One quick and important news announcement: Ransom: The Anthology is going out of print at the end of the month. Edited by Dylan Birtolo (eyezofwolf), the collection features my short story, "Don't Let Go," (which has, in short form, part of my treatise about religion, folk tales, and fairy tales), as well as a host of excellent stories by other authors. Get it before it can no longer be gotten!

It's been a slow week here at the blog, in part because I've been wrapped up in spending time away from the computer, relaxing. (That, in part, has been due to our air conditioner existing only upstairs, coupled with my reluctance to have a warm laptop on my lap.) In the meantime, I've been catching up on review books and library books I'm supposed to have finished and have fallen a bit behind on my own fiction writing -- some of which was supposed to be turned in to my crit group yesterday. (Luckily for me, the other two substraters with the same deadline also neglected to turn in their work, so I'm in good company.)

At any rate, while going through my library books, I picked up Everyday Immortality: A Concise Course in Spiritual Transformation, which I'd picked up off the shelf in the comparative religion section (Dewey: 204.2) and thought might hold some interesting thoughts for excerpting. Little did I know that it's similar, in some ways, to a Christian devotional book. The devotional readings I've done have primarily been short essays, or excerpts from the works of Christian scholars, coupled with Bible verses they illuminate. They're meant to provoke thought and consideration.

In Chopra's book, the intent is the same, but the method is different. On each page, he offers a sutra or koan, one simple sentence jam packed with possible meaning. He recommends meditating for five to ten minutes, reading a passage, then meditating on it thereafter. If it immediately makes intuitive sense, move onto the next sentence. Instead of being guided by an accompanying message, the sentences themselves are the message -- as is what the reader brings to them.

Chopra is a big proponent of what he calls the quantum mechanical body, and he relates new discoveries in science to a higher way of understanding the world. So, without further ado, a few sentences as thoughts for the day. (This guest blog excerpt is necessarily short, due to the nature of the book being excerpted.)

--

Subatomic particles are not material things; they are fluctuations of energy and information in a huge void.

Subatomic particles flicker in and out of existence depending on whether I am watching them or not.

Before my decision to observe them, subatomic particles are probability amplitudes of mathematical ghosts in a field of infinite possibilities.

When I make the choice to observe the subatomic world of mathematical ghosts, the ghosts freeze into space-time events or particles that ultimately manifest as matter.

My physical body and the body of the physical universe are both proportionately as void as intergalactic space.

The essential nature of my material body and that of the solid-appearing universe is that they are both nonmaterial. They are made up of non-stuff.

The last two days have been fuller than I'd anticipated, leaving me little time to post here. (Tonight, my poor vampire character in a Dogs in the Vineyard game was almost slaughtered by zombies. This took time.)

But I do need to post my lovely news! "Nomi's Wish" has found a home! In August, the story will be appearing in Coyote Wild, an online magazine of speculative fiction, poetry, and nonfiction that publishes monthly. "Nomi's Wish" is appearing in the teen issue, guest edited by Sherwood Smith and a number of teen readers. I am absolutely honored that they selected my story; "Nomi's Wish" is the story I've written that I still think is my best, and is certainly the one closest to my heart.

This also ties into Monday's conversation (and I'm thrilled how many people posted there with insightful comments!), because I didn't know that "Nomi's Wish" was a YA story. I didn't necessarily think it wasn't YA, but I was just thinking of it as a story about two sisters, most of which happens when one has graduated from college and the other has graduated from high school. They're both, in theory, adults. But the story of their relationship, and the parts of the story that delve into their histories growing up together, are the core of the story--and they must have hit a chord with the teen readers selecting the stories! I've sent "Nomi's Wish" to adult magazines before with no luck and I suspect that this is because, all along, I didn't realize it was a YA piece.

So I'm incredibly tickled with my August. "Nomi's Wish" will be on Coyote Wild, "The Best Things Get Better with Age" will be in Serenity Adventures, and "Don't Let Go" will be in the ransom anthology (which has a title I don't yet know) edited by Dylan Birtolo (eyezofwolf). What a fun time!

What a year for me to be missing GenCon! Not only is the anthology, edited by eyezofwolf, where "Don't Let Go" will be published coming out. That would have been enough for me to pine over not going. Today, however, I found out that Serenity Adventures will be released at GenCon this year as well! Woe is me for missing the con circuit.

Folks who are going: if you see my stuff on display (even though neither is likely to have my name on the cover), could you take pictures? I'll be there vicariously through your digital images!

...and here I am blogging. Figures, no?

The count so far is four obituaries left and three short essays, but at this point I've gone through all the research and made notes. In theory, this should make the work go faster. In practice, well, I'm blogging. Which is not getting work done.

I did get a good bit of reading done yesterday, getting me closer to finishing at least one of the three reviews left.

The scanning project... well, I may decide to bring it with me. There are quiet evenings on the trip. Last year, I edited the first quarter of Regaining Home on a computer that has since died--so all of my edits have vanished, though I still have the original work from Shawn. Now, a year later, I suspect I'll make different changes anyway.

