Maybe I can’t read or write, but that doesn’t make me an illiterate! Georgi, The Inspector General, 1949 Georgi was not such a bad fellow. True, he was the stooge of a lying, thieving charlatan. True, he played a primary role in selling healing elixir that was actually furniture polish. But he wasn’t really such…
Tag: writing
Christmas Books of Dickens
Two nights ago, in honor of the season, I picked up Christmas Books of Dickens, a volume I bought at my library’s fall book sale. The first story was, of course, A Christmas Carol. I last read A Christmas Carol a year or two ago, and reading it again I was struck anew by what…
Not Too Great a Good
Some Christians place little value on art. But I’m not going to complain about them. I intend, rather, to complain about Christians who place too much value on art. I am thinking right now of Tony Woodlief and his article Bad Christian Art. I ran across this article while reading Sentimentality And Christian Fiction (an…
Emancipating Minors, YA Style
During the recent blog tour of Monster in the Hollows, Becky Miller explored what she believed to be the book’s primary weakness: the fact that Janner, the main character, was “passive or reactive” throughout most of the story. “I believe,” she wrote, “in this climate of literature the young adult in the young adult novel…
CSFF Blog Tour: By Any Other Name
One of the quirks of speculative fiction is how hard people try not to use real names. The whole book is written in English, but old words are used in entirely new ways, the commonest things go guised under the strangest terms, and people have names no living human has carried in a thousand years….
CSFF Blog Tour: Perfect in Weakness
[Spoilers] I don’t suppose there’s ever a good time to have a mental breakdown, but Artham’s time was particularly bad. He was using himself as proof that sprouting wings or fur does not make a human a monster. Then he snapped; his eloquent words melted into gibberish and he terrified everyone with his wild terror….
Happiness Is A Serious Literary Problem
All right, the title is stolen. Dennis Prager wrote a book called Happiness Is A Serious Human Problem, and made such an impression on me with his title that it is never too far from the surface of my mind. What last jarred it to the top again was a blog post entitled, Do Happy…
Christ, the Cross, and Heroes
The other day, while I was browsing Plugged In, I came across a review for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. Curious, I opened it up and came across this: Continuing his Christ-like course, Harry dies and is then given the opportunity to return from the dead to finish the fight against evil….
CSFF Blog Tour: Seeing in the Cave
Michael, who is 36, now often refers to gay life as a kind of cave … Had Michael been secretly unhappy as a gay man, and was he now projecting that onto all gay-identified people? I broached the question later that night at his small off-campus apartment, where we sat in his barren kitchen eating…
The Uses of Weather in Fiction
The thunderstorm has passed. The sky is now a patchwork of grey and bright white, the wind rifles through wet leaves, the birds are beginning to chirp again. So it’s a good time to discuss the uses of weather in fiction. (1) Plot. An outbreak of weather can form the foundation of a plot, or…