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Pamela S

Pamela S

Hello!! My name is Pam, I looove to read and gab....
I'm an eclectic reader, but Epic Fantasy is, by far, my favorite genre!

I love to write as well, though I'm not near the writer I'd like to be :P

Hope ya'll have a great day!! Swing by anytime! :D more »
  • AR, USA
  • member since January 1 2009

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Pamela S’s last login was Friday, November 13 2009.

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Public Notes

  • The-Alchemist-Of-Words

    The-Alchemist-Of-Words says

    I wish you a Merry Christmas with Jesus Christ, the true meaning of Christmas, and a Happy New Year!

    posted 12 days ago. ( send a note )
  • Evelyn S

    Evelyn S says

    Hello Pamela S, I was wondering what sort of work you write?
    Evelyn S

    posted 9 months ago. ( send a note )
  • The-Alchemist-Of-Words

    The-Alchemist-Of-Words says

    Well, you see, there was one of them that was boring because it contained only dates and numerical facts, etc. But I think that they offered me a lot of information about Free Masonry. I am not interested in it, of course, but ABOUT it, about the historical conspiracy on this planet :) I advise you to read them ;) Really! You can find certain books on this theme - offering subjective or objective facts. Read both types. I also find out, after reading those books, that some of our politicians that our country knows well, are involved in Free Masonry. I also found interesting the pyramidal hierarchy. So just try! ;)

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • James M

    James M says

    Believe me, it was my pleasure. Feel free to call on me anytime.

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • Dee G

    Dee G says

    I am almost done with The Elves of Cintra by Terry Brooks in audio read by Phil Gigante. I read these early books for the first time starting in August I think and I hope to go all thru the series again. The Sowrd of Shannara was the first fantasy novel I ever read. If you are going to read these early ones I have to warn you to have the next book in hand especially after Armegeddon's Children where Brooks drops you right off a cliff. Well, actually it is a wall but it sure screams SEQUEL and I didn't see it coming. It took me a couple months to get the next book LOL!

