This intriguing article is by S. Dorman The supporting characters mentioned in this piece are wrong. But are they wrong for their stories? I’ve talked before about wrong characters and how they can be wrong about particular things, or wrong overall in a peculiar way. This piece is a variation, or perhaps further explication, of…
Article by Bruce G Charlton Tolkien’s remarkable creative method has been elucidated by TA Shippey in his Road to Middle Earth; and amply confirmed by the evidence from the multiple volumes of The History of Middle Earth (HoME) edited by Christopher Tolkien. What happens is that Tolkien treats his ‘first draft’ as if…
Article by S.Dorman Author and journalist John Garth taught a course at Signum University on Tolkien’s War-time experience and its influence on language and creativity. J.R.R. Tolkien seems always to have been a lover of high diction, in communion with his love of philology and making languages, but Mr. Garth points out that Tolkien’s…
Article by S. Dorman Is there a right—or wrong—way to fictionalize C.S. Lewis? I cannot say the question was considered when I began tearing into the materials for Fantastic Travelogue, a speculative fiction in which C.S. Lewis and Mark Twain talk things over in the hereafter. Fictionalizing questions that I came to later—in order…
Article by Professor Bruce G Charlton It is well known that CS Lewis and Owen Barfield were best friends, from soon after 1919 when they met as undergraduates in Oxford University until Barfield’s death in 1997, some 34 years after Lewis had died. Because Barfield’s active engagement with Lewis – as man and thinker – continued right throughout his life, as evidenced in…
Article by Professor Bruce G Charlton An Inklings meeting was the (usually) Thursday late-evening meeting in CS (‘Jack’) Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford; to read work in progress, criticize it, and have conversations arising from this. It is important to recognise that the focus of the Inklings was the writing of its members; even…
Article by J. Conrad Matthews Last week, I was looking at some artwork for a Dungeons & Dragons campaign I am playing in. The game had a new Dungeon Master, (not me!) and I was looking for a ‘look’ for my player. The sessions are lots of fun, the players are determining many of the…
This article by Tom Simon is a sequel to Ozamataz and first appeared on Bondwine. So far, I have described my thoughts about ozamataz up to the point where I asked whether one could attract that kind of self-sustaining fan participation, and if so, how. This is also the point at which the Muse, or the Guardian Angel, or…
article by essayist extraordinaire, Tom Simon I have spent the last week or so (when not sleeping off my medications) in a fairly continuous process of brainstorming, chewing over several new-to-me ideas and figuring out how to turn them into actual writing techniques. I forget exactly what prompted me to revisit the Key & Peele skit I…
Article by J. Conrad Matthews My official involvement with the paranormal began over twenty-five years ago when I received a police call to investigate a UFO. This was before ‘The X-Files’ and before anyone could be identified on a police band. I received a chorus of jokes ranging from the theme songs to ‘The…