Photo: fotomanu_93 Here are some tricks to help see the existing world in new ways and hopefully shine a different light on the water we’re swimming in and come up with new solutions in the existing world. Or just make you giggle. Fundamental #1: Life is dirt and sunshine, full of ocean. Every bit of energy, movement, heat, light, thought, and life in the world comes from our sun (with very few nuclear exceptions). It shines down on the world; the plants take dirt and marry it with that sunshine and fill it up with water; we eat the plants and break down those bonds to make ourselves. Complex life is just dirt and sunshine full of ocean. And it’s not just that we do this once; we run out of ocean every few minutes and sunshine and dirt every few hours. We are constantly remaking ourselves and trying to maintain our own complexity. And we will eventually, inevitably fail, decaying back into just the dirt without any ocean or sunshine, and we know it. It … [Read more...] about Life is just dirt and sunshine
Friday Dive
How do you Tax a Made up World?
Photo: ArtGrafx Authors of science fiction and fantasy have cultivated a special skill (beyond the ability to torture characters and be tortured by commas all authors acquire). Simply, we speculate. Yes, all authors need to build a world, but we spend hours (or months, or years...) creating an internally consistent alien species or a complete currency and economic system to back it up. Put more poetically, it’s the ability to see the water we are swimming in and imagine something different. How we pay for things is one of the biggest rivers One of the things I’ve been doing more recently is using these world-building skills on the real world. It’s so hard to get out of our bubble without jumping into someone else’s that may be even more bizarre. Deconstructing the world in the same way you can construct a fake world is a way to pop the bubble, at least for a few seconds. What a society is willing to pay for collectively, to tax, and what it insists is an individual … [Read more...] about How do you Tax a Made up World?
There Are No Alpha Werewolves?!
I have a small problem with the state of current Urban Fantasy. It is all shifters all the way down! Here's an exploration into why that particular myth is a strange choice to go viral. Chaste sexy monsters? Sexy monsters have been around forever from Beauty and the Beast to Frankenstein. (Though if you want to dig deeper, just be prepared when googling sexy monster!) It seems to have really taken off with the film era and Bride of Frankenstein. But even so, until Teen Wolf, Vampire Diaries, and Twilight, werewolves were not a part of global pop culture, and if they did get in, they were firmly bad guys and mostly there for the ick factor. Now we get swoony werewolves aimed at teenagers. What? Before the aughts, werewolves were bad guys; subprime mortgages were a great investment, and social media was young. The worst thing that happened on a platform was living vicariously through the juice cleanse of your junior year prom … [Read more...] about There Are No Alpha Werewolves?!
The Manifesto to End Manifestos
“Ha-ha!' the fox laughed. '*Just* stories, you say, as if stories mean nothing? Stories are the stuff that sticks the world together. Stories are the mud from which we're all made. The power to imagine stories is the power to remake the world as we dream it.” ― C. Alexander London, The Wild Ones, Moonlight Brigade Text version, in case you don’t do images: The Manifesto of Manifestos One: Categorize everything with price per pound and country of origin …. Sorry, wrong manifest. Two: Synergize outside the box but in your wheelhouse to grab all low-hanging fruit and stretch your goals. Three: Use variable fonts so the big words stick out. Four: Don't believe every stupid thought in your head and believe in your dreams and in people and in fairies. Five: Manifestos should be short and sweet with under 5 points. Six: Live like you are going to die, but probably not tomorrow, because you are likely one standard deviation away from 72.4 years … [Read more...] about The Manifesto to End Manifestos