A Letter from Randall Flagg

The following is a letter from Randall Flagg the "Dark Man" to Mother Abigail from Stephan King's The Stand, Complete and Uncut Edition.

Dear, “Mother” Abigail Freemantle,

                It’s been quite some time since the Captain Trips made the world a lot quieter hasn’t it? But enough small talk, I know you've received my visions and denied them. Enclosed is my mark, a nice black stone with an awful pretty red flaw running down it. My ‘flock’ here in Vegas covet these things, they’re a sign of loyalty and trust from me. And this is your last shot. I don’t want you to end up on my bad side Ms. Abigail that’s not a safe or a smart thing to have happen. Oh and your followers out in that little ‘Free Zone’ you’re all running out in Boulder, don’t worry your pretty little head about them. Their deaths will be even more swift than yours, and that eyesore of a town you've got set up down there will be little more than ashes in no time, all you've got to do is make the trip out here and pledge your undying loyalty to me. And renounce any funny ideas you may have about there being a benevolent being in the sky, feeding you information about my kin. That’s just a silly voice in your head and soon enough Abigail just like everything else it’s going to fade away. There’s no room for a god other than Me now.

                Now Abigail I’m going to be to be very frank with you now, I don’t honestly care whether or not you show up any time soon to kiss my heels everything you've got is coming to an end rather soon. If my eyes are right that funny voice in your head that’s been giving you so much hope, has shut its mouth because you took it for granted one too many times. It’s a bit of a shame you’ll receive this letter post humorously otherwise this little tid-bit of information concerning my follower Mr. Harold Lauder’s soon to be assassination of your council in Boulder. A real shame indeed. I do wonder though, if before your 108 year old body gives out if you’ll be able to squawk about sending four of your’s out to Me. And I do wonder, oh I truly do if you’ll still be breathing to tell them that before they ever see Vegas that one of them is going to bite the dust in the thick of the desert. Hell even if you manage to get all that out it won’t matter any, I have big plans for those who chose sides against me time and time again. Plans that I don’t think would be polite to write a letter, to an elderly lady on her deathbed about. But I’m going to anyway. Remember the part about the swift death? I lied, those do-gooders are going to hang high off a special set of crucifix I have lined up for them, and then Boulder will burn, and what’s left of this pestilent crater of a world will finally be mine after all these years, everything ‘Right’ and ‘Just’ can finally stay quiet in its grave.

Best Wishes,

R.F.

Goodreads Widget

W.'s books

The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

Room

by Emma Donoghue

Vol'jin: Shadows of the Horde

by Michael A. Stackpole

World of Warcraft: Ashbringer

by Micky Neilson

Warcraft: Death Knight

by Dan Jolley

Book Talk

5 Reasons why Andrew Ryan was a madman.

Andrew Ryan, the man behind Rapture. Born into poverty in Russia, and rose to wealth and fame in America Andrew Ryan was hardened by what he encountered throughout his life. Rapture, his magnum opus, a city where the sweat on your brow is owned by no other than yourself, where the artist is free from the censor at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.Now building a sprawling city underwater is actually not a monstrously ludicrous idea really, but governing it the way Ryan did makes him nigh on insane.

1. Rapture had zero moral restraints.
Now this is deliberate Rapture was built so that morality and ethics couldn't get in the way of science and the arts in any way shape or form. The issues arise from having no regulation on literally anything, a titular issue that is seen very early on is addiction the the gene altering substance ADAM, any degree of testing initially on non-humans or some sort of work around or hot-fix would have made all the difference in the long run as ADAM addiction leads to excessive gene-splicing and thus the populous of Rapture devolve into the aptly named Splicers.

2. Ryan took laissez faire too literally.
Laissez Faire, or "Hands off" is a political ideal where the government has nothing to do with certain aspects of its systems, the economy most often. In Rapture, although Andrew Ryan is the founder and de-facto leader of the city his mindset meant that he didn't intervene on literally anything that went on in Rapture, which rapidly led to its downfall. The deliberate disregarding of Frank Fontaine who from the start was blatantly attempting to usurp Rapture to the complete and total lack of any attention to the well being or moral standard of any citizen attributed heavily to the downfall of Rapture.

