The Ulangar: Book I, Part 1

ARGUMENT: This is the Book of Origins, where all things begin and all things meet their opposites.

Death and War I dream

of the Stars and Spirits of night

with brilliance high within

high without

And of Ulangar

the god-child who shaped mankind

the mortal who warred against the

hated One of man and beast

 

Oh Muse of my inner eye

under the brow of thy heavy foot

wilt thou not offer thy gift

illuminate my senses

Let me clutch that vision in my hand

to cultivate and bloom into words

still remembering that Vision of beauty

how glorious in answer

Allow my ears to hear thy kisses

let me grasp thy voice in my deepest mind

lest I loose it to the rampant winds of time

Beget my ideas and nurse them to manhood

else the whole will be for naught

Touch these weary hands and let them live

how grand the voice to give such vibrance

Exalted by thine name oh my Muse

without whom the sages lose wisdom

hounds are deaf and kings are beggars

Only thy words matter in this shriv'led

life so naked before thy touch

Envelop us in thy cloak and staves

one stave of joy one stave of sadness

for what means this dust without you

The answer lies beyond my reach

how your grasp as kept me tight

eliminating my fears and woes

Life is everything with thee

and nothing

without thee

The Ulangar: Introduction

No, this blog isn't abandoned. It's just been inactive.

I'm going to continue this by posting up some of my old writing, starting with a big one - the epic that I half completed under the pen name "Viktur Conan Slayson". It's one of those works that took me the better part of 6 years to write, then I essentially abandoned it when my time suddenly disappeared due to work. When I went back to it, I realized that I had become a different person than the one who started working on it. As such, I don't feel that I can properly finish it.

This beast went through an uncountable number of revisions. It started as a dream, I wrote that down as a five page sketch for a story, then started writing it out as a story board for a movie, then switched over to the poetic epic after I started studying different ones. I invented a poetic form, created parts of a musical score for it, half created a language, wrote a copy paper box full of notes, and there's even some parts that are good. It was intended to have a 10 book structure, with an eleventh book addendum; I completed up to book 4 and the beginning of 5, and have notes for the rest of it.

The introduction to the work, which I won't post here, was the poem from Horace's Odes, Book III, 30.

Making a Webcomic - Retrospective

It's been well over a year since I started my own webcomic, and about 7 months since it ended. Along with this, I've started working on collaborative webcomics. That's given me time to do some navel-gazing.

Here's some things I would do differently:

• Don't require people to create an account and log in, just to post comments. That really limits the community base that can be created.
• Don't be afraid to use that joke. This comic was an attempt at a mapping joke, and I was tempted to turn it into a reference to the "minefield" Windows game. In retrospect, I should have gone there. There are many other instances of this throughout the comic.
• But don't re-hash old jokes that you've already made. That's a gimmie.
  
• Don't finish on a broken link. Yeah, that "Lightning Made of Owls" link is broken. I could fix it, or put a redirection web page there, but instead I'll leave it as a monument to this.

Here's some things I think I did right:

• Start it. I had been wavering on starting this, and I'm glad I did.
  
• Give the project a definite scope. I decided to keep myself within the single movie, which meant I only had a limited amount of story to go on. It's not an open-ended project - those kinds of things end up being abandoned.
• Give myself a deadline.
• Finish it.

A New Webcomic

I've been irritated at myself for constantly consuming content, and decided that I wanted to change that.

In response, I created a project I've been considering for a long while: The Bloody Nipple Saga. It's a webcomic in the spirit of Shamus Young's DM of the Ring and David Morgan-Mar (et al)'s Darths and Droids.

Yes, it's been a while since I started it, but I wanted to make note of this here.

My Mid-Life Crisis: A Unicycle

I finally did it. I hit my mid-life crisis and bought a unicycle. What I find fascinating is that, despite the difficulty of learning to ride one in my 30s, I'm finding myself dedicated to learning it.

I finished day 7 of riding it, and I'm able to travel about 6 feet without holding on to anything. Not consistently, but it's a definite sign of improvement.

A Solution to the Debate over Marriage in the US

I live in the blue dot in the middle of Texas, so the legal issue over what "marriage" means is hotly debated in bumper stickers. There's the "marriage = one man and one woman" camp and the "gay rights" camp.

I have an answer to this whole debate. It seems to me that the whole issue around this debate stems from marriage being a religious union. Since the U.S. government is supposed to have a separation between church and state, I propose that marriage be removed from the law.

So, if you want to be married, by all means go ahead. It's your decision. But the law shouldn't have any special language about it.

However, there should be special accommodations for families. What makes it so special when two unrelated people want to live together, as opposed to, say, two brothers? Yeah, the two unrelated people generally have children, but there's all kinds of circumstances where children are raised by people other than their natural parents.

Blogging A Novel

I've been turning a fantasy world in my head for many months, now. Recently, I've been making notes on the world, and otherwise trying to assemble it into a coherent form. Then, the inevitable happened.

I added a story.

I created a general outline for a story, added a few rough characters, and now I've got the itch (again). This time I might make it happen.

I'm starting now with exploring the world's people and parts of its history through legends and myths. I'll merge this, soon, with a character study, of which some may enter the main story, others may move into historical characters, and others may be thrown out. I'll also work on the story sketches.

My point of this post reflects a desire to start putting up some of the fleshed out stories that come out of these initial sketches. I'll see where it goes.