Trapdoor Books

OK. How about a little humor. Just finished a set of difficult chapters on one of my next books and in need of some light entertainment.

Maybe you do too.

In the Peanuts comic strip by Charles M. Schulz, the character Snoopy was often shown to be starting yet another of many novels with the canonical phrase, or variations of “It was a dark and stormy night.”

“It was a dark and stormy night” is a phrase penned by Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton at the beginning of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford.

A reader turned me on to Jason Epstein’s wonderful projection in The New York Review of Books describing the publishing industry of the future entitled, Publishing: The Revolutionary Future.

Part of what I like about the article is that Mr. Epstein talks about the elimination of the redundant traditional publisher infrastructure and non-essential services. The next generation publishing houses will be less about warehousing and distributing returnable physical books and more about good editors providing solid content. This has long been my position on the basics of the upcoming revolution.

Today, I’d like to pull back the curtain for you on an important part of The Ninth Avatar’s world.

“Fantasy” as a genre grew out of traditions of mythology and, as such, each world comes with its own gods, goddesses, and cultural roles borne from those concepts. I agree with John Marco’s recent post that “a fantasy story needs to have some element of magic” and “the magical element (or elements) need to be organically threaded into the world.” In The Ninth Avatar, those elements stem from The Nine Pillars of Magic.

Matt Twing sent in a classic riddle which I thought I would share with you. I suspect it might be a homework problem for his logic class, as Matt is a high school senior and sneaky smart.

You have 12 marbles, one of them is either heavier or lighter than the rest. In three weighs on a balance scale, you must determine which is the odd marble. How do you do this?