Author Archives: authorbengarrido
Help the Helpless Writer Help You
I’d like to introduce my current novel project and ask for your opinons. Partly this is because I believe in open expression, freedom of speech and noble things like that, but mostly, I really just want to steal all your good ideas, put them in my book and then hoard the profits. You know how […]
Why We Hate, Michael Brown and Baton Rouge
Warning: This is a very touchy subject. If you are faint of heart you will not enjoy this post, I promise. The things I say will challenge you, they will cast you as a villain. I’m not trying to be offensive, but this is hardcore. That said, I sincerely do hope you continue. Hatred – […]
The Saint, Version 2.0
The house, brown and squat and smelling of nicotine, left Reggie in a near constant state of fear. His room looked over the narrow alley behind the house and opened into the hallway directly across from his mother’s lonely little cave. Reggie nearly knocked down some of the legion decorative toys and trinkets his […]
The Saint
Reggie, 8 pm It was bad, even for a 7-11. The clerks seldom bathed, the deli meats promised gastric distress and the diverse clientele ranged all the way from sad to hopeless. A congealed soup of unburnt hydrocarbons covered the parking lot to half an inch thick, daily refreshed by the streams of […]
Politicians > Military Leaders > Businessmen, Really?
Between Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Han Fei-tzu and my rapidly worsening podcast addiction, I’ve been learning an awful lot about ancient history recently. One of the themes I’ve kept running across is this pattern where good politicians seem to be much more important and much more powerful than generals or […]
A Panegyric Upon Liberty
Let us sing of liberty! Through the clouds of oppression, however thick, ever our sweet light of freedom shown. Though the bloody hands of tyranny bind and abuse our lady of liberty, she struggles on, inevitable in her triumph. Let us sing of liberty! Under your yoke, however weighty, we have suffered with the […]
Beyond Christianity, Part 3
I recently asked a group of writers how I could write a convincing homophobic character who is himself a closeted gay. Since I’m a novelist asking this question to a group advertising itself as a resource for writers, it seemed to me a pretty reasonable question. I didn’t get anything useful for character development, but I […]
Beyond Christianity, Part 2
A friend on Facebook recently posted a Fox News video about “liberal agitators” at a Trump rally. Being that this was from Fox News, the agitators they chose to show were not particularly articulate. I was milliseconds away from forgetting all about it until I saw this comment beneath the video: “They’re being paid to […]
Beyond Christianity
For those of you who’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll probably not be surprised to hear that I spend a lot of time thinking about modern morality. If you haven’t been following along but still want to be one of the cool kids, you can check out this or this or this or, if you’re feeling super […]
The Face of Oppression is Positively Adorable
While walking to my local grocery last Wednesday I found four hamsters in a trash pile. Unfortunately, two had already died and the other two looked like they were well on the way to freezing. I don’t really think of myself as the sort of person who has hamsters, but I also wasn’t going to […]
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