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[josh-the-writer]

First Flight 117 Year Anniversary

Before December 17, 1903, the closest thing to flying that human beings had experienced was hot air balloons. The biggest problem with hot air balloons is that they are extremely dependent on the winds. A person can’t control the direction it flies. It just goes with the winds.  Kind of like sailing, but without the ability to navigate with the help of water currents and tides. But a couple of bicycle salesmen came into the picture to change that. Enter Orville and Wilbur Wright.  That’s right, if you follow my writing, you may have noticed I skipped my normal Monday post in favor of waiting for the 117th anniversary of the first flight.  After this week, I’ll get back to normal. But I really wanted to do my best to honor this incredible moment.  I’m by no means a historical expert on flying. The only thing is that I have become a complete and total aviation nerd since I realized how much I love it. I’ve been living on aviation social media profiles, as well as reading tons of aviation books, watching aviation movies, TV shows, and YouTube channels.  One of those books was a very interesting biography of the Wright Brothers by David McCullough called...well...The Wright Brothers. That being said, I want to do my best to pay homage to the fathers of modern aviation. The problem is doing that in a post short enough to keep people interested. I mean, literal books have been written for the duo. In fact, books have been written on each brother individually! But I’ll do my Read the full article

[josh-the-writer]

Committing to the Journey

My wife, Cheyna says I change my blog more than I change my clothes. Sadly, I think she is kind of right.  I have jumped from movie blogging to self-improvement to fitness to books to fitness again, and I’m pretty sure I’ve consistently touched on almost every generic blog topic out there.  It is with a very happy and optimistic outlook I am doing this again! Now the blog isn’t about any single subject in particular, but about the journey of it all. But this time I’m freaking committed.  I covered it in the About Me page, but I’ll go ahead and say it again. I’ve decided to make my blog about a little bit of everything. My goal is going to be to write one thing a day. I won’t post something every day because that’s just too much content and I wouldn’t be able to keep up consistently. Instead, I want to just write every single day to make myself as educated as possible and to improve my writing as much as possible.  This blog is about a little bit of everything, but mainly how you can use my life and other lessons I learn to improve your own life. I’ll also write a weekly review of a book and a movie to give some input into what you consume.  I’m not just committing to the blog though. I also have big plans to commit more to my personal health, growth, and relationships.  Here are my plans for the month of September for each topic. Health I used to be much stronger than I am currently. That fact kind of pisses me off.  I Read the full article

[josh-the-writer]

Stillness is the Key - Ryan Holiday

Modern problems call for modern – er – classic solutions. At least that is the belief by Ryan Holiday in his book Stillness is the Key. Ryan Holiday is a well-known personality in the self-help nonfiction book world. He is most well-known for his reinvigoration of stoicism into modern life. He is of the belief that a lot of modern people will be most helped if they just initiate in a bit of stoic philosophy. Holiday is a college dropout. He has said in interviews that he didn’t see the point in going to college to be a writer, as was his goal, and learning about writing and philosophies from college professors when he could actually go straight to the source and read some of the greatest philosophers of all time – philosophers like Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus. Ryan Holiday took the information he learned from these great philosophers of history and wrote about how it can be applied to the modern-day busy life. Not only does he say, “slowing down is good,” but he expands and shows how to slow down and why it’s important. Stillness is the Key is a huge criticism of how life has gotten busier and busier as we’ve advanced as a society. Keep in mind, he isn’t saying that people are bad for living a fast-paced lifestyle. Read the full article

[josh-the-writer]

Stephen Deutsch - Champion

I was in the search for new books to review and help out some less famous authors, and I found Champion by Stephen Deutsch through an online blog tour with Book Collective. Which means I finished up reading Champion and here I am to talk about it. It’s very common for small-time authors, indie authors, and vanity press published authors to have absolutely horrid books. I don’t know how this book hasn’t gotten more attention already! It’s freaking awesome! Champion is a historical fiction about two different people that could be classified as champions. It’s set in World War II-era Germany and depicts the story of young Jew Herschel Grynszpan and Max Schmeling. If you’re a boxing fan then it’s likely you’ve heard of Max Schmeling, he was the German boxing champion that lost his title to Joe Louise during the second World War. His storyline throughout the novel is about how he became known as a Nazi sympathizer despite the fact he never truly believed in the Nazi ideology, he even helps some Jews. But he had to keep up a façade in order to keep himself and his wife out of the line of sight of the German government. The name you’ve probably never heard of is Herschel Grynszpan. He is surprisingly important to the narrative the Nazis pushed on the Jews though. As a young boy, he faced severe discrimination, but he was at a good age for his parents to send him out of Germany with the hopes of him being able to get the rest of the family to emigrate to Palestine. Read the full article

[josh-the-writer]

