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Who do you think refugees are?

#refugenes

A great post by Neil Gaiman to share

Who do you think refugees are?

Who do you think barbarians are?

Who are you, pal?

Build a wall.
Close your eyes.
See the nine-year-old ghost of your great-grandmother clawing to climb it a hundred years ago.
Listen to the bloodied tiny feasts of your five-year-old, great-granduncle landing on the piled up rocks of your wall. His mother lost him in the ch...

So talking about those grandparents, this is what I am made of.
A refugee grandma who came by boat over the Aegean fleeing the 1922 war in Asia Minor. Nine-year-old girl who didn’t speak any Greek. She marries my grandfather, some kind of Casablanca Rick’s café guy, his casino set on fire twice by corrupt policemen during the WWII Nazi occupation.

His father and uncles had fled the mountains after a crime of honor, “don’t mess with my sister�� thing. They flee the village after the crime, and...

Interlude definition: an annoying way to bloat up a book that was already too big by adding a completely irrelevant, at best tangential story.

Interlude. A short break from the history of writing .

is written in a first-person voice. Actually, two first-person voices; the primary one is the barbarian hero, and the secondary one is the monk who transcribes his story.

Writing in first-person is very limiting especially when the narrator has no magical powers to know things. But lim...

I’ve read a few books that give advice on how to write. I had laughed at all of them before I started writing. I was certain that I didn’t need to read anything close to a “how to�� book. Wrong. Once I started writing I found all of them useful. Even when I decided to ignore their advice completely.

I am not writing these posts in the second-person in an attempt to give you advice. I have written one book, ok maybe two, a big book, but only one. I started writing three years ago. I am a wide-e...

I am definitely not fishing for your pity. A personal trainer? No day job as a waiter? Writing on a desktop with two big screens. Note: the two screens are essential, believe me. Yes, I have some money, not a lot, but I can still afford to dedicate quality time to writing. But here is the catch, I have four young kids. Elementary grades and below, and I spend a lot of time with them. So they take up a lot of time. So, if you are a twenty-five-year-old without four kids I believe you can write...

In fact, if you are a writer, you are sitting on your arse all day. Be proud of it. Ignore the naysayers. Do not forget them, though. You are writing for them. To communicate. Or else it is all an exercise in monochrome masturbation.

But yours is a different path. Your first step toward establishing communication is a paradox: you become a hermit. You have at most three thousand readable words to write a day. That’s your repository, your capacity. After that it is an utter disaster, you’ll wr...

Do not. I repeat do not google image search the title. I warned you.
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You didn’t listen.

How do you write 210,000 words in 100 days? Especially if you’ve never written fiction before. There is not much to it. No magic. You open up your calendar. You mark the times, block out four-hour intervals for writing, two-hour intervals for editing, one hour for revisiting notes and research. One hour for walking and clearing the plot point that just doesn’t stick. Plenty of time still left. No excuses...

I started writing Drakon in 2013 when I decided that I had no more to give to the corporate and technology world. There was no internal struggle or debate or sudden revelation. Zeus didn’t hit me with a bolt to make me a writer, neither did Hermes. Herpes was more like it. I had waited patiently for fifteen years to write the book, always thinking that this was the one thing I would immediately do next, when I stopped working the 9 to 5, or more like 10 to 10. I was never a morning person.

I...

I could have chosen anything for the setting of . A young man growing up in a barbaric or totalitarian regime. Unfortunately, I had too many choices.

A twelve-year-old Cambodian raised in Pol Pot’s youth camps.
A very smart and ambitious young German born in 1918, his father dying in WWI. The boy is twenty-one when WWII starts. His two uncles are in Wehrmacht. What chance does he have? He is doomed, you say. And damned. Most of them would be. But maybe there is a chance. A small one. Ma...

Some say that every work of fiction is an autobiography and every character in a book is the author. But this book is not about me. It is not an autobiography. This book is exactly the opposite. is about them. The others. The ones we call barbarians. Our enemies. The Drakons. The ones St. George and our millennial-old knights, princes and saints were sent to slain. The evil ones. The ones who are born and raised to hate us. The ones we as educated, liberal people fear, despise or disa...