What is a writing mind? I guess it’s just two words. A phrase, if you will. And words and phrases only ever have the meanings that we impart on them. Those two words, that phrase, have a special but nebulous meaning, at least for me. It’s like trying to define a color without using examples. No one would give the same definition. Mine might change day by day depending on how I feel.

Sometimes my writing mind is like something I have to coax out of hiding, luring it with good writing, bad writing, or even a good smell. They are someone that I have to draw out before they can start producing anything really good.

Reading that, you might come to the conclusion that my writing mind isn’t necessarily me. It could be a part of me, or it could be a whole other entity sleeping under the surface. Honestly, in my mind palace, it usually feels like the latter.

My writing mind is a bit of a jerk to be honest. Often they are ready to go when I’m at the beach or in a car—I get terribly motion sick if I try to do anything like writing in a car, and yes I do not presume the gender of my writing mind, I would once again characterize any part of their character or identity as nebulous. Very rarely is the writing mind ready to go when I have set aside time for them.

The best nudge I can give my writing mind is just giving it a problem to solve and keeping at that problem. Anyone who’s ever written any piece of fiction or perhaps anything at all has encountered these problems. This part is too slow, this part lacks feeling, and this character has no business being here right now. Here’s the trick though, I never try to get my writing mind to solve those problems. I try to solve them myself. My writing mind shares one terrible flaw with myself. I can’t stand to see a thing done wrong. If I fumble with something long enough, my writing mind appears and takes to the keys. Like a parent grabbing the wheel as their child veers over the center on an unmarked back country road.

Sometimes it takes them a while. Sometimes I will be driving along and just hear the voice in the back of my head telling me it’s bad but offering no constructive criticism. I just know if I keep at it long enough they will show up. It doesn’t work every day, but it does most days, and on my own, I think I’m good enough to get by without their help for at least a little while.

My writing mind was never a fully formed thing. Still isn’t. Probably never will be. There were times when my writing mind spewed out drivel, but it always had something to it. Something that got me excited. There were times when my writing mind was the ultimate copycat. Passing off other author’s styles as my own. It took a while, but eventually, they just stopped doing that. They started to get comfortable, or at least, more comfortable. For all of my writing mind’s perceived greatness, they are still a neurotic half-formed mess at times.

But when my writing mind really gets going I can tell because it sucks the breath right out of me. My adrenaline flows like I’m in the midst of a fight even though I am safe at my desk, incense burning, drink at the ready, and a cat or two curled up at my feet.

I recognize that this is not a dilemma or condition unique to me. I don’t dare say every, but I do dare to say that most writers and creators deal with these sort of mental structures. The human mind is a real treat isn’t it?

Quote of the Moment:

“The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

― John Milton, Paradise Lost

Current Reads:

Sixth of the Dusk by Brandon Sanderson
The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson

Sanderson has dominated my reading lists this whole year. A part of me doesn’t like it. No offense to Sanderson at all, but I typically like to vary my reading. I’d often alternate between genre and never read two books form the same author or series back to back. Why? Maybe there is no good reason but I like to think it keeps my writing mind sharp and ensures that my voice doesn’t drift too far towards another’s voice. My whole life I’ve felt a bit like a copycat and there are long tracts of my early writings where you could almost guess what book or author I was reading when I wrote a story or a passage. I wasn’t stealing ideas, just to be clear, or at least I hope I wasn’t, just voice, rhythms, and affectations.

I’ve steeled my writing mind against that, and Sanderson hasn’t been bleeding into my voice despite the amount I have been reading from him this year.

Even so, I’ve read a lot of Sanderson this year. I’ve also written a fair amount on this blog about him. So why have I read so much Sanderson? I don’t have a gun to my head. I don’t have too many people in my life that are also reading or even have read Sanderson.

Mostly, I’ve missed out on so much from him and I am just trying to catch up before it passes me by. If the Cosmere got too much bigger before I had a chance to read most of it, there’s a good chance I would never read it at all.

There’s also an element of a fear of missing out. That fear has driven me to a lot of places that I had no business being. Books, games, and movies that a truer version of myself, one not governed by external forces, would have never picked up. But sometimes that FOMO is worth something. Sometimes it draws you into something that you would have never tried otherwise and then you find that you like it.

Sometimes the zeitgeist is more poltergeist—a spirit chasing you through life–and sometimes it’s just right. Sanderson fell into the latter category and I’m almost caught up.  You’ll see Rhythm of War down there and soon I’ll return to Mistborn for the final book of the second era, a couple of secret projects will follow (Yumi and Sunlit) and then after a few scattered shorts I’m done, hopefully in time for Wind and Truth.

All this is to say, that I have Sanderson on the brain and since this is an extension of my brain, Sanderson Sanderson Sanderson.

Quote of the Moment:

“The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.”

― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

Current Reads:

Sixth of the Dusk by Brandon Sanderson
Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

As a writer, I read differently than most, or at least I try to. First and foremost, I read for enjoyment. If I am not enjoying something then it’s a chore, and if it’s a chore, it has a way of getting shuffled onto the back burner, and things on the back burner tend to get knocked off the stove and into that nether region behind the stove of which we do not speak.

In that way, I read like most other people, to have fun. But I am also reading to learn. When a scene ends abruptly, I am taking notes on how they ended it. When two characters are fighting each other physically or even just with words, I am taking notes on all that passes between them. I am a student of the written word more so than I am a student of English.

English never really clicked for me. To be honest, it still doesn’t. Ask me to identify the predicate, and I can do that. Take it a step or two further, and I am liable to get lost. At the very least, I am not thinking about these things while I write or revise.

I know how words go together because I’m not just immersed in the language—everyone’s immersed in at least one language—I drown myself in it. I can tell you when a sentence is constructed wrong and I can even tell you how to fix it, but I can’t always tell you why it’s wrong. It just is. It just sounds clunky. I can tell you when I am breaking a rule, and I can tell you why I am breaking a rule, but I can also tell you when no rule is broken but the sentence, paragraph, or page still sounds like ass.

That’s what I love about language. There is a right and wrong way, but both camps are huge. Things can be right but still be wrong, and more importantly, things can be wrong, but still right. Writers have tried to write the unwritten rules of the English language, but they can’t. The only way to understand them is to read, not just a lot, but with care.

