I'm not really sure what this book will turn out to be...

The most difficult things you can do is when you advertise online for your company, a website or anything else you want to be successful with. You need to advertise so you can earn new customers and get something in return. However, you need to figure out various methods and marketing niches to generate traffic and gather prospective consumers. However, with Noccster using his YouTube account, he is able to get subscriptions through the few videos he has uploaded to the website. From there, he aims to let users know how to play his selections of games that are seldom mentioned in other popular sites.

If you’re finding ways how to pay huge search engines like Google and Yahoo for advertisements, you will realize how expensive they can be for this purpose. For instance, if you had to advertise in a pay-per-click section of Google’s advertising, you will need to pay the search engine each time someone clicks your link and is directed to your website. As a result, you can picture those who are clicking intentionally and those who are accidentally doing it. You get to pay Google even for accidental clicks even if you don’t consider them potential customers for your business.

A great thing to earn customers or fans for your business is to organically market. You don’t need to spend so much on advertising. What organic marketing includes is article writing, content, blogs and videos. And this is what Noccster is doing for his potential audience.

Noccster has created a YouTube channel to add gaming videos which he thinks can help and entice people. Here, he finds countless users searching in YouTube for specific videos that can be catchy and interesting to get viewed. However, he needs to provide high quality video that is short but interesting for that user to completely watch the video. He has used his video channel to link to his website and have people redirected to it.

Many people like Noccster has reached their stardom through the help of their YouTube pages. The videos they post in this website make their business recognized immediately. At first, few sets of people will view the video. And you can hardly notice that it will start growing each day, especially if it’s created and done well.

This book was so damned dark and bleak...  Grimdark?  Oh my GAWD, it was freaking grim and dark to the nth degree!

Now I have no problem with grimdark fantasy.  I like characters with flaws and who aren't goodie-goodies.  This post on Fantasy Hive by Cameron Johnston, published just yesterday, reflects many of my own thoughts on the genre.  Needless to say, I don't believe that The Court of Broken Knives succeeds in any of it. There is nothing of hope, of love, of humour, or of anything other than death, blood, violence, sadness and hate.  Nothing redeeming at all!  I couldn't help but think that the author must have a couple of hundred tons of demons to work out on the page. 

Now, the writing is a bit different, it's somewhat odd.  For instance, there are a couple of 1st person POV chapters thrown into the 60 chapters of the book.  Why?  I'm not sure, but it didn't bother me.  It must have worked on whatever level the author was hoping it would.  And that's just one instance of something 'different' in the writing style.  I appreciated the difference though.  Wasn't a problem one bit. In fact it's one of the reasons I was able to finish the book, I think.  That, and the fact that it was a Christmas present and I always want to finish those.

But the characters... OMG... the characters.... not a single one left standing that I cared for.  And all the ones I thought I might get to like... eviscerated, burned up, squished, beheaded... you name it... 

So in the end... far too dark and irredeemable for me.  Depressing.  Not a story that enthralled me - it more appalled me.  

Not a fan. 

White examines the frontiers between European colonists and native American Indians in the 16th and 17th Centuries. He describes how people of utterly alien, intrinsically hostile cultures can comingle and learn to interact in a manner that is in many respects decent and mutally beneficial. He does not attribute successful negotiation to mutual understanding; on the contrary, it could be better described as a conspiracy of mutual misunderstanding. He does not idealise the people involved; on the contrary, he demonstrates that the preferred way to achieve their goals is typically violent. But he does destroy the illusion that there is one side [white and European] representing civilisation and wisdom and an opposite side [red skinned and native American] representing savagery. The most important difference between them, it transpires, is that the Europeans wrote histories while the native American Indians relied on oral traditions.

The book gives much of its account from the perspective of the Indians and, among other things, it supplies fascinating accounts of their attitudes on the roles and status of women and their attitudes to property. These were starkly different to European attitudes and they provide, among other things, a profound rebuttal to those who assert (as they do) that sexual relations and property relations in modern society are fundamentally "natural" in the sense of being fixed and universal. They are not.

Needless to say, contact with Europeans over several centuries produced singificant changes and Indian societies moved towards European values in many respects, albeit a very slow process. For example, there were many conversions to Christianity, a move towards European styles of farming and in any case a lot of inter-marriage. The true history of America was a meeting of people perfectly well able to evolve together into a successful nation. It did not happen because, eventually, one side decided to get everything it wanted by force. The word used in this book to describe American settlers was "Indian Haters." Without romanticising its subject, the book does leave a sense that this was a great pity and a shame.

Quotes below are all from the first three chapters of the book: sorry for omitting page references.

“The creation of the middle ground involved a process of mutual invention by both the French and the Algonquians. This passed through various stages, of which the earliest is at once the most noticed and the least interesting. It was in this initial stage that the French, for example, simply assimilated Indians into their own conceptual order. Indians became sauvages, and the French reduced Indian religion to devil worship and witchcraft. The Algonquians, for their part. Thought of the first Europeans as manitous. On both sides, new people were crammed into existing categories in a mechanical way.”

