New track from symphonic metal band Ad Infinitum with their marvelous lead singer Melissa Bonny (it's basically her personal project) in fine form on both clean and harsh vocals.

Time for coffee

Time for tea

Time to wake up you and me!

Yep, the hot bevvies are ready to go. Got English Breakfast and Sunday Tea (Ceylonese black with vanilla) in the tea pots. Coffee is a Costa Rican dark roast.

Looking like another nice day here. We are having an oddly nice fall here. Not much rain and temps are above normal.

Later, alligators!

Quote by epicellie

There's currently a Halloween Contest for anyone interested at Authors Publish, also something called "Simple Strategies for Building a Daily Writing Habit," and they offer courses, albeit they're pretty expensive ($500+). This website is a really good tool for all writers, from beginning to advanced. They really strive to help writers hone their skills and get published.

Halloween Contest

https://authorspublish.com/hedge-apple-halloween-contest-now-seeking-submissions/

Yeah, I get their newsletters which is where I build these posts from. Good resource for writers. I found it through a guy on here who did these posts before me.

This song was my earworm-du-jour. I have no idea why other than it is one of my favorite Epica songs.

BBQ Sirloin burgers w. broccoli salad.

Sencha (Japanese Green Tea)

What? No love god/dess? Dang, those are almost mandatory in any human pantheon, aren't they? (Ishtar, Aphrodite, etc.) 😊

The one thing to watch is to not make a pantheon too structured. I keep running into that mistake. Pantheons of polytheistic religions generally arise naturally as the cultures develop, hence Egypt having literally hundreds of deities. Though over time, as the religion became more codified, you had deities being combined for various reasons, often more political than spiritual. So depends how developed your culture is, I guess. If they have been around for centuries or millennia then, yeah, it could get pretty structured.

Quote by MikeHanson
God of music, art, theater, magic: Kunst or Amma

I actually have a goddess in this role in one of my stories, my comp winning "The Goddess Dances" on here. She's also the patron of a city, which is her primary role in the story. I did have another story in mind that would involve her as well as introducing a love/sex goddess into the pantheon but it kind of went off the rails.

I discovered Atlanta-based band Foxes & Fossils back during the dark days of the pandemic. They most do covers but have mentioned working on some original material. They've been going since 2009, when founder Tim Purcell decided he wanted to sing with his daughter Sammie. The rest, as they say, is history. Lead singer on this Tom Petty cover is Maggie Adams, who Tim and Sammie knew from their church and who became the second lead singer (they eventually added a third, Chase Truran, when the girls moved away for university so weren't consistently available for a period).

Quote by DenimAngel
I'm back from my vacation!

Did you miss me?

No not at all. Were you away? 😉

I do have fresh cookies today!!(cleaning out the empty cookie jars and cleaning out the cookie tins ..holy cow mostly crumbs in them too

Oh wow, did I ever miss the ... Sara. Yeah, I missed Sara. And the cookies. But mostly Sara. 😋

Fall themed cookies sounded good,

Leaves ,pumpkins, coffee cups, pilgrim hats, acorns and scarecrows

scarfs a pumpkin and an acorn

Yeah, kidding aside, nice to have you back.

Putting on fresh pots of coffee and green tea for the afternoon-evening crowd.

Quote by JamesPBear
Hmm…I guess Mendalla must still be goofing off…I mean, "on vacation." Hope he's having a good time.

Nope, I am just not online at 6:30am. Apparently bears need less sleep than gorillas. Thanks for the startup.

With Halloween coming, I feel like I should work on something spooky. The current story has a horror element, but not the kind of eerie, spooky kind I tend to lean to for Halloween. Oh well, let's see what comes. That story is basically done but I am not going to put it out until I get the second chapter going. Right now, I am realizing that I haven't really fleshed out what is supposed to happen next in detail, whether or not this character dies.

Yeah, I had noticed the resemblance. Listen to Your Heart is possibly my favorite Roxette song.

