Poetry and Salvation (The Salvation of Poetry?)

I’m currently working on Salvation (You can see the cover in my last post http://alockedawaymystery.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/salvation-cover/), and attempting to figure out how to incarcerate a six year old in a world a hundred years from now.

I also recently wrote a poem that doesn’t mean a single thing about my life! =D

Revenge

Let the sparks fly upwards,
Let me fall downwards,
To see the bottom of the sky,

Take off my wings so I can really fly,
Just let me look and let me reply,
Let me look for the things that I can deny,

I deny you,
I defy you,
Look me in the eye,

See the truth as I let you fry,
From the frying pan into the fire,
You got everything you desired,

Not even seeing my conspire,
You can’t jump over this barbed wire,
You are the real one that inspired,

The real true fire to come out from inside of me,
Almost like it was planned by a God,
Will I be happy when you unthaw?
Happy hunting!

James

Salvation cover

Copyright (C) James R. Cohen 2009

So I finally finished the cover for Salvation, book one of two. It’s a webnovel about a kid who is cast out of heaven, hell, and society. I just started writing today, and it’s coming along great. Chapter 1 should be up in about a week.

It is seriously shocking how long it took for me to get that cover, I tell you. Probably about 2 hours of looking through colors and fonts and images, they make me so sad XD.

Short entrees fail =/

James

Stop Staying With What You Know!

A major thing with writers today is that they stick to what they know, to what everyone knows, what everyone accepts. Nobody questions anything anymore. Yes, we know gravity exists. But why does it exist? What is it’s purpose? How is it done? Question everything, theorize, and incorporate into your story.

We are writers. Our purpose is to make the impossible seem possible (Or the other way around). We should be editing the rules, replacing them, just plain having fun and tinkering with the laws of physics. We are supposed to be original, and yet we seldom are. We’re sticking to reality when we should have our heads in the clouds.

Why do we stick to these things? We should be expanding, not sticking to where we are, to where everything is nice and plushy. We stick to what we know when we should be exploring the unknown, to the depths of our imaginations. To things we never thought we could imagine.

As a group, writers are supposed to be doing the original, to maximize the impossible and make it, if not seem possible, at least plausible.

And yet, we don’t. We stick to everything we know instead of going into what we should be, we are stuck in this state of sameness instead of evolving into something new.

James

Unoriginality and Cliche in Modern Fantasy Using Eragon As an Example

In today’s writing, I have noticed that the least original books, the most cliche’d, are the ones getting the best reviews. Look at Eragon; it has a ton of useless filler, multiple plotholes, plagiarism, and it’s badly written, and yet its one of the most critically acclaimed books of all time.

Thankfully, in most writing communities I am on on the internet, I have seen a very large amount of detest for cliche and the like. But some places, on the other hand, seem to encourage all writing. But shouldn’t writers learn to stop cliche and plagiarism early on in their careers (Well, in this case, pre-career, but you understand my point.) Why, in this modern age, is cliche and plagiarism accepted, in some cases even encouraged, by the public?

Is this tendency towards cliche and unoriginality going to continue on in the next generation, in which some, but not all of us are resisting unoriginality in our writing? Or will we continue to go back to the old and the familiar and not going on into evolving the world of the imagination until even the very word is forgotten, until everybody stops even trying to be original? Is this our fate as people, as a world, for writing?

I tend to hope not, but sometimes I have nought but doubt for the future of the creative arts. I mean, today, there is almost no originality in bookstores – everything looks and sounds almost exactly the same, even if any “diehard fan’s” would tell you otherwise.

James

Candy: Isn’t it worth a felony?

This is even better than the Wal-Mart employee who rolled back prices. And by that, I mean ten times better than the Wal-Mart employee who rolled back prices.

A teenager from Ohio decided to charge his school with a bill for over $37,000 from “The Goodie Store”, an Ohio-based candy maker. All I can say to this is, the is both an epic fail and an epic win. Making it paraepic, AND it goes into two different catagories, both of which mean “awesome”.