Quote of the Moment:

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”

― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

Current Reads:

Sixth of the Dusk by Brandon Sanderson
Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

AI has been an interesting development in the last couple of years, and if I am being honest, it’s a little scary how quickly it has reached its tendrils into our society. Let me make it clear, I am not against AI. I think it could be a good tool, and it has the potential to have a bigger impact or at least the makings of a bigger impact than the Internet.

I use AI all the time. I use it as a part of my job. I use it in conjunction with normal search functions, I use it to help me exercise my coding skills or lack thereof, I even use it for placeholder art. When I have to write something that requires regurgitation without much thought or routine writing practices, I will occasionally lean on AI.

However, I will never use AI in service of my creative writing. I have never run a single word of my creative writing through AI unless it was to generate an image, (even then, those images are not intended to be a part of any final product, just placeholders, experiments, flights of fancy, products of writer’s block and curiosity).

Maybe I don’t want to wade into these waters. NANOWRIMO did and it seems to have bitten them. I’ve read the statements, and I get their points, but I also have legitimate concerns about the future of creativity if AI plays a role in that creativity. It has to do with the vision of what you are trying to create. The goal. The core creative expression. If you are making a game and have no idea how to code, who cares if much of the code had an AI’s hand in it? The vision is yours. But in writing, where do you draw that line? How much work do you have to put in before the story is yours and not the AI’s?

Many writers would say any AI involvement in the written word is enough to take some of the authorship away. That’s not going to be enough to stop writers, perhaps even successful writers, from leaning on AI to increase output, maximize profits, and be damned with maintaining the integrity of human creativity.

Not to draw parallels to The Matrix, but at some point, if we hand too much over to AI, it will no longer be the civilization that we are serving. No longer our evolving culture, our creativity. It’s amazing how much we are already trying to hand over to the rudimentary AIs that we have right now. Just imagine how much worse it will be when the AIs are as good as us… or better…

For now, for just right now, can we just keep some of human creativity distinctly human? Just for a little while longer.

Quote of the Moment:

“Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.”

― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

Current Reads:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

Please excuse me while I reflect on the fantasy novel that I have been writing. The project title which may not be the final title is “Taravella” and the first draft has chewed me up a little bit as of late.

I don’t want to spoil much if anything about this novel, but I can tell you a little about its development and the issues that have been plaguing me as of late. In case you haven’t figured it out, my writing style is a bit chaotic. I write what’s in my head, but every story no matter how large or small, starts out as several incomplete thoughts. I often get those thoughts down on the page as scenes, bits of dialog, and outlines. Rinse and repeat forever.

This process can go on for quite some time, but what I end up with when I’m writing a fantasy novel that’s already nearing 200,000 words is a story full of holes. There are entire chapters missing, others that have one scene, and others that are composed of a few notes each written months apart none of which fit together neatly. The holes aren’t plot holes exactly. Some writers may start at the beginning and work forward. I start everywhere and work where I want to.

This only gets me so far. Eventually, I have to go back through and fill in. Often my chaotic tendencies take over again, and I do my filling in a chaotic fashion again. Some holes get filled in, others are left untouched, and almost counterintuitively, others get larger.

As of late, I have been buckling down, working through Taravella from the very beginning, and concentrating the bulk of my efforts on filling in the gaps, leaving only a complete—or at least first draft complete—version of the story in my wake.

That got me pretty far. I think I’m in the back third, though it can be hard to tell. Some spots that I thought would be a chapter have ballooned out and others have shrunk or have been eliminated so my estimate may be off.

One chapter I have been working on for a couple of weeks now. Every day the same chapter has been staring me in the face. I write some words, delete some more, and typically come out ahead but it never felt good. I was connecting the dots, and the dots were interesting, but the lines I was connecting them with were straight filled with events of no consequence or interest. I was going through the motions, and it didn’t feel good.

The other day I was in the slog again and becoming increasingly unsatisfied. I kept trying to justify it with a “Save this work for the second draft, just get through it” sort of mentality. I unfortunately have a hard time with that in nearly all aspects of my life. If I am painting a room and after I finish one wall I notice that I have runs everywhere or the trim is messed up, I have a real hard time starting on the next wall and giving it my all. I want to fix the first wall first. I want the standard to be there from the start. Heck, the other day I lost my earbuds, something I use every day, and despite having a viable backup, it ate at me and ate at me that I didn’t know where my earbuds were. I probably wasted two hours over the course of a couple of days idly looking for them.

This level of obsession has served and hurt me well.

In the case of Taravella, it helped me immensely. As I was staring at the page, trying to inject something of meaning into the scene I was working on I just grew more and more frustrated. I thought back over the last few thousand words. Words that took me too long to write, and I couldn’t find much of value. There were glimmers here and there of a better story, but nothing that went anywhere.

I was about to close the laptop. Admit defeat for another day and hope for a better tomorrow. I’m glad I didn’t do that. Instead, I reminded myself of one of my concepts. Maybe you could call it a mantra. Try to make each chapter and each scene stand on its own. I love Inglorious Basterds for this. In that movie you have the opening scene which is almost a half hour long and then you have the bar scene later in the movie taking up a similar amount of screen time. Both only have a burst of action, both involve characters we don’t have a reason to care about yet, and both drip with tension and intrigue. They are some of the best scenes to ever hit the silver screen, and each could stand on their own as a short film with little to no changes.

How could I make this chapter—the same chapter that has lost interest for me—approach those scenes? How could I make it so that if someone picked up my book, rifled through the pages, and randomly began reading right from this chapter, they would have a good time?

It wasn’t the first time I’d asked that question, but this time I started working through it on the page. What started as just me writing about my frustrations turned into a flurry of writing that may have rivaled the problematic chapter in length. In a few minutes, I managed to weave an outline for the whole chapter, the next chapter, and a good start on the third. The new outline gave the thin chapter I was working on meaning and girth. It gave it impact on characters and events, and it still, with the help of the other chapters I’d outlined, connected the dots that I had been so desperate to connect. I had to take a couple of steps backward to be able to execute on this new visions, but that would have been inevitable anyway if this chapter was to ever improve.

I suppose you could argue that if I’d moved on in the first place, I still would have got there eventually, but I’d argue that I’d just be painting another wall with runs and poor trim for a room that I’d never want to look at again.

