Have you ever started reading a book and find the descriptions of the backdrop to be too rich in the details? While in which the characters seem far too paper-thin and inauthentic?
(more…)Tag: half-penny thoughts
Half-penny thoughts — 12sep25
While I do have other regrets in my life, I think those that cut deepest are those times that I acted cruelly or unjustly to someone as a defense mechanism against all the times that people treated me cruelly or unjustly in my youth.
I was bullied most of my childhood, by extended family as well as by my peers.
By my mid-teens, I was starting to be mean to certain people with the justification was that then I was doing it before they could do it to me, especially when we started drifting apart after being close. Always “as jest”, of course. Plausible deniability…
By my late twenties, I wouldn’t even let most people get closer than superficial interactions with me.
There are people, both living and deceased, that I wish I could apologize to for treating them the way I did. But how to find them? Even social media is useless for finding some of the people most owed an apology. And not everyone wants to hear an apology from me anyway. Those are the kinds of knives I used to stab people.
And while I try to not live in the past or in regrets, I do wish I could at least try to repair as best as I am able those moments where I was unnecessarily mean to another person out of avoidance of risking feeling pain myself.
Instead of avoiding pain, I now carry this poison with me with nowhere to set it down.
You have to laugh at the irony.
Half-penny thoughts — 11sep25
Photo by Ron Lach on Pexels.com One thing that has nagged me recently is the concept of blue pills and red pills.
(more…)Half-penny thoughts — 10sep25
I started reading Jhereg by Steven Brust last night as part of my recent determination to create some air between my brain and various digital and social medias (streaming services including YouTube, mass-social media, news sites, video games, & etc.). I am annoyed with myself now that it has taken so long to read his writing aside from Freedom and Necessity.
I hope that no one is offended when I say Jhereg is just the kind of pulp fiction I was looking for. It is not high literature, nor does it pretend to be. The novel is a fantasy tale of an assassin and mobster, Vlad Taltos, who happens to be a second-class citizen (because he is human) in a fantasy city full of thievery, deception and double-crossings. Plus, he has magic and a reptilian familiar.
And, so far, it works — as a bit of a hard-boiled noir and fantasy crossover. A movie with similar DNA (except set in a futuristic Earth instead of a medieval fantasy world) might be Blade Runner.
Like The Witcher books I’ve been re-reading, it has an easy flow to the storytelling that I think might be missing from a lot of the more recent writing out there. Even some of books I’ve enjoyed that have been written in the past 25 years seem to be trying real hard to be “good literature” when they are, at their base, pulp novels. Or, maybe, I’m just more tuned into penny dreadfuls, pulp fiction, and weird tales and would prefer to read that birdcage liner stuff.
Sometimes I wonder if we put too much emphasis on structure, formulae and erudition, and not enough on merely telling a “ripping yarn”. I certainly don’t know. But I’m sure there are tons of opinions about the matter.
Half-penny thoughts | 29aug25
Takes one to know one, absolutely… But I’ve grown weary of the cynic.
It’s easy to be a cynic. It takes almost no effort at all to be one. Decide that the world is shit and there’s simply nothing that can be done about the matter. People who have a more positive spin on things are Dreamers and Sheeple. Those “in on the secret” walk into an echo chamber of like-minded cynics and we see a devil hiding under every bed. And, in that echo chamber, we tell each other that the devils are in cahoots and they are out to get us. To make matters worse, those devils are also between the sheets and every bed has multiple sheets and, just because those sheeple can’t see them doesn’t mean the devils aren’t at work making the world even more shit than it was to begin with. In secret. Then we remind each other: if you are not with us, you must be against us and you have therefore self-identified as The Enemy.
What claptrap.
(more…)Half-penny thoughts | 20aug25
Photo by Dmitry Vechorko on Unsplash I am on the drift again. The wending roads beckoning from my within, an untethering from my abouts.
