Little King's Eye

The Secret Life of Statues

Sean Prentice, a young American on holiday, stumbles into a hidden world where humans, spirits and animated statues co-exist; some are good, some evil...but they all want what he’s found. Stricken with amnesia and begging on the streets of Prague, Sean is brought to his senses by an ancient spirit of darkness,
a Wight. It needs him to find the Lattice, the key it will use to unleash destruction on our world. Now if Sean can only remember where he hid it.
Statues and spirits collide across the city in a bid for possession of one of the Tools of Creation itself.
This dark urban fantasy is guaranteed to make you look twice at any statue you pass again.

Little King's Eye

Little King's Eye

Book two of the Tools of Creation series takes place in America.
Here's a bit of the intial rough:

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Blog

Blog

A peek into the paradigm of Russ Viola

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Default Ringer | Humanity’s Audible Unorginality

I’ve been thinking about something that happened to me on the way to work the other day. (sounds like the opening line to a bad joke)
There was a snippet of a tune that was stuck in my head. It just kept looping over and over again, until I found myself humming it. Just a couple dozen notes on this track set to maddening. No lyrics, just:

Deeda-lee da-dee da-dee da-dee, Dum dee-da-dee

It wasn’t until later that afternoon, when someone’s phone went off, that I realized what tune had stuck in my head. And not long after that when another phone rang and moments later yet another, I realized why.
As you may have surmised from my [spoiler alert] post title, the jingle stuck in my head was the default ringer for the iPhone 6/s.

unimpressedog

Seriously? SERIOUSLY?!

I know, I can hear all three of the people that read my blog saying, “Russ, it’s just a phone ringer. Don’t let it bother you! What’s the big deal?”

Well, I’ll tell you the big deal. We live in the an age when any one of us can go to ‘The Google’ and pull down the collected works of the best and brightest of our race. We can be exposed to art and prose from masters, philosophy from the greatest thinkers. We have access to all of that fertile mind soil to grow in, yet we can’t be bothered to take a moment to download an original ringer for our phone? Hell!! We can’t even take less than that to simply pick something that isn’t the DEFAULT RINGER?!

I agree that so many people using a default ringer isn’t a big deal in and of itself. It’s even quite funny to watch all the sheeple grabbing for their phones, when one goes off. My point here is bigger than some public annoyance or an ear worm that I can easily replace with the latest Taylor Swift song.

TSwift-Confused1

Is that my phone ringing?

In my opinion, this is a symptom of something bigger.

Our current society of conformity and political correctness forces us to not break from the norm or stand out.

We humans, as a race, have become so lazy that we can’t be bothered to show our individuality and originality to the general public.

We have hit a point in our global human society where originality, and unique ideas just aren’t produced anymore.

I guess I’d just really like to know.

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Found Objects is out now.
The Secret Life of Statues eBook is on sale for a limited time at .99 cents. Check my books for links on where to buy the ebook or physical copy, and ‘LIKE’ me on my Facebook Author Page. Check out my tumblr and twitter feeds if that’s your thing.

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