Quote of the Moment:

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

Current Reads:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

A new story of mine just went live on the site. It’s called:

Something of Meaning

It’s been a while since I published fiction here, mostly because 99% of my creative output in the writing department has been devoted to my fantasy novel.

In fact, Something of Meaning is not new to me. It’s a story that has been kicking around in my folders in a pretty much complete state for a few years. I have decided to publish this one on my site for a couple of reasons. The first is that it is one of my older works and because of that, some of its themes are not as relevant then as they are today, and others are perhaps more so. I don’t know that I’d find a market for it if I wanted to. Rather than let it collect more digital dust, I wanted to share it here and I encourage you to read it.

Spoiler Alert: If you want to read it, do so before continuing here as I’m going to spoil it completely and unabashedly. You have been warned.

Life being a simulation has always been a fixation I’ve had, and as time has progressed and technology evolved, it only seems more possible. The sheer odds that we are in a simulation are staggering, and of course, if we are in a simulation, then there’s no telling what the world is like that simulated us, or if that world is indeed a simulation itself.

When I wrote Something of Meaning, I had a few driving themes. I wanted to explore what it would be like for a person to create a universe, how would they view themselves, and why would they do it. Honestly, it’s more likely that a corporation or a government would be the ones creating such a simulation, but in the interest of the story, I did not go in that direction.

I will admit, it was a choice to make Henry Wright paralyzed and bitter. Writing it again today, I don’t know that I would have done that.

Writing it today, I think I would have brought large language models (AKA the ChatGPTs and Google Gemini’s of the world) into the mix as it’s a natural progression of computing language. Not that LLMs could lead directly to simulated universes, but LLMs are more expressive as a computing language and to simulate a universe down to the atom and create Something of Meaning we would need a more expressive language than what computing has been able to provide.

Having the ending dialog between disembodied entities in a simulated universe was a good choice, and even when proofing that section recently and in years gone by, I don’t think I’d change a thing. It feels honest. I could have made it a twist that we are in the simulated universe, but why? It would be a twist that makes you think or one that you see coming almost immediately, but it wouldn’t be a twist that would serve the story.

The moral—if there is to be one at all—is that bitterness, regardless of drive, rarely gets you what you want. If a bitter god creates a universe to solve his/her/their/its problems then the god isn’t solving anything, but it is giving the universe a choice. The universe can either get to work building itself and potentially solving the problem for which it was created, or it can choose to do nothing. When bitterness drives any endeavor the roads have a tendency to turn into dead ends and the way back often gets confused.

Post Mortem Post Mortem

That’s right, I am going to write a quick post-mortem on the post-mortem I just wrote. Post mortems are both easy and hard. It’s easy because it should be easy to reflect on any work that came from oneself. But, it’s hard for me to have the confidence not to question every decision I made to bring that piece of writing to life. A post-mortem is an exploration of what went right and what went wrong. For big projects involving multiple people, this can make a lot of sense. For a story written by one person (me), shouldn’t everything that ended up on the page at the end be the right thing? Nothing is making me publish so shouldn’t I be 100% happy? Maybe, and I tried to be. I tried to limit my gripes about my own writing. It’s just in my nature to be self-critical. I tried to keep most of that off the post-mortem. Tried to focus on things that I would change if I was to start over, but only if I were to start over. I also tried to focus on all the good that was there. I don’t think I’ve ever written a post-mortem before today. Now I have. I suppose technically, I just wrote two. The moral of this post-mortem? I would love it if you read Something of Meaning.

Quote of the Moment:

“The feeling is less like an ending than just another starting point.”

― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

Current Reads:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

There’s an idea that I can’t get out of my mind. I keep playing with it, likely wasting some time, but still ultimately progressing. Long story short, I have a project that isn’t writing-related that I want to film. Short story long, I’ve been experimenting with trying to incorporate video into my writing. I honestly don’t know if it’s going to be interesting to anyone but more or if I know how to make it interesting.

Right now, it’s just a toy.

Right now, I have some restrictions. I’m not ready to share a ton about the project that I am working on. When I’ve recorded stuff, I’ve kept the screen blurred, but still with enough clarity that you can tell I am writing and how much I am writing.

I don’t talk when I write. That’s a problem, but not one I want to fix. Right now the videos have consisted of stretches of writing punctuated by my thoughts, and when I’ve played around with editing, I’ve sped up the writing part. Is it engaging, does it need to be? Does it need to matter? Does it help me write? Does it serve any purpose other than satiating my curiosity?

I don’t know.

I just know that it has been a good proving ground for me. Maybe I will try to do something regular there, though I have a hard time keeping up with the regular sometimes. This could be me just biting off more than I can chew again and I’m in the process of deciding whether to admit defeat and spit it out, or commit and get it down. What I need are the same things I always need, time and focus. They just often have a tendency of not coming at the same time.

Quote of the Moment:

“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”

― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Current Reads:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

It’s no secret that I am working on a fantasy novel right now. And when you write in a fantasy setting, there are some expectations that readers generally bring with them about language. You don’t often see characters referring to things as “cool” in a fantasy-styled world, for example. The language used is something more akin to what we imagine people talked like in Medieval times, though I’m no linguist, I believe fantasy language has more in common with the English writing style of the early to mid-20th century and almost nothing in common with the Middle English of the Medieval era. We may have Tolkien to thank for that much of the tone and language that modern fantasy contains.
Sometimes I worry though. Many novels written in the 19th century are a slog to read, and the farther you go back, the tougher it gets. If you go back to Chaucer, an author definitely well-placed at the end of the Medieval time period, The Canterbury Tales is borderline unreadable. Without a formal knowledge of Middle English, you are either going to have to guess at a lot of the words, look a lot of stuff up, or read a modernized version.
So why do I worry? So many great books and stories are being produced every year. I even have some stuff floating around out there, and eventually, I’ll have more, but will the English language evolve beyond it all? We’ve imagined worlds where English no longer exists as the primary language or even at all. What if some of the ideas in those worlds come to pass?
I hate that I have to read works like Beowulf or The Canterbury Tales through someone else’s lens and knowledge of English. Even Shakespeare often feels like something people enjoy out of pretentiousness and not out of an actual love for the material. I’m probably wrong, and I hope that I am, but I for one always had trouble pushing through on of his plays.
Art evolves. That’s the bottom line. That’s what I have to accept. All that is good in the literary world today is built on the backs of art that has become unreadable or—even worse—lost to time. As language has evolved, so has the craft. Often one has informed the other, in a beautiful dance that is told through time. Any contribution I make is not a new dance, but a step in a dance that hasn’t ceased since the first story was told by early mankind around some campfire.
So while I reserve the right to be fearful that my work will one day be unreadable by a vast majority of people, I also have to take comfort in that fact. Not only is this the way it is, it’s also the way it should be.

