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How to End a Novel: Writing Strong Story Endings | Now Novel:
1. Leave readers guessing: The open-ended story
2. Bring readers full circle: Ending where you began
3. Pull the rug from beneath their feet: Shocking twist endings
4. Create feel-good lingering: ‘Happily ever after’ endings
5. Build in ‘what next?’ – Cliffhanger endings
6. Create complex resolutions: Combining ending types
7. Avoid cliched and unsatisfying story endings: Ending ‘don’ts’
Christopher Tolkien and the legacy of his father J.R.R. Tolkien: The Steward of Middle-earth:
In 1975, Christopher Tolkien left his fellowship at New College, Oxford, to edit his late father’s massive legendarium. The prospect was daunting. The 50-year-old medievalist found himself confronted with 70 boxes of unpublished work. Thousands of pages of notes and fragments and poems, some dating back more than six decades, were stuffed haphazardly into the boxes. Handwritten texts were hurriedly scrawled in pencil and annotated with a jumble of notes and corrections. One early story was drafted in a high school exercise book.
C.S. Lewis And J.R.R. Tolkien: The Unpayable Debt of Writing Friends (Throwback Thursday) | A Pilgrim in Narnia:
A now-famous literary pact between Tolkien and Lewis, “Tollers” and “Jack,” confirms how different their approach was. Here Humphrey Carpenter records Tolkien’s recollection of a conversation they had, with Lewis speaking first:
“Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.” We agreed’ (said Tolkien) ‘that he should try “space-travel”, and I should try “time-travel”. (Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien, 190).
C.S. Lewis’ space travel story, Out of the Silent Planet, appeared quickly in 1938. We don’t get to see what Tolkien was working on until after he died.
The Philosophy of Our Time | Boston Review:
Nearly forty years after his death in 1980, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is best remembered as the father of existentialism. We are most familiar with him as the theorist of freedom, authenticity, and bad faith in philosophical treatises such as Being and Nothingness (1943) and literary works such as Nausea (1938) and No Exit (1944). But eclipsed in this popular image is an appreciation of the staggering range of his dozens of volumes of published work, especially the fruit of his political activity from the end of World War II until his death—a period marked most notably by a rich and sustained engagement with Marxism.
Far from being consigned to the ash heap of history, the mid-century encounter between Marxism and existentialism remains vital today. As we seek political and philosophical bearings in this time of renewed calls for a socialist alternative to capitalism, postwar efforts to bring Marxism and existentialism together have much to teach us—not only because of the continuing importance of each mode of thought to political thinking and organizing, but also because their interaction in Sartre’s work deepens our understanding of how we exercise agency under conditions we do not control.
The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Existentialist | OUPblog:
Sartre’s talk “Existentialism is a Humanism” was an instant legend. The venue was packed, the crowd spilling into the street. Furniture got broken. People fainted and were carried outside. Sartre had to push his way through to the podium, where he delivered a speech entirely off the cuff. Unsurprisingly, in the circumstances, it was rather sketchy and occasionally inconsistent.
Beauvoir’s altogether more coherent account was published a few weeks later as “Existentialism and Popular Wisdom” in the third issue of Les Temps Modernes, the cultural and political journal the pair had founded.
These were the keynotes of their rich programme of talks, articles, plays, and novels, which firmly established the fifth and sixth arrondisements of Paris as the centre of European intellectual innovation.
Hackers Are Targeting Createspace Author Accounts - The Book Designer:
Authors who have an account on Createspace should go change their passwords immediately — and while they’re at it, they should also double check their payment details.
Reports of Hacking
This story has for the most part been ignored by the press, but starting some time in March or April 2018, hackers began to target author accounts on Createspace.
I have read multiple independent reports in several closed Facebook groups, Reddit, and on Kbaords dated in April, June, July, August, and as late as the first week of November from authors who say that someone hacked their CS account.
Writers On The Move: The Three Most Important Components for Publishing Ebooks:
Formatting. I list this last because most e-book services like Amazon, Createspace, BookBaby etc. make it clear that formatting is essential and provide guidelines for getting it right. I included expanded step-by-step instructions for formatting your book for Kindle in the Appendix of my multi award-winning book on editing, The Frugal Editor.
Note:You should know that when a reader buys your e-book on Amazon, he or she gets to choose what reader format they prefer for his or her preferred device after clicking the buy button. When you use Createspace/KDP, you reach most everyone short of those who refuse to buy from Amazon and you save accounting time tracking different online e-book distributors. You will also saves time reformatting from a print version to an e-book and get distribution and marketing benefits when you use them exclusively.
PS: The fourth most important component of e-books is marketing. No e-book—no book!—is truly published if it hasn’t been marketed. It’s part of the publisher’s job no matter how it is published or who the publisher is. And if it is self-published, marketing is as much the author’s job as the writing of the book. Everything you need to know to market your book the way a professional would if you had the money to hire her is in The Frugal Book Promoter
The Gay Love Stories of Moomin and the Queer Radicality of Tove Jansson | Autostraddle:
Jansson’s queerness is often left out in stories of her life. Puffin editions of Moomin books talked about how she lived alone on her Finnish island; documentaries still talk of Pietil as a lifelong friend. Jansson is no
misnomer, rather, she fits in neatly with the trend of avoiding the personal lives of gay people
– particularly lesbians – that exists to this day.
De Lille; a sobering, brief history of her political time – Ed Herbst - BizNews.com:
For those readers who think Patricia de Lille is something of a national hero for her part in exposing the arms deal that gave us an early heads up on Zuma and his then-incipient army of Zuptoids, reading this will make them think again. The kindest interpretation one can make of veteran journalist Ed Herbst’s time line on her many public statements over the years is that she’s a loose cannon of note, that she trims her sails to the prevailing political winds and brashly tailors her message to whatever audience, regardless of the wider truth.
Russia, Ukraine, and the Orthodox Church | Council on Foreign Relations:
President Poroshenko and the Ukrainian legislature, the Rada, were crucial actors in the move towards a canonically legitimate national Orthodox church. One of the president’s key advisors, Rostyslav Pavleko, was charged with a long-term effort to lead out to the leaders of the world’s Orthodox churches and their home governments to build support for the process that was occurring and the dialogue that was ongoing with the Constantinople patriarch. And so that it was in fact a parliamentary resolution which was cited by the patriarch as one of the triggers for action by Constantinople.
Two Jesuits on the religious history behind witches, magic and Halloween | America Magazine:
The historical witch hunt that people usually have in mind is not medieval; it is a little more recent than that. When we think of the witches who were burned or prosecuted, we are talking about something that emerges in the 15th century and lasts until the end of the 18th century.
In this period, a witch was defined as a person who made a pact with the devil. The pact was usually sealed by sexual intercourse with the devil, and witches formed a community of evildoers, gathering regularly at so-called sabbats. The pacts are what made their evil so powerful.
