The Future is Bright!
Pardon the dust and the occasional disconsolate screaming of web gremlins. Welcome to my shiny new website!
I hope, in general, to be blogging more often, as I’ve found it easier and faster to write recently. I don’t plan on having a schedule, but I still hope to have more content than mere status updates.
C&D2 is going splendidly. No deadlines or promises, but it’s looking promise-ing. God willing, I will have more to share, soon.
For those of you who remember my forays into Steemit, I now have a Hive blog here: https://hive.blog/@smithgift . So far some of the old images are broken, but I’ll look into fixing them–if nothing else, just reposting old content.
I have also chosen to import all the old content into this new blog. I had prevaricated on this. My old blog contained the musings of a much younger, and to be blunt much more insecure self. But they are just as much my writings as these. I do not necessarily still agree with all I’ve said in the past. But they are, nonetheless, my own words.
On that subject, in my very first blog post, I questioned my own ability to succeed. No, I said, I would have my dreams dashed, and like the naked mole rat of metaphor I would merely vomit words into the world. At the time I thought that only reverse psychology would succeed; I would create the ultimate in-joke for my future, unimaginably successful self to laugh at.
But this is not what happened. For one, all the best naked molerats now use Kindle Unlimited, sharing their their KENPs with the whole hive. For two, I realize how horribly pretentious and elitist I was back then. I hope I have at least gained some humility. But, perhaps the thing I was most wrong about was that it was impossible. I have achieved some of my dreams, and found them not to be what I truly wanted. I have had amazing success, thanks to you all. I have ridden the rhinoceros of broken dreams to victory, having glued its horn back on with the glue of effort and the assistance of others, and so I crashed through the gates of despair and impossibility.
The future, beyond the gate, is bright.
The Taste for Realism
I have seen, and admittedly indulged in that fan activity I will call the Fact Checking Game. It goes like this: First, you take some work of fiction, particularly a popular one, and you find some fascinating idea or claim it has. Then you deconstruct it with real world logic, checking all the facts and invariably coming up with an unrealistic or at least implausible conclusion. At this point, bemoaning that the creator did not think of this may commence. As a sequel, you can find some plausible counterpoint, and argue with the proponents of the former conclusion until the cows come home.
This is not, in itself, a bad thing.
Philosophical Diversity in Fiction
No, this is not a post about the culture war. Chill.
This post is about writing other cultures such that they are believable–not as middle-class Westerners wearing funny hats, but as fundamentally different worlds.
On Gratuitous Rape
This is not a happy-go-lucky post. If this subject matter disturbs you, I suggest reading something else, or perhaps waiting a few days–I plan to blog more frequently in the future.
The taste of the modern public has been, as of late, for dark and “gritty” fiction. Whether or not said fiction actually is is a subject for someone else’s post, but consider: The Hunger Games. Game of Thrones. The Malazan Book of the Fallen. The Witcher. Actually, I could rattle off a whole list of popular, dark, fiction, and invariably most of them are going to contain rape.
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