Author Archives: James - Page 7
The Great Traitor by Joseph Kassabian [Book Review]
The Great Traitor by Joseph Kassabian My rating: 5 of 5 stars The Great Traitor is the second book in the Galaxy on Fire series. It picks up where Citizen of Earth left off. It's much better than its predecessor, there's less of the random chaos, and is more about making sense of everything. The Great Traitor The title is a direct reference to the nick-name that Vincent has picked up from the loyalist survivors. His involvement in the last part of Citizen of Earth has been misconstrued, perhaps deliberately, and he is seen as the guy that destroyed the central committee and Earth. At first Vincent hates the nickname. Vincent thinks that isn't fair, because he was trying to stop the weapon being used against Earth. As the story moves on Vincent grows into using it to help him…
Hollow Road by Dan Fitzgerald [Book Review]
Hollow Road by Dan Fitzgerald My rating: 4 of 5 stars Hollow Road is the start of a heroes' journey, and the first book in the Maer Cycle trilogy. We meet three protagonists, Carl, Sinnie and Finn. They've been tasked with returning the body of one of their peers to their hometown. Each of the three has been away following their chosen profession, soldiering for Carl, circus entertainment for Sinnie, and learning to be a mage for Finn. Hollow Road Our protagonists have been asked to journey back to their hometown to take their friend's body to its final resting place. They're given the task by their friend's father, a rich man who pays them handsomely, and hints at trouble on their three day journey down the Hollow Road. The source of the trouble is alleged to be the legendary…
Going to Sea [Write Club]
Going to Sea is a fairy tale set as background for my fantasy novel. It is written for the Write Club Surrey challenge for the July meeting on Saturday. It was quite hard writing a decent fairy tale, and I'm not claiming that Going to Sea is a decent fairy tale. My first two attempts ended up more like Icelandic sagas than fairy tales. I ended up reading a book about what the Icelanders call the hidden people for inspiration. That was really interesting, but turned out not to be that useful. In the end I abandoned my earlier attempts and just wrote this instead. I'll probably finish the other ones though, I think having this sort of detail helps add depth to a fantasy world. Going to Sea, or how people started worshipping Kari Replica Viking Longship (Photo: archiwum…
The Seven Virtues – or a guide to Skyssian attitudes
The Seven Virtues are how a good Skyssian models their behaviour. Told from infancy through the fairy tales, and reflected in the glorious deeds of their heroes, every Skyssian is aware of them. Origins of the Seven Virtues A while back I thought it might be useful to sketch out the core beliefs of Skyssian attitudes so that I could use them as guiding principles for how minor characters could be expected to act. They also help to set direction for officials and institutions, after all if they aren't virtuous who else would be? At the time I stole the Skyssian attitudes from the Old Norse. A sort of set of Viking Virtues. That gave me the first five below. The local Write Club prompt is to write a fairy tale for the July meeting. So, I thought there ought…
Notice: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool in /var/www/html/themself/wp-content/themes/mesocolumn/lib/functions/theme-functions.php on line 502
Adjusting Away from Normal
Like everyone else I've had a turbulent month and I'm adjusting to the new normal. It is a new normal, although hopefully one that won't stay with us for long. Adjusting mentally is harder than it sounds. This is only the fourth blog post I've written on Themself in 2020, an average of one per month, quite far off my height of two a week. I've written more than four posts though this year. Most of them have been written in the last three weeks, since I've been at home. I've made an effort to keep a journal, with photos, of life in the pandemic. It's one of the things that keeps me relatively sane and functioning. Given the change in subject matter I put it on its own domain, although hosted on the same cloud server as this. You…