A non-update post was supposed to go up over the weekend, but either the Blogger app is misleading me, or I messed up the post scheduling. Anyway.
Reading
I read Magic or Madness over the weekend. It's Australian YA fantasy. Ever since, I guess probably Lovecraft, there's been this idea that using magic can make you go crazy. I've never really liked that; first of all, it strikes me as nihilistic, that this very cool thing is inherently damaging, and moreover damaging because we are unable to handle it, and I dislike the idea that magic is like, alien to humans, because most humans believe in magic more than they don't, if you scratch the surface. But also, alien things aren't what make human brains go wonky. Something totally unfamiliar and hard to understand will provoke curiosity or fear, but it's not... destabilizing, the way that, say, watching our fellow humans do horrible things for completely normal, human reasons is. (That's not meant to be Topical; I've had a thing about it for years now). Anyway, Magic or Madness neatly subverts that. If you have magic, not using it will make you go crazy. Using it shortens your lifespan, but that's plausible, if none of the magic users know how to use energy from outside themselves.
I read Magic or Madness over the weekend. It's Australian YA fantasy. Ever since, I guess probably Lovecraft, there's been this idea that using magic can make you go crazy. I've never really liked that; first of all, it strikes me as nihilistic, that this very cool thing is inherently damaging, and moreover damaging because we are unable to handle it, and I dislike the idea that magic is like, alien to humans, because most humans believe in magic more than they don't, if you scratch the surface. But also, alien things aren't what make human brains go wonky. Something totally unfamiliar and hard to understand will provoke curiosity or fear, but it's not... destabilizing, the way that, say, watching our fellow humans do horrible things for completely normal, human reasons is. (That's not meant to be Topical; I've had a thing about it for years now). Anyway, Magic or Madness neatly subverts that. If you have magic, not using it will make you go crazy. Using it shortens your lifespan, but that's plausible, if none of the magic users know how to use energy from outside themselves.
Writing
I have a rough draft of the first chapter of my fantasy novel. It's not done, but it exists. Of course, there's a bit where it still just says [transition] in brackets, but I firmly believe it's better to do that and keep moving forward than to let yourself stall out on a promising piece because you don't know how to get your characters from one place to another. I ended up dumping the flashback scene that was supposed to somehow help me with that, although obviously I still have what I wrote of it, and it's possible it will turn out to belong there after all. Total writing time last week was 4 hours and 48 minutes, bringing the total for the 20,000 hours project to 22.61 hours.
I have a rough draft of the first chapter of my fantasy novel. It's not done, but it exists. Of course, there's a bit where it still just says [transition] in brackets, but I firmly believe it's better to do that and keep moving forward than to let yourself stall out on a promising piece because you don't know how to get your characters from one place to another. I ended up dumping the flashback scene that was supposed to somehow help me with that, although obviously I still have what I wrote of it, and it's possible it will turn out to belong there after all. Total writing time last week was 4 hours and 48 minutes, bringing the total for the 20,000 hours project to 22.61 hours.
Publishing
It's literary award nomination season, so I've been finding out about deadlines and stuff. The Pushcart Prize has a really unhelpful website. Haven't read as much slush as I'd like to have.
It's literary award nomination season, so I've been finding out about deadlines and stuff. The Pushcart Prize has a really unhelpful website. Haven't read as much slush as I'd like to have.
ETA: Post that was supposed to go up on the 29th has now been posted, and apparently postdated.
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