I see people doing it in concert livestreams and videos and find it absolutely terrifying, so no.

WYE get a picture with an artist you admire if you just met them casually on the street or something? (I know people who have done this)

I have found many of the episodes of the documentary series Immortal Egypt scattered around on Youtube so starting to partake. On a bit of an Egypt kick right now and we are contemplating a trip to finally see the place for next wedding anniversary, which is a big one.

For this time of year, any of the following Dracula adaptations:

Nosferatu (1922, though I like Werner Herzog's remake, too)

Dracula (1933 with Bela Lugosi, 1958 aka The Horror of Dracula with Christopher Lee)

Count Dracula (1977 TV adaptation of the novel)

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992 big budget film, not as faithful as the title suggests but a gorgeous gothic spectacle)

Not a chance. I get nervous going down a slide. 😳

WYE learn to fly a plane?

Coffee dripping into a pot

Tea is something else we got

Earl Grey and English Breakfast

Our hot bevvies are nothing but the best.

Hey, we are still waiting on the judging so technically the comp is not over yet.

Judges: 1/10, 2/10, 1/20

Crowd: (boos me, applauds judges)

Well, I changed the route for a tour I just did in my own country (Canada), partly due to Hurricane Fiona hammering our Maritime provinces. I wasn't headed for the worst-hit areas, but at least one National Park we had planned to visit shut down many sites and services for the season early to buy themselves time for cleanup.

Quote by AnnaMayZing

Just thinking that Marko has left a notable gap in Nightwish's sound...

He definitely has on vocals. Troy has tried valiantly but there's some songs that need a stronger, harsher voice than he can provide. Jukka Koskinen, the new bassist (who is excellent on bass), did do backing vocals in Wintersun before coming to Nightwish, so maybe Tuomas will try him out on the next album? (Recording in 2023 for release in 2024 is the word. The band have already heard demos.).

Quote by verbal
Ape, I think you should kill off your character - did you notice all the dramatic stuff you started talking about once you came across the possibility?

I have both versions written. You're right, the "Nalia dies" version (that's the character's name) definitely packs more of a dramatic wallop. Eff, it hurts to write about grief, though. Been through a bit too much of it myself, I guess. I snuck a wedding of sorts into the "Nalia lives" version so it had me tearing up, too. Maybe I am just too sensitive to be a writer, eh.

Haven't posted one of these in a while. As usual, it's a mixed bag with some interesting ideas. There's one entirely themed around merfolk (mermaids and kindred beings). Another is looking for poetry inspired by Frankenstein. Stories told from a dragon's point of view (Anna?). And much more. I'll look them over as usual to see if anything clicks. Maybe you should, too. A few do have fairly close deadlines (October 15 in a few cases), others are end of year or similarly longer periods.

https://authorspublish.com/37-themed-submission-calls-for-writers-for-october-2022/

Irish Breakfast tea.

I think I just threw up a little at those weiners. Please tell me that's a joke.

5791 (let's just walk rather than run)

Hopes are embodied in dreams.

New Day, New Week. Frost is on the ground here, and a pretty hard one, too. Definitely Fall now.

Got some Ethiopian Yirgacheffe in the coffee pot (hey, my son said it was good). Irish Breakfast and Earl Grey in the teapots with other fine teas in the neat little wooden tea box on the counter. I'm keeping the pop stocked but I imagine there won't be much call for cold bevvies anymore so I'll only make iced tea if asked.

My writer's muse pulled a fast one on me yesterday. I was working away on the new Tana-verse story and ... yeah, I killed off a character I did not intend to kill. Gave her a hell of a death scene, too. Only problem is, she's supposed to be a major, recurring character in this sequence. I had already planned it out as a dramatic healing scene where she is critically injured but is healed by another character (there's some seriously powerful spirits in this one) but somehow went the other road instead. However, having her gone throws everything else into chaos so I am going to fork the story (thanks be to the electronic gods that Google Docs has robust versioning) and try to write that original ending.

But if I find the healing scene doesn't fly for some reason, I guess I'll need to revisit the rest of the story arc. Because I absolutely refuse to pull a Spock on this (Star Trek II : The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III : The Search for Spock respectively kill off Spock and resurrect him). Either she's healed before she croaks or she dies and her companions must carry on without her (one of them is her partner, so major grief scene coming if I go that route).

As I plunge into the next set of stories set in the "Tana-verse" (yes, I'm really calling it that internally), I find myself starting to sort out the world a bit more. In the original series, I mentioned the existence of a priesthood called the Denith Lorn but did not really delve into religion beyond that. Obviously, in a world where spirits are a reality, religion is a bit of a different beast from what we have today. It will be more akin to ancient societies who believed their deities were really with them and affecting their world.

Now I am starting to flesh that out a bit, and two characters in the new story are Denith Lorn. One is an fully ordained Lorn, the other is what I am currently calling an "aspirant", basically a teenager seeking to become one of the Lorn.

I have decided that "Denith" is actually the name of their principle (and probably only) deity. Basically, the most powerful of the spirits who overarches the world and who rules and guides both spiritual and physical worlds.

The "Lorn" part means "servants" so the priesthood are the "Servants of God" essentially. I am also introducing some more powerful spirits, including an "angel" analogue called the Denith An ("Spirits of God"). The first story introduces a lot of this, but I am saving a fuller explication of the religion for a later story that will take place at the most important temple of the faith.

As someone with a fascination for mythology, theology, and religion, creating a faith is an interesting exercise. The hard part is making it feel real and lived, rather than something created as a framework for the story. I have lots of experience living in, and studying, religions from throughout the world and history, so I hope I can "keep it real". Of course, there is also the risk of making it into pseudo-(insert religion here), simply an analogue for some real religion which then introduces the risk of dissing followers of that faith indirectly and maybe unintentionally. Or, of course, promoting that faith, but that's usually more likely to be deliberate (c.f. C. S. Lewis).

One thing I am not doing is using the story to deconstruct or critique religion (well, mostly, a bit might creep in). My religious figures are going to be, for the most part, sincere, honest believers who seek to live out the best values of what they believe. I will leave the "religion is evil and religious people are corrupt hypocrites" stuff for others.

Quote by MikeHanson

I finished reading Steven King’s The Gunslinger, the first book in his Dark Tower series which is supposed to be his foray into the fantasy genre. I started reading this book back in the 1980s but quit reading it because it was too bizarre and violent. I also wasn’t into the old west setting back then. I finally completed it. My conclusion: It is bizarre and violent, and I’m not sure I like the old west setting that much. It seemed like there was not enough to the story, the characters seem to come and go at random. It did not inspire me to go out and read any more of the series. This is the only Steven King novel I have ever read. I imagine he does better in the horror genre. I had seen advertisements for this new novel Fairy Tale, but now I am not as interested in reading it.

The Gunslinger is, in retrospect, the weakest book in The Dark Tower. I quite enjoyed it, though. Later books are still weird but the Western element fades into the background a bit. And if you know King's post-apoc fantasy epic The Stand at all, its Satan-analogue Randall Flagg is the villain later in the series (he's actually a recurring villain in King's fiction, even if he is best known from The Stand).

But, yes, in general King is much better at horror than fantasy. While I kind of drifted away from him due to over-saturation in the eighties and nineties, I would still put some of his work (The Mist, Christine, Salem's Lot, The Shining) pretty high on my horror reading list. And he's done some excellent shorter works, like the four novellas in Different Seasons, not all of which are even horror (e.g. The Body, the basis for Rob Reiner's film Stand By Me, is from that collection, as is Rita Hayworth And the Shawshank Redemption, basis for The Shawshank Redemption film).

New story that I have underway.

One day, I will succeed.