Filed under literature …

Mar 28 2012
Leave a comment
creativity, fantastic points of ignorance, literature, mythology, production, Writing

Concerning Fan Fiction

Dude or Dudette writes a book. Book takes off—international bestseller. Dude or Dudette who wrote book becomes King or Queen of their now crowded world as people flock there to wander around, watch their characters, witness their characters’ powers (be they wisdom, weapons or witchcraft and wizardry) and eat some of the local cuisine.

The patron of that world (King or Queen Storyteller) continues to guide this client (reader / viewer / listener) to follow characters as they make choices. In following the characters, a client chooses right along with them, for good or for bad. This continues until the tour ends and the patron refers the client to the waiting room. Either one of two things has happened. Either the writer must pause until he or she finishes the next volume in the series or there are no more books. The story is over. In both cases, the patron shows their clients the waiting room.

If they have no reasonable reality to return to or if they have no other world to hop into or if they find a particularly strong attachment to this patron’s world, those reader-clients will wait for a long time. Some might even leave the waiting room. They may try to explore dark corners of the map, eat more of the food, watch more characters. This is okay, I suppose, though it’d be creepy for the characters if they ever discovered these unsupervised peeping Toms. Curiosity’s good as long we temper it by truth and care for other people. However, if clients spend too much time there, they may try to revolt and grab the throne, break the rules, reverse gravity or change the themes and substance of the story.

They may try to rape some of the characters or even murder them. Continue reading →

Tagged , ,
Mar 23 2012
11 Comments
book review, censored opinions, Critique the Critics, Entertainment, film, literary interpretation, Writing

Hunger Games Made a Better Movie (but I still liked the book)

The last time I stood outside in fifty-degree rainy weather for four hours to watch a midnight showing, I was in grade school. I never do it for the movie alone, I do it for the immersive experience of communal cinema viewing. [Insert rant on how the old world of cinema is dying and shameless plug for Hugo]. When you’re surrounded by a bunch of crazy people who dressed up to see the movie you’re after, it’s easier to justify spending $9 on a ticket and watch the rain soak through your $1 copy of A Storm of Swords while you pass the time until midnight — you know that all of them will shout, scream, laugh, cry and cheer at all the right parts. With a crowd like that, people could make Troll 2 an enjoyable experience (and often do).

Unfortunately, this movie’s torn between two thieves – pretenders and despisers. Pretenders read the book, gush about it for hours and then act as if the thing could never in a centillion years turn into a better movie. Despisers say things like “Hunger Games was a terrible book” or “I hate it.” Though I can’t do much about hatred, the “terrible book” line is superlative and I reject it. Continue reading →

Tagged , , ,
Mar 23 2012
32 Comments
Critique the Critics, Entertainment, humor, literature, The Writing Life, Writing

Rejection Letter Fail

Therapeutic to watch a writer tweak this rejection email sent CC: by mistake from agent to 238 of us:#amwriting #fail pic.twitter.com/MRF2qhFf

(This email thread went on for hours as we all bantered back and forth about it. They call themselves “The 238″).

Mar 21 2012
6 Comments
creativity, fantastic points of ignorance, literature, Writing

Literate Yourself

These two pictures circulated around Pinterest awhile back:

Several years ago a friend of mine asked a minister what he was reading.
This minister said, “Nothing.”
My friend responded with, “Okay, well… what have you been up to?”
Hisses sounded out this minister’s mouth when he said, “Saving souls.”
My friend said nothing after that.

A few months after that episode, I read a little something by Mark Twain:

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot.

Last week, a buddy of mine apologized for taking so long to read something. He sent a text, his self-depreciation forcing me to respond differently than normal:

Josh: Sorry, so slow. I’m a terrible reader.
Me: No you’re not.
Josh: Sure I am. I’m slow and I don’t read much.
Me: Why’s that make you a bad reader? People might dislike what they read or the content may bore them, but that doesn’t make them a bad reader, just bored. When you find things you like, you read like crazy. I’ve seen you.
Josh: Thanks man.
Me: No prob.

Or something like that. I’ve thought about our conversation since, about language and our need as humans to communicate deep thought. Even in illiterate cultures, there’s this rich history of sages entrusted with the stories of the tribe. Only certain people can tell that story. It makes for reliable oral tradition and liberates our minds through reflection, memorization and story. When we liberate our mind with imagination, we dream up a better world. Those dreams become realities in time.

