Andrew Michael Miller's Thought Backlog
Writer and working Agile professional. Author of Pancho's Fall.
Five years ago today, we got the news. I was at work and just settling into my cubicle with my first cup of coffee when I received a call from my sister Jenny. Knowing that Jenny didn't call very often, especially when she knew I was working, I had a bad feeling in my gut that would be justified in the first seconds of answering the call. "Matt's dead."
I've returned from my long hiatus. It took me a long time to get my hosting set back up, but I've come back with good news.
First, I freshened up the look of the site. The old one was fine, but I didn't like the way it felt coming back into it. The new look is here to help give the site better direction and a professional look, while still being true to who I am.
Often times in storytelling there are cases where two or more plots or events are linked together and play out side by side in order to add depth and additional meaning to the overall story. When this happens, it's called a parallel narrative, and there are different applications of the concept throughout the various forms of storytelling. The most common place to find parallel narratives is film and television, but it remains very common in literature as well.
One topic that gets debated quite frequently in writing is the question of whether writers should use the word "said" or choose a synonym for the word. Any piece of writing with character dialogue has to deal with this question, and there's really two camps that stand their ground fervently. On one hand, English teachers tend to absolutely love when synonyms are chosen instead of the word "said" repeated ad nauseum. On the other hand, most successful literary authors, tend to use "said" more than any other word when describing a character talking. But there are notable exceptions. Which is right?
Cesario de Torium, one of the great clerics at the turn of the first millennium in the Age of Kings, wrote this poem in response to what he considered a "tragic glorification of the terrors of war," after sentiment began to grow in his lifetime for a supposed "reconquista," or a reclamation of land within Caelon once belonging to the Torian Empire, from the Warathi conquerors who now inhabit it. Being old enough to have lived through the Northern Campaign that ended at the Battle of Gelgadongo, as well as being an ardent scholar of history, he sought to stymie sentiment for a new war as he feared it would only bring further destruction, death and decay throughout the land.