Short Stories and Their Use in Fictional Novels

Short stories are cool because their structure is easier to comprehend in a short amount of time. After reading numerous stories a favorite genre, one begins to understand what separates the spellbinding journey from the boring narrative. There are uses of these shorter forms.

A novel is composed of short stories. Once you understand this it becomes easier to follow the most complex of books. You learn to take it bit by bit and connect it with the authors main idea. It should be that every chapter has some kind of meaning. It will probably have a major event, a struggle, a climax, something was learned by the characters. Not all the problems will be resolved till later though.

Clive Barker once said in an article that there is no "mental breakdown in Poe." You are simply thrown into the mayhem. In many modern horror writers' books, there is an intro to the world and then weird things start to happen. It is possible to create different effects on the reader's mind by structuring things differently. And it all comes down to the short form.

The Past Revisited

Poetry is a link to the soul. It's a creative act. Listening to a poet read her poem and talk about when she started writing poetry got me thinking that writing is about curiosity. She said her grandmother died four years before she wrote the poem. And her first poems, including this one, really had an emotional connection to her inner self. Like, Einstein said something about having childlike curiosity, this poet remembered her grandma from her childhood, then as an adult she was able to express this feeling.

Halos and Ice Crystals

The bright light is caused by refraction through pencil shaped ice crystals in the air.

Apex of the Sun

Falling leaf changes from green to red, to dull gold.
Smooth mist on far away hills winds through the buffs of mangled bark.
Closer tall aspens frolic in the wind.
Coves, and alcoves in ground, on the edges of the cliffs.
Sun falling dark beyond wriggling clouds.
Slapping waves gurgle and splash.

There's An Ancient Fascination

Artists are always talking of ruins or trying to make something appear old to fit in with a scene or painting. Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem, and the last few lines contained a reference to ancient lore. It said something about you will cross the river styx. A note at the bottom said "forgetfulness." That seems like a great symbol for forgetting because once you've crossed into death, what more do you need?


Also, poems talk of mythical giants and refer to their names. It has something to do with the literal meaning of their stories, but it also says don't make the same mistake. What's in the past cannot be changed. Interesting things we can learn from the past.

In the Marshes

I.

Gold, money, reconaissance. Filled to the brim, beneath statues in the pond. And Below, the rusty door to a new world shatters at the last touch. Below the waters It is hard to see. And the dirt swirls in clouds
Obscuring the only light from above.

II.

Half the time, on the dark side, green money collects in the curling bark. None can See where it comes from, or when it vanishes, but it is there. Farmers cutting tall Grass don't notice it. Sailors fight the wind that tears it from the grey.

III.

Slippery all the way down. The bucket at the bottom holds two keys. One blends the Farmer's door into the back of the tree. The other a mystery. Whom shall find the Only tree with no green? The safest route of all.

Writing and The World Today

I guess its national writing day or week or something. Funny because on the Seed Magazine website they have an article claiming that everyone will publish by 2013. Since online mediums allow people to do that for free, you don't just have to write a book. Blogs, twitter, emails, all add to the internet written words. Publishing, to Seed, counts as 100 people reading or viewing your post.

Howard Nemerov has a collection of poems book that contains many of his books of poetry. It's quite amazing how much poetry he has published. His word choice and rhythm often roll off the tongue nicely. The meaning of his imagery and the development of each piece really points out a certain idea or message. I read somewhere that he often writes from the loser's perspective or the outcast. Maybe, sometimes it's hard to tell what he's writing about at all, but that's the art of poetry. There's no explaination, just the poem. The multiple meanings in each work are probably unique to the individual that finds them. Anyway, great poems, you should check them out.

The Package of Land

Blue foam climbs a steel plated turtle.
The churning thrush of gentle cool water reminds
The clouds to glow in the sunlight.
And everywhere the sound of hens breathes into the air.
Warm nights no longer bring comfort because the wind
Stays active more often.
And the stream, once a rill, now is a swale, and its steep canyon walls
Sleep while children run across fallen leaves.
Until then, visit the past.
Come hither, son of lost love, make the Spring come faster.

Physics Thoughts.

