The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,500 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.
Stories about girls vomiting themselves to death and dystopian death games entertain the youth of the present day. Kevin Swanson takes a brief journey into popular teen reading fare, and discusses a Christian view of fiction with Christian author, Lee Duigon.
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Third in Bell Mountain series takes readers to the brink of apocalypse
By Robert Knight
In tough times, it’s difficult enough to convey hope without sounding like Pollyanna, the ridiculously upbeat heroine of the Disney movie of the same name.
But, how about offering real hope while the world is coming apart at the seams, evil is on the march, and prophets are predicting doom?
It’s all there in The Thunder King, Lee Duigon’s third installment of the Bell Mountain series, a fantasy of epic proportions set in a medieval world that arose on the ashes of a sophisticated civilization.
Duigon, who wields one of the sharpest and funniest pens as a cultural/political columnist, keeps the action crisp, the characters believable, and the reader guessing where it will all end.
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Sorry to bring up politics again. But when utter, unadulterated fantasy is repackaged as a political program that people are urged to vote for–and actually do!–it mightily cheeses me off.
This particular fantasy raises anguished howls of protest over “income inequality”–as if there were ever such a thing in the real world, or ever could be, as “income equality.” The message is that if we elect a bunch of really cool Democrats, they’ll get rid of all that inequality and transform America into the land of equal incomes.
Does this mean that a gang of crooks and schnooks in Washington will wave a magic wand, and you and I will suddenly be blessed with incomes equal to Nancy Pelosi’s, or Al Gore’s? I mean, what is this–the Arabian Nights?
The only place in the real world where there is income equality is the cemetery.
How do you get your reader into the fantasy world you’ve created? Here are some of the methods that have worked for various writers.
Don’t bother with a fantasy world: set all your action in Southern California. This is the method of choice for cheaply produced movies. Bring He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, or the Predator, some other set of fantastic characters, to L.A. It saves on production costs, and saves writers the trouble of being creative. Please don’t even think about using this method.
One exception–Ellen C. Maze’s vampire novels (if you want to count them as fantasy instead of horror). She makes it work.
Make subtle adjustments to our world to turn it into a fantasy world. I’m not a Harry Potter fan, but J.K. Rowling deserves a big hat-tip for coming up with this technique. It remains to be seen whether anyone else can pull it off.
Transport protagonists from our world into the fantasy world. No one ever did this better than C.S. Lewis in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. This would appear to be the easiest way to present a fantasy, but don’t get the idea that it’s easy to do it well. But it is very easy to do it badly.
Treat the fantasy world as if it were the only world. This is the approach most commonly used–Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, Harry Turtledove, and (blush!) I, just to name a few of many. How to do it is the tricky part.
I think it’s best to start the reader off with people and places that will seem familiar, or at least easy to adjust to, and introduce him gradually to people and places that are increasingly fantastic. This is why The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings start with Hobbits in the Shire. Although Hobbits are the product of Tolkien’s imagination, they are very much like us, inwardly; and as the story progresses, and they move out from the safe, comfortable Shire, they respond as we would to the more exotic regions of Middle-Earth: with wonder, joy, awe, and terror. He makes it so easy for us to identify with Hobbits, he doesn’t need to start the story somewhere in our own world.
Always assume your reader can’t help being skeptical. You’re asking him to believe in something he knows to be fantastic: and in this you have to give him all the help you can.
I’m often asked for advice on writing fantasy, so I thought a few suggestions might be helpful. Here are some pitfalls you should try to avoid.
Don’t bombard your readers with outlandish names. If you write a sentence like this, you’re asking for trouble: “Froobish the Saffronesian dismounted in front of the Temple of Quor and prayed a silent prayer to Poogle-Mo-Pooble that he would find High Priestess Botchygaloop in a forgiving mood.” Oh, I can imagine your objections. “No way, man! Lord Dunsany always wrote like that! So did Clark Ashton Smith–and what about all those crazy monikers J.R.R. Tolkien came up with? He had a character named Legolas, for cryin’ out loud!”
Yes, part of the fun of fantasy is making up the names. All I’m saying is, don’t overdo it. Besides which, great artists like Dunsany, Smith, and Tolkien can get away with things that the rest of us can’t.
I don’t like to do politics on this site, but occasionally some “leader” makes a remark that’s so asinine, it just has to be answered.
Our president says, of the Occupy Wall Street dingbats, “I understand the frustration… People feel separated from their government.”
No, dude–no! You couldn’t be more hopelessly, cluelessly wrong!
We are not separated enough from our accursed government!
“The Cellar Beneath the Cellar is better than the first, and flows with a tighter, more focused narrative. The characters all come into their own, the scope and details of the world are more fully fleshed out, and we learn more about Obann and its history.”
Read more HERE.
A review of Lee Duigon The Thunder King (Vallecito, CA: Storehouse Press, 2011)
$14.00 289 pp ISBN: 978-1-891375-56-9
Reviewer: Forrest W. Schultz
Like the second book, the third one in the Bell Mountain saga adds more plot elements to the mix and provides deeper discussions of their significance. Perhaps there are some critics who may judge the result to be too advanced for a juvenile reader, but, in the immortal words of Mortimer Adler, “We need something over our heads to lift us up!”.
We learn more about the significance of the ringing of the Bell and about the decadence of t he Temple, especially that of its First Prester, who is first in wickedness, not in piety. And we see ever more clearly the parallel between the teaching in the Secret Scrolls and the doctrines in the Bible, and between the history of Obann and the history or Israel and the Church.
But it needs to be borne in mind that the story is a fantasy — a story in its own right — not an allegory. As the biographical sketch of the author on the rear jacket makes clear, Lee Duigon loves both fantasy literature and sound theology. And, contra much of popular opinion, there is no discord between the two because, after all, God is the greatest story-writer of all — history is His Story, because it is His fantasy that became reality when He created the world. Amen!