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Like every other kind of fictional genre, comics have the power to spark the imagination and restore a sense of beauty. Their fantastic heroes, villains, and sweeping mythologies have become for us a paradigm for how we can find goodness in a world that often seems bleak. For one comic… Read more »
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“Let us pine for the City where we are citizens… By pining, we are already there; we have already cast our hope, like an anchor, on that coast. I sing of somewhere else, not of here; for I sing with my heart, not my flesh. The citizens of Babylon hear… Read more »
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Do you have a blog? Ignatius Press is seeking bloggers to help us spread the word about our wonderful new novels! For a limited time, Ignatius Press is offering bloggers a FREE e-book of your choice of two new novels: The Rising by Bob Ovies or Tobit’s Dog by Michael… Read more »
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In my last post on Suffering and Inspiration, I mentioned that an author’s life can often give birth to the ideas for their characters. There are good reasons for this. A good character is built on events and people that an author has experienced. The human experience and other humans… Read more »
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This review was originally published at A Prince of the West. I try to order new novels from my publisher whenever I can afford to, partly to encourage them to keep publishing fiction and partly out of solidarity with my fellow authors. Sadly, the results are sometimes mixed, but lately… Read more »
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Marvin’s nephews … The conclusion was too obvious when they brought along their computer games and their cell phones and shrugged off their uncle’s suggestions about activities he had enjoyed as a boy. Fishing, exploring the lakeshore for agates, whizzing downhill on a toboggan, and reading Tom Sawyer had no… Read more »
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I hear about a science fiction novel from a friend. He says he thinks I’d like it; it’s along the same lines as another author I like, and involves a lot of very imaginative world building. So I go to the local sci-fi bookstore and pop in. They have a… Read more »
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Flannery O’Connor suffered from lupus. C.S. Lewis lost his young wife to cancer after only 4 years of marriage. There is a theory that G.K. Chesterton suffered from developmental coordination disorder. J.R.R. Tolkien contracted trench fever while serving in World War I, and continued to have bouts of illness throughout… Read more »
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Last week I wrote a bit about the creative process and how you must persevere past the “gap” between what you desire to create and what you can create. I thought I’d follow up with a quick post on one of the biggest enemies of creativity: comfort. Man craves comfort,… Read more »
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I am leaving for Cracow (Kraków) in a few hours, the better to celebrate the canonizations of Blessed John Paul II and the other guy. No disrespect to Blessed John XXIII, but in Poland he is most definitely second banana to the great Jan Paweł Drugi. Polish street vendors still… Read more »