Matthew P. Schmidt
My Blog
The Plutonium Idol
The thing with idolatry in ancient Israel wasn’t that the Holy People did not worship the LORD. Far from it–they simply worshipped everything else, too. It is such idolatry that remains to this day: while mankind once bowed before idols of gold and stone, now it pledges fealty to idols made of silicon and plutonium.
The Devil has succeeded in quite a trick: convincing some who call abortion a bloody holocaust to Moloch to worship at the altar of passing entire nations through the nuclear hellfire. I am certain that if this blog was more popular I would get angry comments defending the latter practice. Instead, no one cares at all. But it is what it is: a sacrifice of others–hundreds of millions of them–for our own peace of mind. Hail your god, America, the Trident! Kneel before the Minuteman! For the LORD might not protect us from nuclear war–but we know they will!
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Philosophical Diversity in Fiction
No, this is not a post about the culture war. Chill.
This post is about writing other cultures such that they are believable–not as middle-class Westerners wearing funny hats, but as fundamentally different worlds.
On Gratuitous Rape
This is not a happy-go-lucky post. If this subject matter disturbs you, I suggest reading something else, or perhaps waiting a few days–I plan to blog more frequently in the future.
The taste of the modern public has been, as of late, for dark and “gritty” fiction. Whether or not said fiction actually is is a subject for someone else’s post, but consider: The Hunger Games. Game of Thrones. The Malazan Book of the Fallen. The Witcher. Actually, I could rattle off a whole list of popular, dark, fiction, and invariably most of them are going to contain rape.
How not to write fight scenes like a teenage boy describing his victory in a video game
I have seen many authors try, and fail, at doing fight scenes. The typical thought–and I say this having thought it myself–is that it’s all about prose and action and explosions and maybe some bad words said at dramatic moments.
This is false.
Well said!