“Literacy gave this initial stage a potency and durability for Europeans it might otherwise have lacked. Because the French were literate, knowledge of Indians was diffused far from the site of actual contact. Such knowledge, unchallenged by actual experience with Indians, survived as a potent cultural relict. Long after it ceased to govern the actions of those who actually lived among Indians, the idea of Indians as literally sauvages, or wild men embodying either natural virtue or ferocity, persisted among intellectuals and statesmen in France. Assimilated into European controversies, these imaginary Indians became the Indians of Chateaubriand and Rousseau. They took on importance, but it was one detached from the continuing process of contact between real Algonquians and real Europeans.” …

“It was Frenchmen (for Frenchwomen would not appear until much later) and Algonquian men and women who created a common ground – the middle ground – on which to proceed. This process of creation resulted quite naturally from attempts to follow normal conventions of behaviour in new situations… The result of each side’s attempts to apply its own cultural expectations in a new context was often change in culture itself. In trying to maintain the conventional order of its world, each group applied rules that gradually shifted to meet the exigencies of particular situations. The result of these efforts was a new set of common conventions.” ...

“Perhaps the central and defining aspect of the middle ground was the willingness of those who created it to justify their own actions in terms which they perceived to be their partner’s cultural premises. Those operating in the middle ground acted for interests derived from their own culture, but they had to convince people of another culture that some mutual action was fair and legitimate. The congruences arrived at often seemed – and indeed were – results of misunderstandings or accidents. Indeed, to later observers, the interpretations offered by members of one society for the practices of the other can appear ludicrous. This, however, does not matter… Cultural conventions do not have to be true to be effective… They only have to be accepted.” ...

"The operation of the middle ground must be understood within a dual context. First, there was the weakness of hierarchical controls within Algonquian villages and the frailty of any authority French official exerted over Frenchmen in the West. Second, there was the cultural threat each society seemed to pose to the elite of the other. What this meant in practice was that both the extent and meaning of social relations between Frenchmen and Algonquians were often negotiated largely on a face-to-face level within the villages themselves and that these relations were not what either French authorities or Algonquian elders might have preferred them to be. This does not mean that there was no official element involved, but rather that the official decisions could not determine the course of actual relations.”

"“French accounts were united, first, by their inability to understand the status of women vis-a-vis men except in terms of conjugal relations and, secondly, by their tendency to group sexual relations in terms of two opposite poles of conduct, with marriage at one extreme and prostitution and adultery at the other. … The immediate result was to define women in terms of a person – her actual or potential husband – who may not have been anywhere near being the most significant figure in the woman’s life. Depending on her tribal identity, an Algonquian woman often had a more durable and significant relationship with her mother, father, brothers, sisters or grandparents, or with other, unrelated women that with her husband or husbands. Nor was an Algonquian woman’s status dependent solely on her husband. Her own membership in ritual organizations or, among some tribes such as Shawnees, Huron-Petuns and Miamis, her own political status in offices confined to women, had more influence on her social position that the status of her husband did.”

“Even when the most careful and sensitive of European observers talked about the status of women and sexual relations, .. they eliminated much of the actual social world that gave those relations their full meaning… European conceptions of marriage, adultery and prostitution just could not encompass the actual variety of sexual relations in the pays d’en haut.”

"“Algonquian and Iroquoian Indians were first attracted to European goods not for their utility but rather for their symbolic value... The political or religious benefits Algonquians obtained from European goods should not be confused with the prestige Europeans associated with wealth. Algonquians, as individuals, did not accumulate wealth. Goods in Algonquian society actually belonged to no single person, although they always rested with some person for a time... They passed them on to others. Goods, in effect, only paused with a recipient and then flowed on through established social channels. This did not mean that any commodity belonged to everyone in common – for all these social streams were distinct, and people shared only in particular ones – but rather that those people within what might be called the social watershed of family, clan, or village, might eventually come to claim an item for a time. Each recipient incurred a reciprocal obligation to the giver, thus ensuring that goods were constantly in motion. Defining what were surplus goods in this situation – goods beyond the basic needs for subsistence and production – is difficult, since groups, not individuals, accumulated goods and possession was so fluid. The only dam that stopped the circulation of goods in these social streams was death. The dead acquired goods through burial gifts, but they could no longer reciprocate.”

“...the Feast of the dead, a ceremony that the French, with their ideas of personal accumulation saw as mad. ... In preparation for the Feast of the dead, which took place periodically in order to rebury the dead after a temporary interment, the host village amassed large amounts of European and native goods. These they gave as grave offerings and as gifts to allied groups invited to the feast. ... Many of the goods given away in these ceremonies lost their utilitarian value. ... the village funerals and other occasions for exchanges strengthened and made manifest through the reallocation of goods a larger network of social relationships. The flow of goods within these relationships seemed backward to the French: Leaders did not amass wealth but rather, gave it away; the dead did not leave property to the living; instead, the living bestowed scarce goods on the dead. Algonquians had put European goods to the service of an existing social reality.”

Empires and Kings - A.C. Bextor



Klara was just five years old when she witnessed her father being labeled a traitor and murdered by a man named Vlad. Brought into his house to be raised as a reminder of his first kill, Klara has always been fascinated by the man she calls "V".

Fifteen years have passed and Klara is now a beautiful 21-year-old woman. Her feisty spirit and regular disobedience have Vlad paying more than a little attention to her. Giving into his attraction for Klara is not something Vlad can allow himself to do.

When Klara takes matters into her own hands those sparks ignite into a raging fire with repercussions that could burn them all.



So WOWZA was this book good. The writing was fantastic. The plot was fast paced and intricate. It was gritty. It was heartbreaking. It was tragic. The characters (both main and secondary) were well developed. The relationship between Vlad and Klara was slowly built up and multi-layered. I loved so many of the secondary characters and I hope we will be seeing more books with them in it. Lastly, the ending GUTTED me...I was bawling my eyes out. WHY Miz Bextor...WHY?!

Two HUGE thumbs up from yours truly!