HeyJaredWriting And Reflections
Essays and rambles on aspects of writing from words to research. All free until I collect and publish them, whereupon they are available with a paid subscription.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 24
- Latest publication
- Sep 30, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Aug 31, 2026
Latest issues
Mixing Up the Motifs (opens the original)
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In one of L. Frank Baum’s later Oz stories, we meet the fairies of light: Sunlight, Moonlight, and so on to the seventh and most beautiful, Electra.Nothing odd in that for the era. One World Fair had the Fairy of Electricity presiding over a building, and in Oz itself, we had Tik-Tok the robot man as well as fairies and all the other magic.<a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Xy3D!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstac
And The End Of All Our Exploring (opens the original)
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Ah, the great unknown! The regions where our intrepid characters can find dragons, dog-headed men, and gold!We shall not cease from exploration,And the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.Well, actually, you may or may not end up where you started, and you may or may not end there wiser than you began, but the more you explore, the sooner arrives the hour when you cease from exploring.Because it’s actually a matter of running out of une
Good, Evil, And Favorites (opens the original)
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Such is the degraded temper of our time that I begin by telling you what hypocrisy is.Hypocrisy is feigning to hold beliefs that you do not really believe.Nowadays, people throw it about to mean someone who does not live up to the standards he professes. (Or even not living up to them in their interpretation of his standards -- which is generally a very bad piece of polemic.) That would make a hypocrite of a bum telling children to avoid the booze, or they will ruin their lives as badly as he ha
The Colors of Woe (opens the original)
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Someone just died. What should your characters wear?We have many records from modern, medieval, and ancient sources. Sometimes we have to glean between the lines, but it is clear that much depends on their social status and, perhaps more, on their purses.Black dye is expensive in many eras. White cloth often needs only bleach, but then, it shows dirt very easily, and having it cleaned is not cheap. The expense is not trivial; one Victorian reformer noted with approval that a new widow who had be
It’s Coming, It’s Coming! (opens the original)
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The series is a trilogy! The essays have again been collected and submitted for pre-order! If you want the paperback, alas, you can only buy it when it comes out, but ebooks are available for pre-order!At Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, <a href="https://www.smash
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