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November 14, 2023 will be the 10 year anniversary of the November 14, 2013 murder of my 8 month old infant son, at BugLight Lighthouse Art Studio of Southern Maine Community College in South Portland, Maine. If you have any information about who his killer is, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322

NEVER FORGET:

My Son Was Murdered, The Killer Walks Free, Your Child Could Be Next!

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FAQ: What are the most visited pages on this website and how many visits do they get?

Several years ago, I wrote an article on how to write different types of magic uses, or rather how I personally write various types of magic users within the context of my Quaraun books. Today that page is one of my top ten most visited articles. It gets 50 to 500 views/reads/hits/visits per day depending on the time of the years and has had over 200k visits total since it was published.

Amphibious Aliens: Debunking The Atwater Family's Alien Abduction Hoax with more then 30MILLION reads since 2007 and The GoldenEagle: Debunking Stephen King's World's Most Haunted Car Hoax with over tenMILLION reads since 2007 still rank as the two most visited articles on my website, but, neither of those are writing related.

Writing Medieval Servants is my most visited writing related article with over 7MILLION reads.

This website was started in 1996 and has 1 to 3 new articles (all written by me, I am the only writer on this site) published almost daily. In 2017 we crossed ten thousand articles published. As of 2023, EACH article gets MINIMUM 10 to 70 reads PER DAY, with the high traffic articles getting 500+ reads per day.

And since December 2019, my website now gets three hundred thousand to 7 million reads per month - well over ONE HUNDRED MILLION PAGE READS PER YEAR, making it not only the single most trafficked site in the State of Maine, but also one of the most visited websites in ALL OF NEW ENGLAND!

{{{HUGS}}} Thank you to all my readers for making this possible!

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 TRIGGERED! I'm a Straight Cis Woman, but I am deemed Too Gay For Old Orchard Beach, Are you too gay for the bigoted, minority harassing, white power, gay hating psychos of The Old Orchard Beach Town Hall Too? 

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Starting a novel with a prologue: yay or nay?

Starting a novel with a prologue: yay or nay?

Due to the very long length of this question, only a small portion of it is shown here...

Starting a novel with a prologue: yay or nay?

For me, I don't mind prologues IF they are ACTUAL prologues... the definition of a prologue being 2 to 3 pages to introduce a previous event important to the plot, but does not take place in the same timeline as the novel.

But far too often these days, authors use the prologue as a place to lecture the readers or write a 90 page worldbuilding explanation of what the world looks like or a detailed 50 page history of a battle or whatever. I feel like the bulk of authors these days don't know what a prologue is anymore and just slap anything at the front of the book and stick the title "prologue" on it no matter what it is.

Fantasy is my primary genre, both as a reader and a writer, and as a result of this recent trend of 50 to 90 page "prologues" that are not prologue... I've stopped reading prologues all together for any book written in the past 10 years.

There was a time when a prologue was a quick 2 page introduction to the back history of the story.

Not anymore!

Yie!

For the past 5 years, almost every prologue added to a Fantasy novel, is now a 50 to 90 page detailed description of not only the world, but all the things the author researched as well.

I started reading a book a few months back... it had a 90 page prologue - NINETY FREAKING PAGES! - on why Neanderthals make the ideal basis for the book's main character race, and why dinosaurs and Humans should never be in a novel together, and then a detailed history of all the author's Anthropology and Archaeology degrees, then listed off all the actual fossil dig sites he dug at....

I was like... does this guy even know what a prologue is? This is not a prologue, this is a damned history lesson! I mean, if this guy ever wrote a college textbook on the history of the Jurassic Period, he'd be amazing! He really knows his stuff, I'll give him that. But you don't put stuff in your novel! I just felt so much, like this guy had never read a novel in his life and the only movie he had ever watched was Jurassic Park, and that the only reason he wrote this novel was so he could tell fans of dino-sci-fi they were jerks (his word) for liking those types of books. (Yes, he started right in the "prologue" that readers of dino-sci-fi were "jerks"!)

