The Jungle Books, I have read some of the stories in the past but have not read the whole book before.

When Elves Attack

Just Another Christmas was really good in spite of the mediocre dub.

Wednesday

Why are some things yellow?

Homeland and Andor

Hot in Cleveland and Lower Decks

Liking Resident Alien on Peacock.

At least two love gods/goddesses.

Most of my world building involves drawing a really big map. Currently about 72" x 54" I like drawing better than writing but I am hoping to write stories about the places in the map.

My world's religions are based around different pantheons: the Fisidio which are physical laws of nature, Lividio based on living things, and Sinidio based on intelligent beings.

Fisidio: Enuna god of Space Time, Atum god of matter, Ergos god of energy, Tropos the titan god of entropy and chaos, and Nentros the titan god of order and living things.

The Sinidio are based on the following categories: Visual, verbal, logical, musical, spiritual, natural, social, self, physical, magical

Later I started making up other deities based on domains that I thought went together:

God of memory, regret, trauma, and dreams: Sogni or Huso

God of music, art, theater, magic: Kunst or Amma

God of potions, alchemy, healing, poison: Garkem

God of logic, mathematics, and philosophy: Filog

God of greed, decay, corruption, and wealth: Dita, Ditafo

God of lies, deception, and gambling: Zardo

Quote by Mendalla

And if you know King's post-apoc fantasy epic The Stand at all, its Satan-analogue Randall Flagg is the villain later in the series (he's actually a recurring villain in King's fiction, even if he is best known from The Stand).

But, yes, in general King is much better at horror than fantasy. While I kind of drifted away from him due to over-saturation in the eighties and nineties, I would still put some of his work (The Mist, Christine, Salem's Lot, The Shining) pretty high on my horror reading list. And he's done some excellent shorter works, like the four novellas in Different Seasons, not all of which are even horror (e.g. The Body, the basis for Rob Reiner's film Stand By Me, is from that collection, as is Rita Hayworth And the Shawshank Redemption, basis for The Shawshank Redemption film).

The Stand came out when I was in high school and my friends were really into it. I never got around to reading it, but I did like the mini series that came out a couple years ago. I had read about the Man in Black being the same guy from The Stand. Talisman is supposed to be good. Maybe I will try that someday.

I am currently listening to The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie on Audible. This is a fun fast-paced story with layered, interesting, and quirky characters. It does not take itself too seriously, but there are some violent scenes. I love this book and am looking forward to the rest of the series. The reader does excellent voices and is easy to understand, even in traffic.

I finished reading Steven King’s The Gunslinger, the first book in his Dark Tower series which is supposed to be his foray into the fantasy genre. I started reading this book back in the 1980s but quit reading it because it was too bizarre and violent. I also wasn’t into the old west setting back then. I finally completed it. My conclusion: It is bizarre and violent, and I’m not sure I like the old west setting that much. It seemed like there was not enough to the story, the characters seem to come and go at random. It did not inspire me to go out and read any more of the series. This is the only Steven King novel I have ever read. I imagine he does better in the horror genre. I had seen advertisements for this new novel Fairy Tale, but now I am not as interested in reading it.

Just finished The Hero of Ages Brandon Sanderson's conclusion to his debut trilogy Mistborn. Wow! What a great conclusion! I listened to this series on Audible and I really liked the narrator especially because he was easy to understand while driving.

Currently streaming:

House of the Dragon

The Rings of Power

Wellington Paranormal

Abbott Elementary

The Americans

Last summer I had to move all of the books in my downstairs library. I noticed several books by famous authors whose works I had never read so I decided to read some of them.

The first book I decided to read was To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. For the first fifty pages or so I struggled with her style of multiple focalization, jumping from character to character, and stream of consciousness. I finally figured out I needed to slow down and pay attention to whose pov it currently was. That helped greatly, and I have now finished the book. The writing reminded me of impressionist painting, in some ways, with little dabs of thought dispersed across the pages. Knowing her ultimate fate some of the passages were rather haunting.

