Find yourself in a better story
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Passages: Defy the Darkness
This week’s “passage” is a movie, the first short from Lamplighter Publishing. In this “new dark age,” a few will defy the darkness. This is a must-see for everyone who uses words to shine light in our culture! “With every word, with every page, with every story, we defy the darkness.”
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Images – Cyndere’s Midnight 3
Much has been said by other CSFF bloggers about the beauty of Jeffrey Overstreet’s writing. They’re right. Even Publishers Weekly, reviewing Auralia’s Colors, called his writing “precise and beautiful.” But what makes writing truly beautiful? It starts in the roots, in the word choices themselves, in the rhythms as they grow into something more. And…
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Immerse Yourself – Cyndere’s Midnight 2
Yesterday I bought a copy of Cyndere’s Midnight, happy and excited because I rarely get to buy novels — especially ones I’m really excited about. I actually bought two books, because Cyndere’s Midnight is the sequel to Auralia’s Colors, and you can’t read a sequel first. At least I can’t. Consequently, I’m halfway through Auralia’s…
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Cyndere’s Midnight: CSFF Blog Tour
Jeffrey Overstreet is not just a novelist. That “just” is not meant in any way derogatory; sometimes I wish I was just a novelist. But Overstreet, like me, writes a lot more than fiction, and I’m willing to bet his fiction is coloured by the attentive finger he keeps on the pulse of popular fiction.…
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Passages: The House of Dreams
Maggie Sheffield has just begun her adventure when she meets Nicolas Fisher and his black bear. Nicolas takes her to an inn called the House of Dreams, where they quickly come face-to-face with a living nightmare. I love to write description, and the House of Dreams has always been a particularly vivid scene to me.…
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Passages: Virginia Ramsey
Virginia Ramsey is one of the key characters in the Seventh World Trilogy. She makes her first appearance in the passage below. This scene is special to me because it was the very first scene written in Worlds Unseen. I jotted it down on a scratchpad when I wasn’t even sure what the story would…
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Whom Readest Thou? Book of Names 3
Today wraps up my first blog tour with CSFF. Thanks everyone for your comments and participation–your answers to my question yesterday are fascinating. When I first visited Dean’s HiddenLands.net, I was struck by the beginning of his “About Me” page: Dean Barkley Briggs is an author, father of eight, and prone to twisting his ankle…
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Why Writest Thou? – Book of Names 2
In yesterday’s post I touched on Dean Briggs’ personal reasons for writing The Book of Names (and its sequel, Corus the Champion, due out July 2009). I started reading the first few chapters of Corus last night and was struck by the poem that begins the book: What if sorrow was a doorway, And memory,…
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The Book of Names: CSFF Blog Tour
First, an introduction: a week or so ago, I joined the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour group, which means that I have access to review copies of upcoming Christian speculative fiction and that I get to participate in promoting those books. I was too late to get a copy of the book I’m…
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To Love and to Honour: A Review of Robin McKinley’s “Beauty”
“I was the youngest of three daughters. Our literal-minded mother named us Grace, Hope, and Honour, but few people except perhaps the minister who had baptized all three of us remembered my given name.” As a very young child, Honour renames herself “Beauty,” a nickname which sticks despite the fact that she is hardly the…