This is not to say that I stopped writing all together. I’ve made a lot of headway on my two big fiction projects, The Cost of Magic, and The Tribe of the Star. The Tribe of the Star has taken on a pleasant change of tone, which I think, and my girlfriend concurs, will be much more appealing to the reader. You’ll get to see the first of those pieces online here in the next couple of days.

I started out posting The Cost of Magic here at Loki Listens every time I added to it. I dropped that in favor of completing it and polishing it after 20 some-odd parts. It’s become a bit of an epic work for me, being the longest piece of fiction I have ever written. It’s still a long way from completion, but I have very high hopes for it. To be cliche, it’s a labor of love.

Jack
I Still Listen.

Update

It’s easy to forget that we have perfection in our hands when times are rough. Richard Matheson spent a lifetime writing horror and dark fantasy, to end up his masterwork as one of the greatest love stories ever told. Why did it take so long? Love is so hard to express, even for the most sensitive of us. Passion is so much easier. This is why we are barraged by “love stories” that are nothing more than sex driven fantasies. In the rare instance that passion and love meet, we find something truly great. Something that transcends words. The love story is now even harder to tell, and it can become downright scary.

As writers, when we find this kind of extraordinary relationship, our first instinct is to run. We want to run because for the first time in our lives we have no words to describe what is happening to us. It’s confusing, we stumble, we fall. We falter. You see, in running, we can understand, in words. The only way we really understand anything.

With love comes fear, but hopefully passion and love together can offset our natural fear of loss.

In Matheson’s What Dreams May Come, the main character has to come face to face with not only his greatest fear, but also the greatest fear of the majority of mankind. Is that what makes it so compelling? It is definitely what makes it ring so true in the hearts of so many.

By using this novel, I’ve skirted myself(safely around), for now, the subject of my own feelings and fears. Eventually I’ll face them down, as Matheson, and so many others have, finding the strength in their constant growth.

Jack.
I Listen.

Fragments
#5
What Dreams May Come

But every Tuesday that this happens, it gets a little worse. Life looks a little more bleak. You can’t count sheep anymore. You stare at the back of your eyelids in a daze that seems, almost, like sleep. It’s so close, you can taste it. You can smell the dreams at the boarder of your thoughts, screaming to come out.

But they don’t. And it’s no where close to sleep. It’s worse than counting sheep. It’s worse than racing thoughts. It’s emptiness. Silence. Loneliness. Apathy.

And sometimes you wonder if it’s ever going to get any better. It’s more than Tuesdays now. Then, you find yourself reading something like this. Something totally asinine.

When I started writing the novel, The Cost of Magic, which is unfolding slowly on this blog, I grabbed a few characters from a novel I could never bring myself to finish a few years back. The name of that novel was to be: Blame it on Tuesday. It may still come together, as I allude to it more than a little in The Cost of Magic.

We’ll have to see how bad these Tuesdays get first.

Jack
I Listen.

Fragments
#3
Blame It On Tuesday

There were, however, literally dozens of “Saint Valentines.” The name was awarded to martyrs by the early Catholic Church, meaning very simply, that the man was worthy to be a saint.

Arguments have been made that Valentine’s Day was never a holiday of any sort, until the writings of Geoffry Chaucer, after which, it began to appear in many works of fiction.

Valentine is generally regarded as the patron saint of lovers, thus the holiday.

So there you have it. A very brief, and fairly uninformative generalization about this day’s festivities. Either way, if you’ve got someone, hold on to them. But, what do I know? I just listen.

Jack.
I Listen.
Saint Valentine

Way off-topic.

On my new phone I’ve been keeping track of where I’m going and such with GPSed.

Still have the Early Bird Edition of Loki Listens Volume 1: Developmental Theology. Download the PDF here.

Lots of cool stuff coming up this week, as I am back on my regular writing schedule.

Jack
I Listen

Monday Update
January 5, 2009

This week we are going to see more updates to The Cost of Magic and the Basic Ideology series.  I’m going to introduce you to my first completed eBook, and a couple of new Squidoo lenses.I’ve got an article on teaching styles, and an article on two relatively new technologies that seem to keep butting heads.