Go literate yourself this week – liberate the book side of your life. Read a story. Memorize a poem. Reflect on a song or a film.

Otherwise imagination disappears.

Tagged , ,
Mar 14 2012
2 Comments
book review, fantastic points of ignorance, film, literature, Religion, Woship, Writing

Zombie Church by Tyler Edwards

When I first glanced at the title Zombie Church by my man Tyler, I immediately recalled the part of Resident Evil 4 where all the monk zombies come out of the abbey grumbling in Latin, chasing you around the graveyard. Or was it priest zombies running out of a cathedral? In any case, the imagery sustains the title and meta-metaphor for his book:

Zombies.

Church.

Yeah, that ain’t right.

Most of you know my deal with Christians – or anyone for that matter – riding the coattails of fads. People use fads to make money rather than masterpieces, so I groaned “not another zombie… whatever” louder than many of you groan “not another vampire… whatever.” However, I know Tyler, know his fascination with all things geekdom (including zombies). Tyler erected a giant retractable screen in his dorm room back in college and mounted a projector over the door. If you set out to watch a cheezy or action-packed or larger-than-life movie, you used Tyler’s room.

More importantly, I happened on the environment he and many of his friends ministered in over the last several years. If anyone has holed up in a little building on some side street, using it as a base from which to pull hit-and-runs with the antidote, it’s Tyler. Eugene Peterson talks about pastors like Tyler in Under the Unpredictable Plant. Tyler stays. He refuses to leave unless, at the last-minute, it might kill his family. Then he’ll move camp. But only then.

Continue reading →

Tagged , , ,
Mar 12 2012
2 Comments
literature, impulsive pastimes, creativity, production

Artistic Delusions of Grandeur

There you sit among the crowd at the most prestigious award ceremony for your craft. The host takes hold of the podium. “And the winner is…”

He opens the envelope and reads your name. People stand and applaud wildly as you walk forward and give some moving acceptance speech.

We artists dream this up at some point. It may come in a a vision, a daydream or delusion but regardless we’re surrounded by all the people we respect and care about and they’re telling us how awesome of a human being we are to achieve such genius. Call them “fans” or “mentors” or “judges” or whatever, but they’re there, tucked inside our fantasies.

For me, the delusion happened like this: I read a leadership book that told me I needed a BHAG – a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Never the one to be outdone, I decided I wanted to write forty works of revolutionary quality spanning eight or more genres by the time I die. Big. Hairy. Audacious. Goal.

Did I mention audacious?

Continue reading →

Tagged , , , ,
Mar 07 2012
Leave a comment
Alchemy, fantastic points of ignorance, Kingkiller Trilogy, literary interpretation, mythology

Sympathetic Magic

Search Wikipedia for Kingkiller Chronicles, scroll down to “sympathy” and you’ll see this description:

A combination of voodoo and quantum entanglement

Though that’s descriptive of what sympathy looks like, it doesn’t get at sympathy’s mechanics very well. I know I sound like a broken gramophone playing a warped wax record, but we get at this fantasy stuff through the old books, not voodoo and quantum entanglement despite the presence of mommets and nosebleeds.

Check out a copy of The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion by Sir James George Frazer from your local library, preferably a print version, and flip to the table of contents. It looks something like this:

Chap.

  1. The King of the Wood……………1
  2. Priestly Kings………………..……..9
  3. Sympathetic Magic……….……….11

I turn to the page eleven and read this:

If we analyze the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like or that an effect resembles its cause; and second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.

Frazer calls the first The Law of Similarity and the second The Law of Contact or Contagion. From the former, the magician produces any effect he wants by emulating it. From the latter, he believes that whatever he pulls off on a given item will influence the person who once had contact with it, regardless of whether it came from his body. What’s Abenthy have to say about all of this?

The law of sympathy is one of the most basic parts of magic. It states that the more similar two objects are, the greater the sympathetic link. The greater the link, the more easily they influence each other.

In other words, things act on one another at a distance through a sort of… well… sympathy. The Law of Sympathy included byt the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contact. Sympathists assumed a sort of ether or fifth element transmitted the effects through the void of space. Ironically, alchemists often called the product of the great work “the fifth element.” I’m unsure whether there’s crossover between the arts. Regardless, Frazer finds the concept absurd as a science calling it a half-science and a “misapplication of the association of ideas.”