So I contacted this guy and asked him about it and...oooooooooh boooooooy....

WOW! I got a 60+ page response telling me that "Fantasy readers needed to be taught a lesson" (his words), and that they had "no business making up fictional races that couldn't possibly exist" (his words), and he proudly boasted that he never in his life ever read a fiction novel and never would....yow.

Well, it certainly showed in his novel writing, that he had never read a novel before writing one.... but it especially showed in his so called 90 page long "prologue", because it was clear by reading his prologue that he had no clue what a prologue even was!

And I wish I could say this was an isolated incident, but, dang, I'm seeing this sort of "prologue" being written more and more often. Especially in self-pubbed Fantasy. And, as a self-pubbed Fantasy author myself, I know this sort of thing reflects on ALL of us. The more prevalent these sorts of quasi-prologues become, the more they turn off readers to prologues.

For me as a reader, these days, I'm likely to skip even buying a book if it has a prologue, let alone read it. ESPECIALLY if it's self-published, as it's become a trend of late for authors to let their egos lose in prologues. You don't see it in agented/trade books that often, because editors don't let those sorts of author rants go in the book. And as a self-pubbed Fantasy author, I'm worried that this sort of thing is not only putting readers off Fantasy with prologues, but turning them away from ANY self-pubbed Fantasy prologues or no. Yes, this is something I worry about a lot, because I know that as a Fantasy reader myself, I'm tending to avoid self-pubbed Fantasy lately, because of this "fake prologue" issue... and that worries me because I LOVE self-pubbed Fantasy and don't want to avoid them! Newer self-pubbed books these days have these weird "fake prologues" that are insanely long. 50 pages is fast becoming the norm, and I've seen longer ones.... which I wouldn't mind if they were actual prologues and not just the author having a hissy-fit rant.

My belief is, if the author feels they have to explain the details of their story, outside of the story, then that author is a very poor writer and in desperate need of taking some writing classes so they can learn how to tell a story and include everything the reader needs to know, woven within the story.

I would like prologues if they did what they were supposed to do, and BRIEFLY in a few pages, introduce the setting/backdrop of the story. I mean if it's an ACTUAL prologue, then fine, I don't mind.

But I think far too many authors these days don't know the difference between a prologue and an "here's my life history on how I wrote this book"...and it's ruining my perspective on books with prologues.

I mean, you look at books written 30 or more years ago, and how prologues were written... they BELONGED with the story. They were PART of the story, but they were just a part of the story that didn't fit in the story. And they worked, because they helped the reader get to know the plot and characters better. Prologues like that I'm fine with and don't mind reading.

But I don't want to read 50 pages of an author explaining how they did their research to ensure that we stupid readers know the difference between a cave man and a neanderthal, followed by explanations of all the hows and whys of the ice age and its effect on the story, followed by the author listing off all their degrees in anthropology, and which digs they dug at, blah, blah, blah. I bought the book to read the story, and if I want to know the history of how and why they wrote it, I'll head to their website and read their "About Me" page.

Far too many authors use their prologues as a way to talk down to their readers and, I wanted to read a story, not be lectured by an arrogant author.

Now, from what I'm understanding, it sounds like you want to tell you story from one character's perspective, but it's important to the plot, that the reader know a bit of backstory from another character's perspective first? But you don't need to do a 2 PoV story, so you just want to write a quick short story told from 2nd character's PoV, and call that a prologue? Right? Well, that's EXACTLY what a prologue is supposed to be. A quick backstory, from the PoV of someone not the PoV character, to help the reader understand the main character.

Based on what you have described, I think your prologue sounds like it fits the story and is actually a prologue being used as intended. So I would think your story would be fine with a prologue.

Of course, you also said it was only 350 words?

A 350 word prologue is only half a printed page in a paperback novel... you know that right?

