The last week it has been rainy, and I haven't been taking too many photographs. I had hoped that I would be able to photograph the Moon as it swung underneath Jupiter and Saturn, but the clouds did not cooperate, and the morning skies were only clear by the time the Moon was past Mars.
The rains also kept me from writing outside, which means I didn't get much writing done, period. I'm also going to blame crazy pollen counts (and sinus headaches) for my lack of writing, too.
I am slowly making progress on edits for a 7500 word story, so there's something.
Saturday, morning (8 AM PDT) I listened to Pembroke College’s Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature, which was an online symposium of previous speakers -- Kij Johnson (2013), Adam Roberts (2014), Lev Grossman (2015), Terri Windling (2016), V.E. Schwab (2018), and Rebecca F. Kuang (tba) -- discussing how science-fiction and fantasy literature respond to, and provide inspiration during, moments of despair and personal difficulty.I'd hoped to be able to use Zoom to get in, but I was shunted to the YouTube channel. The panel was like an excellent OryCon or NorWestCon panel. I found the running chatter on the chat-bar distracting and had an open notepad over it. At the end I found myself missing convention panels and the occasional meeting with the Wordos at the local bar and grill.
It was interesting to hear how the panelists' work styles were affected by the pandemic differently. What I took away from that was that the pandemic was good for research; that the tension between the isolation of writing and the communicable quality of performance provides the creative force to write; and that--extroversion or introversion aside--what the writers missed were the social interactions story-telling needs to function: interaction with others refilled the well of creativity.
On writing crises, the consensus was that writers write crises anyway, and this was going to change the science fiction and fantasy literature in the same way Spanish Flu, the World Wars, the Vietnam War, 9-11, and climate change changed (and is changing) the literature of their times. In terms of making a difference, the sense was, (borrowing from Dorothy Sayers' "Gaudy Night") if what you do well is art, use your art to help someone on the front lines get through it. Someone else pointed out that women, queers, and people of color have been writing about living through crises of existence for 30 years.
The panel touched on Eucatastrophe, hope, and how fiction is an attempt to make sense of the world in a world that doesn't make sense. And how memes were a way of sharing culture "from the bottom up."
In talking about working away from the Mono-Myth of the Hero's Journey, the panel sort of addressed what to do with the concept of "The Good Guys" and "The Strong Ruler," and I wished someone had formulated a question addressing how to strain out some of the more toxic ingredients from the soup pot of tales. The consensus seemed to be that simple, un-glorious things like washing one's hands is a new way to (heroically?) save a culture, and that this could be the start of a move away from stories with Grandiose, external Evil (slay the dragon) and toward more nuanced, internal challenges.
Before concluding, the discussion turned to the nature of the landscape (A Stranger Rides Into Town / The Protagonist Gets Lost in the Forest, Confronts a Guardian, and Returns Re-integrated) in story. What struck me was when Teri Windling pointed out that Urban Fantasy started out in the 1980's ("War for the Oaks," deLint's Newford stories) exploring the numinous landscapes of The City, but by the 1990's had turned into Urban Vampire and Werwolf Hunting (Buffy).
So now I'm re-reading bits of Jane Yolen's "Touch Magic" and wondering things like, in a culture where the global village has the Internet -- with its memes and hypertex narrative -- what has been the influence on the development of "The Lively Fossil" of Faerie Tales?And wondering which personal myths I write.
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