Continue reading →

Tagged , , , , ,
Mar 05 2012
3 Comments
literature, book review, literary interpretation, Entertainment, movie review, C.S. Lewis, article review, Writing, The Writing Life, Cities, New York City, Religion, Tolkien, poetry, travel, impulsive pastimes, news, humor, film, Storyssentials

Small Demons Preview

Thanks to Yewknee for sharing Small Demons with me back in October. I refrained from sharing with all of you Literators back then because, frankly, there was so little to share. Sometimes beta-testing looks like questing with your half-orc across frozen wastelands until the game glitches and dies, sometimes it looks like stress-testing Google Wave.

At other times it looks like this:

…

…

…

So I’ve been waiting and waiting for Small Demons to put enough content up for me to share it with all of you. Today’s the day.

Here goes:

Continue reading →

Tagged
Feb 24 2012
10 Comments
censored opinions, literature, The Writing Life, Writing

The Short Film and Serial Novel Comeback?

In the latter part of 1837, Charles Dickens published the first portion of a book that he would finish piece-by-piece in a magazine. He was twenty-five the year he ended each successive part on a cliffhanger. His audience waited, often jittery through half-contained excitement for the next issue. Bit-by-bit he orchestrated a novel whose last words greeted public eyes in 1838. They later compiled the book into the single volume we know as Oliver Twist. Commoners could afford the weekly installments while the aristocracy enjoyed complete volumes.

Sixty-four years after Oliver, Georges Méliès complimented his career as an illusionist with Le Voyage Dans La Lune. The innovation of Trip to the Moon shattered the time-boundary of two-minute shorts with its then stunning fourteen-minute runtime and later inspired Selznick to sketch Hugo. Granted, moving pictures eventually added enough film to keep an audience seated for a couple of hours plus intermission but there was enough room on the screen for short films all the way through Chaplin’s era. People paid a cheap price for several shorter films and then talked about them over ice-cream at the nearest diner. With the rise of the television, however, short films tapered off. Rising ticket prices made it unfeasible to go to short films. The industry exiled small-budget directors to festivals and college film classes. Feature films made the money. Good news for the average joe, bad for the struggling screenwriter.

In the late fifties, the paperback revolution made it cheap and easy to buy a full novel. Why pay for shorts or serials when you can get the whole thing for a dollar? Book production skyrocketed, despite the hollow warning from Publisher’s Weekly. The serial novel fell into… well… novelty. No, more than a novelty. Serials became a thing for antique road shows and pawn stars to get their grubby paws on. Good for the common man, bad for the struggling author.

Continue reading →

Tagged , , , , ,
Feb 22 2012
2 Comments
book review, Entertainment, fantastic points of ignorance, literature, The Writing Life, Writing

The Thinker’s Thesaurus

We like words here, don’t we?

Chuh-huh… yeah! That’s why today’s fantastic point of ignorance goes out to all of you wordsmiths, literators, storyweavers and spelling bee champions out there. I asked for free stuff this Christmas, things like carols and cider and snow cones and oral stories involving hearts five sizes too small but my Grandma’s a gift giver like most of my family. She bought me a copy of The Thinker’s Thesaurus.

Touché, granny. Touché.

Here’s the thing, I’m a recovering academic. I root out ivory tower talk when it rears it’s out-of-touch head. I also doubt I’ll be publishing a story, a non-fiction feature or even a poem in the New Yorker any time soon. Though I’m an avid reader, they’d scoff at my work if it ever managed (against all odds) to land a manuscript on their desks. Because of these disqualifications, I find little practical use for such a book as The Thinker’s Thesaurus.

Don’t even care.

Continue reading →

Tagged , , , ,
Feb 20 2012
5 Comments
literary interpretation, The Writing Life, impulsive pastimes, fantastic points of ignorance

Firefly: Power and Poise

Saturday, February 18th, I lost my Firefly virginity.

I waited right around seven years to do this – ever since I stepped onto the college scene and my newfound friends began badgering me to watch the show. I borrowed the series from a friend, sat down on my Saturday at 7:45am and watched the series straight until 9pm. Yes, I was that hooked. This show’s amazing, and I completely understand why Firefly fans beg so often, so long and so convincingly  about making a second season.

