Thursday, February 12, 2009

Guest Post: Jason Pratt




Please welcome Jason Pratt, author of Cry of Justice. He is on a Blog Tour to promote the first book in his new fantasy trilogy.

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THE THREAT OF VALENTINE'S DAY

I can't help but feel horribly depressed this time of year, for my own reasons. But true love would fix all that right? And everything would then have a happy ending, right?

Right?!

Well, maybe. It depends--not on true love, but on me. The selfish side of my mind and soul, you see, is not really all that interested in true love. In fact, that part of me is scared spitless by true love. That part of me would much rather have someone who is addicted to me, and who lives as an extension of my life. True love is far more threatening.

The main heroine of my novel, Cry of Justice, endemically embodies this problem with my ego and pride and self-centeredness. Not that this is all she is and does; but whenever I preach I tend to preach against myself. {wry g} And bless her heart, Portunista often ends up saddled with being the exemplar of the worst parts of myself. This kind of preaching is going on, against that hellish attitude in the back of my mind, at the end of CoJ.

Writing from her hindsight, summing up her thoughts and feelings about how she was in the past (the main timeline of the story), Portunista, now a beloved Empress, assesses her greatest failure--in principle, and in practice:

"Our choices affect the momentum of our minds--and I had chosen wrongly; and so my pride was once again at stake: my pride in my present, and in my future, and in myself.

I had convinced myself, once more, that [someone who truly loves her] was a threat.

"And, indeed, he was. He was a threat to my self--the most dangerous threat one's self can face.

"What I didn't understand--what I refused to understand--but what I understand now, is this:

"There is a threat that enslaves the self, to another self. And this, I still believe, should be resisted, to the very blood.

"But there is another threat.

"It takes away the food of the self, gnawing upon the self," and gives to the self... everything else.

“The first, the hideous threat, resembles the other; making the hideous threat more hideous. But--the second threat should be accepted, when it is given, if it is given, if ever it is perceived; for much the same reason a mouth and tongue should eat, ideally of anything—except themselves.

"How is _that_ a threat?! Is it not glorious?!

"Yes; it is glorious.

But, it means one's self must be dependent, after all, on something other than one's self. And I, myself, refused to accept that truth--that threat."

If you know that someone truly loves you, please accept that love if you can, as much as you can, tomorrow.

And happy Valentine's Day.

{s}
Jason Pratt


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About the Author:

Jason Pratt is a native of West Tennessee, and the systems manager for Dyer Fiberglass, Inc. He holds a bachelor of communications degree from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. When he isn’t freelance editing other people’s books or writing philosophical treatises as a respected guest on various Internet sites, he can be found pondering tactics and strategies in the latest wargame or studying metaphysics and world history. Occasionally he finds the time to instruct, judge and compete in the art of fencing; and has been known to write cinematic epic fantasies when people aren’t looking. CRY OF JUSTICE is the first book of an initial trilogy, the third book of which he is currently composing.

7 comments:

  1. Thanks for hosting the article, Mari. {s!}

    JRP

    ReplyDelete
  2. Incidentally, I have no idea why there are so many extra quotation marks in the excerpt from CoJ. I didn't put them there.

    For clarification purposes, the book excerpt begins at "Our choices affect...", and ends with "And I myself refused to accept that truth--that threat." There should be open quotation marks at the beginning of each small paragraph along the way (which is standard format for multiple paragraph quotations), but no close quotation marks until the end of "that threat" (ditto).

    The "If you know..." sentence afterward is from me again, for this article; not an excerpt from the book.

    JRP

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  3. I emailed you last week with a word version to get your input on the formating since it came to me a bit messed up. I never heard back so I went with my best guess. Also, I didn't receive the copy of the book so I wasn't able to check the quotes. I let Tracee know about that a couple weeks ago. I recently emailed her to let her know that I will not have a review for the 19th.

    Thanks for the clarification, though. I will go ahead and fix it for you.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mari,

    I'm pretty sure my emailer killed paragraphs and inserted weird carriage returns (even by my standards {g}) and divided some words into pieces and smooshed some words together, the first time I sent the article to Tracee (the publicist who put together the book tour)--which she didn't tell me, but which I discovered after she started posting up interviews and articles.

    I sent her a doc file to make corrections with, which I know happened for at least one interview. But I have no idea whether she sent you that corrected doc file or not.

    I never did receive a doc file from you in the email, so far as I know. If it arrived, but didn't say anything in the title header about CoJ, I may have accidentally deleted it as spam. If you sent it to Tracee, she didn't forward it along to me.

    The review address list I was given by Tracee doesn't have anyone's name "Mari" or [your last name] in it, which probably explains why you never received a review copy. {wry g} If you'll give me a mailing address (send to my name, no space between first and last name, at compuserve.com--LABELED CLEARLY IN THE HEADER so I don't accidentally erase it), I'll be glad to send copy dated and autographed to you specifically (or to whomever you wish, if you prefer), from my local stock. (All the other reviewers in the tour got unautographed copies from warehouse stock, when I sent the address list to my distributor.)

    Hope that's helpful!

    JRP

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks Naida!

    You can actually thumb through the whole book for free at books.google.net (or .com or whatever the suffix is, I forget. {lol!})

    A list of various reviews (and links thereof) can be found at one of my prior book tour stops here at the Medieval Bookworm's site. (Worms of the world untie!! ... or, unite! Whichever! {g!})

    The extended list in the comments (which includes some more negative reviews for comparison) also includes links to me reading portions of CoJ aloud, especially the first four chapters.

    JRP

    ReplyDelete
  6. Very interesting post ... and quite a view of love there! Love how he tied in Valentine's Day! I'll have to check this out at the Google link he provided. thanks!

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Thanks for taking the time to comment! :)