The Final Weekend: A Stoned Tale - Neal Cassidy

I've done a couple of book blog tours before, but my favorite has always been when I worked with Erik and his team at Breakeven Books. So, when he reached out for me to be part of the book blog tour for The Final Weekend: A Stoned Tale, I jumped at the opportunity. Sometimes you just need a fun dumb read that is the equivalent of Project X in book form and everyone is of the legal age. It’s even more important to have this when the world is in the middle of a pandemic. There are times when you just need to be in a world of everyone partying and having a good time. That’s exactly how I would describe the events on The Final Weekend: A Stoned Tale by Neal Cassidy. Here’s the author blurb for his book: Neal Cassidy is an American writer who grew up in Forest, Va. An ex-tennis pro, he also spent his winters competing in Big Air & Slopestylecompetitions on skis. After many years of an undiscerning lifestyle, hedecided to put his experiences into his first novel, The Final Weekend: AStoned Tale. He does his best writing at home while listening toTchaikovsky at a low volume, with a hot black tea, frozen chocolate fruits, and five pre-rolled blunts within reach.The Final Weekend: A Stoned Tale author blurb Neal Cassidy’s book The Final Weekend: A Stoned Tale is largely influenced by the party lifestyle. It’s a book full of debauchery, alcohol, and smoking a ton of marijuana. Read the full article

[josh-the-writer]

Louise Rasmussen and Winston Sieck - Save Your Ammo

I love reading books. I especially love reading books that are specifically written to make me a better person. That was the goal Louise Rasmussen and Winston Sieck had when they wrote Save Your Ammo: Working Across Cultures for National Security. The two doctors founded Global Cognition together where they strive to advance cultural competence in demanding environments through research, training, and assessment. Basically, it’s two doctors that help other people understand different cultures. Save Your Ammo is an introduction to what their work is and offers some explanation and concepts to help you in your own life. It takes the lessons and concepts that the United States military uses when doing their international missions and distills them into messages that anyone can digest. These can then be applied to almost any career pursuit. One example of this is the idea that you should always try to understand other people’s perspectives. The scenario that Rasmussen and Sieck use for this is a general working on finding specific people in Al-Qaeda. The general and his team try to use aerial surveillance to pinpoint locations, but those that claimed they could find the Al-Qaeda members couldn’t find anything from an aerial perspective because they had never seen their hometown from that perspective. They could only pinpoint the street view. Then the general and his team could zoom out on the camera and find the coordinates to plan their missions. Read the full article

[josh-the-writer]

Jenna Moreci - Eve: the Awakening

As I said in my recent post on story structure archetypes, I’m a big fan of Jenna Moreci. She has a YouTube channel that focuses on writing. She does some fun videos as well as some that are truly informative for any writers. Eve: The Awakening is the first book she has written, and it’s incredible. Eve: the Awakening is a young adult science fiction book that follows Evelyn Kingston as she fights the social hierarchy at her new college, the super-elite Billington University in Sothern California. Oh yea, and Evelyn, who goes by Eve, is a chimera. That means she is an evolved human that has telepathic powers. Chimeras are heavily discriminated against, in a way that makes me think of mutants in the X-Men series by Marvel. Not only is Eve a chimera, but she is the strongest chimera that has ever been documented. Yeah, the biggest downside is whenever there is the whole “strongest to ever exist” trope. Moreci deals with it well, but it’s still an unnecessary evil. It gives the book a “chosen one” vibe that makes it lack real stakes. Because Eve is basically unbeatable, she is boring to deal with. She has some social concerns that are actually more entertaining to read because there are stakes in the social hierarchy of the school. There is, naturally with any young adult novel, there is a love angle. Moreci, who is known from her YouTube to be critical of poorly written love stories, navigates these waters very well. Read the full article

[josh-the-writer]

7 Archetypes of Story Structure

What are the 7 archetypes of story structure and how can they help me write a book? If you're like me then you want to write the next great American novel.  The sad news of that is that it's highly unlikely that that will happen for a very long time. A lot of the reason behind that is there are so many people producing such high-quality novels, and it's really hard to capture a national novel at this time in history where there are so many varying voices.  Again, if you're like me and hundreds of thousands of other English graduates, you still want to write a book. With technology the way it is, it's easier than ever to write something and get it out in the world. You can self-publish your novel instead of being roped into an unfair contract by a big publishing house. You can be an incredibly successful author with self-publishing. Jenna Moreci is the perfect example of this. I even reviewed her first book here. It's really hard work, but it can be done. But now that you've made the decision to write a book, it's time to settle on a story. When working on that story it helps to have an outline to follow.  There are numerous ways to go about it, and if you're a nerd about writing and critical theory like me, you probably have heard of Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious. It's essentially the theory that humanity is all connected through an unconscious mind. It's why almost any story can be connected and compared to others.  This Read the full article