Photography of the Day: Sunset on the Lake


Sunset on Lake Lawtonka at the close of a mild Oklahoma Day

At the end of a nice Oklahoma December day, the shadow of Mt. Scott looms over a calm Lake Lawtonka.

Mount Scott

Mount Scott

Like a blazing fire, the dying sun explodes over the Wichita vista and bids farewell to the peaceful lake. The silvery surface is a refreshing interruption between the dark shores and distant peaks.

Sunset on the Lake

Sunset on the Lake

Then we step back and take in the breadth and beauty the lake has to offer as it frames the distant ridge-line of the granite peaks jutting up from the earth. Farewell, Friday.

Lake Panarama

Lake Panarama

 

 


– by J.Wade Harrell,

author of Shadows of Siernod and Flames of Palamarr

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Photography of the Day: The Breath of Winter


The Breath of Winter

Winter can be a destructive season but it is strange how we can find beauty in destructive forces. The season’s frigid breath bears down upon us with frosty wrath then leaves us with stunning images. Such is nature, a study in beauty and destruction.

Frozen Grass

Frozen Grass

There is a reason certain creatures and plants go dormant in the winter. With no luxuries of climate control, it is best to withdraw into a state of unconsciousness to weather the brunt of nature’s extremes. The ice will eventually melt and fill the ground with replenishing life-giving moisture.

Icewood Forest

Icewood Forest

 


– by J.Wade Harrell,

author of Shadows of Siernod and Flames of Palamarr

Posted in Nature, Photography, Weather | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Special Offer: “Shadows of Siernod” on Kindle only 99 cents!


Haven’t got a copy yet?

Enter a realm of fresh fantasy that pays homage to old school sword and sorcery action while pushing the genre’s boundaries to new heights. There are no children or cute heroes in the world of Siernod, only brazen brawlers and swashbuckling swordsmen fearlessly tackling every obstacle of Shadow that faces the realm.

Go to Amazon and get your Kindle copy for just 99 cents and fall into a world of swords and Shadow where you will follow the legendary hero, Fist La’brau, slicing his way through one doomed fate after another.

This offer is for a very limited time so don’t wait.

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– by J.Wade Harrell,

author of Shadows of Siernod and Flames of Palamarr

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Who is Elric of Melniboné?


A brooding anti-hero of truly epic proportions

Book cover artwork by Michael Whelan

Most fantasy readers have heard of him but many don’t know him. To some, he is just a pathetic weakling who relies upon drugs or herbs to support his frail being until he finds a sword to take their place. If you take the time to read Michael Moorcock‘s writings concerning this unique man, you will find out he is much, much more than some weakling with a powerful toy coming back to sling vengeance upon former bullies.

Elric was created in Moorcock’s novella, “The Dreaming City” (Science Fantasy No. 47, June 1961) and it later bacame part of the “final” novel of Elric titled “Stormbringer”. This was not a Tolkeinesque adventure of faith and hope but rather a venture of doom seeking to find its place in the annals of the multiverse. After Elric’s creation, he became a popular fictional character after which Moorcock wrote more stories about him and then wrote several novels. The short stories were arranged into novel formats an published in a sort of chronological order and contained several side characters who became other protagonists in their own books. Most notably, Corum, Erekose, and Hawmkoon. Elric, as these other related heroes who become known as a single identity of the Eternal Champion, seems to attract companions able to ignore the doom and death that follows him on his journeys.

So, just who is this lanky albino, 428th emporor of the ruby throne with crimson eyes that leaves behind his royalty upon an ancient island kingdom of sorcerers to see what lies out in the world of man? To the casual observer, he is of a distant race born with bizarre hereditary ailments that make him seem frail and vulnerable except for that demonic sword he carries with him called Stormbringer.

A complex man with exceptional empathy: Elric is not content sitting upon a throne issuing edicts all the day long. No, Elric must know the meaning of life and what it is in the world that makes men of other nations fear him so much. His life is embroiled with complex situations as he finds affection for one of his cousins and strife with another that desires the throne more than he. Those relationships drive him to his fate of a road of love and hatered in which he duels for survival and eventually becomes armed with the most powerful weapon perhaps ever held in the hands of a mortal. Already endowed with arcane powers, Elric finds that this sword has more than a mind of its own and can aid him in sustaining the life of his ailing body and can provide blood and souls to his patron, Arioch in order to summon aid whenever the fickle deity feels the desire to answer his call.