3. Ryan's Politics.
Because Rapture had no real leader, Ryan's position as the wealthiest among the people and founder of the city set him up as a political figure head, because of this Ryan took it on himself to compete many times in political stand offs and campaigns against key figures in the community. See Rapture was top heavy when it came to social class, the rich and intelligent were like gods in their pantheon but the lowly workers who actually built Rapture were still in the city, and they were upset because of the drastic imbalance in the system, Frank Fontaine struck out against the upper class and soon a political war broke out, during which instead of convicting Fontaine on his crimes of smuggling and trafficking on the spot Ryan chose to debate with Fontaine, a debate that destroyed a vast amount of Ryan's credibility with his people and only acted to stoke the already white hot flames of rebellion. Ryan will go on to repeat this suicidal debate style with other candidates stirring Rapture's populous

Post #4, Adaptation of "The Maze Runner"

For "The Maze Runner" an aspect that will certainly be difficult to capture is the sheer scale of The Maze itself, The Maze isn't simple it's a massive and long series of always changing twists and turns that has carte blanche in the book as it doesn't need to consume material space, but in a movie adaptation The Maze would need to be condensed. Not so much as to change the scale and impact it has on the book, but The Maze couldn't be a prop or a series of stages it'd need to be fairly CG to work properly.

Another scene/aspect of "The Maze Runner" that may be difficult to adapt is the feeling of terror the characters go through when The Maze stops shutting down at night. The whole premise of the book being a mass lab-rat testing site works because as each character enters the safe haven of The Glade they integrate into a new society and attempt to solve The Maze, which just so happens to be filled with mechanical monsters who exist to both hinder and aid the 'Gladers' called Grievers. The Glade remains a safe place because at night when the Grievers become most active The Glade shuts out entrances into The Maze, this has been going on since the beginning and none of the characters could never imagine The Glade not being safe. But when the final subject enters The Glade the doors stop shutting and the Grievers are free to attack non-stop. Capturing unspoken emotion is already something movies have a hard time doing, trying to reenact that scene without placing it in exact proper context could prove difficult.

The ending of the book which I won't go into great detail about would be the hardest thing to really capture, as "The Maze Runner" is part of a series the book ends fairly nonsensically and without a great deal of explanation as that is expected to be taken care of in the next novel. In movies unless there is a lapse in time where cutting off like that is logical like in the "Lord of the Rings" series then leaving the audience of a movie with something that isn't really a cliff hanger but a massive list of questions gone completely unanswered can really ruin a film. As the entirety of the story takes place in The Maze and The Glade itself when the book ends and you learn that it was some sort of very elaborate test to ensure a fairly vague event it becomes a very stiff and difficult contrast to deal with wrapping up a movie. It's as if a movie like "Titanic" underwent all of its events but at the very end instead of a prologue, you see Jack waking up on a beach and the trailer for "Inception" plays, very hard to grasp.

How True, is True?

To give a physical number as to the amount of a book that should be completely true to consider it Non-Fiction, I would have to say at least 98% of the material as a whole must be truthful for it to be considered under the Non-Fiction umbrella. This is because relatively that is what history texts tend to be and they should out of all under the genre umbrella be the most truthful, some very very small inaccuracies and minute events that effect no other events being omitted for the sake of length are fine. It is when the inaccuracies are glaring and obvious and when events that directly effect others are modified then the genre divide begins to form.

Considering books that poster themselves as Non-Fiction but are in reality half-truth, or in actuality half-lies, the matter is simple. These books like Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" are Fictional stories that follow a Non-Fiction format. Frey says that only 18 pages are changes overall and that makes up around 5% of his book, if the events of those 18 pages are crucial to any other part of the story then it isn't 5% Fiction, every event those pages create or embellish have a direct effect on the rest of the story. For instance if you in reality went to jail for a day and were mildly uncomfortable, but in the book that you claim is legitimate you state you spent several months in a prison then the rest of the book the reader now has that time-frame and experience issue, being involved in a crash that kills students and being completely indirectly effected by a crash that kills students that you happened to kinda know are two completely different things on both a physical, meta-physical, and psychological level and all of that will drastically change how your characters are viewed by readers.

