Myth, the Universe, and Everything

That's right, I'm under 30 messages in my inbox. That's a mark of success, and I'm sticking to it. I don't think it's been that way for months, and today, it happened by accident. How exciting!

In other, slightly less successful, news, I'm still in the middle of work on "Kidnapping at Willow Creek," the new Choice of Games adventure I'm writing, and I'm still at the beginning of edits on Into the Reach. We're already through June's halfway point, and I'd been hoping to finish both projects this month. Current outlook? Doubtful. I have gotten some other stuff done, though, like updating my website a little bit to reflect my new look. The old author photo's seven years old at this point, and I figured it'd be nice to actually have my headshot look like the modern me. (The photo was taken by the awesome Jason Neely, who was a coworker of mine in my days at JBML.)



In other news about moving forward, the Viking Saga group is gathering for the first time since, I think, February this weekend, so we can get back to clearing the automatons of an upwardly-mobile sorceress from Baba Yaga's hut. Because only good can come from helping Baba Yaga. Right?

Best news of the day isn't mine: it's that fellow Substrater Max Gladstone got a starred review of his upcoming novel, Two Serpents Rise, in Publishers Weekly. Go Max!

What's your good news?

My day often goes like this:

Whew, Bug is asleep. Time to get something accomplished. Do I:

Shower? Or write?
Do my assignments that are due this week? Or write?*
Fold laundry? Or write?
Make dinner? Or write?
Blog? Or write?
Sleep? Or write?
Clean up the glass that the editorial assistants shattered all over the floor? Or write?**
Spend time with Twostripe? Or write?
Have a social life? Or write?***

It is hard to find time for writing.(sartorias did a great blog entry over at Book View Cafe about writing with kids.) On the other hand, it is important to find time for writing.

After not writing fiction pretty much at all during my pregnancy, I've finished two short stories and am halfway through a third since Bug arrived. I wrote the first issue and treatment for the first arc of a comic.**** I've written several chapters of a co-written (with lyster) serial novel (which, to be fair, I think I did write chunks of while Bug was still cooking). I've plotted out a new novel. And I still don't feel like I'm finding time to write. I'm very, very lucky that Twostripe is supportive of my finding time to do fiction writing as well as the work that brings home the guaranteed check. I don't know how I'd manage otherwise!

--

* Sometimes the work is also the Work. It's lovely when that happens, but it is infrequent.
** Editorial assistant Jack missed a jump up onto our freestanding kitchen drawers yesterday and knocked down a jar of peanuts and the coffee maker, shattering both the jar and the coffee pot. I guess he wanted to provide better incentive for cleaning the kitchen floor -- or he was mad at us for always brewing decaf.
*** I admit, I still like to spend time with friends now that I'm a parent, and even prioritize it sometimes. Running role playing games certainly fits into this category, and I haven't given that up yet. Hopefully, I won't have to. :)
**** One of the instances in which the work was also the Work.

Today was our monthly Viking Saga game, and I love love love how my players are letting me drag legends and fairy tales all together in a very satisfying fashion. Today, they helped Fata Morgana, aka Morgan le Fay, out of being encased in crystal by her former pupil, the nemesis of the PCs. Since one of the PCs used to hang out with Arthur and company, he was none too pleased at helping Morgan. Another was not fond of the idea of aiding a person who had encased Myrddin Ambrosious in crystal (as he's a member of the druidic order that follows in Merlin's footsteps in our cosmology). But, as one of the players said, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend, until they become my enemy." So, I got to have fun playing Morgan as an NPC. She's a great favorite of mine as one of the early bad girls of literature. But the bad-girl aspect isn't what I love about her. It's that she's so wonderfully ambiguous: sure, she raised her son (who she may have had by her own brother, Arthur) to take over Arthur's kingdom. Sure she had a huge grudge against the Pendragons. (And really, given the whole story of Uther and Igraine, who can blame her? Uther was a total jerk.) She may well have been hugely power-hungry, searching for magic greater than she could contain or control. But in several of the stories, she's also one of the women who escorted the fallen Arthur to Avalon, where he would sleep until his wounds could be healed. She's Arthur's antagonist -- until she's his protector.

What does that mean?

I suspect Robert Graves would suggest that she's playing out part of the story of the White Goddess. She's often considered part of a trinity of women (always with Morgause, who is sometimes Mordred's mother instead of Morgan, and sometimes with Nimue or Viviane or Elaine). A look at the Mordred story reflects Graves's depiction of the cycle of the Year King: the new king becomes the lover of the goddess, then must be slain by the king who follows him, who is in turn slain. The king's death is symbolic of the death of the year, and his life, the fertility of his kingdom. Morgan as a goddess figure -- or as a fairy figure, given her French title -- has distinct appeal, and makes her moral complexity, or her amoral standing, that much more interesting.

