"I do not consider either the just, or the wicked, to be in a supreme state, but to be, every one of them, states of the sleep which the soul may fall into in its deadly dreams of good and evil when it leaves Paradise following the Serpent." ~ William Blake Christmas falls at that dividing point in the year where light is most oppressed by darkness. After the longest night of the year, the Midwinter Solstice, the unconquered sun returns on December 25th in the Sol Invictus. The birth of Christ was symbolically placed at this point, overlaying two ancient pagan holidays, Roman Saturnalia and Germanic Yule. The choice was poetic. What more dramatic day could a divine being enter a world ruled by a fallen angel, in order to preach love and forgiveness? After all, the pagan roots of Sol Invictus are drenched in drunkenness, slavery and sacrificial blood. This cosmic battle between good and evil has inspired writers and poets since the very first stories were told. The visionary artist and poet William Blake was fascinated by the conflict between darkness and light and embodied it in … [Read more...] about May you walk in the Light: Merry Christmas vs Pagan Solstice
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The Corrections: Hemingway Editor scores Nobel Prize winning author’s prose as “poor”
I am a word nerd. I love to geek out on weird and wonderful applications like Scrivener, Microsoft Word, Grammarly and the Hemingway Editor. These programs are innovative and can do some of the heavy-lifting for writers, especially in commercial writing, social media and journalism, catching spelling mistakes and proofing for small errors. But for novelists, poets and short story writers, editing programs are like talking to your drunken roommate from college; they don't always make a lot of sense. Allowing an editing program to decide how you should write is a critical mistake. Writing software has certain weaknesses, just check out the infamous spell check poem which proves conclusively that spellcheck is not the boss of you. Editing programs cannot detect rhythm or poetic metaphor or choose when the passive voice is more powerful than the active voice. Complex sentence structure baffles the algorithms of these applications. One day maybe, but not now. Editing and spelling software cannot replace education or instinct. Writers need to learn the rules in order to make … [Read more...] about The Corrections: Hemingway Editor scores Nobel Prize winning author’s prose as “poor”