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • James M

    James M says

    Hi, Pam!
    I finally finished my adventure into fantasy pedantry. Don't forget! I did warn you. Sorry it took me so long. I finally got back home after working on the road for a month or so and I've had a long list of honey-dos to address. At any rate, here you go.
    The supreme forces in the universe are known as the Word and the Void.
    The Word is that which represents order and the light of life and creation. It is the power of the Word that has given rise to all that lives in and of the Earth.
    The Void is its equal and opposite. The Void is death. It is chaos and destruction; it is the end of all things. The Void in its unreasoned fury, campaigns endlessly for the end of the universe and the Word itself.
    The Word’s wisdom seeks to maintain the balance between the forces of order and chaos, the light and the dark, knowing the danger of shifting too far or too long in either direction. The Void always seeks to shift the balance toward itself.
    Long before the rise of humankind, into the world came the Faerie-kind. The Faerie-kind were divided into two general types: those that served the Word, which created them, and used their power to serve and protect the Earth and its creatures; and those who chose to use their power to satisfy their own desires for domination and destruction.
    The Histories of the Druids tell us that these diametrically opposed Faeries came together in a war that lasted decades, if not centuries, with the advantage shifting back and forth many times. On the one side you had the Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, and other even more magically powerful Faerie creatures. On the other were the Kobolds, Goblins, Ogres, and likewise more powerful magical Faeries called Demons. Eventually all of those who fought against the Faeries who served the Word were assigned this common label.
    Ultimately, the good guys won, but even then the forces of the Word, led primarily by the Elves, were faced with a problem: what to do with their defeated enemy. They obviously couldn’t let them go and expect them to uphold any sort of peace agreement. They could devise no reliable form of earthly imprisonment. They did not have it in them to execute their prisoners no matter how evil.
    Therefore, the most powerful wizards of the Elves developed the magic to create the Forbidding, a pocket dimension of nothingness in which to imprison the Demons for all time, and sacrificed a princess of their own to become the Ellcrys tree to be the keystone of the prison. So ended the war.
    From that time forward the creatures of Faerie adopted a policy of isolationism with regard to the advance of human civilization. For the most part, the creatures of Faerie were no more immortal than humans. Their lives may have been prolonged by the use of their powerful magic, but their lives definitely had an ending as surely as they did a beginning. There were a few notable exceptions to this rule, such as the King of the Silver River. As he was at the beginning of the world, as the last true servant of the Word so will he be at the end. The other Faerie creatures, rather than take over a role as the teachers of humankind in its infancy, instead chose to hide from them. That both they and the demons and dragons that they fought against continued to appear in folklore all the way up through the 20th and 21st centuries is testament to the impression the war made on them.
    At any rate, by following a policy of isolationism coupled with no longer having the Demons to guard against, the remaining Faerie creatures slowly, over the millennia, began to lose touch with their magical heritage. The Elves remained strong as a race due to their highly structured and organized society, but the other races (Dwarves, Gnomes, etc.) having lost touch with the magic that sustained them slowly died out in the face of the rapidly expanding human population of the world.
    However, the magical world of Faerie was not able to leave humans completely alone. No longer having a ready supply of magical Faerie creatures to work its will, the Word turned to those of which it had many. Out of all of thousands, and all too soon millions, of humans to chose from there were a handful who were found to have the sense of honor, duty, bravery, and determination to serve its purposes. These people were called the Knights of the Word. They were recruited by another unique Faerie creature of great power known only as The Lady, who was called the Voice of the Word. When a human man or woman agreed to serve her as a Knight of the Word, they were given a black rune-carved staff. This staff was the source of the Knights’ power. It was a weapon used by the Knights in their struggle to protect life and the balance between the Word and the Void.
    The Void, of course, also had its champions. Being deprived of true Demons through which to work, the Void found humans to subvert. Humans who wanted immortality or power and were open to trust in the promises of the Void. These people gave up being human to become a new kind of demon. It was the mission of the Knights of the Word to guard against the plots and machinations of these once-men and demons, hunt them down, and, with the power of their staffs, destroy them. And so it went for hundreds of years with the greater portion of humanity completely ignorant of the quiet war between the Word and the Void. Meanwhile, the Elves, the one race of beings that could have properly prepared humankind to face the Void, chose to live in isolation and secrecy in their city of Arborlon, located in a region called the Cintra. The Cintra just happened to be located deep in the Cascade Mountains of northern Oregon.
    Into this world was born Nest Freemark. Nest first enters the story as an eight year old girl in the book Running with the Demon. What makes here special is that she has magic. She apparently descends from a line of women born with innate magic. This strikes me as evidence that perhaps humans were not completely disassociated from the creatures of Faerie during the thousands of years between the end of the war against the Demons and the time of the beginning of Nest’s story. Nest was born and lives in small-town, Illinois. I can’t recall the name of the town, but she and her ancestors have used their magic to protect and uphold a grove of trees. This grove is very special is a locus of ancient power and, in partnership with small wood-sprites and the animals of the woods, Nest and her forbears have given themselves over to its care. Nest’s problem in this story is that she is the target of a demon, who is very adept at insinuating himself into the psyches of the people he meets, thereby opening them up to suggestion. These suggestions are usually very damaging, both to themselves and to others who happen to be around.
    Onto this stage steps Knight of the Word, John Ross. Another gift of The Lady enjoyed by the Knights of the Word is a form of prescience that warns them through their dreams of coming demon-engineered calamities. Thus does John Ross come in timely fashion into this small town with the purpose of protecting Nest from the demon and hopefully destroying it along the way. I won’t tell you how it turns out.
    In the second book, A Knight of the Word, we find that John Ross has fallen. He has decided that being a Knight of the Word sucks, it has ruined any chance he has ever had at having a normal life, and he’s not doing it anymore. The trouble is that one doesn’t stop being a Knight of the Word until The Lady says you’re no longer a Knight of the Word. Furthermore, what John fails to realize is that he is in serious danger of becoming subverted by a demon, himself. The demons, you see, won’t leave someone like John, who has always been one of their most implacable and dangerous enemies, alone. What could be better than turning someone who has always wrought such destruction among them? Failing in that, they could always kill him later.
