… when you feel like the world is kicking your ass
You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing – Richard P Feynman
Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for but never seen. — Anne Sexton
I think that’s what writers do, try to write the pictures they’ve seen with their souls. And probably why nothing ever quite measures up to the vision in our mind’s eye. I know I’m never satisfied with anything I write.
I’ve been reading Word Painting by Rebecca McClanahan, a book I’ve had for many years but never got around to reading. That’s where I ran across the Sexton quote. The book is filled with quotes and anecdotes of writers and artists. I’m only about 50 pages in, but the main message seems to be avoid cliches, make use of the rich language that exists.
Too many…ellipses…in your manuscript…make characters sound…breathy and…asthmatic…
— Rhonda Helms (@RHelmsBooks) October 16, 2013
And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.
This is a snippet of a lecture Neil Gaiman gave to the Reading Agency in London, on Monday, October 14, about the importance of reading, libraries, and librarians. Read the rest here in The Guardian. It is a long-ish read, but worth it. Gaiman makes the case for reading, libraries, books and daydreaming better than anyone I’ve ever seen (or read). Pass it on.
Now if only people would put down their smart phones and tablets and turn off the tv long enough to read a book.
“There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October.”
– Nathaniel Hawthorne
Only posting today because I’ve been home sick. Finally felt well enough to wander outside and get a few photos of these gorgeous leaves when the sun hit them. Autumn needs to be twice as long as it is, it passes far too quickly.
Stay, Autumn, don’t go.
Word sadly came today of the passing of author Ann C. Crispin, science fiction writer and defender of writers everywhere through her collaboration with her friend and fellow writer Victoria Strauss, via the Writer Beware blogs here and here, and their website. It was only two short days ago I learned of her battle with cancer. If you’re a writer, or have any aspirations of writing, the best thing you could do for yourself is acquaint yourself with their work. These two have brought to light so many shady publishers, agents, and writing scams, the value to the writing community is incalculable. In so doing, to no one’s surprise I’m sure, they riled the slimeballs who try to prey on the newest, most naive members of the writing community, going so far as to take the battles to court.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden this morning tweeted out an impassioned defense of their work as a tribute to Ms. Crispin, which I have transcribed here, with permission from him and Victoria:
Most reports I’ve seen about the death of Ann Crispin describe Writer Beware (which she co-founded) as a group formed to ‘protect writers’ or something along those lines. Writer Beware is actually more specific than that. It exists to expose the scams on the fringes of publishing. Dodgy pay-for-play self-publishing schemes. Phony agents who actually make their money by funneling authors to vanity presses. A lot of good writers have been swindled by operators like this, wasting not just money, but lifespan. Ann was, and Victoria Strauss is, a hero for taking on the task of keeping track of this sort of crap, and educating a generation of writers in how to spot it.
And a final note. Writer Beware’s enemies periodically accuse it of being opposed to self-publishing. This is BS. What WB is against is fraud.
I can’t even imagine what a debt I owe them. Rest in peace, dear lady.
I just thought you should all know.
More random bizarro thinking on my part.
I suddenly started wondering what science fiction of the future will be. Today most science fiction is focused on colonizing other planets, alien encounters, high-tech taking over, dystopias, the fall of civilization, robots, AI, time travel, extending human life. Ok, that’s a whole lotta stuff.
In say, a thousand years, when we’ve conquered space and how to travel millions of light years, encountered alien races and survived the fall of civilization and rebuilt, AI will be pervasive, robots old-hat – what form will science fiction take? What will future sci-fi writers write? Presumably by then the question of “are we alone in the universe” will have been answered. Possibly not, but my gut says another thousand years will see things we haven’t even dreamed yet; finding extraterrestrials will be small potatoes.
There’s been some discussion lately that science fiction no longer deals with the ‘big questions’ of what-ifs, that it’s focused on the immediate future: There’s some truth to this. Most of the sf I see lately is riffing on some current political issue, detours in tech that derail us, terraforming planets. These topics will seem like baby steps to future generations. :::just gave myself an idea…:::
I wonder what the ‘big questions’ will be a millennium from now. Or am I being too optimistic? Will we still be consumed by the things that concern us today: overpopulation, diminishing resources, pollution, corruption, greed, religious wars, politics. Will we be Borg? Will cyborgs be passé by then? DING! (another idea) John Steinbeck was right:
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
I would imagine all these topics that we spend so much time writing and thinking about today will be as normal to future humans as telephones and electricity are to us. I’ve been spending a lot of time wondering what future science fiction will consist of, and I guess I’m no visionary because at the moment I have no idea what people will be wondering about in a thousand years. If you look back at what people were doing a thousand years ago in 1013… The Norman Invasion hadn’t even happened yet. Brian Boru had not yet fought the Battle of Clontarf (that would be the following year in 1014). The Black Death, The Crusades, Copernicus, Columbus, Magellan, Galileo, Da Vinci, Gutenberg, the Protestant Reformation, Henry VIII, Mozart, Beethoven, the bicycle, the automobile, Kitty Hawk, Apollo 11… all that and so much more in just the last thousand year. Imagine even the same rate of advancement taking place over the next 1000 years. And at the rate technology increases and the fact that so much more is being done in general makes it almost scary to think where we’ll be in a thousand years. Or two thousand.