Though the weather is still too warm still for such things, I drew on my fleece jacket, pulled up the hood around my face and over my head as I walked from car to my once-a-week-office-space and felt at home within the folds of fabric. My bare legs incongruent with the jacket over my torso, but I could care less. I used to half-jest that I was made for kilts — my legs have always been too warm and I still wear shorts at home in the winter when everyone else wraps themselves in thick blankets.
(more…)Half-penny thoughts | 14aug25
Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash I have problems with the logic behind the pithy advice that in order to be a great writer, you must read. Voraciously. I know Stephen King has been credited with saying something along those lines, and I’m pretty certain he isn’t the first author to give such advice. [Oh no! Nobody Author dares counter the prevailing wisdom of the Almighty Stephen King! Heresy!]
I mean, I think that might be partially true if you are looking to emulate a style, a genre or an author. I will submit that you should be well-read in order to know how others write — as long as when you have done so, you read or have read with a critical eye. Reading only eye-candy and consuming to consume will not make anyone a great writer. But I question the concept that the reading requirement is a persistent prerequisite for writing great things.
It is probably a good thing that I have no ambitions for greatness. I’m quite alright just writing and enjoying the act of writing. Happy about it, even. So there’s little risk of greatness coming from my little corner of the world. I honestly should let those striving towards greatness deal with this question and not worry my pretty little head about the matter.
But I’m not convinced being a constant reader necessarily is a requirement towards being a great writer. Especially if you want to be a writer that wants to be the pathfinder type. To boldly go where no one has gone before, or some such thing. Or the subversive, where you need to have enough freedom apart from classic tropes to break them while still remaining familiar with them. I can see several other types of writers who could benefit from not “reading when they aren’t writing.”
When wisdom seems to not stand up to scrutiny, I get all nervy and bothered and I end up saying something.
Am I off the mark? Probably. But I remain unconvinced that the wisdom that a writer must read as part of their formula for greatness always holds true.
I know… I’m all duck and cover after this post. Especially after invoking and questioning the King of Horror’s holy gospel.
Your thoughts?
Be gentle as you tear me a new hole. I break easy.
Half-penny Thoughts | 12aug25
Photo by Daniel Jensen on Unsplash I’ll admit it: I’ve been binging The Walking Dead again.
If I want to pretend to be an intellectual, I’d say it was research into human nature in the face of an apocalypse. I have not recently seen evidence in real life that suggests that people will act differently than their fictional counterparts if they were faced with a zombie (or any kind of, really) apocalypse. Zombies in TWD might be the overt threat, but the real monsters are other people. The Witcher games and books, fantasy tales about a “monster hunter” mutant named Geralt of Rivia play the same tune. Horrifying creatures are a real threat, but the true monsters are us.
(more…)Half-penny thoughts | 07aug25
Somewhere in Alaska, my photo My mind keeps going back to when I was driving through Alaska, Yukon and British Columbia. Not to disparage Alberta or Saskatchewan, but those landscapes were too “familiar”. Really, once you’ve seen one endless field of a particular crop, they all take on a similar character and we have a hell of a lot of examples of that landscape when you’re away from the river valleys in the upper midwestern states of North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin. My eye craved something different from what I could view a half-hour’s drive from home. And so, the last leg of my trip was not nearly as visually stimulating as the foreleg of the same.
(more…)half-penny thoughts | 18jul25
Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash I visit plenty of places on the internet lately for or by writers and I recently encountered this strange theme on one site where all of the writers seemed to all be posting in the theme of “you’re a great writer, keep writing” affirmations for each other. Some were even pretty self-congratulatory (“yes, I like my own posts and I am not ashamed to”). Still others were of the “everyone here is the best writer”.
Now… I’m not against encouragement. I’ve even partaken in it myself. But when it becomes a common, daily and reoccurring theme… I have the strong urge to pinch my nose and walk away from that kind of community. Even if it is well-intended community-building, it still smells like bullshit.
Write, don’t talk about how great everyone else’s writing is (and god-forbid, don’t tell me how great you think your own writing is).
What do you think?
Am I just being a humbug? Or does it feel like a weird kind of phony? Do these folks really mean it? Or are they just saying it, hoping that others will pay it forward until it boomerangs back?