On the matter of if Mr. Shields is correct in saying that we don't need genre boundaries and that they limit writers. I feel that he has lost understanding of what genres do. Genres are at their most basic element a guideline for what a story should include and get rid of, they mix often and their boundaries are actually in many cases already very blurry, but what they do on a practical level for non-writers is what they are most useful for. Genre gives a reader the ability to a glance tell within a general idea what a book is about, Fantasy books will very clearly have completely different elements than a Murder-Mystery, if we preclude the use of genres overall the reader is who suffers, if libraries were to suddenly stop sorting books by genre the reader would have a more difficult time finding what they truly want to read. Seeing as how reading is already on such a scarcely balanced needle-head the advent of genres allows easy and quick access to books for everyone, Shields is merely taking the concepts of genre too seriously and has missed massive ulterior concepts in what genre really is.

Book 1 "Room" Project

                  In the novel "Room" by Emma Donoghue the rising action of the novel and a constantly referenced and important aspect of the story takes place in the aptly named Room. Now Room itself is just that, it is an actual single cell room containing all the amenities of a typical house, restroom, kitchen, and bedroom, all within the same cramped space. The catch to Room is that the only door to the outside is remotely locked, nobody comes in, or goes out without the explicit permission of Room's owner. A middle aged kidnapper named Nick. Now while fans of the novel can read the book and attain a feeling of what it would be like to exist in Room like Jack, the five year old protagonist of the story who narrates the novel in his immature and innocent voice. The absolute weight of the novel is made almost less so by the decision to give the reigns to Jack to narrate. The childish take on everything in Room and the fact that he was both born and raised in it, and he cannot fully grasp the concept of a world outside of Room, the reader looses some of the severity from this colourful narrator choice. So as a fan-experience, something to really aid in striking the nail home, we propose the "Room Experience."

                The "Room Experience" itself will sate the mind's misunderstanding about what Room itself is like. The experience would entail a scaled larger model of Room, so that an average 5' 5'' adult would be able to view the setting of Room from the perspective of Jack, who during the story is 5 years old. During the time in the scaled Room participants will be able to view various micro-settings from the novel. For instance, Jack is forced to spend some of his nightly hours in a large standing wardrobe (named Wardrobe by Jack) avoiding the gaze of Nick as he comes to check on Jack's mother who was the original prisoner and occupant of Room. Wardrobe plays a part in the story as it is Jack's world within his world but also as a character that Jack must interact with, during the fan-experience participants would be able to view Wardrobe as it was depicted in the story, but at their scale as to allow the severity and weight of the character's plight to truly set in.

              In addition to Wardrobe, all pseudo-characters inside Room will be recreated to match the scale. Items like Lamp who is responsible for the sole light-source in Room and Skylight will be replicated to match the time of Room's events, being coated in snow and dampening the light in Room. Excepts from the novel will be scattered about in places where certain events took place and will be used to add emphasis on concepts like the fact that Jack and his Mother were given so little by Nick that to entertain Jack his Mother had to fashion a toy 'snake' out of scrapped eggshell halves and string, dubbed Eggshell-Snake the gravity of such a toy is to degrees lost in translation between the event in the book and Jack's narration.

          The "Room Experience" is made not to broaden the audience of the book directly but to aid in the understanding and severity of the book's setting, to very clearly set in stone the desolation that the characters were forced into for the opening act of the story, and to gain a sort of new-found clarity to what Room actually is. A portion of the crafting done in "Room" is made purposefully vague, so that reader have to scramble to try and understand the often confusing and unintelligible words of a five year-old who is trying to get the story out the best he can but finds unintentional pitfalls in narration due to his age and lack of understanding. The vagueness of "Room" in describing Room itself can be seen as a strong suit by those that analyze the story, but can just as easily create frustration in readers who enjoy understanding the full width of their stories. The "Room Experience" is for those readers, those who want the nail struck home and to add another layer of depth to their interaction with the novel they've put their waking hours into reading.