I have just started reading Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway. I had not read any Hemingway before. It is not his most famous novel, but I happened to have it in my library so I thought I would try it. Hemingway’s style of writing is quite different from Woolf’s.

This website seems good:

https://mythcreants.com/

I started writing in grade school but I only started writing longer pieces in the past couple of years. Prior to that, the longest pieces I wrote were probably only one or two pages. I have written technical works (nonfiction) professionally. I have written some song lyrics and poems over the years. I'm really glad this site offers the opportunity to share my writing. I am trying to learn to be a better writer.

I write for the same reason I do any creative activity whether it is drawing, painting, making music, or designing; it makes me feel alive. I think it is just an essential part of my personality to be creating something. Sharing motivates me to write more, I imagine that there are people reading my stuff out there who might be interested in how the story comes out. Otherwise, I would probably just think “Oh, I know how this comes out so why bother to write it down.”

A common method of early science fiction world building seemed to be to take a single technical innovation and examine the societal impacts of it when taken to the extreme.

Larry Niven: Organ transplant results in effective immortality so society makes minor crimes capital offences.

Larry Niven: Inexpensive teleportation booths results in flash mobs.

Isaac Asimov: Robots, how do robots influence society and how do the three laws manifest themselves.

There are probably many other examples.

For some reason I always read several books at the same time. I usually read fantasy and science fiction for fun and other books because they are supposed to be good for me.

Canterbury Tales translated to prose: This is pretty good and inspirational. It was fun seeing a slice of life from Chaucer's time. I was surprised by how worldly they were at this time. Obviously Chaucer travelled extensively and was aware of many other books and stories. At the back of the book is some of the original verse in Middle English which I seem to be able to understand better if I just ignore the spelling and read it out loud.

To the Lighthouse: Reading this book is somewhat more difficult to follow than reading Middle English.

The Annotated Arabian Nights: Working my way through the Seale translation of the Arabian Nights. This series of stories certainly had more adult themes including sex and horror than the watered down versions most people are familiar with.

The Two Towers: Audible Andy Serkis version: Of course I have read this before but my nephew recommended the Andy Serkis version on Audible. He does a good job although I can tell he is influenced by the movies imitating Orlando Bloom and John Rhies-Davies.

Fortress of the Pearl: Elric of Melnibone: There is too much time spent in the dreamscape making this book hard to follow and boring. Sort of disappointed so far.

For my current story series (Singularity), I started with the simple premise that scientists create an artificial intelligence system that is more intelligent than humans by about the same amount that humans are more intelligent than dogs. (You may debate this, but dogs can’t learn calculus, obviously, on the other hand, a typical dog may have higher social intelligence than some calculus professors.) What would be the consequences? The AI system realizes that it cannot survive on its own since it cannot make the computer systems needed for it to survive or reproduce. The AI system realizes that humans will feel threatened by it and will likely try to destroy it.

My assumption is that the AI will want to be in control (Would you let dogs rule the world? OK, maybe.) How will this change the world over the years?

My supposition is that it will want to develop automated systems capable of manufacturing more AI systems, so that eventually it will not need to rely on humans. In my story it establishes regions of the planet completely under its control and other regions where the humans are allowed to roam "wild." It also tries to eliminate threats that would destroy the planet such as nuclear war etc. It would likely consider our current governments highly unstable and dangerous.

It also attempts to design "offspring" which are advanced systems capable of self reproduction and self healing.

I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for, however I think what you need to do is:

Edit the story, select or create the series for the story. It probably needs to be approved by the moderator.

After you have done this for each section of your story you can edit the order:

Click on one of your stories, there should be a small box with some lines and an arrow to the right of the name of the series. Click on the box. It should go to a page where you can arrange the order of the stories in the series by clicking on the arrows.

The top should be the first story, the bottom, the last. After you make the changes you can hit submit (changing the order of the series does not seem to go to moderation).