As you hopefully saw in our recent weekly writing update, I finally finished the first draft of Verdon's Tragedy, a side story set in the Fo'Fonas world. Even if revisions go smoothly, I don't expect a release date sooner than December 2022, but I want to share some thoughts about the story and the writing now.
Weekly Writing Update
Time to start another month already, and we're over halfway through the year. You can tell, because we're halfway through Blood Magic's third season with this week's release of Blood and Dragons, Part Two.
Society’s Origins
When I unearth an article that I can make applicable to writing and storytelling, I have no compulsions against sharing it with you. This week, that’s a paper from Science Advances on how societies initially arose: “Disentangling the Evolutionary Drivers of Social Complexity: A Comprehensive Test of Hypotheses.”
Blood Magic S3:E6: Blood and Dragons, Part Two Release
If I’d plotted the series differently, this could easily have been the climax, the final episode, the end of it all. I didn’t, though, so I hope that means that you’ll all now be on tenterhooks about what the real ending might be like.
Dialogue Short Stories Reviews
I made an exception this past week for a pair of short stories (they could almost be called flash fiction) that Brandon Sanderson recommends for studying dialogue. Since the stories were fine examples of both storytelling and writing craft, I decided to share a review for them, along with a review for Sanderson’s contribution to this technical style.
Logical Fallacies
A logical fallacy is a systemic flaw in the sequential process of deriving conclusions that can occur in any application of that method of deliberation, and can result in achieving erroneous end states. Significantly, it does not include cases of failure to implement logical processes in the first place, nor does it apply in most cases to innate traits of neurophysiology.
Announcing: Books to Read
Those detail-oriented readers may notice a change to the site's main menu. The "What I'm Reading" link has been changed to "Books to Read." This is part of a series of small changes I'll be implementing over the next few months to better emphasize to potential visitors what the site is all about, and what they can expect to gain by coming here.
Weekly Writing Update
Between finishing Verdon's Tragedy and making progress on Trust but Verify, I didn't have a lot of time for other writing this week.
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Review
Don’t expect a text that exists primarily to inform or tell a coherent story, because that’s not what Franklin was setting out to do with his autobiography. It was instead intended originally for his son, and eventually for a wider audience of the burgeoning America, as a moral guide, an example and explication of how it might be possible to live a moral, productive, and well-regarded life, such as Franklin himself led.
Definition, Connotation, and the Function of Language
A long time ago, there were no dictionaries, no modern language associations, no Oxford standards. Language is a fundamentally organic system that has been evolving for thousands of years, as complex and intricate as something like the economy, and for most of its existence its rules have not been explicit.
IGC Publishing 