But wow, would I like to see it.
This week we have the dreamy Knight of Cups from the Hudes Tarot. He’s looking all wistful and serious, maybe he’s had his heart broken. The water in his cup is showing the southern ecliptic. I don’t know if Hudes follows the standard Cups/Water/West; Swords/Air/East; Wands/Fire/South; Pentacles/Earth/North attributions or not. While knights often indicate movement, charging forward, here our knight is calm, serene, as if he’s expecting someone or ready to greet someone. This is a guy who’s not shy about expressing himself. Romantic, dreamer, poet, lover.
Expect news, or an arrival, possibly an invitation. Something in the offing this week. I hope everyone gets a nice surprise. I sure could use one. Stay cool, everyone. Hope this heat wave breaks soon.
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. – Grahame Greene
Who are you people, and how did you get control of this planet?
I suppose I’m depressed.
If you suffer from it, you know that no amount of jokes or friendly ribbing is going to tease you out of it. Oh sure, you can put up the smile the way you put up Christmas lights – all the neighbors can see them even if they leave you cold – but lurking under that is that abiding sense of ennui. As I once heard, “Telling a depressed person to ‘cheer up’ is like telling a blind person to ‘look harder’.” If it was that easy, don’t you think we would have done it?
I’ve reached a point where I truly am beginning to feel like I must be a different species or from another planet. I just don’t get people. All the stuff you run around doing, driving all over the countryside to do this, that, or the other thing, cheering for sports teams, or taking a day cruise, going to movies, out to dinner. I just don’t get it. What’s the point? What does it do for you? How does it change your life? I don’t get the current obsession with BDSM but judging by the news and how many other people do, I really know I’m not one of you. To me it’s such a bizarre concept. But, this is what your lives revolve around, so be it. I don’t understand anything about you.
The tribal predisposition. You find the most trivial ways to separate into new tribes all the time. Hairstyles, clothing colors, personal conveyances, profession, beliefs in supernatural entities (or lack thereof), skin color, eye color, hair color. I’m so tired of trying to sort out who’s in which tribe. I was apparently dumped on this planet, alone. I have no tribe. And sports – Modern wargames where one tribe tries to kill the other tribe, and all the villagers turn out to watch the battles. Some of the villagers get killed occasionally, but rarely do any of the warriors die. Peculiar way to fight battles.
And the way you love your guns and war… If you didn’t love them so much, they’d be gone. But people love war. They LOVE it. When 3D printers burst onto the scene just a few short months ago, what was the first thing someone made with one? A gun. That’s right. And they’re even easier to make now, completely plastic. Someone (or a lot of someones) find this important. I make jokes on Twitter about being a Viking and swinging my battleaxe, because, again like the Christmas lights, people find it amusing. And for the record, I don’t get Christmas lights either. So, favorite human pastimes include killing people, and cheering up the survivors with Christmas lights? You people are just weird.
The things people find important just baffle me. Like these big ugly houses they like to build
What the hell were they thinking? Well, they were thinking of themselves. For more on big ugly houses, there’s a whole series of posts about Big Ugly Houses in and around Walnut Creek, CA, an area I know from having lived there for almost ten years. Look for the one the writer dubbed “Xanadu.” It will make you shudder. It looks like a fortress from an alien world. I just hope it’s not from whatever alien world I’m from, because WOW would that would be embarrassing.
Celebrity worship. Why? Why do you fall all over yourselves to place on pedestals people who do and say horrible things? Or just useless stuff? If you’re going to worship other humans, why not scientists, philosophers, educators, crisis aid workers? Allow me to suggest one that I find particularly noteworthy. I’m posting it nearly full-sized to make it easier for you to read, so you don’t have to keep clicking:
A great man, a great thinker.
But, maybe I’m not entirely alone. I suspect the recent trend and popularity of dystopian, post-apocalyptic literature and movies are indicative of a general dissatisfaction with modern life. For me, it’s a possibility of a ‘reset’ button, to get away from the structure of society around banks and money, or power-mad egomaniacs with bombs, and maybe find a better way to organize society. I don’t know what that better way might be, as I am not the great thinker Dr. Sagan was, but with luck those who are might be able to lead us into a better future, one built on more compassionate foundations, and not about oppressing others to improve one’s own lot in life.
If you’re gonna dream, dream BIG, I always say. Back to writing.
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