    The Lady chooses Nest Freemark, now grown into a young woman in college, to go to Seattle, where John has settled in an effort to have a normal life, and convince him to once again wield the power of a Knight of the Word in Her name. Trusting in John’s friendship and regard for her, the Lady believes that only Nest has a shot at convincing him to see reason. The alternative is as simple as it is harsh. The Lady cannot allow someone like John, one of her most powerful Knights, to be turned to the Void. Such a thing would be a disaster for the world. If Nest cannot convince him to reassume his mantle as a Knight of the Word, then The Lady will have no choice but to have him destroyed.
    In the final book, Angel Fire East, John Ross is given one last mission by The Lady. She has promised him that if he completes this mission successfully, then his duty to her will be discharged and he can lay down his staff once and for all. Every couple thousand years or so, there is released into this world a sentient burst of wild magic. This magic is initially without permanent form or function. We find out later (not in this series), that it is the King of the Silver River who periodically releases these bursts of wild magic into the world whenever he feels there is great need. This wild magic is called the Gypsy Morph.
    The Lady tells John Ross where the Gypsy Morph is going to be born (somewhere on the Pacific coast of northern Oregon) and gives him the tools and information he needs to catch it. If the Gypsy Morph is not caught, then after a few days it will dissipate into nothing. Once caught, the Gypsy Morph can be influenced by whoever catches it and it begins to “morph” accordingly. The Lady warns John Ross, that demons will know when the Gypsy Morph is born and that they will be drawn to it. What he must do is catch the Gypsy Morph and protect it from the depredations of the demons, who will seek to destroy it if they cannot bend it to their purposes, until such time is it can morph into its final form and its nature becomes set. After catching the Gypsy Morph, John Ross is treated to a rapid fire series of changes in its form. I think it starts out as a sort of silvery cloud, and John uses a special, magical net to catch it. It promptly turns into a butterfly (I think). It then turns into a series of small animals. The frequency of the morphing gradually lessens. It starts out changing into a new form every hour or two, but it gradually lengthens the time out until it retains a form for a couple days, instead of hours. It finally assumes the form of a small boy of three or four years of age. At that point, the Gypsy Morph utters its first word: “Nest.” So, John starts heading for Illinois, fighting off demons every step of the way. The principal demon interested in the fate of the Gypsy Morph is one named Findo Gask.
    Gask is special.
    You see, most demons begin to degenerate after a century or two of fighting in the cause of the Void. The loss of their humanity is a gradual thing and once begun it never stops. They get their power, they get seeming immortality, but over time they slowly lose more and more of themselves until they become almost like animals. At this point they usually become the tools of other, more powerful and less animalistic demons. Either that or they get destroyed by those other, more powerful and less animalistic demons to ensure that the existence of demons remains a secret from humanity at large. Even those who become tools eventually get destroyed when they reach a point beyond which they are no longer controllable.
    Gask is different.
    Though he is one of the oldest and therefore the most powerful demons, he has never lost his ability to reason like a human. Here we see how the Void separates the weak from the strong. When you give yourself to the Void, it gives you power. Then it gives you more power. It’s a weird form of Darwinism. The Void takes your humanity and gives you power over others, but in order for you to remain a useful tool of the Void you must retain enough of your initial humanity to remain rational. If you can’t stick to the Void’s purpose, then the Void consumes you.
    Gask has managed to avoid being consumed. You don’t find out how old he is, but you get the impression that he has been around secretly spreading misery and campaigning for the ruination of human civilization for centuries. He has held to his rationality by managing to remain supremely focused on his one driving desire: the absolute annihilation of all life, as well as inflicting as much pain and misery and destruction along the way as possible. This is, of course, what the Void is all about. That the Void’s ultimate reward for such sterling service must result in his own destruction is something of which Gask is fully aware, unlike so many of the Void’s servants, and either doesn’t care or is looking forward to it. I won’t say any more about the story other than to say that certain aspects of it share some interesting parallelisms with one of today’s more popular religions. I’ll be happy to discuss them after you’ve read the book.
    Now fast forward at least a hundred years. Brooks is unclear on the exact amount of time, but it’s at least a century and probably closer to two. This is the Genesis of Shannara, which is to be four books (I think) starting with Armageddon’s Children, Elves of the Cintra, Gypsy Morph, and the final book has not yet been disclosed.
    The demons and other types of subverted humans have slowly managed, primarily under the insidious direction of Findo Gask, to sow enough dissension and destabilize civilization to the point that there is no longer any form of centralized government (at least in the U.S.). Humanity now exists primarily in fortified compounds or as roving bands of armed militia that are little better than roving bandits who loot, pillage, and otherwise savage any settlements not strong enough to effectively fight them off. Pretty much the Road Warrior setting.
    Most of the Americas have been reduced to a wasteland by the use of biological and chemical weaponry. There are bio-engineered plagues and pollution, which, along with some limited use of tactical nukes, has pretty much wiped out the lion’s share of humanity. Most of those who have survived have begun to mutate into life forms barely recognizable as human.
    In addition to the man-made devastation, the demons have been doing charming things like setting up concentration camps. The walled compounds that some people have organized themselves into can’t hope to withstand the onslaught of the hordes of demons and once-men that fall on them like the proverbial flood. After wiping out a human settlement, surviving children (there are no surviving adults) are herded together into camps where things are done to them to warp them into demons themselves.
    The Knights of the Word have dwindled until there are only two left: Logan Tom and Angel Perez. The others have either died, gone rogue, or been subverted themselves into serving the Void. Logan Tom, a survivor of one of those fallen walled compounds, is probably one of the strongest and most deadly Knights to ever wield the staff. Before becoming a Knight, he was trained by a group of militia, acting as guerilla fighters, hunting demons and raiding their concentration camps. He receives a dream from the Lady informing him of the efforts of his predecessor, John Ross, and that he must journey to the ruins of Seattle to protect the Gypsy Morph and aid it in its purpose. That purpose being to lead the last remnant of humanity to place of safety (provided by the King of the Silver River) where they will be able to survive the final firestorm that will consume what’s left of the world, including the demons.
    Angel Perez has been waging a campaign to smuggle the children out of those walled compounds which misguided and delusional adults steadfastly cling to as the only hope against the demons. With the help of some wiser people she manages to lead several hundred survivors out of Los Angeles as that compound falls to the demons. While engaged in this, she receives a dream from the Lady informing her that Elves are not just creatures of myth and she must journey to their home of Arborlon in the Cascade Mountain range of Oregon. She must convin