I’ve got a lot planned, and as long as no one slips me anymore Vicodin, it should come out pretty cool.

Jack
I Listen.
Monday Update
December 15, 2008

*****

It started off innocently enough, like most things. Especially things in Minus’ life. He often felt like the opposite of King Mitus, since everything he touched turned to shit, instead of gold.

“But it’s different this time,” he thought to himself. He always thought this to himself. He seemed to really like writing an internal monologue.

So, there he was: very happy, very stupid, and very drunk. What was different from every other day? Nothing. Nothing at all. Or so he thought.

It was near midnight, and after several pitchers, when he found himself alone, talking to a girl in her early twenties. The volume was turned down on the rest of the bar. The people moved in slow motion and sound traveled as if through water. Minus loved these moments, when he felt so very at home. These moments seldom lasted, and took much drink to accomplish.

The girl was cute, but young. Minus had already forgotten her name. But this time was different. She had that silken aura glow, like the girl that haunted his dreams. He’d seen her play a dozen roles in his dreams, but she was always obviously the same person. He could always tell by that bright white glow. She was a mother one night, a sister another, a lover more often than anything. In his dreams, Minus never looked the same. He knew who he was, even when dreams happened from odd perspectives, as they often do. And he always knew who she was, even when she was nothing like the night before, or any of the thousands of nights in his life.

This was a long dream. It haunted and beckoned. It tore at his heart strings and played death metal in his rotten soul. Minus was not a bad person, but a person consistently forced into bad situations. He couldn’t really grasp how at least half of his life had actually happened. But it had. Dreams through a Seconal haze. Hadn’t there been another dream-girl a few years(or a lifetime) ago? The Thorazine year that followed that instance had taught him that, no, there had never been a girl in his life with this aura. Even though his pineal gland would ram itself around to try and break free from the anti-psychotic’s numbing embrace.

But the pineal gland survived for moments like this. Brief glimpses at reality on the other side of the vale. And it shouted as he talked to this girl.

Minus fought a little when he felt the vertigo pulling him in. He was never very good at fighting this falling feeling, even though it almost always lead to pain directly. So he funneled down in to the synchronicity that surrounded this girl.

Her name, it later turned out, was Jane. Jane was 22, not really old enough to know better. Minus knew better, he just didn’t care. If Jane had known better, she would not have cared either.

——–

Jack.
I Listen.

The Cost of Magic
Section #1

Fable 2 has sucked the life out of me all week.  I’m on my second play through.  My friends come over to play it constantly.  It’s a pretty big deal.  hah.  I have 39 of 50 acheivements, and 800 of 1000 gamer points.  Not bad.

You would really enjoy Fable 2, no matter what kind of games you are into.  It’s been catching a lot of flack because it’s not very deep, and the story is short.  But, come on.  It’s freaking fun.  I can’t get enough.  Seriously.

Aside from that, a lot is going on.

• My depression has lifted.
• Posts every Sunday.  No exceptions.
• Posts may be even more frequent.
• Fun Stuff coming.  Including a weekly podcast.
• My Xbox 360 writes it’s own blog!
• You can now leave tips, care of TipJoy.  Check the side bar—>
• Part time day job starting soon, as well as a writing gig.
• Developmental Theology 089 eBook in the works.

Is that everything?  I doubt it, but for now it is.

-Jack

“It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are. In view of this and in keeping it in mind constantly while dealing with the book of Genesis, I have, insofar as I was able, explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation.”

– Saint Augustine of Hippo: The Literal Interpretation of Genesis 1:19–20, Chapt. 19 [AD 408]

Saint Augustine’s ideas on the nature of truth and science are essential to modern understanding and have influenced many great teachers and philosophers of all ilks.

-Jack
I Listen.
I do that Travel thing sometimes, too.

Basic Ideology 101

Lesson #2
Saint Augustine and the Reconciliation of Science and Scripture