What you are classifying as a prologue, is barely big enough to even be called a paragraph, so I'm not sure, you even need to put it separate from your first chapter at all. Just have it be the opening scene of your book, on the first half of page 1.

That said however, I still as a buyer, would probably skip buying the book, just on grounds that it had a prologue at all, even one done right, simply because I'm so fed up with trying to slog through world building info dumps and author lectures, disguised as "prologues", that I just don't even bother to sift through fake prologues trying to find real prologues.

So, with that point in mind, I think, it may in fact be in your best interest to rather then write it as a prologue, instead write it as a flashback, and then title it Chapter 2 (not Chapter 1) So, what I'm suggesting is, use chapter 1 to introduce your main character and plot; then swing into the important backstory in chapter 2, then jump back into the main character's story in chapter 3. Does that make sense? You end up weaving the "prologue" into the story itself that way, instead of it being a separate piece before the story.

Or perhaps, if the prologues was very long... perhaps you could tell it throughout the whole story. Say for example your novel is 200 pages long, and your prologue is 20 pages long, and your novel is 20 chapters long. You could have 1 page of the prologue at the beginning of each chapter; have it be an "opening scene" printed in italics, on the first page of each chapter, so taking the entire book to tell the prologue, each page ending abruptly with a '...'. With the reader learning a little bit more at the beginning of each chapter, resulting in it being a sort of mini-story within the story. It makes sense in my mind, I hope I'm explaining it correctly. I think that method would work pretty well with the particular story you are describing.

In the end, I think, some stories NEED prologues, but most stories don't, and far too many authors, thinking ALL books REQUIRE a prologue, slap together something that is NOT a prologue and stick it at the front of the book and call it a prologue when it isn't one.

As a reader, I don't mind prologues that really are prologues, but I'm fed up with things that are not prologues being slapped in the front of a book and being called a prologue.

So, if your book needs a prologue, give it one, but if it doesn't need a prologue, don't write up something just for the sake of having something at the front of your book.

Last edited by PinkUnicorn; Today at 06:20 AM. Reason: I can't spell :P

Be a unicorn, write Yaoi, have a glorious sunshiny day!
 I live where pink unicorns eat butterflies & poop rainbows. 
 I WRITE about books and writing.
I VLOG about books & writing.

What do you want to become? 
What did you do today to step closer to that goal?
Whatever you do, be your best at it!
And remember to have yourself a great and wonderfully glorious day!

~EK
EelKat.com
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By EelKat Wendy C Allen

If you ever made fun of or had any part in the destruction of my farm, and the illegal selling of half of my land to Colliard, you shall lose your land.

If you ever made fun of or had any part in my being homeless since 2006 - YES, I AM still homeless in 2023, you shall become homeless.

If you ever made fun of or had any part in the backhoe driving over my house, you shall lose your house.

If you ever made fun of or had any part in my car being cut in half, you shall lose your car.

If you ever made fun of or had any part in my becoming crippled, you shall lose your health.

If you ever made fun of or had any part in the murder of my son, your child shall die an equally horrible death.

Evil men go out of their way to try to drive a person to suicide.

Are you an evil man?

Are you sure you're not?

How many people have YOUR hate filled words killed?

Next time you go to do a mean thing to a fellow human, stop and really think about the consequences of your actions.

Did you ever notice how every one has a story to tell about me, yet not one of them ever speaks the truth?

What lies has YOUR gossiping tongue spread about me?

Did you know...

October 16, 2006, bomb blew up my house because of YOUR lies.

August 8, 2013, the house which replaced the one the bomb blew up, was driven over by a backhoe.

November 14, 2013, my 8 month old infant son was murdered because of your lies.

November 14, 2013, I was beaten up, paralized for 5 months, spent 18 weeks relearning to walk, I'm now crippled for the rest of my life, because of YOUR lies.

Are you proud of what you have done?

Enjoy your eternity in Hell. You earned it. You've certainly worked hard for it.

~EelKat

If you have any information about any of these events, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207-774-9322