God of Ruin is a Hard SF thriller, Book 3 in the Ruin War trilogy. Your heart is the door into hell. In the destructive struggle for the Aetheric Bridge, elite Graysmith Ritry broke his soul into seven constituent parts. Now those parts roam the world blinded by loss and new addictions, mopping up holdouts from the war with King Ruin. But the real war has only just begun. From the ashes of King Ruin’s defeat a god-like power rises, with a solitary decree- an unstoppable flood is coming, to wash everything clean. And Ritry is a soul divided. How …
story craft #19 Weight in a Name
You’ve probably heard of the callback, a technique comedians use to get fresh mileage out of an old joke, often with exponentially uproarious results. Here’s a callback in Seinfeld: Seinfeld did these a lot, in this case it was a callback and a kind of catch phrase linking back to a previous episode, that when repeated multiple times, only gets more power. Master of my domain. I use these sometimes just hanging out with people- something gets mentioned early on, you see a chance to mention it again later, tangentially related to what they’re saying, boom, everybody laughs. Everybody uses …
Why The Maze Runner outruns all logic – movie review
★★★ The Maze Runner by James Dashner (Dash is a good name for a book about running) is an infuriatingly good example of taking great liberal splashes of all the great stuff that went before (LOST, Truman Show, Hunger Games), and not learning the key lesson from any of them. It is fun, it is rollicking, but by the end (and after reading the synopses of its sequels on wikipedia) I just feel like it’s empty, like a jester’s sad bauble-bladder deflated of all air. Disappointing. But, if you’re not burned out still on the let-down cop-out ending of a …
King Ruin – The Ruin War 2
King Ruin is a Hard SF thriller, Book 2 in the Ruin War trilogy. Your soul is the war zone. In the fearsome battle with Mr. Ruin, elite Graysmith Ritry dived deeper into the fires of the mind than ever before. There he found the ‘Aetheric Bridge’, a crossing-point that links all souls throughout time, and unleashed its awesome power. Now that power has been noticed. King Ruin, a malevolent entity far greater than Mr. Ruin, wants the secret of the Bridge, and Ritry alone stands in his path. But Ritry is nothing compared to the King, and there’s nowhere …