Quote of the Moment:

“Love is a gretter lawe, by my pan,
Than may be yeve to any erthely man;”

Translation:
“Love is a greater law, by my skull,
Than may be given to any earthly man;”

– Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Current Reads:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson

Something I think about a lot in my writing is the concept of intelligence, especially when it comes to my characters. I fancy myself a decently smart dude. I have some diplomas, a love and curiosity for science, and I try to always be learning or absorbing something, but I do not want to be limited by my intelligence when it comes to my characters. In other words, I want to write characters smarter than me, but is that possible?

Time is the balance on that. With enough time, knowledge, and hindsight, you could probably plan the perfect Normandy invasion. With the resources on hand, there must have existed some plan, some training, some idea, or some combination thereof that would have resulted in a more rapid victory with less cost of life. It’s possible a few people have even run these scenarios since. That’s a little like writing an intelligent character. As writers, we have the time to figure out everything from a witty comeback to turning the tide in a war and the creative license to back it up.

The gray area also helps. Every story has gray area whether you want it to or not. If it didn’t it would be a slog to read. When you start a story, the reader doesn’t know every character’s back story and meaning for existence, and by the end, they likely won’t know much more either. Maybe they will know a lot about one or a handful of characters, but some details will never be known.

The truth is the writer doesn’t know this either. They may know the highlights and for some short-lived characters, what you see might be all they ever thought of, but those instances where the writer does know more than the reader that’s the gray area. This gray area can add unique motivations and give a story texture and can keep a character interesting. What’s better, knowing that your main is going to kill this Rick guy the second he sees him, or just that he knows who Rick is and he’s looking for him? Of course, as he’s looking for him, the writer can drop subtle clues that will demonstrate intelligence after the fact. It’s the Ocean’s Eleven strategy. When the reader is kept in the dark about a plan, it can make the plan seem far more intelligent when they finally see all the pieces come together at the height of the narrative.

And then you have shit that even the author doesn’t know, but they don’t need to. A character might be smart because they know how to engage the fission ports on an interstellar warp reactor, but since that’s not a real thing we don’t know how smart that is. The author has control here and by the time the character is ready to prove his worth—if the writer is worth his or her salt—there have already been a few scenes that would establish the intelligence of such an act. If not directly, then at the very least indirectly.

Why try to write more intelligent characters at all? You don’t have to. But I’d rather not have something that I don’t think I can write. If there’s a tool out there, I want it in my repertoire.

Quote of the Moment:

“Why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man immediately needs to know what’s on the other side?”

― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

Current Reads:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson

I used to do these writing exercises. I had so many names for them over the years. Runways, scraps, loose thoughts, dreams. I would sit down, and just start pounding keys. No plan for what I was going to write. Just slapping keys. Sometimes interesting stuff would come out. Most of the time it wouldn’t. It was a cure for writer’s block, for a lack of motivation, and perhaps even for a lack of imagination at times. Sometimes it was a struggle to bring myself to the keys, and doing one of these writing bursts was all that would give me enough comfort to write anything. Sometimes I would spend a whole hour doing that and convince myself that it was enough.

For me, there is a fear of failure every time I write. It doesn’t matter if it’s writing for myself, for the world, or for someone special. Even now, I feel bad for wasting that time on those scraps and dreams. I remember all those words that I was so proud of even though I knew 90% of them were bad.

I have to remind myself that my mind wasn’t in the right place most of the time then. If I never put myself through the struggle of writing those scraps and dreams maybe I never would have gotten where I am now as a writer. I will be the first to admit that I have a lot of work to do, but the only thing there is to do is to keep working at it. Keep pushing myself. And If I can’t create what I want to create right now, maybe I can at least create something instead of those nothing words I kept leaving in my wake.

Quote of the Moment:

“Human beings have a remarkable ability to accept the abnormal and make it normal.”

― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

Current Reads:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Dawnshard by Brandon Sanderson

Put space between you and your writing. The only way to truly know if you have something is to step back, forget it as well as you can, and come back to it with fresh eyes. Are you getting excited for the next chapter? Who cares if the writing is still rough, are you enjoying it?

Either answer is okay. If you are enjoying it, then you know you’re on to something. It may not be great yet, but it can get there. It has good bones as some might say. Not enjoying it? Should you scrap the whole thing? Maybe? Or maybe you just need to think on it more. Rewrite a couple of scenes, add something to a character or a plot point, and play around.

That’s the beautiful thing about writing. Nothing is permanent until it’s published. You are bound by nothing but language, and even there, the reigns are pretty loose. Though I hate the sacred cow phrase, there is some truth to it. Nothing in your writing should be sacred except for what people have paid for, and even then, feel free to leave yourself a backdoor.

Let’s play with an example for no real reason:

You said that Dan was afraid of flying in the last book, but now you need him to get across the country fast. Not the best example because that conflict sounds fun to deal with, but if you had to change it, maybe he never was afraid of flying, maybe that was a lie he told other characters and the reader to get out of something in the first book and now here you are revealing some things about your character. Not only is he not actually afraid of lying, but he doesn’t have a problem lying to people to get out of something. Maybe lying isn’t really a part of who your character is though. Maybe there was some other fear. Something he was embarrassed to admit that prevented him from flying. Maybe there is a confrontation later about it

Don’t feel trapped by your past decisions. Writing is all about creating traps for yourself and then finding ways to fool the audience. In this way, a writer is better than a magician. We build traps without knowing how we are going to make them work when we have to escape them. Granted, we have the benefit of time, and usually no audience is watching us work.

All this is to say your writing isn’t what’s special. It’s how you try and fit your writing together that is. In a living project, every word is on the chopping block until it’s published somewhere. Want to change something? Do it. Try it. Play. Writing is about play, and it’s far too easy to forget that.