I'm not big on Morgan-as-hero, because I think casting her as the protagonist against Arthur and co. as the sympathetic figure in the narrative makes her less interesting. But Morgan as priestess of Avalon, as lady of the Tor or the Well (or the Tor and the Well), as the pagan sorceress participating Graves's mythic cycle -- that Morgan fascinates me. The Morgan in the game's cosmology is, as an NPC, less complex... but I've paired her off as a sometimes-consort of Loki. To me, that's like throwing two Tricksters in a cauldron, stirring, and seeing what comes out next.

It has been far too long since I posted here. Unsurprisingly, I also owe lyster a chapter of Blood and Tumult. When it comes down to it, writing is hard. :(

I write in a very immersive way -- I like to set time aside and completely delve into what I'm writing. If I have a block of a few hours, I can bang out a chapter and be on my way. But finding a block of time is difficult, and it's hard to prioritize that over holding my sleeping baby some days. It's all about finding balance, I know (it's my libra motto), but right now the scales are definitely tilted over into my daughter's court.

That said, I don't mind reading while holding a sleeping baby, so I've gotten a lot of books read recently. I've been plowing through the long lists for the Mythopoeic Society Fantasy Awards, both the children's list and the adult list. (I'll happily talk about the short list when it's revealed; the long list is secret.) I've also been reading review books. And I've noticed a trend in the past two years -- there are a lot of Arthur retellings out there. There are some coming out right now that were originally published in the 1980s, but are being released in new editions. There are new versions based on a historical Arthur, retellings based on Welsh myths, and modern stories with Arthur tie-ins. There's obviously been a market for Arthur stories since, well, Arthur became a legend, really, but there seems to be a glut of them lately, many of them quite good. (The ones I like best are, of course, the ones with good portrayals of Glastonbury.)

So here's my question: Is this new? Or am I just noticing it because I went on a rant to one of my editors about a particularly bad use of Arthurian legend, during which she realized I was an Arthur nerd, so she now sends me scads of Arthur related novels?

On a complete tangent, I'm getting ready to send my 4e Viking Saga team to the Continent from the Isles. Early on, we decided we'd just make Europe awash with tiny kingdoms, most of them feuding with each other, which our historian player said wasn't actually too far wrong around 800 AD. So the idea is that the Continent is going to feel like a fairy tale sort of place until the players get to the Scandinavian nations. I have yet to figure out good fairy tale rulers to make use of, however. Anyone have a favorite fairy tale king, queen, or other ruler I should use with Vikings and Celts?

Wow, has it been that long?

Why yes, yes it has.

The holidays were fabulous around here -- lots of great time spent with family before the actual dates themselves and then lots of extra hours at work to cover the time I took off! We had some fun gaming in New York on the first with our characters from the 3.5 continuing Xen'drik Expeditions campaign (we couldn't just let it go when it stopped being an organized play game). Twostripe has ramped the karate schedule back up, and Bug is big enough in my belly now that I can feel her from the outside of my belly even when she's not moving. That, by the way, is wild. There's a little person in there! The editorial assistants are now eating grown up food ("We're not kittens any more, boss!"). And I've been copyediting, book reviewing, finishing up my Living Forgotten Realms Adventure (slot zeroes starting soon!), and doing reference writing -- my usual ridiculous pace of work. My big fun project for the weekend (besides crib shopping!) is creating a map of the kingdoms in Great Britain for the Viking Saga game. Since we're somewhere between 700 and 900-ish A.D., ambiguously, I have some great fun maps to play around with to help me decide. (New favorite resource: Anglo-Saxons.net.)

The other big news for the beginning of the year is that I've just gotten a Nook, and am in the testing phase to decide if I want to keep it. Much to my embarrassment (since I posted the assurances of a bookseller on several forums), the Nook does not, in fact, read .doc or .docx or .txt files, which was one of the primary convincing factors for getting it. (I had intended to use it primarily as a tool for 1) reading digital review books, and 2) keeping up with Substrate submissions.) The Nook does read pdfs natively, however, and there are plenty of free programs to convert files from Word to pdf. Next hurdle? It doesn't annotate pdfs yet (actually, it might -- there are differing reports from users on this, and I need to play around with it more; B&N just says it doesn't support the feature as yet). That's a hurdle for me, since I want to be able to annotate Substrate pieces to remember what my thoughts were while reading -- and want to be able to have other people do the same for me. (Twostripe has not yet given much response to my thought that he could, perhaps, read drafts of my manuscripts more easily on an e-book reader this way; he is a print guy.)