Therefore, we see Elric, a man with complex curiosities concerning his world and his role driven to the edge by more complexities caused by the evil power he possesses and attempts to justify but in the end seems to possess him. But through all the turmoil and struggles he undergoes, we see a man who commits great evil that is constantly trying to make it through life answering the greatest questions of life all the while never wanting to do harm to anyone, especially those most loyal to him. As fate would have it, it doesn’t always work out that way and that causes Elric great grief.

Shares the soul with a million incarnations: Elric is a man of incredible power in spite of his weakling appearance. His mind is sharp, his desires are strong, and his sword is malevolent. You cannot label him as good or evil. He simply is himself wanting to find out the answers to life’s most complex puzzles. However, as much as he desires to explore freely and satisfy his own curiosities, he discovers little by little that his possession of the black sword that screams, howls, sings, and drink souls is only permitted because he shares the fate of a million other individuals throughout the known planes of existence known in Michael Moorcock’s writings as the Multiverse. That fate is the role we come to know as the Eternal Champion. The Eternal Champion never seeks to be the flag bearer of humanity or the eternal balance but once that role is realized, it is impossible for him to rid himself of the mantle. The more he resists, the more the calling drags him into the massive struggles on truly epic stages involving gods and great demons of the higher worlds.

Thus Elric is merely one incarnation  that spans the ages of worlds and planes of existences that reluctantly and without purpose, serves the eternal balance, rescues humanity or dooms it, whichever is necessary at the moment, and challenges the gods who threaten the civilizations with destruction as they use the lower worlds for their great chess games.

Moorcock's Stormbringer, a facinating conclusion to the Elric saga from the short story and short novel era, is fast paced, adventurous, and to the point without unnecessary subplots focusing mostly upon one character - Elric. It contains a host of epic level mind candy to awe readers consuming only about 80K words.

Moorcock’s Stormbringer, a facinating conclusion to the Elric saga from the short story and short novel era, is fast paced, adventurous, and to the point without unnecessary subplots focusing mostly upon one character – Elric. It contains a host of epic level mind candy to awe readers consuming only about 80K words. Book cover artwork by Michael Whelan.

Is forced to bear the weight of many burdens and destined to fulfill a cruel fate: Fate can be an ugly thing and that is an understatement for Elric. As he seeks to embark upon journeys to learn the ways of the Young Kingdoms, he learns more about himself instead. He learns that his burdens are to be great, that anyone he starts to like becomes doomed to have ever known him, and that his end will erupt in cataclysmic results. We learn that only one incarnation has ever been able to be reincarnated many times over and remember his fate. Perhaps Elric is lucky he is not that incarnation and that there could come a day when his burdens will end and all is fulfilled. What that fate entails could be answered at the fabled city that spans the planes of the multiverse, Tanelorn. That is the only city that Eternal Champions can seek for solace but it seems so elusive that the only alternative for Elric is . . .

In some ways, he is like all of us but painted in a role of the most epic proportions: In some ways we are all like Elric. We seek answers to life. We seek the end of misery. We seek that state of being where we can be satisfied and simply live out our life on a plateau of satisfaction. However, like Elric, we seem to always be met with disturbing ironies of fate that seek to dash our hope and serenity. The main difference we see is that with Elric, once again, his tragedies and his fates take place on epic stages where the gods act out their plays of extreme power.

Is there a little of Elric in all of us? Does Elric embody the trials and tribulations we all face in life to some degree? I think we can all say that no matter how hard we try, things just don’t end up quite as lovely as we plan. For any fantasy reader who hasn’t read these yet, you have deprived yourself of a wealth of fantastic fiction accounts that contain a big bang without all the wordiness and fluff that authors today stuff between covers of their books. Don’t let the scant girth of these books fool you for they contain more thought and mind candy than you will find in most other writers whose prose are multiplied in the word count category. Reading the books that make up the story of Elric of Melniboné, we see that Elric is you and Elric is me.


– by J.Wade Harrell,

author of Shadows of Siernod and Flames of Palamarr

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Review: “At the Mountains of Madness”


A  classic horror by H. P. Lovecraft

at_the_mountains_of_madness3a

There is nothing more mysterious than reading a story set in our own world that is tainted with a dark twist concerning the unknown. When a person reads a story that contains so much believability but is spiked with a subject matter that exposes some eternal darkness beyond what we know to be true, the reader is left with a feeling that there are things in this world yet to be explained.