Quote of the Moment:

“Fear is a survival instinct; fear in its way is a comfort for it means that somewhere hope is alive.”

― Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

Current Reads:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson

This will be a short one. My last two or three posts were a bit odd, I will admit that. There was much debate, between me and myself and anyone else living upstairs about posting them at all. Hence why they went up a little late.

Part of writing this blog, or anything for that matter, is finding a balance between knowing where this will go and letting it just take me somewhere. A road trip is always better if you let the road do the driving sometimes.

All that is to say that my writing is going well, but my blog writing as of late is more just spasms on the keyboard. Loose thoughts that don’t have a home, so my blog made them a home. I can’t promise that will change, and this isn’t an apology. It’s more of an admission of guilt. Truth is, I don’t want to feel guilty for what I put up here. Maybe not an admission then, but an inoculation against guilt. The blog will always be whatever I feel like making it into each week or however often I post. This week, this is it.

I do have some good ideas for the blog in the future. These ideas might take a little longer to develop, especially since my blog is sort of my last writing priority. Stay tuned, dear reader, and you will be rewarded… with something… maybe.

Quote of the Moment:

“At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.”

― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Current Reads:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson

Everyone knows or should know, that life began in our oceans. As plant life stretched up onto land, an opportunity presented itself. Suddenly there was food up there. There was already air and warmth, but now food? Who can resist? The fish, or something like fish, began to push themselves out of the water. Pushing further and further, taking trips on the shore. Staying longer and longer. Until one day, something came up out of the water never to return. Soon the fish will forget what it means to be a fish because they are not fish anymore. That’s how a fish becomes a man.

We think of this as a process that takes thousands if not millions of years, and for evolution it does, but we didn’t get here without having a few tricks of our own. The human mind is an adaptation engine. Don’t believe me? Have you had any friends or family join the military? Not all of them, but most of them come back as different people for better or worse. Maybe not as extreme as a fish becoming a man, but a teenager becoming a soldier is no small feat. They may not always be a soldier, but most will have lessons from that experience that follow them the rest of their lives.

The same is true for almost anything. When you want change in yourself, don’t sit in the pond trying to change, throw yourself out of the water, don’t try to change. Let your mind relax, go with the flow, and take lessons back from your excursion.

I feel like I did something like that myself recently, and I’m better for it. I’ve been a better writer, father, and husband. When I was out of the water, I said yes to pretty much everything. I relaxed myself into a whole other scene and community, and I took lessons from that. I couldn’t have foresaw the impacts it would have and even now, I can’t fully describe those impacts. It’s a vibe, a feeling. I’m trying not to hold onto it. Holding onto things means you can let them go too. I am trying to just be. And lately, being is pretty good.

Quote of the Moment:

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Current Reads:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson

In light of my last post, may I just ask you to come with me for a moment? Don’t be scared. Fear can take the best of us, but it has a habit of leaving the worst of us behind to rule the world, so don’t let that take you. I may be prone to ramble, say nonsense, and try to get away with it. This will be a little more of that but it will also be an exploration of the written word and how it reflects on reality. This isn’t really a battle against reality, maybe a proxy war, but certainly not a battle…I don’t think.

This is really about what I prefer to read. I haven’t made much of a mystery about it, but I vastly prefer to read fiction. That isn’t to say I won’t pepper in so-called true stories or auto-biographies, especially on people or events that are of high interest to me. I’ve read dozens of books about the Apollo space program in one form or another and when you find an Erik Larson, it’s hard to read just one of his books.

Generally, when given the option, you will find a work of fiction in my hand over a work of “truth.” No, I don’t want to read a “self-help” book or some biography about another successful person whose only accomplishment is being successful. If they work for you, then more power to you.

Why do I think fiction is better? Firstly, I am not convinced that reality is real. That may seem like a cop-out. It is. In truth though, most of the world isn’t interesting most of the time. Put that on my headstone why don’t you? People tend not to change, and the story gets old really fast. The things that happen quickly are usually bad and most of the things that happen slowly are bad too. Meanwhile, we can study all the lines on each celeb face to ensure that we still have something to live up to. Look at the billionaire bank accounts and know that we can get there someday but at the same time know that we can’t, and we hold these two things in our heads at the same time and call them both truth.

Real characters, real people, are often too complex to grow and understand. Do you even understand yourself? Like truly?

Fiction is attainable because it’s unobtainable. You know you can’t be Gandalf, Skywalker, Snow, or Kvothe. You know you can’t meet them. They are figments of a writer’s imagination. No, they are more than that. They are a shared hallucination between the writer and their readers. These unreal people can’t hurt you, they aren’t causing global warming, but they can take up real space in your mind. And why shouldn’t they? You know them better than you can know anyone. You know their whole story from start to finish. That’s more than you can say about Ryan Reynolds, isn’t it? Not to disparage Deadpool, but if I am going to study and obsess over people I have never met, isn’t it healthier and safer for them to be unreal people?

Fiction is just cleaner. Simpler. I can’t be the next Bezos or Obama, nor would I want to, but maybe, just maybe I can live in some of these fictional worlds and maybe, just maybe, create a few of my own along the way. I apologize if this turned away from being a defense of fiction and more of a therapy session, but therapy is really what any of these blog posts are. If you can’t afford therapy, try writing.

Quote of the Moment:

“The future is there… looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.”

― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

Current Reads:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson

I am not sure how often I will do this, but I am going to publish some scrap that I recently wrote. I’ll call these scraps windows as they are a window into what and how I write sometimes. This particular window is from nothing, and it will probably never be used for anything. It was just a thought that was stuck in my mind. You could think of it as a reverse writer’s block. An idea I needed to put somewhere before it would let me write anything important. It could be the backdrop for a story or an insight into a character, but as it stands it’s more than likely just going to end up a scrap in my writing file.

I figure, why not put it to use and throw it on the blog? Perhaps it’s just a cop-out to make this blog easier, but hey, my blog my rules, right? This little window has received very little editing besides just a once-through for spelling, and it was very stream of consciousness, not in style, but in how the idea hits the page. So be gentle, dear reader. Be gentle and enjoy:

I keep coming back to the idea that we are all living in a simulation, or even that maybe just I am living in a simulation. Truman Show feels like it’s riding on my back as of late. The world is starting to seem fake, and our methods for experiencing it are at best imperfect and potentially even invalid. There is a very real probability that nothing that you see or interact with or gain information from is real.

