Kentaro Miura, the brilliant manga artist behind Berserk, passed away on May 6th, 2021.
While Berserk is not his only work, it is undoubtedly his most prolific and influential, and it is what I knew him for. I was first introduced to Berserk back in the early 2000s, by friends who had already ravenously consumed the ongoing tale of the black swordsman. I became just as hungry for more.
Continue readingEarlier today I created a small piece of digital flash-fiction, based upon my current feelings given recent news about what our future may be like. I’m not really quite sure what I was going for, but it was a small funnel that helped me cope with a potential reality. I hate it, I feel powerless, but I won’t stop doing what I do, either way.
Enjoy. Vote. Take care.
Let’s talk about the Mary Sue. It’s damn-near iconic in the literary world by now, but for those uninitiated, it derives from the name of a self-inserted character that appeared in an old Star Trek fan-fiction someone wrote.
It was bad, I s’pose…
So, I intentionally wrote something akin to a technical manual, but it’s really sorta like a speculative flash-fiction. In the vein of George Saunders’ I Can Speak™, it tells the story of a fictitious product and informs the world in which it exists through a form other than a normal story. In Saunders’ work, it was done through epistolary, and in mine, it’s done as an owner’s manual. This was a fun experiment to both write in such a professional and technical way, while also trying to establish the kind of world where this product would fit into.
People only check the manual when they’re already knee-deep in trouble…
So if you’ve got some time, you can check out the dry delivery of a possibly magical world through the uCast® Σ Owner’s Manual. Hope you can find some enjoyment in it!
Until the next post, Keep Yourself Alive!
While doing some updates to the look of my blog (do you like it?), I also came across a little story experiment that I uploaded, but never actually published, so here is Epistolary, a weird narrative I’m not sure works but hey, if you don’t try you’ll never know.
Epistolary is the term for a story told through correspondence, and so I wanted to try a simple enough story using a more recent form of communication. It was a fun challenge to think within the context of the technology in order to divulge all the information I wanted to, from whose chatbox it was, the time of different messages, and inference of different events through organically written dialogue.
I hope you’ll enjoy this small update. Until the next post, Keep Yourself Alive!
Hey bookworms! While I’ve been just slaving away at new chapters, I also started up another little project, and I swear it isn’t nearly as distracting as it sounds. There’s lots of people out there who like stories, but don’t necessarily have the means to hunker down and stare at a book or screen for a time to consume it. Audiobooks are pretty huge now, and so I figured, I might as well offer people that same luxury, so I started up the Aural Anthology, a channel where you can find audio versions of my work! For free!
See? They’re diggin’ it, so it must be great
First up is the audio version of Friday Nights at Cheep’s, some quick flash-fiction to test everything out and see how it all goes! A very special thank you to Matthew Branton for his excellent voice work in this little piece.
I hope you all enjoy it, and if you do, don’t hesitate to share it! Until the next post, Keep Yourself Alive!
Star Wars: The Last Jedi was a great film. Or it was a terrible film. Or it was a good film, but a bad Star Wars film. I dunno, I can’t keep up anymore.
At least we can all agree it was, indeed, a movie. Right…?
I’m a fan of Star Wars, as I’ve said before. Personally, I had a lot of fun with the new film. I was able to see it twice, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially in getting to catch certain things that I missed on my first viewing. There are a lot of things people have talked about regarding the movie, from the way certain characters were portrayed, how the universe continued to work, and where the narrative took us. In this article, however, I would like to talk about one specific element that I’ve heard criticized consistently, and that probably sticks with me the most. Obviously, massive spoilers ahead after the jump.
Yes, I’m not dead, which is probably pretty obvious since I’m a bit more active on my Facebook page and much more active on Twitter. For the most part over the last little while I have been keeping my head down, nose to the grindstone, as it were, hence why I haven’t made a lot of blog posts, despite the myriad topics I would have loved to cover, but never quite felt like I could articulate them well enough. Click past the jump to find out what I’ve been working on!
JB Sargent 