Is Genre a Four-Letter Word?

Here are the plots to three novels: can you tell which are fantasy novels?

* The son of a twisted duke is killed in a bizarre accident, and his innocent fiancée finds herself a prisoner of a haunted castle, pursued by the duke himself. Only the strange, twisting corridors of Otranto can save her now, where statues cry bloody tears and giant helmets exact their unholy revenge.

* A sailor is shipwrecked on an island and wakes up to find that ant-sized people have captured him. They dub him the “Man Mountain” and force him to do various menial tasks (like saving the entire kingdom with his own urine), until, terrified by his potential power, decide to kill him and parcel off his body to various parts of the kingdom. But the “Man Mountain” has other ideas...

* Two knights are captured in battle and thrown into a dungeon for life. Through the bars, they glimpse a garden outside tended by a beautiful woman: both of them fall madly in love with her, and vow eternal hatred on the other, since only one can lay claim to her heart. Eventually, one night is pardoned while the other manages through subterfuge to escape. Once free, the second knight prays to Mars to assure him victory, while the other prays to Venus; both god and goddess grant each one success in love and battle. This causes quite a debate in Olympus, and Jupiter has to stand in judgment as to which lover will live with the maiden—and which will die in defeat.

Sam Reeves Reads The Dark Backward!

Check out Sam Reeves reading Chapter One of The Dark Backward (my new book) on his You Tube channel. Sam is known for being the voice and brains behind The Rabid Bookworm which not only reviews books but often performs them for his viewers. Today, he took time to read the first chapter of my book, allowing Hildigrim Blackbeard to finally speak out in a clear, bold voice. Thanks so much for honoring my book, Sam!

Click on the link to watch (it's about 9 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNlKLtGcISA&feature=share

When We Fall Out of Love With Writing...

The romance of writing is that sudden flush of inspiration, when a story, character, or idea grabs hold of your entire soul until you have to rush to your paper or keyboard and write it down. “Romance” is the correct word to use, too, since it’s not hyperbolic to call it a love affair. Sometimes it’s merely a crush, but at other times it’s truly love at first sight: a woman whose eyes make you dream of being better than you are, or a man whose voice gives you goosebumps when you imagine him speaking your name. Anyone who writes can relate to that feeling, after having written five or six pages in white-heat, when you look up from the page and think, “my god, I’m actually a writer! I’m in the middle of writing a book!” The whole world makes sense, or at least you do, as you float through it, no longer seeing a distinction between the world outside your door and the one in your mind. It’s all grist for the mill, raw material to construct the elaborate castles and cathedrals of your imagination to stand for all time. 

Kill the Cutpurse! is Free to Download this Wed-Thur on Amazon

You can download my first (and newly revised) novel, Kill the Cutpurse! on Amazon today and Thursday. All you need is a Kindle or a free Kindle app to read a short, fast-paced novel of humorous epic fantasy centering on a trio of thieves who are comissioned to steal the largest clock hand in the kingdom...and end up dismantling the very gears of the thieving community! Check it out in the link below:

https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Cutpurse-Joshua-Grasso-ebook/dp/B01ETWWL0G/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

The Technology of Storytelling

Writing is a form of technology: the book is a tool which more accurately (or perhaps, definitively) records a story for all time and space. Before writing, we still told stories, and these stories changed every time they were spoken, since a good storyteller would take the ‘frame’ of the tale and embellish it like a literary game of Telephone. The oral works which have come down to us in writing, such as those by Homer, or Beowulf, or any number of myths and religious texts, represent the oldest technology in existence: a thousand tale-tellers and their dreams kept the stories alive through sheer force of will, telling stories over and over again lest they fade into the twilight (as many stories undoubtedly did; we’ve probably lost more stories than we preserved). With the advent of writing we discovered new tool that would preserve a story, intact, for all time the second the ink dried on the page. Some feared it would make us lazy; perhaps we wouldn’t see the need to tell stories at all. After all, once we wrote them down, couldn’t we just read them over and over again? What need to keep making up new ones?