If this were true then you have to accept the fact that there are no certainties. Though we all “know” we will die, it is an uncertainty. Life is an uncertainty. My god does play dice.

There is no way to know anything. The sun really has no reason to rise tomorrow if we are all just bits acting on bits.

What if the universe had a bug? A momentary glitch, maybe even a repeatable. Jump in this one spot just right and cause a temporary and momentary dissipation of the weak atomic force.

Maybe these code bugs are already there and if they are caused by a method of observation how can we know that we are not dealing with spurious data from a bugged output matrix? A particle accelerator creates anti-matter as a glitch, a particle that never existed before. Instead, we make theories about its existence in the early universe. It doesn’t matter whether observation came first or second really. Theories are just theories until they are observed and we used to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe. That was a theory.

What if the earth WAS the center of the universe because that’s what we believed and what made sense, but as our need for more and more answers grew, the universe has had to keep retconning itself including its laws? The earth might have been flat just a few hundred years ago. Until we had Hubble’s eye, galaxies outside of our own mightn’t have existed yet.

Imagine the writer, putting smears in the sky amongst all these pinpoints of light. In the moment, they just want these spots to create a beautiful night sky for their story’s characters, but then, much later, they had to decide what those spots of light were, and eventually even the smears had to be explained. That part of the universe simply wasn’t written yet.

Okay, but what does all this mean? What is it all good for? Should we live life to its fullest? Should we live for our children or the people we share this planet with? I don’t know. But it does make science rather trivial almost, doesn’t it?

Now, I love science. I’m a space and computer nerd who loves to learn and loves exploration and discovery, but maybe that’s my mind just making a game of it. Or maybe, that’s my Truman Show brain literally making the universe around it, moment by moment.

The fact that we think aliens would remotely like us or even in terms we would or could understand seems so assonine. That’s not a word I use lightly. In fact, I don’t think I ever used it. In fact, I spelled it wrong and I am fucking leaving it for the record. Asinine is an asinine way to spell asinine. Maybe there’s an alien that can’t even perceive us. Maybe we can’t perceive them. Maybe they are here right now thinking the whole universe works by entirely different rules and it makes perfect sense to them that they live in a water droplet fizzing through a black void. They could be right next to you right now, hunched under a moltar impressioning memories on the domlix. And maybe, just every once in a while, one violates the emulsion of its blend and that’s why your eye twitched while checking out at the Pig and trying to seem normal in front of another human for one goddamn second.

Quote of the Moment:

“Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them.”

― Terry Pratchett, The Long Earth

Current Reads:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson

I warn you, I am going to purposefully make this list a little out of the ordinary. Getting into debates about things like best and worst is almost as boring as reading a dishwasher manual. As you are reading, don’t read into anything too much. All of these books are also from my read shelf only as I want to be able to speak to the book’s contents and not just some outward metric.

Best Book: House of Leaves—Mark Z. Danielewski

When I say that House of Leaves is my best book, I do not mean that it is the best story I own on paper. I mean that the book itself, the way it was constructed into a thing that you can hold, makes it the best book in my collection—see, I told you this list would be a little weird. There are some books that you shouldn’t put on a screen or listen to, and this is one of them. House of Leaves is best read by yourself in a dark room at night if you can stomach it, and it’s far more than just the words that will have you going mad. It’s the book, how it is laid out, and how it communicates to you almost subliminally. Also, as far as first words go, this book has the perfect opening page.

Worst Book: The Count of Monte Cristo—Alexandre Dumas

Do I think The Count of Monte Cristo is a bad book? Not by a long shot. It may well still be the best revenge story ever written. John Wick doesn’t have anything on Edmond Dantès. It’s my copy of this book that’s bad. I read this in high school, it was my walking around book. It’s a thick and dense paperback that I shoved in and out of my backpack hundreds of times. The spine is barely readable through the creases and though nothing has started to separate yet, usually my metric for buying a new copy, it is still holding itself together by the thinnest of margins.

Most Valuable Book: The Name of the Wind—Patrick Rothfuss

My copy, or at least the copy I am referring to is a signed 10-year anniversary edition. Does that make it overly valuable? Not really. I have books that likely cost more new (I bought this one already signed), but this book is valuable to me, and that’s what I am measuring here. The Name of the Wind really opened up my mental doors to modern fantasy when it came out. I’d read Tolkien at that point, and many other things, but I’d mostly stayed away from most fantasy. I don’t know if I ever would have read Game of Thrones, or started into the Cosmere without The Name of the Wind. I think I may have bought this book more times than any other. I have two hardcovers on my shelf now. I know I’ve given at least one hardcover away and I started with a paperback. I also own the audio version and an e-book copy. When it comes to The Name of the Wind, I am covered, and this signed copy holds a special place in my heart and my shelf.

Largest Book: The Lord of the Rings—J.R.R. Tolkien

This was a close one. I didn’t go by page count or even word count. If I had, I know it could be beaten. Instead, I went by physical size. I had to do some comparisons to be sure, I even pulled out my Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with all six books, and my copy of The Lord of the Rings beat it out by virtue of its protective box. This mostly comes down to the edition I have which is the 50th anniversary edition. I guess you can still buy it and wouldn’t you know, it costs more than the signed The Name of the Wind copy. I didn’t have to look far or hard to prove my point.

Smallest Book: Vic and Blood—Harlan Ellison

This was a close one. I have a few thin books hanging out on my shelf. Some skipped putting anything on the spine at all because the spine was so small. Vic and Blood did have the title on the spine, but at only 79 pages and with similar dimensions to my other thin books, I had to give it to this. Looking for a quick but interesting read, really you can’t go wrong with pretty much anything that Harlan Ellison has written.

Most Embarrassing Book: Pounded by Politics—Chuck Tingle

I bought this book at a time when I was very disillusioned with politics, as I’m sure we all were and perhaps still are. I was hoping for a laugh and mostly ended up hate-reading it through to the finish. What I thought would be a book making fun of political figures was just over-the-top scenes of intercourse between unlikely politicians and characters. It’s a book that somehow took itself too seriously and not seriously enough at the same time. Still, it’s on my shelf for better or worse.

