Once I made what is, I fancy, a common mistake in college and registered for an elective English class. At one point in the course, the professor told us to make allusions that our audience would understand, and furthermore to consider our classmates our audience. To illustrate what our audience would not understand, he asked…
Shannon’s Blog
The Worthless World
Stories that are at their core cynical about the world present two different visions. The first is a vision of a world without heroes. The second is a vision of a world that doesn’t deserve heroes. These visions may easily be combined and sometimes are, but each can and does go alone, too. Together or…
Blitz: Beyond a Darkened Shore
On Tour with Prism Book Tours Release Blitz for Beyond a Darkened Shore By Jessica Leake Beyond a Darkened Shore by Jessica Leake Young Adult Historical Fantasy Hardcover & ebook, 384 pages April 10th 2018 by HarperTeen The ancient land of Éirinn is mired in war. Ciara, princess of Mide, has never known a time…
Coming Back, Going Forward
Of all the good old literary games, one of the most well-respected is Find the Archetype. It consists of taking a character, proving that he is like other characters who filled similar roles in their own stories, and declaring him an Archetype. It’s a simple game – there are only about six stories ever told,…
Bad Religion
If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject. The release of A Wrinkle In Time has brought this quotation to the surface. It sounds profound and is, I think, deeply wrong, but I don’t want to attack a lone, disconnected sentence. It would be better to return the sentence to its…
In Praise of Short Stories
There was a time when the world abounded with short stories. Great authors wrote brief masterpieces, securing their places in literary history and in English courses throughout North America; great books were introduced to the world as serialized novels. The mediocre and the obscure – overlapping but not homogeneous groups – found their footing in…
Cover Reveal: Bound Beauty
On Tour with Prism Book Tours Welcome to the Cover Reveal for Bound Beauty By Jennifer Silverwood This YA Dark Fantasy is volume three in the Wylder Tale Series Coming winter 2018, cover designed by Najla Qamber Designs Beware the bond between blood and beasts… Vynasha has united the warring human and forgotten clans of…
A St. Valentine’s Poll
So I was thinking about what might be a good or at least passable topic and suddenly I realized: this post will go live on St. Valentine’s Day. It seemed appropriate, then, to write a post themed on this great holiday of love, and anyway I was having trouble scraping up passable topics. Whether this…
Do You Want to Go?
The Greatest Showman (now in theaters!) opens with an exuberant musical number titled – this follows logically – “The Greatest Show”. It’s on YouTube, of course, though merely listening pales against viewing it and, even more, viewing it in theaters. Part of the brilliance of this song is that it captures what made the greatest show…
Review: Merlin’s Mirror
The old legends of Europe hold that Arthur, greatest of Britain’s kings, was conceived by the trickery of the wizard Merlin. Merlin himself, the tales go, was demon-born, the son of no man. But what if both were the sons of no man – the sons, rather, of the Sky Lords, aliens seeking to return…