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • catsnclarinets (liz)

    catsnclarinets (liz) says

    no i don't think i have. thanks for the suggestion i think I'll try her sometime. =)

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • Dee G

    Dee G says

    The Black magician trilogy looks good...oh no...have you seen my TBR pile????

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • Robert F

    Robert F says

    No worries! I do understand about the weather. We just got snowed on here two days ago and it will probably happen again before the end of winter.

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • Dee G

    Dee G says

    oooo I just saw you added Endymion Spring! I really loved that book but most folks I have talked to thought it was dull. I would love to hear what you think of it. I did it in audio and hubby did it in print. I wanted a sequel!

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • Dee G

    Dee G says

    what are some of your favorite audio books? We read Deep Storm by Lincoln Child, Still Life with Crows by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child and Peter Pan in 08 for our favorites. Feed was a very unusual audio book but it really held my interest and Lost on Planet China was the funniest read in a long time. I did Inkheart by Cornelia Funke in print first and then in audio...it was a good one too. I am struggling thru The Collectors in audio (david Baldacci) because of multiple voices in the narration.

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • BeckyL

    BeckyL says

    Hi, and welcome to the Chiller group. Our group's been around for a while so there are a ton of threads. Hop on over to our introduction post and tell the group hi and talk about some of your favorite horror authors. Feel free to start your own discussion posts and browse our growing group shelf. Also, we're looking to start a Horror movie discussion, and that is open for nominations right now.

    Any questions at all just ask, same for suggestions or ideas.

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • James M

    James M says

    You asked for it! Give me some time. This could take a while.

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • James M

    James M says

    Hi, Pam! Thanks for the invitation :) The more the merrier!

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • Sho

    Sho says

    Ooh well I've added them! =D Forgot to put a note so no idea if they'll twig who I am lol. Joined that group you sent me too and a couple others, I keep finding more stuff to do on here! xx

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • Sho

    Sho says

    I has a friend! =P Ooh lack of smileys... =0
    Hello! My, that's a vast shelf you have!! Cheers again for linking us this site =D
    btw is German B our German or another one?
    xx

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • Robert F

    Robert F says

    Goodness! Well that is soon. Glad to see I made you laugh :).

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • Robert F

    Robert F says

    Fantastic Pamela! Please let me know if you do. I can tell from your shelves you have wonderful taste in books!

    posted 12 months ago. ( send a note )
  • Nina M

    Nina M says

    Hey there. At the library this weekend, we bought a pocket copy of The Hobbit for a quarter and it made me think of you. (You know, the book, not the hobbit. ^__~ ) I hope all is well! :D

    posted 12 months ago. ( send a note )
  • Germán B

    Germán B says

    Hiya!!! I've been a bit busy these days, but nothing far too serious... I hope you're okies too ;)

    posted 12 months ago. ( send a note )


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