My edits on "Don't Let Go" are about half-complete as well. Dylan (eyezofwolf) was great at getting the edits back to me nearly immediately. His changes will make the story better, which is the thing I love most about the editing process. It's like putting rocks through a tumbler--they're prettier when they come out. (There are a few rare exceptions, and I suppose that might be true of the editorial process as well.)

Despite all that stuff still on my to-do list, it was great going back to campus yesterday and seeing people I've traveled with or shared meals with (and one classmate of mine who is finally a graduate) receive their degrees. It was an absolutely beautiful day for it (unlike my own graduation, which was rainy and cold), and I actually got sunburn on my face from being out in the sun for several hours. (The sunburn isn't fun, of course, but spending that much time in sunshine is certainly lifting to the spirits!) Which reminds me that I still need to pack the sunscreen for my trip.

I have been a bad blogger this week, and for that I apologize. On the up side, not blogging has meant I did more fiction writing, and I finished "Don't Let Go" last night (clocking 6447 words yesterday for a grand total just over my total word-count limit; I'm hoping Dylan will have suggestions on cutting it down the hair it needs to be cut).

To celebrate finishing it, I gave myself the morning off and finished a book I've been reading: Standard Hero Behavior by John David Anderson. If you haven't pulled this off your library or bookstore shelf yet, don't pass go, don't collect $200, just head straight to the library or bookstore and pull it off. This is Anderson's first novel, and it's entirely satisfying--it features fifteen-year-old Mason Quayle, a struggling bard in a town where all the heroes have left, as he blunders into his first quest: a mission to bring the heroes back. One of the town's missing heroes is his own father, and the quest becomes as much about discovering who his father was as it does saving the town from impending invasion. The story is the traditional hero's quest spun on its head, and it's delightfully satisfying. You all know I've read several brilliant books in the past year: this one's pretty high on that list. It's been marketed as a children's book rather than YA (possibly because it's not very edgy), so get over to your junior fiction section and check it out. (And if anyone is on a list serv somewhere with John David Anderson and could pass on my admiration, I'd very much appreciate it! I've gotten too used to being able to compliment the authors I admire in their blog comments, I think. *g*)

And now, for a short excerpt from "On Fairy Stories" by J. R. R. Tolkien, in lieu of an original guest blog.

--

There had been much debate concerning the relations of these things, of folk-tale and myth. . . . At one time it was a dominant view that all such matter was derived from "nature-myths." The Olympians were personifications of the sun, of dawn, of night, and so on, and all the stories told about them were originally myths (allegories would have been a better word) of the greater elemental changes and processes of nature. Epic, heroic legend, saga, then localized these stories in real places and humanized them by attributing them to ancestral heroes, mightier than men and yet already men. And finally these legends, dwindling down, became folk-tales, Marchen, fairy-stories--nursery tales.

That would seem to be the truth almost upside down. The nearer the so-called "nature myth," or allegory, of the large process of nature is to its supposed archetype, the less interesting it is, and indeed the less it is o a myth capable of throwing any illumination whatever on the world. Let us assume for the moment, as this theory assumes, that nothing actually exists corresponding to the "gods" of mythology: no personalities, only astronomical or meteorological objects. Then these natural objects can only be arrayed with a personal significance and glory by a gift, the gift of a person, of a man. Personality can only be derived from a person. The gods may derive their colour and beauty from the high splendours of nature, but it was Man who obtained these for them, abstracted them from sun and moon and cloud; their personality they get direct from him; the shadow or flicker of divinity that is upon them they receive through him from the invisible world, the Supernatural. There is no fundamental distinction between the higher and lower mythologies. Their people live, if they live at all, by the same life, just as in the mortal world do kings and peasants.

Some friends and I are planning a King Arthur plotted Dogs in the Vineyard game. (DitV is a storytelling based system that I haven't played in before, so I can't say much more about it than its name.) Since I actually have done some Arthurian study (I took a tour course in England where we met with Geoffrey Ashe, who is an Arthurian scholar, and with whom I've communicated since), I'm naturally interested in pulling in some of the more obscure stuff that I've learned. Given my love of Glastonbury, England (where Geoffrey lives and where I've now been twice--and would go back at the drop of a hat if it weren't so expensive), I've started drawing on some of the legends I learned there: Joseph of Arimathea built the first-ever Christian church in Glastonbury, it is said. Glastonbury, originally surrounded by water due to the changing coastline (or during certain seasons, or surrounded by fens/marshes rather than sea, depending on the story), is the legendary Isle of Avalon, where Morgan and her priestesses once lived. The combination of those two ideas in one place--early Christians and Celtic mystics--makes for some interesting character ideas using some of the philosophies of Celtic Christianity (that I also picked up in Glastonbury).

All of this brainstorming led me to an interesting idea: like many early churches, might'nt the church at Avalon have received letters from Peter, Paul, or John, who wrote letters to so many of the other early churches, offering guidance? If so, what might those letters have said? And if the Letters to the Avalonians were classified for the Apocrypha, rather than for Scripture itself, what might have happened to that potential book of the Bible?

It all sounds like an Indiana Jones style adventure waiting to happen. Or, alas, something reminiscent of The DaVinci Code. Despite that, I think one day it may surface in my writing projects. That way, I'll have to go back to Glastonbury for research!

"Don't Let Go"

2,149 / 10,000 (21.5%)