Tag: creating

Making stuff: up, real, and nicely.

A Self-Defrocked Holyman In A Fantastic Land Teases Out A Meager But Honest Living As A Mercenary Cook

AS AN INVESTED SACREANT, Prosatio Silban ministered to the souls of the Uulian Commonwell’s faithful. But now, his mission is tending the palates and gullets he encounters in his cook-or-die quest for the next paying customer – whether demure courtesan, cranky giant, duplicitous wizard, mystical indigene, pretentious nobles, minor godling, or whoever else is hungry.

Inspired by Don Quixote, Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste, and the Dreamlands Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft, these two volumes of episodic fantasies – The Cook For Any Price: Across the Rimless Sea and The Cook For Any Price: More Commonwell Tales – are part culinary tour and part spiritual adventure. Ride along in Prosatio Silban’s well-stocked galleywagon and through a world unlike any you’ve ever visited.

(Available through the above links as e-books, and also in paperback: Across the Rimless Sea – More Commonwell Tales!)

RECIPE COLLECTORS! Want to prepare meals (and eat!) like Prosatio Silban? The free download Commonwell Cookery will nourish appetites both gastronomic and literary. May the Flickering Gods smile upon your honest and sincere emulations.

    What Are Readers Saying?

Ransom Stephens, author of The Book of Bastards
    “Sometimes you just need to let someone else deal with the BS of life. … Prosatio Silban is the man for the job!
    “This intrepid chef travels a world that reminds you of places you’ve been, places you’d like to go, and places you’d prefer to avoid. With his old-school (really old) food truck, he achieves a view of the world (well, a world in a different time and a different place (a very different time and place)) that’s sort of like Norman Rockwell would have had, if he’d been in that very different time and place. All the while, he leaves your mouth watering with recipe ideas! Semi-seriously, it’s sort of like Patrick Rothfuss meets Julia Child. Continue reading “A Self-Defrocked Holyman In A Fantastic Land Teases Out A Meager But Honest Living As A Mercenary Cook”

Words To Bring Back: “Virtual”

– Definition: adj. almost or nearly as described, but not completely or according to strict definition.

– Used in a sentence: Though no Popeye, I am a virtual strongman when it comes to eating spinach.

– Why: Let’s retake the words that have become redefined in our modern now-a-go-go world; instead of using “virtual” to indicate a computer/online-based experience, how about instead saying “digital?” “Computer-based?” Or that ol’ ’90s standby, “cyber?”

We Interrupt This Blog …

… FOR THE FOLLOWING PUBLIC-SERVICE AGGRANDIZEMENT:

The current plan (and behind-the-scenes task) involves formatting all 90+ Prosatio Silban stories for an independently published paperback and e-book titled Across the Rimless Sea; as a size comparison, the collection so far (‘prox. 137,000 words / 400 pages) is a bit longer than J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King.

By the process of editing and placing these tales in a specific narrative order, many have/will become substantially different from what you’ve seen here. Meanwhile, I will continue the story-a-week schedule to fulfill your Thursday mythopoetic needs.

Thank you for your patronage; it means a lot to me. And may the All-Mother watch over you!

Words to Bring Back: “Meme”

– Definition: n. an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.

– Used in a sentence: Charles MacKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is perhaps the Western World’s first serious catalog of memes.

– Why: I am a semiotic and purist dinosaur who thinks the term’s au courant application shortchanges its original meaning. Memes are the heavy-hitters of enculturation. Let’s not confuse them for “captioned graphics,” shall we?

5 Thoughts: The Grand Old Process

1. THERE IS A CERTAIN COMPULSION to the act of writing: an unscratchable itch that won’t let the fingers refrain from their fruitless but busy task, whether on paper or keyboard.

2. To ask writers “Why do you write?” is to confess an ignorance of this basic graphomanic drive. One writes because one can’t not write, just as one breathes because one can’t not breathe. It is a function of having a particular sort of bodily structure, of brain or lungs or soul. Just as creating is joyful — physically pleasurable — refraining from creativity can be quite painful. Continue reading “5 Thoughts: The Grand Old Process”

On Writerly Spirituality: Yom Kippur Edition

THIS DAY IS STEEPED IN regret — and resolve.

Yom Kippur is not as joyful as Pesach or Shavuot, which respectively mark the exodus from Egypt and embrace of the Torah[1], but it’s a day which carries its own spiritual riches. It is both comforting and discomforting to take stock of one’s last-year deeds, deciding what to build on and what to discard; call it one soul-bending enrichment experience. Continue reading “On Writerly Spirituality: Yom Kippur Edition”

5 Thoughts: Seminal v. Derivative

1. ONE OF THE CHICKEN-OR-egg challenges of modern media (social and traditional) is their pervasive sense of nonlinear immediacy, by which I mean the everything-at-once flattening of the artistic landscape.
Continue reading “5 Thoughts: Seminal v. Derivative”

Fandom as Cargo Cult

IF WE BUILD IT, THEY will come — again.

First, you need to know what a “cargo cult” is: a folk religion among some groups of Melanesian Islanders who believed that they could attract cargo-carrying airplanes by engaging in sympathetic magic. They got this idea during World War II, when real airplanes (both Allied and Japanese) visited these islands and airdropped actual cargoes — food, weapons, clothing, medicine, and the like. After the war, the planes stopped coming. But the islanders, convinced that the proper conditions would bring more goods, built airstrips (in some cases, complete with landing lights) and otherwise mimicked certain behaviors they thought would achieve their goals. It’s a powerful communal buzz, and easy to get lost in. Continue reading “Fandom as Cargo Cult”

Words To Bring Back: “Fervent”

– Definition: adj. Having or displaying a passionate intensity.

– Used in a sentence: “Our” cat was a fervent consumer of rats and squirrels.

– Why: There are good and bad manifestations of this quality. On the one hand is our hyperpolarized political landscape; on the other hand are fen of all stripes. One is harmful, the other harmless. You decide.

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