Most Obscure Book: The Emperor of All Things—Paul Witcover

Do you remember when Will Hunting read his therapists’ books before they had a meeting? In a similar fashion, I had a published professor, and this was his book. It’s a decent book with an interesting idea, but it’s pretty uncommon. I have never seen it anywhere other than Amazon and on my bookshelf.

Least Obscure Book: The Stand—Stephen King

Hear me out. You may say The Lord of the Rings would be the stronger answer, but I disagree. The Stand is the least obscure book I think I own that is least obscure as just a book. It never had a movie or show, at least that I am aware of. Nearly everyone knows of it or has read it, but it definitely wasn’t assigned reading in grade school for anyone. My copy is a little old, and a little beat up, but I would guess that it is a strong contender for best-selling novel without a show/movie to its name.

Coolest Book: Tress of the Emerald Sea—Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson, you and your Dragonsteel team did an amazing job with your Secret Project books. I have all four (and a pre-order in for the fifth), but have been holding off on Yumi and Sunlit until I get further into the Cosmere. All could have been contenders for this category because they just look and feel so cool. Ultimately, I think The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England  is perhaps a little cooler physically in the blue with foil shining bright and little illustrations on nearly every page, but Tress had the better story and it’s almost equal in pure cool factor, so I let it edge out and win this category.

Quote of the Moment:

“This is not for you.”

― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

Current Reads:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson

Continuing with my book month theme, let’s take a look at how I categorize and tend to the collection.

When it comes to categories, I have a few. Two you already know, and they are by far my largest. That is read and unread. You would think that every book should fit into those two categories unless I am tracking books that I have started and haven’t finished—I’m a completionist so that is rarely a problem. But I actually have a few other categories. Biographies, books about music, reference materials, comic books, and more all fall outside of my normal reading and I don’t like to keep them with my fiction.

Occasionally, very occasionally, I find cause to put a book that fits into one of those other categories into my main read/unread library. A reference book that is mostly short stories and essays on those short stories? I can see a case for that. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is an autobiography, but since it’s mostly a work of fiction, where does that go? Same for Catch Me If You Can. Sometimes it all comes down to how a book hits me, how it makes me feel once I have read it. And yes, that means a book can go from being lumped into one of those other categories only to land on my read shelf once I’ve read it.

The system doesn’t have to make sense to anyone, at the end of the day, so long as it makes sense to me. Why separate them at all though? A lot of it comes down to keeping track of what I want to read/have read, and what I just want to keep on hand in case I need it or it has some sort of other value to me.

I have a collection of Perry Rhodan novels that I am working on completing, and even though they are fiction, I treat them like comic books. They are part of a collection. Though I do read them, I see them more as an oddity. I keep them together and separate because I don’t want to break the collection up between my read portion of the library and my unread bookshelf, but I also don’t want to force myself to read them all just to keep them together. For starters, I haven’t collected them all yet. Beyond that, forcing myself to read them all, one after the other, just to fulfill some sort of vision, will only result in me hating the process and the books.

How do I track all of this? Well, it is a mother of a task, and I recently went through the struggle of rebuilding my read/unread libraries digitally. With the way I keep books and how I consume them, I can’t trust myself to know what books I currently possess, and which ones I don’t, so I need access on my phone. This can be a struggle to build mostly because a lot of my books are older and predate the current ISBN system. Some of them provide enough info to build an ISBN but even then, not all of them show up, and the ones that don’t have to be manually added. The end result is I have a spreadsheet backup and a handy log on my phone. The app I tried this time is called Bookshelf on the Play Store, in case you want to try it for yourself.

Many people build these digital libraries because they want to track when they lend out a book. That’s not what I do. In fact, I never lend a book to anyone but those that live in my household. That may seem cruel, but I do it for a couple of reasons. First being, as I already said, I care for my books a lot. Even the beat-up ones. And I really only trust myself and no one else when it comes to their care. Moreover, books often take a long time to read. In that time, things get forgotten, and it’s never fun to ask for your book back. Have you ever asked for a book back from someone that insisted you never lent it to them? Been there, and it’s not worth losing a friendship over. Instead, whenever I can, I give books instead. If I really want you to read a book, I’ll just get a copy for you or even give you a copy from my library so I can have an excuse to upgrade from paperback to hardcover or from old edition to new. Might I bend or break this rule? Sure, but I’ve lost too many books to make lending the common practice and policy of my library.

Knowing your library and knowing your books is like knowing yourself. It should be no surprise then that my library has strict rules that govern what is ultimately a beautiful mess.

Quote of the Moment:

“The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert.”

― Dean Koontz, Odd Apocalypse

Current Reads:

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
White Plague by James Abel

I believe in used books, and though publishers may not agree with that, I think you will find that most authors do. Borrow books, buy them used, use the library, whatever you need to do to read the books you want to read—short of outright stealing—by all means do it.

I love buying used books for many reasons, chief among those reasons is much the same as my desire for variety and the unknown. When I want a specific book, I will probably buy it new, I will probably find the hardcover, and I will do some homework to make sure I am getting the best and most complete edition/version possible. When I buy a book used, I wasn’t looking for it. I found it. That’s the difference. That’s the adventure.

Do I feel like I am doing the author harm by buying a book used? No, and I will tell you why. When I buy their book used, it’s because I wouldn’t have bought it new. If I love the book, then I may buy others from the same author or even in the same series. At that point, I am buying new. If I like it, I will talk to my friends about it, maybe even give them my used copy so I can buy a new one. Buying one used book could lead to the purchase of several new books from that author for multiple people.

On top of that, many of the used books I buy are out of print to begin with. Sometimes I am buying a used book because I have already listened to the audiobook version or read the e-book. In short, there are very few reasons to feel bad about buying a used book. If you one day see something I wrote on a used bookshelf and you think about buying it, don’t hesitate on my account.

I believe in taking care of my books, used and new alike. I do not dog-ear pages, I never leave a book in a place where it could get dirty, my hands are clean when I am reading or handling, and the dust jacket always comes off. I also have an intake process. I log the book in my digital library so I can keep track of what I have, I clean any stickers off the book with care, and attempt to correct any bent pages. If I detect a binding going bad while reading, I may even stop and consider a different way to finish the book.

