"Signs Preceding the End of the World" by Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman.
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Tag: literature
Dogs barking and the stupidity of literary fashion
My editor, who gets to poke at my manuscripts, flagged a sentence in the first course of my occult mystery, "A dog barked in the distance." This is a cliche according to Rosecrans Baldwin, a novelist who wrote an article for Slate back in 2010. He says it's tired writing. If so, I'm in good …
Continue reading Dogs barking and the stupidity of literary fashion
No such thing as a good ugly woman
I'm sure many of you have seen where the NY Times put together an interactive chart that asked people to rank all the characters in Game of Thrones on a good-evil/ugly-beautiful axis. The results should be of interest to storytellers. There is a clear bi-lobed cluster. You could argue of course that this is the …
More on the Limitations of Writing Really Good Villainesses
One of the reasons Darth Vader is a timeless villain is because he's Luke's father. Luke, as the hero, represents us -- either indirectly in that he fights for us, or directly as a stand-in, a power-projection of the self. Vader, then, in perverting his role as father, inverts it and becomes the antithesis of …
Continue reading More on the Limitations of Writing Really Good Villainesses
Setting and Hardboiled Detective Fiction
I was listening to some lectures on the detective novel on the plane, and the dude really had some neat points. (Go figure.) But first, for background, you have to know that American detective fiction, sometimes labelled "hardboiled," grew out of the English detective novel, which tended to be very genteel. The detective in the …
The Call to Adventure
I've ignored it twice in my life. At least. Which is kind of a big deal. For those who don't know, the Call to Adventure is the first stage of the Hero's Journey as outlined by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 opus The Hero With a Thousand Faces. As with any seminal tome, there are those who …
Why is there nothing to watch?
Most of us have had the experience, probably quite recently, of scrolling through literally hundreds of movies on Netflix and not being able to find a single thing. Last night I ended up switching to my cable company's On Demand section and still came up empty. But then something interesting happened. On social media, a …
