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Showing posts from November, 2015

Writing advice: Subtly (is like a cannibalistic metaphor)

Subtly Let’s talk about subtly. As an artist, you can view your job as three different things: 1) It’s your job to create something off an idea, and let the world interpret it, 2) It’s your job to form an idea and present that idea in a compelling enough way to bring joy to others/yourself, 3) It’s your job to create something which will have a clear cut message, which the piece of art might present from multiple perspectives. One could argue that “making something which people will throw money at” is the fourth point of view, but I don’t call those people artists.  I call them manufacturers.  As a writer, your medium tends to leave less up to interpretation. It does, however, give an ample opportunity to present issues from different perspectives and reveal the moral gray area in which most acts in this world fall. This is why it is important to incorporate subtly into your work. This is for a number of reasons really, and if you make it through the reasons...

Review: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer – In which my joke title annihilates

Novel: Supernatural, Horror, Mystery. Contains violence and disturbing imagery.  This review contains minor spoilers.  I finished this book a while ago, I have just been so busy with my practice writing that I haven’t gotten around to this review. The book is about a secret government operation called Southern Reach who has been sending teams of researchers into a closed off stretch of Florida designated as Area X. It is one-third a mystery, one-third a cosmic horror story, and one-third a mind-blown-makes-no-sense-but-is-cool-anyway type story. The narrator is one of the researchers, who becomes more and more unreliable as the situation degrades.  This helps the atmosphere a lot. First things first, I should mention that I have actually met the author of the Southern Reach trilogy, Jeff VanderMeer. I took several presentations in which he taught about writing. So with that out of the way, if I’m not particularly hard on him at certain points, it...