Category: Articles & Essays
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Christmas According to the Movies
‘Tis the season when bloggers everywhere trot out their “best of” cinematic lists for the closing year. To those I’d like to add mine, except that it’s nowhere near to being an objective catalog of bests but an admittedly personal line-up of favorite Christmas movies. They also fit into neat subgenres. In no particular order,…
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V-Squad
Available as print and digital books on Amazon. Employing elements of classic Noir literature and contemporary action-adventures, V-Squad is the story of a small band of vampire-heroes recruited to take on the Nazis. In August, 1943, millionaire vampire John English informs President Roosevelt that Nazi-aligned vampires intend to assassinate Winston Churchill and the principal Allied generals before they can…
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Blank Spaces Between the Words
Every time I sit down to work on my fiction, I learn something about the craft of writing. Some years back, a pleasing thought occurred to me in one of those lightbulb-in-the-head moments: that there are blank spaces between the words in prose fiction, gaps that the human mind automatically rushes to fill. Recently a…
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Silent Movies: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
Deeply moving and in places surprisingly funny, Sunrise was released in 1927 at the end of the silent era, and is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made. A farmer (George O’Brien) is having an extramarital affair with a woman from the nearby city (Margaret Livingston). Stylish and sophisticated, she seduces him into agreeing to kill his wife…
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The Dreaded Blank Page
So, you’re a writer. See if this sounds familiar. You stare at it and stare at it, and it seems that it stares back, that blasted cursor winking at you, daring you to write something — a word, a phrase. Anything. It’s at that point that you remember that you haven’t fed the cat in…
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Poetry
It’s been many years since I wrote poetry, but one night a couple of verses presented themselves to me while I was watching, of all things, The Walking Dead – which probably accounts for their, shall we say, unsentimental nature. VISIONS OF VALHALLA If I had read the runesI might have known the taste of blood like ironwhen…
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A Good Day to Write
Writing can be slow-going. I routinely sweat over the first paragraph of every story I write, and often still can’t seem to get it right. Knowing what I want to say is one thing, but finding the perfect words to bring that about is a different matter. It’s not enough to simply describe the scene…
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François Marcantel Immigrates to Louisiana
Okay, so this isn’t strictly speaking a piece about writing and/or books, but I am a Southerner with a legacy of literary compatriots (Faulkner, Welty, O’Connor, Lee (a couple of those), Capote, etc.; and you all have read them – right?), so this puts the topic at hand in the ballpark, more or less. You…
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François Immigrates to America, Part Deux – Or Frankie, Jr.
Continuing the family saga: François Marcantel stayed in Louisiana; he didn’t have much choice (see here) and married and, as usually happens, in the fullness of time had children. The oldest son also was named François. We in the family know him as Frankie, Jr. Along about 1788, Frankie, Jr. became involved with his wife’s sister, and not…
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My Book for a Desert Island
Success is as dangerous as failure.Hope is as hollow as fear. –Lao-Tzu Way back in 1972 I found myself in a spiritual and psychological desert of sorts, at odds with everyone and everything around me and uncertain as to what direction, if any, I should take. It was at that precise moment that, like Howard Carter…
pamela marcantel 