The reading function, however, works beautifully. I've had an overdue review for Flames Rising since, what, August? The book came to me as an e-book, and despite reading the first twenty-odd pages on my computer screen, and then printing it out to three-ring-binder in hopes that I'd actually read it in print, I hadn't managed to actually read the thing. With an e-reader, though the formatting is still a little wonky (the pages are about a screen-and-a-half, so every other "page-turn" is only a small portion of the screen), it's been a much easier read to digest. It's a short story anthology, and in the last two days, I've read the various introductions (there are three -- two nonfiction and one fictional) and three short stories (including the first actual fiction I've ready by Cherie Priest of Team Seattle, who I've been meaning to read for ages), which amounts to nearly a third of the book.

The Nook is easy to use, loads fast enough that I don't feel like I'm waiting, has decent wallpaper installed for when you put it to sleep (they recommend never turning it off), and seems like a pretty straightforward device. I'm enjoying the e-book reading experience far more here than either on computer screen or printed from a three ring binder, so it's a major coup in that regard (though whether it's better than any other e-book reader, I couldn't say). Since reading e-books for review was half of the point of buying it, I'm satisfied on that score. I'm still playing with the annotation function to see if I can make it work for the rest of what I need it for -- which will impact my final decision on whether I remain an e-book reader owner, wait for a model that does everything I want it to (the Kindle has a lot of the functionality I'm looking for, but doesn't natively read ePubs, and the conversion process for that sounds like a bigger hassle than .doc to pdf), or decide to purchase another of the devices on the market (despite what their flaws might be). In the mean time, I'm having a fun reading experience and generally enjoying using it, so I have no doubt I'll be an e-book reader owner in the future, if I don't end up keeping my Nook this time around.

One of the things I've been doing while I haven't been on livejournal is planning a new mythic home game. Several of the players I was interested in bringing into the game are fans of Norse myth, which is one of my weak spots in my myth studies, so this is a good excuse for me to expand my horizons. As we're doing the set up, a lot of my ideas about myth studies appear in the e-mails or in conversation, and something interesting is happening: I'm remembering that most people, even those well versed in mythology, don't have the same background in mythic analysis that I do, and that some of the concepts that I take for granted these days about sacred time/space (Eliade) and the evolution of consciousness (Barfield), are, in fact, foreign ideas. That people have pretty much always thought the way we think now is a basic assumption that I've had trained out of me. I'd just completely forgotten that it is a basic assumption, probably for most of the academic world.

But just like I've been trained to think of the history of thought in a non-standard way, I suspect there are a lot of ways in which we're trained to think in modern academic systems that aren't necessarily the way we'd think without the training. I was considering the Socratic dialogues I read in college this morning, and I remembered that within them, logic was used to show that knowledge existed outside of man, independently, and could be accessed, with the proper lead in, by even the simplest child. But later use of logic and reason, most specifically in the scientific method, doesn't have the same assumption of form, from what I understand. Applying the scientific method is a comparatively new way of thinking about the world -- the people who first applied it (arguably Muslim scholars in the 11th century, but it didn't get picked up in a broad sense until much later, possibly post Newton in the 1600s) knew it was a new way of thinking at the time. They were changing the way people think.

I recently had a conversation with a prof about how associative thinking is a style of thought that also has to be trained -- not everyone can do it naturally. Being able to look for similarities and group them together -- even if they have absolutely nothing to do with each other (though they might!) -- isn't something that all people do automatically. Robert Graves certainly did it on his own, and The White Goddess is a great example of associative thinking, as well as what happens when a poet eats a lot of mushrooms and thinks about myth on a Mediterranean Island.

This makes me wonder quite a bit about the ways people thought before academic training was as widespread as it is now: the way you'd be trained to think would likely be various rules of how to get on with the spirits around you -- leaving milk out for the brownies, etc., etc. The Puritans were terrified of the woods when they arrived in the Americas, if Hawthorne's writings about the subject have any merit. Why? Because it was unknown? Because it was wild? Because it was the domain of people other than themselves? Did they lack the training to think about it, because it was something they hadn't encountered before? Or had they, in fact, been trained to think about it as something to fear?

It also makes me wish I'd been keeping up with my Breakfast with Barfield project, which has, sadly, fallen by the wayside. I'm reading quite a lot of books for the Mythopoeic Society Awards lists, and much of my reading time has been with those titles rather than my normal TBR pile. (Luckily, the two have intersected quite a bit.) Hopefully, I'll have the chance to discuss more of these concepts with both the folks from different academic backgrounds, as well as the students who will have just covered evolution of consciousness before we go to England in May. I'll actually be visiting Mark Vecchio's Mythic Imagination course next week, so it'll be nice to have the refresher!