It’s like all of you told me all these years that there was gold in them there hills, but I blew you off because, let’s face it, there’s always gold in them there hills. But seven years later I walk over the tops of them there hills on the first open Saturday it crosses my mind and find out what you meant was “there’s gold on them there hills.” Lying around. In hunks and nuggets and bars. What you meant was “take a walk over this hill and pick up all the friggin’ gold you want, dummy.” That was Firefly for me, walking around and finding gold everywhere. That’s why I imbibed all of it in a single day: gold rush. Three things stood out to me: a lesson, an interpretation and a longing.

Continue reading →

Tagged , , , , ,
Feb 17 2012
Leave a comment
censored opinions, Entertainment, literature, Storyssentials, The Writing Life, Writing

Storyssentials: World Building

Ever look at one of these, these, these or these?

Fantasy writers perfect cartography. We have Tolkien to think for that, for he coined the phrase “cartographic writing” – writing from the map. You create the world, the mythology of the world and then you write with a character inside that world. Unfortunately, many fantasy writers focus so long on the what and the where that they neglect the who and the why questions. Good answers to these questions create great stories. Today, we turn to the fantasy writers to teach us about trade, authority, ceremony, and ethics.

Trade

What can your characters do to make a living? Awhile back on Twitter, I asked people to list out medieval professions. Piper, Karl, Matt and I came up with the following list:

Tagged , , , , ,
Feb 15 2012
3 Comments
literature, Entertainment, Alchemy, Kingkiller Trilogy, impulsive pastimes

Kingkiller Nigreddo: Wind

“So Taborlin fell, but he did not despair. For he knew the name of the wind, and so the wind obeyed him. It bore him to the ground as gently as a puff of thistledown and set him on his feet as soft as a mother’s kiss.”

Wind’s fairly important in this book. I could argue that it’s even more important in WMF, but that detours us from our goal (Remember, the “continue reading” is to protect Kingkiller virgins from spoilers).

Why wind? Why mention the control of wind and even inversion of wind? What’s wind to do with alchemy?

During sublimation, a vapor escapes the mercury. The alchemist must capture that vapor and through solution and distillation turn it into water. If you looked at the Emerald Table, you’d see the fourth law: “The wind carried it in its womb, the Earth is the nurse thereof.” Maier thought this means that sulphur (the masculine) is carried inside Mercury (the feminine) as the raw goods of the work. In the middle of sublimation and distillation, we see Hermes flying through the air like wind. Here’s Zoroaster’s Cave:

Our stone in the beginning is called water; when the body is dissolved, Ayre or Wind; when it tends to consolidation, then it is named earth, and when it is perfect and fist it is called Fire.

They also called that mercurial mist the zephyr, and it often symbolizes the white stone of the albedo. The Alchemist by Ben Jonson refers to Sublet’s puffer, Face, as billowing the flames. “That’s his fire-drake,/ His lungs, his Zephyrus, he that puffes [sic] his coals [sic].”

Continue reading →

Tagged , , , , , ,
Feb 09 2012
4 Comments
Alchemy, Entertainment, fantastic points of ignorance, Kingkiller Trilogy, literary interpretation

Kingkiller Nigreddo: He said to the stone, “Break!”

Further into our first Taborlin the Great story, we see Taborlin trapped in a windowless stone cell. Nevermind that the cell evokes images of coffins and tombstones (more Nigreddo death-to-the-old-life imagery), we’re interested in the magic!

But Taborlin knew the names of all things, and so all things were his to command. He said to the stone ‘Break!’ and the stone broke. The wall tore like a piece of paper, and through that hole Taborlin could see the sky and breath the sweet spring air.

In alchemy “stone” as a singular entity refers to the philosopher’s stone the vessel or protagonist transforming from common to holy or lead to gold. A “stone” is a prima materia that has gained the Midas touch and provides the aqua de vida.

But we’re not talking about a stone but stone as an element. Taborlin knew the name of the element “stone” and could control it… as in the title The Name of the Wind. For Lindy’s advice on the matter, we need his “rock” entry. Rock stores the prima materia - the philosopher’s stone. Robert Fludd named the stone “a spirituall [sic] rock of pure transparent saphir [sic].“

Translation: the rock holds the good stuff. Continue reading →

Tagged , , , , , , , ,
← Older posts
Newer posts →