Myth, the Universe, and Everything

At the beginning of January, asakiyume posted on facebook:

2013 Creative PAY IT FORWARD. The first 5 people to comment on this status will receive something from me this calendar year - a surprise gift of some sort. There will likely be no warning. It will happen whenever the mood strikes me. The catch? You must also post this as your status and pay it forward. (Please PM me your address if you are one of the first 5).

I thought this was a fantastic idea, and, knowing how wonderfully creative asakiyume is, I definitely wanted to get in on that action. Not being super crafty myself, I posted to my own facebook page that I'd produce some sort of story snippet for people who posted on my page. It never occurred to me that baking would count toward the creative pay it forward until I received these in the mail:



Six cookies (one not shown here because its broken arrival meant I ate it immediately) that were as beautiful as they were delicious! Now, I am no artist, but I do like to bake, and I've come up with a few fun words about molasses and a small hero named Elias that my own pay-it-forward friend will be receiving.


A close up of my favorite image by the fantastic asakiyume

One of the things I'm noticing about having a Kickstarter campaign up and running is that I'm far more likely to donate to other people's Kickstarter campaigns. I'd donated to two, and one indiegogo, in the few years before starting my campaign; I've doubled the number of campaigns I've backed in the last two weeks, and I expect that trend to continue. There's something about funding other people's creative endeavors that's really satisfying, and because I'm so grateful that people are funding mine, it makes me even happier to give to others. I suspect that's one of the reasons Kickstarter is so successful -- and hope that other people feel as good about contributing to mine as I feel about contributing to others!

(x-posted from kickstart_tu)

Dear Friends,

Any of you who follow my livejournal know that recently, I had the opportunity to have Stacy Whitman (slwhitman) write a guest post about her plans for her new publishing house: Tu Publishing. The mission is admirable: the books put out by Tu Publishing will feature multicultural heroes and heroines, helping science fiction and fantasy for children and teens become a more diverse genre. Young readers should be able to find fantasy and science fiction where their own culture is reflected in the world of the novel, and the goal of Tu Publishing is to offer just that. (You can read more about the goals on Tu's mission page.)

Here's the catch: ever publishing endeavor needs capital to start. Stacy is using Kickstarter as a fund drive to get the project started. As of today, she's reached 29% of her goal, and only 25 days remain for contributions! That's where we come in.

In order to help her reach her goals, this community has been formed to auction off items, services, crafts, and other various and sundry offerings, with all the proceeds going to the Tu kickstart page. We hope to help Stacy and Tu reach the goal of $10,000 by December 14th.

How can you help?

1) Donate something to our auction.
2) Bid on something donated to our auction.
3) Spread the word! Get lovers of fantasy and science fiction to pop by!

Contributors decide on the starting price and the end time of their auction. Because the turn-around is so soon, auctions will begin as soon as the listing for the offering is posted.

Auction winners will make a donation directly to the Tu Publishing Kickstart page and send the receipts to the contributor.

Thank you so much for your support!

--

In old news, I completely forgot to resolve my contest on November 7th. Congrats to karenkincy, asakiyume, and vita_ganieda, who will be getting Andrew Lang fairy books in the mail. :)

In somewhat less old news, my Norse Saga game on Sunday caused the second best fit of laughter I've ever had in a role playing game. (The first still goes to Cody Jones for the dirigibles.) I did not quite fall off my chair (hence the dirigibles maintaining the number one spot), but I did cry, I was laughing so hard. This is one of the many reasons I love table-top role playing games. (Also, I got to totally myth-geek the table with references to Taliesin, Cerridwin, Annwn, Bridget, Manannan, Gwyn ap Nudd, Loki, and sundry others.)

But now, off to figure out what I'm going to put into the auction!

I've had the pleasure of corresponding with Francesca Forrest (asakiyume) since we met in the comments of the athanarel community and on sartorias's live journal. When Francesca was announced as one of the other writers to be featured in the Coyote Wild young adult issue, I was incredibly excited to meet her all over again--this time through her fiction. Her work has been also featured on Three Crows and in the recently published Lace and Blade 2 from Norilana Books.

