Writers write, right?

Photo by Nana B. Agyei

The title of this blog says I’m a writer. And, although I generally do write regularly, I’m all too distractible. Especially when I’ve come to the point in the story where I know what the problem is but I don’t know the solution. It’s very hard to just keep trying out different ways of approaching the problem. It’s so easy to read, or call a friend, or play a game.

Not that any of those are bad things. They’re just not

Review: Jim Butcher’s “The Aeronaut’s Windlass”

I don’t think that guy’s actually in the book, but he sure looks cool, doesn’t he?

Genre tropes are tricky things. There’s a sense in which the conventions of western storytelling were old when Aristotle articulated them in his Poetics. And there’s a sense in which the structures of a genre, say, the genre of steampunk, are constantly being reinvented. At the WorldCon I recently attended, there were several panels discussing the nature and limits and dynamics of steampunk, primarily the distinction between a steampunk aesthetic – the coolness of costumes and visual artwork – and the content of steampunk stories, which may or may not include “period” themes of colonialism, racism, nascent industrialism, and so on. Everyone agreed, however, that steampunk is a well-established sub-genre of speculative fiction, and that every new steampunk work was adding to and developing the definition of the genre.

Now, Jim Butcher has made his name

Reflections on my first WorldCon

This year’s Raven logo alluded both to local Native American legends and the members’ dreams of flight

I spent the past week at the World Science Fiction Convention, AKA WorldCon, this year held in Spokane, Washington near Sasquatch country, so AKA Sasquan. (Next year’s will be in Kansas City, Missouri, and the 2017 WorldCon will be held in Helsinki, Finland.)

I’m not a joiner, so I have not attended many Cons in my life. By not many, I mean, this is my second Con. My first was (I think) a Norwescon back when I was in high school, which was slightly after the crust of the earth had cooled. But I have a couple of friends who have regaled me with tales of their WorldCon adventures over the past few years, so

RIP, Leonard Nimoy

In case you haven’t heard, Leonard Nimoy has passed away.

Leonard Nimoy in 2011. Photo by Gage Skidmore

I’m not normally affected by celebrity passings, other than to offer a quick prayer. But his portrayal of Spock in The Wrath of Khan showed, to my childhood mind, the Platonic ideal of nobility and (if I’d had the word at the time) charity. It is one of the few movie scenes that actually changed the way I saw the world, and so formed my whole life. I am deeply grateful for that performance.

I don’t follow the private lives of actors. I don’t want their real world lives to impinge on the characters they portray. So I know next to nothing about Nimoy, the man. Since I don’t usually connect to actors in a personal way, it surprises me that his death brings me to tears. After all, Spock has not died. Nimoy’s death is no more and no less tragic than any other man’s. To paraphrase Donne, his bell tolls for me and for thee. But because his art impacted me so deeply, I feel it more deeply.

I suppose that is the purpose of art: to create a work that allows others to see the world more clearly, and to experience the truth viscerally. Nimoy’s work, in collaboration with his writers and directors, did exactly that for me. And I believe that he could not have played a character of such virtue so compellingly without having some experience and practice of virtue in his own life.

I have read that Nimoy was a believing Jew, who took his faith and heritage increasingly seriously as his life progressed. I am a Catholic, who believes that God loves all people of any religion or none, but that He has a special care for the Jewish people. I hope no one minds if I offer the traditional Catholic prayers for the repose of his soul.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon him.
May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed,
through the mercy of God,
rest in peace.
Amen.

One hundred brains – UPDATED

Two by two, hands of blue?

About one hundred brains have gone missing from the University of Texas at Austin.

I wonder if any of them were type A-B Normal?

UPDATE: Turns out the brains had walked a long time ago, and were destroyed because they were “not suitable for research.” A fitting epitaph?

Review: Crimson Bound

Red Riding Hood, super soldier.

Full disclosure: Rosamond Hodge is my friend, which is how I got my hands on an advance reader’s copy of Crimson Bound. I’ll do my best to be objective.

Hodge’s specialty is a romantic mash-up of myth, fairy-tale, and classic literature. Her first novel, Cruel Beauty, used elements of Greek mythology, Victorian England, and Renaissance alchemy as a lens to re-imagine the Cupid and Psyche/Beauty and the Beast story. Her next novel – actually a duology – will involve Romeo and Juliet and necromancers. This novel crosses Red Riding Hood with the lesser known Girl with No Hands. Wait, not romantic enough? She throws in a love triangle – make that a love quadrangle. With the wolf. Sort of.

The wolf in Hodge’s retelling is

No tolerance for CNN

CNN Headline:

Oh, CNN… “Are there gay rights in China?”

I am intolerant of incorrect grammar!

Snapdragon!

I have the best friends in the world. The other night, we played this:

Fetching flaming fruit from liquor… what could go wrong?

The basic game is:

Snapdragon (or flapdragon) is the name of a pastime that delighted Victorian children during the Christmas season. A shallow bowl was filled with brandy, raisins were tossed in, and the brandy set on fire. Players try to snatch the raisins from the flickering blue flames and pop them, still blazing, into their mouths. The burning raisins also were called snapdragons.

We used a metal platter on a couple hot pads, and the flames were no hotter than the space heater in my basement. In fact, I could hold a flaming raisin in my fingers for quite some time without any pain. That’s because alcohol burns at temperatures as low as 26 °C, or 79 °F. Indeed, the fire burned itself out in less than ten minutes.

Pro tips: use cheap brandy; it’s not like you’ll be drinking it. Also, warm it up a little first, to make it light more easily.

Much fun, but please be safe. Use a stable surface and keep something handy to extinguish the fire if need arises: baking soda or water should be fine.

Review: Neverwhere

I’m late to the party on this one. I have lots of friends who have recommended Gaiman’s work to me for years, but I always had something more pressing to read. I enjoyed the one exposure I had to Gaiman, the 2007 movie version of “Stardust”, but it didn’t exactly rock my world.

The edition I read bore this cover; the current printing has a rather bland green cover.

Then I signed up for a course on popular fiction (which was subsequently cancelled [only in Seattle would a pop fiction course be cancelled in favor of a literary fiction course!]), and I saw Gaiman’s 1996 novel Neverwhere on the syllabus. I figured I’d run out of excuses, and picked it up at last.

Now, all this situating of how I came to read Neverwhere is important, because

Lifestyle, personality, character

My cousin, who is literally (1) half my age, just articulated a profound insight.

She said, “People think their lifestyles are their personalities. But they aren’t.”

Indeed. What we do for recreation and the manner in which we live are significant. Aristotle acknowledged that