Results of Ruminations

My boys and I have spent the summer listening to (and they, reading) All the Weyrs of Pern.  It is, to me, a culmination of eight books (three of which we read) that build toward the dragonriders of Pern finally eradicating their age-old enemy, Thread.* The ending (spoilers) has the deaths of some beloved characters, and it's written with such loving tenderness that, despite the fact that I hadn't read the book since I was in elementary school--maybe middle school--I still remembered some of the moments. After the book was finished, I asked my kids if they thought it was a good ending. "No," said my seven year old. I could hear a hitch in his throat. Glancing in the rear view mirror, I saw that his eyes were plastic wrapped with tears that hadn't yet freed themselves. Now, my middle son is a sensitive soul; he cries anytime he feels a little too much emotion. But I could tell the ending was getting to him. My older son, who is 10, confessed that he had cried a l...

Strands: One of the books that I read this summer was about incorporating the classics into education. It was essentially a home-schooling manual, with afterthought inclusions for those who teach in the private or public schools, and it made all sorts of wild assertions about certain books. I think, were I on the same wavelength as the author, I would have understood what he was saying a little better, but for me and my brain, he was blowing a lot of hot air. An area that stood out to me? When he started classifying books as "bent, broken, whole, and healing." "Broken" is a book where "evil wins" but it motivates a person to improve the world; "whole" is where, as the author puts it "good is good and good wins", while "healing" is one that is "whole" and makes an important, personal impact on the reader's life. But it was the definition of "bent" that really made me sit up: "Bent stories portray...

While talking with a friend on the way home from writers' group, I had a bit of an epiphany. It may be a thought that has been expressed by other, more intelligent and better read thinkers out there, but it was something that struck a nerve in me. It's pretty simple: High- and epic fantasy in the traditional vein is often propaganda for aristocratic suppression of the lower classes. Papa Tolkien  It's not unusual to give the title of "Father of modern fantasy" to J.R.R. Tolkien. Like other giants in their fields (Shakespeare, Freud, Marx, and many more), anyone attempting to work in the same genre or discipline has two options: Confront, or go around. There is no ignoring Tolkien if you're writing fantasy. Part of what makes him so fundamental is his tapping into mythic motifs, re-conceptualizing them and modernizing them in such a way that the topography of fantasy has been permanently shifted because of it. Probably laughing at all the imitators th...

A couple years ago, my wife's friend invited us to a steampunk ball up in Salt Lake City. We're definitely geeks, and we love to cosplay, so the invitation was right up our alley. What we didn't have, though, were costumes to go along with the theme of the dance. So, over the course of about a week, my wife whipped up some quick steampunk-esque costumes. They were quasi-Victorian, had some gears on them, and looked fine and fun. They weren't the most impressive things at the ball, by any stretch, but they did the job. One thing about my wife: When she gets an idea in her head, she wants it done and she wants it done right. Even though we had fun at the ball, she wanted to improve the costumes, to make them more noticeable and eye-catching. The best way to do that was to become more authentically steampunk. I happened across Steampunk'd  on Netflix, which we then began to watch together in the evenings, after the boys were tucked in bed. We're not steampunk c...