Do I want my used books to be perfect? No. But I want them to be as perfect as possible. As good as they can be now that they are in my care. And when they enter the coveted “read’ shelf, they are displayed just as proudly as any other book in my collection. I love having a shelf that tells a story. I can see pristine books that look like they were barely ever cracked open, and they are right alongside beat-down books that have had a journey. Sometimes these books might even have the same author or be a part of the same series.

Once in a while, I am compelled to replace a used book with a new copy or a copy in better condition. This usually happens for books that end up meaning a lot to me. If the cover art is different, especially for something out of print, I might keep both, but usually I don’t. In that case, the used book will go to a friend or be donated to a local used bookstore, and the cycle continues.

Quote of the Moment:

“The other side was stacked with books, most of them old and with that smell that old books have. Probably not everyone likes that smell, but I do. It’s musty, but good must.”

― Stephen King, Fairy Tale

Current Reads:

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Edgedancer by Brandon Sanderson

It’s book month. It is? Sure, why not? Not even going to bother to look up if another month is book month. For me, no for us, right now, it’s book month. This month, each week, I will talk about my relationship with books in general. There’s no better place to start than with a look at my unread book collection and how it functions…or at least, how it pretends to function.

To start with, I keep a hefty collection of books that I haven’t read. We are talking about somewhere in the area of 200 books, and I keep them all crammed together, stacked tight, double deep on a single shelf. I do not put these books in any order other than size. Why size? Because ordering them by size does a few things for me. One, it lets me fit as many books as possible on this poor bookshelf. Two, it still gives me a way to find books. If I know a book is a hard cover, it narrows my search to certain stacks.

Why keep them unorganized? Space is a big reason of course, but there’s actually a reason to make it take up very little room. I’m a little ashamed of them. They are all books that I want to read and haven’t. For most, I just don’t have the time, for others, I might have found the second or third book in a series I’ve never started. But mostly, it’s the former.

The biggest reason to keep them unorganized? It encourages me to experiment with my books. The books I buy are all over the place. If I see an old sci-fi book with a cool cover and an author I’ve never heard of, I’ll pick it up. Books by mainstream authors? Why not? Classics that weren’t forced on me in school? Imagine how much cooler I will be if I read it on my own. Friend recommendation? Don’t mind if I do. Honestly, when you get enough books in one place I am convinced that they multiply on their own.

With such an odd collection, kept in such a specific kind of disarray, it’s hard coming to my shelf looking for a specific book. Half the time I don’t even remember what I have (I have to track my library on my phone for those late-night bookstore runs). Instead, I have to come to the shelf with an open mind not knowing what I am going to walk away with.

This system is not without flaws. For example, I have by way of gifts, collected not one but two Harry Potter books, neither of which is Philosopher’s Stone. It’s a book series I always intended to get to, but was never in love with the writing. Now, I have more misgivings, but it’s also such a cultural touchstone that it feels wrong to shut myself off to the series entirely. So, as a half-measure, I keep the two books on my unread shelf. I try to avoid situations like that, but likely through fault of my own, it does come up.

Once I read a book though, then it gets to go on the “read” shelf. A shelf of order, where all the spines align, the authors are alphabetical, and each series is kept in order. My read books sit behind me, spread wide, supporting me as I work. My unread books sit right next to me when I write, just inside my peripheral vision, taunting me.

Quote of the Moment:

“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

Current Reads:

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

It’s interesting to think about the concept of good writing. We know how Shakespeare, Dumas, Cervantes, Chaucer, Tolkien, and Asimov hold up today, but are they still good for today’s standard? Meaning, if they were written today, as they are, would they get acclaim or be left unelevated and forgotten? It could very well be a different answer for each of these, and perhaps that’s a sign that at least something is right with the world, but let’s turn the question on its ear before we have a good debate on the matter. What side of the debate will I land on? At this point, with these words fresh off the finger tips, even I am not sure.

On the other side of the matter, would Chaucer have appreciated Martin? Would Shakespeare enjoy Scalzi? There would be a little language barrier, but even ignoring that, I can honestly say I have no idea. Maybe Scalzi’s humor would have seemed simple or his concepts unnecessarily complex. (Not me, Scalzi, when you say Kaiju are real, they are literal nuclear bombs, and people secretly study them, I am all on board for the story and the humor) Would Chaucer have found Martin too long-winded and hard to follow? (Martin, keep those books long, make me work for it, and no pressure on Winds of Winter) It’s hard to say. On one hand, maybe if they had the context of where the writing came from, they could appreciate just how far we’ve come with storytelling. Or maybe they just won’t understand. Like an old diesel mechanic not accepting that electric cars are the way of the future.

Maybe it’s the context that matters here. When you read Dumas, you know you’re reading Dumas. It’s a little different than if you were reading the same words scrawled on a park bathroom stall.

Herein lies the big question. If context can make writing good, could it be the only thing that makes it good?

Sounds preposterous doesn’t it? But let’s play with the idea a little bit. If a 6-year-old writes their first story, it’s going to be shit unless there’s some additional context. If it’s your kid, then you are bound to be proud. If it’s not your kid, but you know and like the kid, wouldn’t it still be at least good? So the barrier here is liking the kid? Liking the author? It applies to all those classic authors up there too, doesn’t it? When you know what an impact Chaucer had on the writing of his time, you respect the writing more and come at it from that heightened perspective. When you read a play from Shakespeare or see one acted out, you enjoy it because of what it meant to the people of his time over 4 centuries ago. We see these names and we assign weight to them because of what we’ve read and learned about them. Isn’t that just other people trying to pass down something of a writer from generation to generation? They are trying to get us to know the writer. Maybe not who they were as a person, but who they were as a writer at least.

Maybe my writing isn’t good. Maybe this blog isn’t good, but don’t you think, if you got to know me, you’d like it a little more?

That can’t be right. Right? But I think maybe it is. How do we like a person whom we’ve never met? Because you catch a glimpse of a soul through writing. That goes for any writing at all. It may not be the true soul, but it’s the closest thing that you can get in print. Therefore, we only get better as writers, because we get better at sharing ourselves.

It’s just a theory.

Quote of the Moment:

“Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.”

― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Current Reads:

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson