If you want some more realistic facts about historical sea rover’s (including the real difference between pirates, buccaneers, and filibusters) check out The Sea Rover’s Practice, written by former Navy SEAL Benerson Little.
If I were ever going to publish a writing advice book, it would probably be something to stem the deluge of wannabe creative writers, like this:
I rant about paper fetishism a lot. This weird cult of the paper book habitually twists research into pseudoscience to slander ebooks as sleep-stealers, brain-numbers, and (ironically) out of fashion. It’s exhausting confronting these ignorant primitivists, particularly because I actually prefer paper books to ebooks. But I do not prefer them enough to lie or corrupt science in order to evangelize my preference as a universal virtue.
Paper fetishists, on the other hand, simply cannot stop lying about ebooks. Their obsessively dishonest denigration of ebooks is, to be honest, a little creepy. Of all the thinly veiled hate movements out there, this one has to be the inexplicably virulent. It’s just a book format, people.
So let’s talk about the latest anti-ebook polemic at Mic, which persists in ignorantly calling paper codices “actual books” in complete misunderstanding of the many formats books have gone through over the ages. Jon Levine continues the dumbing down of our discourse of book format by misrepresenting research to favor the dogma of paper fetishists.
Levine drags us through three categories of bullshit supposedly demonstrating the superiority of reading paper books: memory, comprehension, and empathy.
Today’s visual poetry is simply a maxim on how tactical victories can feed strategic defeat.
Thank you, Rick Perry.
hooker (Fr. houcre, Sp. urca): a Dutch vessel of fifty to 300 tons, single- or double-masted, with a fluyt-shaped hull. Sometimes referred to a three-mast vessel.
– The Sea Rover’s Practice : Pirate Tactics and Techniques, 1630-1730 by Benerson Little
Among the serialized fiction in my Free Fiction Friday cycle is a dark, gunpowder fantasy that combines elements of gritty, realist, “hard” fantasy and epic, classic, “high” fantasy.
Based on this fusion, I originally called the story High & Hard, not only to reflect the two genre elements but to capture the Western grittiness of the tale. I kicked up a domain for it and everything, www.highandhard.com, and snuck the phrase into the story:
He saw nothing, heard nothing except the broom-brush of nearby trees moving with the unstill air. His whole world was empty and, but for the sick breath of the wind, quiet… The sun was high and hard. Even through the sheet of cloud, it hurt his eyes.
In the meantime, I received some reader feedback that perhaps High & Hard isn’t the best title for the series. So, since a reader raised the issue I decided to let the readers decide the issue, and started a poll.
Given a range of options, readers overwhelmingly chose the existing title! Some options that I thought were shoe-ins (The Cornerstone, The Long War, The War for the Cornerstone) received no support whatsoever. The results are below: Continue reading