There are things in this universe that no one understands. Space-time is one of those strangely baffling concepts. Every culture calls it something, but just a name means nothing. To know how it works and what it does is entirely more complex and mayber impossible. Einstein has the most widely accepted theory on the curvature of space-time. The distortion of light near massive bodies is hard to test. A solar eclipse had to occur and careful measurements of positions of stars before and after told astronomers and physicists if anything moved due to the bends in the fabric of space by the planet.
After nearly missing the last opportunity to view the line of stars through a telescope, the pictures were snapped and the study began. The test of Einstein's theory was proved right. Light does bend when it travels near a massive object. To picture why it would do this think of a grid of squares stretched flat over a region of space. Now if a planet slowly landed on it and came to rest the grid would depress until the planet was held in place. This may partially explain why stellar masses don't roll around freely like marbles on a tabletop. They instead are sitting in holes and move because of the relationships to other massive bodies.
Since the dips are created in the very thing that any existing object must pass if it travels there, light or anything else will follow a path curved like the depressions in space-time.

A Beautiful Poem.

Beautiful raindrops coalesce on broken green leaves.
Sound of water falling onto rocks.
The city is frozen, but the forest is alive.
Distant mist crowns the tip of a black mountain, its white feathers falling to earth.
Thus is the landscape with no people.
A time to be remebered and gathered again.



*Partially inspired by the art of Eyvind Earle who looks into the infinite of nature.

Fibonacci Poetry

Here's a cool idea based on a sequence of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence. The first numbers are 1,1,2,3,5,8,13.....etc. It starts with one and each successive number is the sum of the previous two. Example: 1, 1+0=1, 1+1=2, 2+1=3, 5+3=8,....so on.

Ok, the poetry part of it begins. Each line in your poem contains as many syllables as the sequence indicates. Lines one and two have one syllable, line three has two syllables.
Here's one I made up.

Time
Pearl
Beach Comb
Sound Wave Through
Glass, Footprint Travels.
People Hop The Fence Before Me.

Now you know how to do it. The sequence also occurs in natural things such as the spiral pattern on a sunflower. So the amount of syllables and the rhythm of the poems you create with it will surely sound natural and inspiring to others.

The Coolest Things (Ponderances).

Sometimes I don't know what to write here. It's not like it has to be perfect. I don't write a draft and then edit and type it. I just sit down and type at the moment. If there's anything I want to say, then I'll say it.
An interesting thing that occured to me is how do mathematicians graph four or more dimensions? We can graph two, or three, or even four ( if you count time as the fourth). But anymore than that and you can't even imagine. What's the use then? Physicists constantly deal with these higher dimensions. And one theory says that gravity is so weak because it leaks into other dimensions. It spreads itself out. This is a lot like listening to a guitar when your standing right next to it, and then walking away. As you go farther, the sound diminishes and is eventually so weak that you can't hear it.

Computer Science Rocks

Programming is a lot of fun. I'm learning C++ right now. Just for fun, really, to explore. Math and science go well with computers. Since high-level languages are symbolic and simplified english knowing math well helps to understand how to write code. You can make simple business apps or games with the beginning experience.

Music Track Two

To get the song click on "music track two" above: Another acoustic song made this week. You need Itunes. You can download it here. Also, at the bottom of that page there is a link for the windows 2000 version.
http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/

Music Track One

Ok it works but you need to have Itunes downloaded. Simple. Once you have Itunes, click the link that says "Music Track One" above this and download the track one. It should automatically open in Itunes and play.

The First Thoughts of a Blog

The picture above is painted in oils. My favorite landscape created in the 2009. Second, something I learned today must be passed on. I told you I have an interest in engineering. Well, an old book I came across yesterday tells the difference between electronic and electric. Guitar amps use what are called tubes that have electricity running through them. Inside tubes the air is sucked out to create a vacuum. One class of tube is filled with gas, the other has nothing, but they are both vacuums. When the electricity zaps through the empty space in the tube, it is called electronic. If a current passes through wire or uses capacitors and other solid components it is called electric.
A light bulb is electric because even though there is a vacuum inside the bulb, the filament carries the current. A flourescent light is called electronic because the current passes through the space inside. An interesting fact for the day!