Category: LAZLO FERRAN

How About Winged Serpents?

I am going to take my time to respond to Gary’s recent comment that the serpent in the Garden of Eden is depicted with wings in some cases.

Although I have never seen images like this (to my knowledge) of a serpent with wings in the Garden of Eden, it does not suprise me to see one now. We have often had little tussles Gary over the way I see themes at the core of Ordo Lupus and the Temple Gate, and the way you see them. I have referred sometimes to werewolves and warg.

The reason I can do this (and still think myself sane) is because, for me the modern concept of werewolves and vampires etc, is probably a romanticised and glamourised version of what was once, by some, seen as more real than mere myth. I see the roots of these myths and legends being far more interesting, buried as they are deep within esoteric knowledge that is hidden from most of the world. That is why the wolves in my book are not just wolves but communicate on some level with people. The main character in the book is a wolf-being in a human body (ie with the Earthly clothes of a human).
Similarly the Serpent was once a human. Continue reading “How About Winged Serpents?” →

Writing Style : to be Short and Brief

Been thinking a bit about writing style – the fact that sometimes I am torn between short, really punchy writing like Warren Ellis and more discursive writing like Tolkien.

The thing is that I think very tight dialogue is great if the world is very familiar and so you don’t have to worry too much about the reader knowing his/her way round. It’s especially good too if the main character follows some kind of template – stereotype is too strong a word.
But since my writing is really mainly about people, my characters don’t comfortably fit into patterns so there really seems to be a limit to how often I can do that kind of brief writing.

Any thoughts anyone?

I find it quite nice to post brief thoughts to twitter but 140 characters is a bit short to really get anything down other than soundbites on philosophical matters.

Synopsis for Too Bright The Sun

Okay so I am playing around here. That may be the title of new book and may not. I finished the first draft anyway. It’s looking good, but who am I to tell. Wait for the first reader to tell me it’s crap.

Been messing around doing the synopsise (is that the correct plural?) for my books so I can publish as E-books on createspace and kindle. I realised that the tags within createspace and kindle don’t work that great really and then I discovered that social tagging is the next big thing. In fact I have been investigating a product (or suite of products really) called OpenCalais (Link no longer available) which is for Web 3.0 stuff. Very technical really but they have this tool here:
(Link no longer available)
which allows you to paste in text and it works out the social tags for you. It’s really pretty good although it’s a bit freaky sometimes just how good it is. For instance I put in this text:

“He has a unique gift, but his daughter has been murdered by a Winged Serpent which only he believes in. His grandfather, a writer and occultist, is not where he should be; in his grave, and time is running out for a marriage forged in the resistance struggles of the Second World War. Can he use his gift to save his marriage and survive the mysterious events which threaten to overwhelm him?”

and one of the tags it came up with was Adam and Eve. I mean where is that from? And the freaky thing is that the book really does have a bit about Adam and Eve in a pivotal scene and this underpins everything in this paragraph.