Dissecting Literature

 Hi there! It’s time for a good, old fashioned Dissecting Literature post since we haven’t done this for quite some time. As we said in the last post, editing and life carried us away, but there are many interesting topics left in the world we’d like to cover.  This post was in my mind for quite some time, I just didn’t want to stick my head into a hornet nest with today’s topic – religion. But live at let live is a great motto, so now I’ll try to stay objective and keep away from anything judgemental (it’s a great way to find peace with others and yourself).  Religions exist from the beginning of human culture. It’s in our nature to seek answers about the world, because – as H. P. Lovecraft put it – our greatest fear is the unknown. On a practical side, every religion tries to answer the same questions: the beginning, the end, and what happens in between. Science can answer most of these to a certain level, but there will always be more questions.  A professor of mi...

  Hey there, traveler! Some of you may have been wondering about the utter radio silence for the past weeks. Well, a few things contributed to that – lack of ideas, late-autumn low mood and a bit of buzz about our WIP. As you might have seen on Twitter, we got around to have a professional edit Shackles of the Storm, an oh boy, was it not an experience! So much so that I decided to write a little something about it, if any of you are still waiting for this step.   First of all, a round of applause: our editor did a fantastic job. She was thorough, she went into details and she didn’t pull her punches when that was needed. To top it, she did it with a pinch of sarcastic humor that made us laugh many times (on our own incompetence). Her work is even more impressive when you consider how many things she needed to fix, and to do that, I’m going to publicly humiliate myself by sharing our most prevalent flaws. Okay, maybe I won’t humiliate myself, but I think if you learn what we f...

Hey there, traveler! In our last post, we discussed some cultural and psychological background about everyone’s favorite paranormal trope – the ghost stories. However, for some people, these spooky otherworldly apparitions go beyond the realm of fiction and myth and turn very real. Throughout history, some swore on their life that they experienced hauntings personally and raised the fascinating question: can ghost exist?  Similar to many topics about people’s beliefs, there’s no hard answer. Since science considers anything possible until there’s concrete evidence against it, we can only dissect a number of particular events and consider circumstances that may drive people to believe what they saw, heard or otherwise experienced was indeed a ghost. The very first ghost sightings happened early in history, and as such, people needed no concrete evidence, only credibility. If you are a 14th-century peasant and someone you trusted said they saw the ghost of Old McDiedhorribly in his s...

  Hey there, traveler! Spooktober continues its march towards Halloween, and so, I’ve returned with another famous macabre trope – ghosts. Since it’s directly linked to last week’s post about more fleshy and brain-eaty living dead beings, I suggest you check that out (here’s a link ). Now, onto the topic. As we discussed before, dead things returning to life is a tale as old as time, having ancient origins like (as one of our reader’s pointed out) Egyptian mythology with the resurrection of Osiris, or Greek epics like Odyssey, where the titular hero converses with ghosts of long dead heroes. But ghost is a much more variedly used term in contrast to zombies and the undead. If you think about the Ghost of Christmas Past, celtic ghosts such as the banshee or your friendly neighborhood poltergeist, sometimes a ghost isn’t even a dead person. So, how do we start to tackle this trope? At the beginning, of course. Ever since the days of ancient Mesopotamia (a.k.a. the first civilization ...

Hey there, traveler! Since Spooktober has officially begun, I thought it only fair to use this opportunity to shed some light on the oldest horror trope ever: zombies. Or to be more precise, the reoccurring theme of living dead creatures, as they are so common nearly every civilization has one version of the legend. The basics are pretty simple – something or someone that by all logic should be dead and buried now walks among the simple folk, terrorizing brains and eating children, or the other way around. Legends of these beings are so widespread they have different subcategories to them based on how touchable they are and how easily they come back after their should-be-final departure. The meatier (or to sound intellectual, corporeal) variants range from the previously discussed vampires to literal rotting corpses pushed around by angry or just really bored demons. In contrast to the ephemeral ghosts, these living dead mean more direct physical threat, and by extension, cause a diffe...

  Art by Robson Michel Hey there, travelers! It's Wednesday again, so I once again immersed myself into my newest book baby (really early in gestation), called After The Gods (at least for now). I just realized you can't read Wattpad without registering (it should have been obvious, I'm really sorry) so I decided to put the finished texts up onto the blog as well, so you can all read it and I'll make sure to include links in these posts as well. You can find the first chapter here: Chapter 1  If you're unfamiliar with the project or this series, I'll leave a link to last week's introduction here: link But for those who'd skip it, here's a tl;dr version: I decided to write a WIP and document my progress from the inception till the finishing moments of the first draft. Since I'm a proud pantser, this is as much a discovery for me than it is for you, and I thought I'll let you inside my mind to see how I shape a story. What I knew so far was t...

  1. A relic from the past Asgeir heard the first thud well before the fog crept in, yet he chose to disregard it. He thought it superstition, one of the many shadows plagueing every soul since the serpent’s rise. There was no reason for him to abandon this field so ripe with the remains of a bloody battle. Shattered spears, torn shields and dented blades lay everywhere Asgeir could see, some of which could still fetch him a day’s rations in the Nook. He couldn’t understand why people clung to these rusted mementos, but they did. They sought some salvation from the blunt axes and bent bows, a spark of hope hiding withing these weapons. A chance to fight the terrors that befell humanity. The next thud was louder and more clear, and when Asgeir raised his head, the blood froze in his veins. The horrid figure emerged from the milky mist and trampled on several half-eaten corpses while turning its blind sockets towards Asgeir’s racing heart. It was larger then the tales told, standing ...