantasy world be like, if magic were legislated to near extinction? Because that’s what became obvious, as I wrote. More and more the magical beings and spells of the ancient times faded away, not because “the world has moved on,” but because the laws of magic themselves became too onerous.

For the first half1 of my creative career, I was an actor. Still am, in some ways, and a great deal of my writing has the stain of performative dialogue. What I mean by that is: a lot of my writing comes out on the page sans the tone or emphasis that it has in my head. Sometimes this a wonderful thing. Good writers can convey the sound of their characters’ voices with just words on the page, while bad writers…well, compare any transcript of a Donald Trump monologue to its recording,2 and see how much information is lost without the pauses, the emphasis, the pitch of voice…

The End The Macabre Tale of Edmund Moulde took me more than a decade to write, and I still can’t honestly say “I’m done.” Art is never finished, only abandoned, and I could continue to tinker with this and that for decades more. I certainly can’t say it’s polished. Only the first book really reached that level of “completeness” for me, I’d still call the last three “second drafts” at best.

The third book of the Edmund Moulde quadrilogy was fun to write. I enjoyed coming up with all the little world-creative details, creating a world that was as much about fun little things as it was about people. All in all, while I can’t seem to ever allow myself a sense of satisfaction with my work, I can at least nowadays see some virtue in it. But all good things must come to an end, and so on Monday I will begin posting my final book in the Edmund Quadrilogy: The Last Days of Yesteryear.

And with that, we finish the second book of the Edmund Moulde Quadrilogy. On Monday, I will start posting the third book: Edmund Moulde and the Battle of Harmingsdown. Among other things, Edmund’s story has always been about transition, either from orphan to heir, from shame to pride, or from peace to war. From a Meta persepctive, I myself was always interested about what the transition from Steampunk to Dieselpunk might look like.