By following her live journal, it's clear to me that Francesca sees the world in beautiful ways, and she's able to capture that world view in her photography and her prose. About a month ago in the comments on my journal, we got into a conversation about the nature of how people see the world, culturally, impacting more than just their myths. Apparitions and mythical creatures are certainly culturally specific, but other ideas--like concepts in medicine--are also bound to the worlds they come from. Francesca's guest blog contribution riffs on that theme and applies it in a broad spectrum. I'm delighted to host her words here. Thanks, Francesca!

--

As a child, I was a religious syncretist. I tried to reconcile each new religion I learned about to the others, so as to be in a state of grace for all possible faiths and deities. It wasn’t long before I realized that this was a hopeless task. The effort and the failure left me with a profound curiosity about the fact of multiple, mutually exclusive truths, however. I see the pattern in lots of places—in politics, in medicine, in philosophy.

I was mentioning to alanajoli a book called Medicine and Culture, by Lynn Payer, that examines these different truths in medicine. Depending on whether you’re in England, Germany, or France, how your ailments are diagnosed will vary. Theoretically, medicine is a fairly objective science, and yet the liver ailment that you receive medication for in France may not even be acknowledged when you cross the border into Germany, but the Germans may uncover a heart ailment. What’s true, medically, in one place just isn’t, elsewhere.

It’s not surprising that usually, you find people adhering to the truths that they know. If you know the ailment is in the liver, because you’re in France, then that’s what you treat. In the spiritual realm, Portuguese or Croatian children may see apparitions of Mary, but Kazakh and Kirghiz kids probably won’t.

This doesn’t always hold, though. In mid-nineteenth-century China, Hong Xiuquan, a would-be civil servant who studied the requisite Confucian classics diligently but who still didn’t manage to pass the civil-service exams, had a vision in which Jesus Christ came to him and told Hong that Hong was Jesus’s younger brother. Hong then founded the heterodox Taiping sect of Christianity and led a huge rebellion against the Qing dynasty.

Or, how about a more peaceful, small-scale example that I recall hearing about on the radio back in the very early 1990s: A pair of English (or possibly American or Australian; I can’t recall) explorers were traveling into the interior of Borneo in the 1980s, visiting groups of people who had very little contact with the outside world. They stayed in one such village, where the foundational spiritual belief was in a great tree of life, on which everything had a place, in relationship to everything else. During the course of people’s lives, they might dream about this tree, and when they did, they would get a tattoo to mark their spiritual progress.

Well, while the two explorers were staying there, one of them had just such a dream. He talked about it most feelingly, talking about perceiving all these different animals and birds, all on the tree, all in relation to him and to each other.

So, sometimes we do cross out of our own truths and into other people’s. I find that very comforting, somehow.

I forgot to mention, Coyote Wild's YA issue is live, complete with "Nomi's Wish" and stories by janni, faerie_writer, jimhines, asakiyume, drachin8, fairmer, and several other wonderful writers who I don't know from lj. (I have not yet read them, but I know they are wonderful because I trust sartorias's taste.)

I may take a chunk of tomorrow, once I organize my brain, to just read some of the stories. I did read the poem by Shweta Narayan and jimhines's "The Haunting of Jig's Ear" when they were first posted, and enjoyed both very much. (I particularly enjoyed "The Haunting of Jig's Ear," if only because Jig the Goblin getting the best of people who are bigger and more powerful has a way of making my day. Goblin or no, I identify with the guy.)

If you have the chance, definitely drop by and read some of the stories--and send a note to the featured writers who have ljs. I've been getting some very nice comments, both on lj and via web chat, and I'm enjoying having other people meet Lou and Will an incredible amount. I've never had such quick and direct feedback from readers, and it's thrilling! I'm hoping to be insightful enough to be able to do the same for the other featured writers.