THE ENTITLED TRIBUTARY TALES

These two posts, The Tributary Tales, and Conan, Baba Yaga, and Tôl Karuţha will explain what I mean by the Tributary Tales.

Suffice it to say that over the holidays (in my spare time between Thanksgiving and Christmas)  I made basic, and sometimes quite complicated, plot and character sketches of the Tributary Tales I wish to write.

Below is the new and expanded list of the Tributary Tales I will write and the titles for each story. I’ll post plot and character sketches and the stories themselves as I write them. I’ve made good progress on Tôl Karuţha and on My Battered Heart already, with the second being a graphic novel script, not a short story. The Godzilla story, Rising Son, will actually be a film script not a short story. But most all of the others will be short stories or short novellas.

I will work on these stories and scripts in my spare time, they will not interfere with my business, novel, or non-fiction work.

So, here is my list of entitled Tributary Tales:

THE TRIBUTARY TALES

Tales of the Fictional (or partially fictional) and Mythical Characters that had the most influence on me growing up or that in later life most appealed to me

Aeneas – The Flight from Knossos
Batman – My Battered Heart
Beowulf – The Good King Comes But Once
Cole and Hitch – The Ravine Near Ridgewater
Conan – The Vengeance of Tôl Karuţha
Daredevil – Black and Blood Red
Doc Savage – Savage Is as Savage Does
Galahad – Galahad and the Golden Stag
Godzilla – Rising Son: The Eternal Ocean is my Womb
Hephaestus – The Forging of the Titan’s Chain
Horatio Hornblower – The Jib’s Complaint
Jack Aubrey – The American Problem
John Carter – The City Never Seen
John Galt – Free is a Four Letter Word
Kirk and Spock (Star Trek original series) – The Battleship Remission
Lone Ranger – The Cold Wind at Sunrise

Lovecraftian  – The Secret Grave of Harrow Hill

Merlin – The Bones of Old Stone
Nathaniel Bumppo (Hawkeye) and Chingachgook – Blood Feather
Orpheus – No Music May Soothe, or perhaps, Tears of Iron
Parsifal – The Sorcerer’s Swan
Philip Marlowe – The Crooked Dane
Robin the Hood – The Fletcher and the Fulmen
Roland – The Menhir and the Moor
Sherlock Holmes – The Case of the 12 Septembers
Siegfried – The Rhine-Wine (of the Black Elf)
Solomon Kane – With Evil Intent
Spenser – High Roll Her
Taliesin (Taliesin Ben Beirdd) – Sweetly Sang yet Rarely Ventured
Tarzan – The Ruins of Khumbar and the Slave Girl
Túrin Tarambar – The Piercing of Melkor’s Doom

MY EARLY WEEKEND

MY (painfully) EARLY WEEKEND

I am reading a book called Story Physics by Larry Brooks which I am not only finding immensely enjoyable, but enormously beneficial and useful. I’ll discuss that in detail later.

I have also been reading my new Dungeon Master’s Guide, in great detail, page by page, and quite slowly. Again, I’ll discuss that later.

At the library yesterday I got several new books to read: two new Spook’s Apprentice (Last Apprentice) books, The Fury of the Seventh Son, and A New Darkness.

(A New Darkness is supposedly about a female Spook named Jenny – I’m looking forward to reading about a Spook who is a chick, wondering how she will deal with various evil creatures, especially the physically powerful ones. For those who don’t know, these books are written by Joseph Delaney and are my very favorite set of modern children’s books short of the Harry Potter books. Mainly because Delaney’s books are so gritty and down to Earth and even realistic given the fictional subject matter. And to tell you the truth, if I lived in such a world, I’d be a Spook.)

I also got a book entitled Dangerous Women, edited by GRR Martin and Gardner Dozois, and about, you guessed it, dangerous women. I got it primarily because it has a novella by Martin on the death of King Viserys Targaryen, the end of the dragons (in Westeros), and the resulting civil war which led up to the Game of Thrones. I often find the events prior to the Game of Thrones books (such as the Dunk and Egg stories) to be far more interesting than the GOT books. However, it looks as if the book might contain some other interesting fiction on dangerous women as well.

Finally, as far as fiction goes, I got the science fiction novel, The Abyss Beyond Dreams by Peter Hamilton. I know nothing of it as of yet. However, having recently read Great North Road (also by Hamilton, and which I thought had some very solid police and detective work in it, as well as some fantastically useful futuristic/mundane invention ideas), and the Dark Between the Stars (by Anderson) I am trying to read more modern sci-fi writers. I also got a new 52 Green Lantern Corp graphic novel.

For research materials I got a new lecture series, Singers and Tales (about the history of oral tradition poets and storytellers, such as scops, bards, skalds, etc.) by Mike Drout. Drout is my very favorite lecturer on languages, literature, Anglo-Saxon, poetry, Tolkien, and English.

I got some great books on Venture Capital and Capitalism, a book on career advancement called Trajectory (looks quite useful) and I am almost finished with a book on business and career by George Anders titled, The Rare Find. I have added The Rare Find to my own personal business and non-fiction libraries.

Yesterday I also went to see the Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies, and I enjoyed it but I will post on that later, not right now.

I plan to post on some of these subjects in detail but for this morning I have a very painful neck and back injury which is also very debilitating. I have had my neck and back injury since Wednesday but it has become progressively worse over the past few days. Ever since I broke my back about every six months or so, especially as the Winter weather turns cold and wet, I will suffer such an injury for about a week or so.

It has taken most all of the natural pain endurance I have to type this post and eat breakfast. So, after I finish breakfast and take a pain killer I may very well spend the rest of the day in bed.

Have a great weekend folks. And a pain-free one.

THE MAN OF BRONZE AND THE MAN OF STEEL

Today, when my wife and I went out I got a new Doc Savage novel (Phantom Lagoon) and the Doc Savage Man of Bronze film (which I had seen before, but still…)

So, BOO-YAH!!!

“A wise man once observed that trouble has walked around in skirts since the beginning of things.
This particular wise man did not proclaim such a thing in so many words, but every man knows it to be true…”

Phantom Lagoon

When a novel opens that way you know it’s going to be good.

Also, I got the soundtrack to Man of Steel. My Wife and I both agree that soundtrack is some of Hans Zimmer’s very best wok, and he has done some excellent work. If you ask me composers for film are some of the very best composers working in the world right now.

I’m not absolutely sure why that is (I mean aside from the obvious, it is an excellent and profitable music market), but I’m beginning to think that’s it because the music being composed is associated so directly with powerful visual images (in this case derived from film). That seems to me a very logical conclusion.

One normally thinks of music and the composition of music as a more or less strictly auditory (or perhaps even mental experience), but suppose modern film composers are so good because they are intentionally (or perhaps even subconsciously) directly associating powerful visual images with the musical ideas they are composing and expressing? (This technique could be both self-limiting and self-liberating depending upon how it is employed.)

That might very well alter the underlying compositional patterns and techniques these composers are employing. It is a logical chain of reasoning but I’m not sure how many are considering that it could be very well greatly altering their innate composing habits.

Anyway, thinking on these matters and having deduced a probable cause I’m going to try some experiments of my own in attempting to compose music “visually,” rather than auditorially, or to fit word and phrasing patterns (lyrical composition or song composing), or as a purely mental exercise.

See where that leads me. I’ll let you know what my experiments yield.

THE MYSTERY OF RAMPO

Still one of my favorite films of all time.