Amateur Psychiatry

The single major reason for becoming an Amateur Psychiatrist is this:


Pure Spite.

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The Book

The Book, is of course a book written by people who don't write books, but know all about books. Or people who write books and aren't that successful with their books, but still know more about books than any of YOU will ever know, or I will ever know for that matter.....in other words....The Ubiquitous "They" of the writing world who have made up rules for all of us good little authors to follow. Let's look at some:

Never start a book with the weather.

Never start with back story.

Avoid info dumps (this is a good one actually).

Don't use contrivances such as letters or a diary to convey back story.

Avoid long exposition, verbosity and wordy prose.

Tension, tension, tension--always! Courtesy of Donald Maass.

Never switch POV in the middle or....anytime. Unless it's third person and different people. 

Never use adverbs/verb modifiers  ("If you have to modify, you haven't found the right verb!" ~Author Hank Schwaeble) Although I still defy him to find the "right" verb for the phrase "kissed hungrily."

Get out your Thesauruses, go ahead. I'll wait.

"Show don't tell."

Never begin a sentence with conjunctions.

And so forth.

All and all decent rules. But when you're a good writer, all rules are made to be broken--they must be broken. It's a rule.

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Traditional Mawaige

 Traditional marriage, that ubiquitous term that has caught the nation's attention like the term "family values" did a while back. But from where do these terms originate, and what do they actually mean?

If you ask any conservative, they'll tell you, without even blinking, "The Bible."

Well let's take a look at that, shall we?

In the bible it was common practice for a man to have many wives, concubines and slaves.

In the bible, "love" is never mentioned as a reason for marriage.

In the New Testament, marriage was generally frowned upon altogether, preferring instead to exhort followers of Christ to be celibate and even eunuchs (ouch!)

So...tell me about that "traditional" part again?  Back

Imhotep

Okay, so that movie, The Mummy totally stole the name for their hot-but-creepy mummy, Imhotep. TOTALLY different guy.

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