Category: history

New Episode for Hunter Healer King

Posted on Posted in Cool Books, Cool Websites, Fantasy, history, Mel Dunay, Paranormal Romance, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingLeave a comment

To claim her inheritance, Chloe Fortabat has to leave her ranch and come to the Old World, where she mingles with monster hunters. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man. Dr. Maxim os Storm’s mission is to destroy those monsters which feed on human pain. He is drawn to Chloe, but she is being slowly transformed into the exact type of monster he hunts. He does not know if he can cure her in time, or what she will do when she learns his secrets…

I plan to drop new episodes for this serial every Sunday in the Kindle Vella store for the foreseeable future. To learn more about Vella, keep reading.

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New Episode for Hunter Healer King

Posted on Posted in Cool Books, Cool Websites, Fantasy, history, Mel Dunay, Paranormal Romance, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingLeave a comment

To claim her inheritance, Chloe Fortabat has to leave her ranch and come to the Old World, where she mingles with monster hunters. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man. Dr. Maxim os Storm’s mission is to destroy those monsters which feed on human pain. He is drawn to Chloe, but she is being slowly transformed into the exact type of monster he hunts. He does not know if he can cure her in time, or what she will do when she learns his secrets…

I plan to drop new episodes for this serial every Sunday in the Kindle Vella store for the foreseeable future. To learn more about Vella, keep reading.

Continue reading “New Episode for Hunter Healer King” →

Hunter Healer King in Vella

Posted on Posted in Fantasy, Freebie, history, Mel Dunay, Myth, Paranormal Romance, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingLeave a comment

To claim her inheritance, Chloe Fortabat has to leave her ranch and come to the Old World, where she mingles with monster hunters. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man. Dr. Maxim os Storm’s mission is to destroy those monsters which feed on human pain. He is drawn to Chloe, but she is being slowly transformed into the exact type of monster he hunts. He does not know if he can cure her in time, or what she will do when she learns his secrets…

I’ve decided to serialize Hunter Healer King, the more advanced of my two WIPs, on Kindle’s Vella Store, to help motivate me to keep plugging away at it. If you would like to know more about Vella, read on…

Continue reading “Hunter Healer King in Vella” →

Weird Wednesday: Here, Have Two Italian Versions of Pride and Prejudice

Posted on Posted in Art, Cool Websites, historyLeave a comment

Officially out of ideas for Weird Wednesday, so here is a fansubbed copy of 1957 Italian TV version of Pride & Prejudice, complete with volcanic Wickham/Darcy feud and missing footage problems that keep us from seeing the first proposal scene and whatever/however Lizzie learned about Wickham’s checkered past. If you have already seen the first two episodes, which are easier to find online, click in the upper right hand corner to see the rest of the playlist.

And here is a fan reading of the Donald Duck/Paperino parody of Pride and Prejudice, as it appeared in Topolino magazine:

1984 and Sobering Thoughts on Ash Wednesday

Posted on Posted in Cool Websites, history, Weird Science, World BuildingTagged , , , Leave a comment

This isn’t explicitly religious (the source material is anything but religious in fact), but I thought it more appropriate to post the Weird Wednesday material yesterday, and put this up today.

This is a story about how people who have no values beyond their own desires and sense of mistreatment are easily destroyed by people and organizations who have no values but the will to power. The main character may be the product of his environment, but ultimately, being Winston is a choice.

Don’t be Winston or Julia. Understand what matters to you, do your best to cultivate habits of virtue and live up to whatever code of conduct you’ve managed to discern. Pray. But also, don’t feel smugly superior to Winston. Look at St. Peter the Apostle, virtue signaling about his courage and loyalty on Holy Thursday, and then denying his Lord that very night. We all have the opportunity to rise or fall. What will we do when that opportunity comes?

Weird Wednesday: Hot Rodding the Silmarillion

Posted on Posted in Cool Books, Cool Websites, Editing, history, Myth, Weird Science, World BuildingLeave a comment

Many people are aware that the published Silmarillion was compiled by J. R. R. Tolkien’s son Christopher, with an eye towards consistency and concision at the expense of poetic detail, from a wide-ranging variety of incomplete (and often mutually contradictory) manuscripts left by JRRT. I have read some volumes (not all) of the History of Middle Earth, which includes many of the source texts Christopher Tolkien used, but I have only recently become aware of the third-party scholarship showing how it all came together, in books like Arda Reconstructed. Also interesting are the fan attempts to construct more comprehensive and poetic-sounding Silmarillions than the one published by Tolkien’s son. These can seem a little dry, because for copyright reasons, they are basically citations to texts compiled in the History of Middle Earth.

This one is a “finished” one-fan project: http://tasarinan.atwebpages.com/silmap.html

This one, the work of many hands, has been ongoing for twenty years: https://forum.barrowdowns.com/forumdisplay.php?f=16

Happy 13th of July! (Happy “Corday”?)

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Today is the 229th anniversary of the assassination of Jean-Paul Marais, blood-thirsty Jacobin leader and media baron, in 1793, by Charlotte Corday. She belonged to the somewhat less extreme Girondin faction of the French Revolutionary movement, and blamed Marat for the execution of some of her Girondin friends.

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