He is now in jail awaiting a trial for tellacumnications fraud, and his bond is over $30,000. He was stupid enough to order it to his home. You would think that his parents would, ya know, notice thousands and thousands of boxes of candy showing up at their front door, no? Not to mention the local police.

Just goes to show; Buy your own candy =D.

James

PS You can find the story on Fox News here: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,490869,00.html

“I must blog about this.”

I promised somebody I would blog about “this”. Sadly, what this is will not be known until I press “enter”. Dare I press it? Dare I? 

Yeah, I dare! You see, Ben has this idea that we could create a network of blogs for writers – I link you, a million other writers link you, you link us, we all link eachother kinda thing — starting with Pandemonium, Windroads, and Forsaken. Dreamborn (A nonlinked site), isn’t listing any of them, but is probably still in the original plan.

And if we did this, an Seventh Element-ish site could come up from the awesomeness. And this is beside the fact that the idea is awesome in the first place. Seventh Element was a website created by Ben (Again, owner of Windroads), for writing, although in it’s later years it was merely a forum and than ceased to be anything mid-December 2008.

This could evolve into something good. Possibly even something great. And even if it isn’t great, it will be FUN, which should be the point of it all in the first place.

I, for one, see this as a call to arms, for one thing because it sounds just awesome and for another because… Well, what other reason but a call to arms?

James

Webnovel vs. RLnovel Standards

I’ve been noticing lately how there are some books that I would find acceptable on the internet, and not in a real publshing company, and some webnovels I would find acceptable in a real, living book. (If books can really live, since technically they are dead trees =D).

For instance, there is the entire Twilight Saga, or the Inheritance Cycle – both I would find entirely acceptable as webnovels and not as the real thing.

And as for webnovels I would find good enough for publishing, Spinner’s Endoflux (http://spinworkstudios.com/endofluxtheory/) is a fantastic example.Right now all he has up for it is a short excerpt, but I hope I can count on him  for more. He posted some of it on his old forums, Seventh Element last year, and it totally blew me away. Of course, if you want stuff from him, you can bug him on his blog, Windroads, link in the sidebar.

I have always been what I call a “literary advocate” – that is, I have high-set literary standards (Perhaps too high) for RLbooks, and lowset standards for web-books. The way I see it is, if you’re writing a webnovel, it’s more a writer-in-training thing then anything else.

Once you get published, you get paid, and once you get paid for something, you finish with your “training”, so to speak. But sometimes the training is finished a little too early, at least in my mind. It depends on the writer, sometimes, but sometimes what the writer does isn’t in his or her best interest.

I close with these words: “Influences? Fuck those, I haven’t got any.”

James

A first post

Welcome to a blog! It’s the first one I’ve ever had. Or created. =D I’ll be using smilies a lot, so get used to it.

Nothing much is really going on right now in my life.

I just got my brown belt in Okanowan Goju Ryu Karate Do, and I’m working on my upcoming webnovel, Salvation, which is book one of a two-book series which has been titled The Unwanted, about people who are unwanted creations of God, cast out of heaven, hell, and society. Still in the outlining stage though.

I’m also working on three short stories; The Organs of a Dead Angel, from the point of view of an animal, who is eating the body of a dying angel; Oh, The Darkened Window Speaks; about a guy who feels ugly on the outside, so he looks inside and finds nothing but ugliness there, too; and Pheramones, which is about this guy who meets an alien and finds he wants to be eaten by it, and he enjoys it.

I haven’t been writing much lately, but I’ve been planning to write a lot; mainly I’m in the outlining stages for everything, at the moment. Poetry still continues to spurt out of my all-too-small brain, though, as usual.

As I said, this is the first time I’ve ever had a blog before, so I guess I should just talk about my life and writing and stuff. I’ll probably update this once every few days, and if I don’t, it’s just ’cause I don’t have anything to post about,

I guess that’s, well, that.

James