In an easy to read, conversational style, Beyond the Basics of Creative Writing takes you step-by-step from idea generation through the writing process and into publication and promotion of your finished work. The text is more than just a simple handbook. With a focus on audience, character and worldview, Beyond the Basics of Creative Writing examines the entire writing process in detail, working toward the goal of helping intermediate and advanced writers produce professional quality imaginative stories.
In this book William G. Lycan offers an epistemology of philosophy itself, a partial method for philosophical inquiry. The epistemology features three ultimate sources of justified philosophical belief. First, common sense, in a carefully restricted sense of the term-the sorts of contingent propositions Moore defended against idealists and skeptics. Second, the deliverances of well confirmed science. Third and more fundamentally, intuitions about cases in a carefully specified sense of that term. The first half of On Evidence in Philosophy expounds a version of Moore's method and applies it to each of several issues. This version is shown to resist all the standard objections to Moore; most of them do not even apply. It is argued, in Chapters 5 and 6, that philosophical method is far less powerful than most have taken it to be. In particular, deductive argument can accomplish very little, and hardly ever is an opposing position refuted except by common sense or by science. The final two chapters defend the evidential status of intuitions and the Goodmanian method of reflective equilibrium; it is argued that philosophy always and everywhere depends on them. The method is then set within a more general explanatory-coherentist epistemology, which is shown to resist standard forms of skepticism. In sum, William G. Lycan advocates a picture of philosophy as a very wide explanatory reflective equilibrium incorporating common sense, science, and our firmest intuitions on any topic-and nothing more, not ever.
A comprehensive and hands-on introduction to the core concepts, methods, and applications of agent-based modeling, including detailed NetLogo examples. The advent of widespread fast computing has enabled us to work on more complex problems and to build and analyze more complex models. This book provides an introduction to one of the primary methodologies for research in this new field of knowledge. Agent-based modeling (ABM) offers a new way of doing science: by conducting computer-based experiments. ABM is applicable to complex systems embedded in natural, social, and engineered contexts, across domains that range from engineering to ecology. An Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling offers a comprehensive description of the core concepts, methods, and applications of ABM. Its hands-on approach—with hundreds of examples and exercises using NetLogo—enables readers to begin constructing models immediately, regardless of experience or discipline. The book first describes the nature and rationale of agent-based modeling, then presents the methodology for designing and building ABMs, and finally discusses how to utilize ABMs to answer complex questions. Features in each chapter include step-by-step guides to developing models in the main text; text boxes with additional information and concepts; end-of-chapter explorations; and references and lists of relevant reading. There is also an accompanying website with all the models and code.
Paul Greer did not want to kill again. His daughter Brenda’s boyfriend, murdered secretly by Greer because he was African American, seems to be a successfully hidden part of the past. When the new white boy Brenda brings home proves satisfactory to Greer, he thinks the family’s problems are behind them. Soon, images, brought on by guilt, he thinks, change everything. The dead youth’s likeness appears to Greer and his wife in the form of people they know. The spirit of the dead, seeking vengeance, threatens to destroy everything that Greer holds dear.
A vampire novel linking the origins of vampirism to the fall of the Mayan civilization. The novel is a horror thriller focusing on the tragic fall of a modern day college professor obsessed with growing old. His obsession leads to a gruesome transformation ritual involving the human sacrifice of his virgin bride and ending in his rebirth as a vampire. The murdered bride’s brother then goes on a violent trail of revenge. William E. Rand has taught creative writing and literature in California, and currently teaches College English in Tampa, Florida.
When John Hardin’s brother, a priest, apparently commits suicide, he goes to his brother’s parish in Philadelphia to find out the truth of what happened. The events of the suicide are revealed to him by the pastor and by a possessed man through a series of short stories. Painted Demons presents a series of violent confrontations between people and elements they see as evil. The reader may not always agree with those judgments; where a character names evil, the reader may see justice, sickness or blind authority. But before that realization, the reader must often wait to see from which character or source the horror will come. In each case, normal people are introduced leading average lives; but their existence becomes threatened by something or someone they have previously known as sane and safe: an elevator, a city bus, a bit of trivia, a parent, a spouse. The stories always encase a vein of normalcy, Character and relationships become the backbone of each story and contrast with the fast plot, violence, and horror which develop to drive each story to its climax. Along with the horror, a main goal of the collection is the surprise of unpredictability from story to story. Most of the tales deal with the supernatural, but not all. They are split between first and third person narrators, but any story is as likely to be told from the point of view of the evil or predator as from the intended victim. Sometimes the evil wins, sometimes not. And once or twice the reader may not be sure. Some stories have no descriptions of gore, while others rip and bleed. But they are all stories about people—plain but very disparate people—caught suddenly in desperate, terrifying situations.
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