What is a book?

A book is an amalgam of words that form sentences and therefore full ideas and concepts that interact together to create a logical flow of narrative intended to be read by someone other that just the writer. What a book is not is a physical thing, words themselves and the media to read a book are in fact terrestrial but the book itself and the story those words form are something almost extradimenional. The way books came into being was like the birth of other arts, it was established loosely with a common theme. That every book were words printed on paper and sold in large sets of pages bound together. But just like the other artful media we have created the book has slowly began to adapt and to leave it's previous restrictions, the binding of pages was merely a means to an end and is now just a suggestion of how to convey the books story. If we look at the music industry, a media form that actually evolved in tandem with the book for the longest time giving a new form for verse to take, where as most all prose remained between it's bindings, verse became music, and music occupies so many forms and has evolved to strive as apposed to survive. The vinyl record made music you couldn't make yourself portable, then the 8-Track tape and the CD improved on those ideas and made music such a beautiful success, likewise when we discovered a way to change prose into a new art form. That of movies and plays and television, they all started as a book renamed a script and as time passed we stopped having to use colossal reels of film to play movies, they turned into video-tapes and then DVDs and now Blu-rays and digital distribution just as it's cousin music did. But the book, the old forefather of all our art media is still trapped by the old-world construct it began as, the book is now dying because humans have attached too much to the physicality of the book's bindings, an author who relies on the concept of a book having weight, of smelling a certain way to convey the idea that yes you are in fact reading a book, have failed at their jobs. Writing itself has evolved to fit the new media the book is trying to occupy, authors are writing more descriptively and with  more passion because they have in a way transcended the mortal plane, they have become like their great-grandchildren arts by becoming digital.  The sad interaction of some authors to stop this transcendence into the next phase of life for the book are the noose around it's metaphorical neck, most all authors that make the comment that the physical body of their book is an aspect vital to it's feeling were born before the age of the Internet and digital media. They didn't grow up with a world that is always shifting in the field of arts, where nothing is set in stone anymore and where they would actually have more freedom. They too, like the book grew up bound by an old-world construct. The idea that a book must be pages between bindings and that it must go through a publishing house and the concept of royalties and not being paid the majority for their work, has crippled the minds of yesteryear's authors, and their mindsets are passing down the shackles as they die out. Digital Media is the key to the lock on the book's prison, but so many are too enticed by the nostalgia too let go. That is something that needs to change for the book to not just survive but thrive in the new-world, children need to be brought up learning too read and enjoy a book for it's content not its medium, less the book itself will rot away with the paper-backing it was forged into.

Why do I read?

Why do I read? I read for, more or less the same reasons we as a race of Humans read. Out of boredom to be entertained by the realm of the past or a flight of fantasy. Or to at times learn of the way things once were, to understand the past and it's countless flaws and apply them to solve the errs of today or even tomorrow. Because I too am a writer and not just a reader when I read it may not be to entertain or to learn in traditional ways but to leech from others who have coated pages in ink, it isn't the nicest of terms but it's the most truthful one. To learn from reading is to merely absorb the information and swallow it without any real-world application, we learn from reading textbooks and news articles things we are often mandated to read. But what we leech, what we truly feast and gorge our minds on are books and articles of art that fill us with new ideas and concepts our minds alone could never have explored without this outside intervention, and to say we do not use the works of other to our advantage when we write in our own words is a heinous fallacy. As a race we consume and grow in all we do as is the way of humanity, and so to is it true in writing and reading. To pluck the best words and thoughts, the most interesting concepts and details from the works of others to attempt to amalgamate a story of worth is the busy work of all writers and is what an avid reader will expect of an piece they're reading. Why do I read? I read to become a better writer, a more knowledgeable person, and to expand my mind to where it could never have possibly gone alone.