“At the Mountains of Madness” is one such read, a novella that was originally rejected by Weird Tales magazine because it was too long for the pulp format they were built to handle, and it draws you deeper into the world we live in by taking you to unimaginable places on our own planet. It seems that Lovecraft was enamored with the frozen continent since his youth and it was only inevitable that he would eventually write his longest work about an expedition to that remote land in our own world that he depicts so wildly that one would think they had stepped through the cosmos to another planet.

Lovecraft’s story begins as a group of scientists decide to embark upon a mission to Antarctica to use a device to extract some core samples to study hoping to discover a bit about the earth’s history in a less than hospitable region, environmentally speaking. Early on in the story you are delivered a long expose of scientific words you can hardly pronounce and you might be tempted to put the story down in favor of something a little easier to read but when you stick through the mire of big words you start to be intrigued by some bizarre encounters.

The scientists begin the explore the frozen continent at the southern fringe of our globe in all its harshness and barren cold while you see the events unfold with a first person narrative with minimal dialogue that is common to Lovecraft work, and as we have noted before, probably comes back to his own introverted personality. It is very clear that he is much more concerned with what happens than he is with establishing talkative relationships between characters. Yet, in his own way, you can identify somewhat with the characters as the story moves forward. You want them to keep going because it is through their eyes that you see the tale unfold and if they do not discover the source of the twisted mysteries then you don’t succeed in discovering the source of the strange life forms they discover buried beneath the arctic ice.

After chance leads one of the scientists to discover the beings that can neither be classified as animal or vegetable, certain horrors fall upon them. Perhaps they should have never disturbed the ancient creatures preserved in the frozen world. After the horrible events strike, our protagonist Dyer and his sidekick Danforth venture plane toward a bizarre set of mountains they dub the Mountains of Madness. There they find something so bizarre and otherworldly on our own planet that hints at intelligent life far more ancient than our own history, land their plane, then trek into the ancient city at the bottom of the world. The psychology of the human mind cannot be satisfied unless they explore this dark Cyclopian world of strange geometric patterns laden with mysterious murals. These murals seem to tell the story of what they find as they delve deeper into a dark abyss that hints at something even more horrible.

I won’t spoil the experience by revealing the ending as I have only highlighted some of the weird events that haunt the expedition where they learn more than they bargained for. But rest assured, you will be left with a sense of twisted reality that makes you never want to visit such places that will alter your view of our existence.

Is it worth the read? Well, some say it is not Lovecraft’s best work but the imagery is unparalleled for its time and still stands as a landmark of fictitious architecture of alien origin. The story bogs down at points with long lectures of scientific mumb- jumbo that makes you feel like you are back in Biology class. At other times you feel like the story takes a jump backward holding you back from proceeding with the story line. Others hail it as classic Lovecraft that no fan should omit from their reading list. The ancient city of a lost civilization of life forms more bizarre than we could ever imagine is so large, so alien, and so extreme to exist right under our nose that it confounds us to the core of our being testing our own sanity. The imagery described is certainly a sign of a world that contains powerful beings that if unleashed, would alter our own civilization in ways we hope we never have to deal with.

What would happen if world leaders and the scientific community at large were told of this massive dark discovery where these Elder Things have been aroused back to life by the accidental stumblings of curious scientists and left to roam the subterranean halls of our misunderstood planet? Better yet, what would you do?


– by J.Wade Harrell,

author of Shadows of Siernod and Flames of Palamarr

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Author’s News


New Short Story in the Works

Scribing JWH FantasyI have been working on a story under 10,000 words and my first draft cut that goal razor-thin. My intent was to enter it into a contest and to also feature a female protagonist. My readers are well aware that I have prominent female characters but I thought it was about time to put a capable woman in the lead role. Stay tuned to see my latest character, Berahna, fully equipped to ride front and center as an action hero in the same universe as the fabled Fist La’brau thought in a different time.

dragons_bloodThe working title of this story is “Thrones of Lumindor” and I am certain this tale will not disappoint as it weaves in a little high fantasy element into my sword and sorcery styled fantasy.

Amazon Author Page Update

I also thought it might be time to refresh my author page with an updated narrative and it now includes all my stories available on Amazon. Check it out at http://www.amazon.com/J.-Wade-Harrell/e/B004Y6Z8NK/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1373171180&sr=8-1 .


– by J.Wade Harrell,

author of Shadows of Siernod and Flames of Palamarr

Posted in Fantasy, Writing | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment