Results of Ruminations

Counting this post, I have five remaining essays on the Results of Ruminations blog. This isn't to say that I'm giving up my non-fiction writing--that isn't changing at all--but I will be shifting over to my author website, stevendowdle.weebly.com . This is a mixed bag for me, but I think it's time to start generating more content in the place that I'd like to see people visit. While I'm not an SEO guru or anything like that--and, it seems, I'd probably be better off outright buying the domain to let it start percolating through the search engines--I feel that having visitors to a Blogger site isn't that worthwhile. I don't pretend that someone will read an essay I write, then think, "What else has this kid written besides essays?" and will then try to find my website. But if they're already there and want to look around? Then it's easy. I have additional features on my website that aren't on the blog. For example, there are...

In speculative fiction, we use the phrase "worldbuilding" (sometimes with a space, sometimes not) to talk about the process of creating the rules about the imagined worlds in which our stories take place. Tolkien is held up as the gold standard, what with the fact that he created complicated and diverse languages, then used his story of The Lord of the Rings  as an excuse to showcase the people and world that spoke that language. He points out in his "Foreword to the Second Edition" that he doubted anyone would want to read it: I desired to [write these novels] for my own satisfaction, and I had little hope that other people would be interested in this work, especially since it was primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues. (xxii)  Maps, languages, histories, and other sundry notes were compiled posthumously in The Simarillion  and other books, all under the direction of ...

Growing up a bookworm, most of the family's vacations saw me in one of two places when it came to buying a souvenir: The stuffed animals section, or the book section. The former comes from a still-present appreciation of cute things (though I don't want to pet anyone's animals because that means I have to go wash my hands). But it's the latter that, as I reflect on my hazy self-memories, I begin to see the stirrings of the bibliophile that I would one day grow into. No one is born able to read, and I have memories of my own illiteracy. My mother was paying bills one day. I know this was before I went to school, so it was likely the late morning, early afternoon. Sunlight spilled over the kitchen table on which the sundry bills were spread. My father, a free-lancing guitarist since before I was born, would get the money from work (gigs, as they call them in the industry, doncha know) and my mom would crack open the checkbook, fill out the amounts, seal the envelopes, a...

Writing advice is like underwear--certain styles work for certain people, but it's really there for support. Man. I feel like that should be a meme, like with flowers or something. Y'know, an inspirational Instagram photo. Hold on a sec. Yeah, that's more like it. Source . Just like you probably shouldn't try on every type of underwear simultaneously, not all writing advice is useful at the same time. And some doesn't work at all for the individual. One piece of writing advice that always requires a little bit of tailoring would be the "Write what you know" advice. Taken too literally, it makes it seem as though the only thing people should write is a journal--after all, what one knows is what one has done. I think there's some value to that. Some people lead interesting lives. I'm not one of those people, so I prefer my fictional stories to be a little bit more than recitation of my minutia. One thing that I believe about writing fict...

When younger, I read a lot of different genres of fiction. I stayed up late reading Goosebumps , like most kids of the nineties, but I also read Young Adult "classics" like Island of the Blue Dolphin, The Cay, and It's Like This, Cat.  I would try some of the bigger stories, but even Alice in Wonderland  was too strangely written for me to really engage with it. I read a lot of Redwall  books as I edged out of elementary school, and Anne McCaffery's world was large in my imagination by the end of sixth grade. Mr. Soto, my sixth grade teacher, read to us the first book of the Prydain Chronicles, which I instantly snatched up and read on my own. (That reminds me: I want to reread those books.) I read novelizations of video games ( Castlevania ftw) and movies ( Hook ). By the time I hit middle school, I was sometimes buying books of movies I couldn't see because they were rated-R, gaming the system as only a ninth-grader could. I picked up some Robotech  to go alon...

Our school has always had a "mentoring" period that ended up being, at best, a glorified home room. This year, we're having a shift in the mentoring program that's making me excited. I'm looking at the act of creativity--using imagination and skill to craft something new. As a basis, I'm considering the way in which Blizzard Entertainment (specifically) and video games and movies (generally) use collaboration and joint-contribution to a single vision. This vision is of a world in which all the students are building it up in some way. It's the act of world building--which I've done by myself for years--writ large. I'm excited because this is an opportunity to become more familiar with others' ideas, to have the spark of mutual ideas stirring and generating fresh concepts. Of all the parts of making a video game, that type of creative problem solving has always intrigued me. A decade ago, I took a classroom of kids up to a local video game st...

Virginia Woolf: The essay, then, owes its popularity to the fact that its proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities, so that under the decent veil of print one can indulge one’s egoism to the full. You need know nothing of music, art, or literature to have a certain interest in their productions, and the great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast into the form of essays. (" The Decay of Essay Writing ") For the most part, I like Virginia Woolf. I studied her works a couple of different times in college, and though she's hardly a "beach read" type of author, she's thoughtful and significant. Nevertheless, the aforementioned essay smacks of "old man shouts at clouds"--you know, this old thing.* Perennial. ( Source )  Despite her crotchety take on "kids these days" and their "writings about themselves", Woolf has so...

Note: Since the new film version of the book is coming out soon, I'll put a spoiler warning on this post, if only because someone may be planning on watching the film without having read the book. So here it is: As I mentioned before , I'm reading Stephen King's It. The book is massive--clocking in at over 1,400 pages--and tells the story of a haunted town called Derry, set in King's home state of Maine. A handful of kids end up being compelled to defeat the evil entity known as It (or Pennywise the Clown), and then, when they get older, they have to return to Derry in order to defeat It once and for all. So the set up is pretty straightforward, but part of what I found so interesting was how  the story was told. Despite its sprawling size, the book is tightly connected. Small details ripple through the narrative, which spans a summer in 1958 and a spring in 1985. Even the paper boat that kicks off the tragedy and terror and leaves by the end of the first chapter...

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...

Time: 11:04am. Timer: 25 minutes. Go. Case #1 Here's a thing I've been thinking about: Fame. Part of it comes from the book I started listening to this morning, But What if We're Wrong? . I'm still early in the book (about an hour and a half so far), but there are ideas that are challenging and interesting. It's part futurism, part history, part critical analysis--definitely up my alley, even if it does make me uncomfortable with some of the implications of the cheerily described tendencies of humanity. Klosterman begins by talking about Moby-Dick , one of my favorite novels. I've read it once in college (where it ought to be read, if only so that the worthwhile conversations that the book inspires can have regular space; in lieu of college, a good, dedicated book club could tackle the Whale over the course of, say, three or four meetings), then half again whilst playing a Batman video game. It's not easy to read by any stretch, and its purpose is far...

Why do we tell stories? Yeah, yeah, I know: To make sense of the world, to preserve our culture and heritage, to explain what we could be. There are lots of reasons, and a lot of them also make sense (which is nice), but I've been thinking a lot about stories lately. Maybe it's because it's late but I'm worried the insomnia that's been plaguing me the last three nights is lurking behind me; maybe it's because my own sense of self-worth and legacy resides in twenty-six fragile letters, pushed back and forth on my keyboard millions of times and my stories remain almost entirely unread; maybe it's because the late July night outside of my now-open window is cooler than July usually is, and that feels like a detail that ought to be remembered somehow, if even in a nebulous, digital way. Maybe there are more reasons for telling stories than there are stories to be told, or maybe because there are really only a handful of each, but the veneer is different enou...

I was watching a video on how to freestyle rap (because I think it's cool and I'm curious how people do it), and one of these videos (I can't remember which), the teacher, Scott Para, said something that really caught my ear: He said that good freestyle rappers are those who are able to dissociate their prefrontal regions of their brains, thus allowing them to speak without the impulse to regulate the thoughts as much. Curiosity piqued, I did a quick Google search and came across this article , which verified and expanded what Para claimed: The brain stops trying to self-censor. Or, as it says in the article, "these shifts in brain function may facilitate the free expression of thoughts and words without the usual neural constraints." That's really interesting to me. The brain is a complicated organ, but the fact that we can think about our brains is fundamentally cool, as well as the idea that professional rappers can reroute where  they are thinking in...

I finished my tenth novel today. As I've been struggling to finish this latest book (struggling because I wrote all 88,000 words of it in the last four weeks, and that kind of focus is draining), I decided to do a rough approximation of how much writing I've done since I started college/came back from my mission. (During my time in Florida, I didn't really write anything, though I talked about ideas with roommates or companions. Writing--genuinely putting effort into my stories--started in July of 2004, after I had been home from my mission for about a month. I've been writing ever since.) Since I'm bad at math, I decided to make a spreadsheet that would do the calculations for me. This is what I have so far: All of these are finished novels, and some of them I even like. The numbers have decimal points, for some random reason. Ignore those extra zeroes. I'm only talking about finished  products, but assuming those numbers are right (I'm a little ...

I wouldn't say this is a companion piece to an older essay , but it is a spiritual successor. Despite the fact that lots of different thoughts have been percolating, I feel as though I would be remiss if I didn't self-indulge about how I feel about my writing, especially now that I've finished, essentially, six days of uninterrupted writing. And the way I feel about my writing is pretty much this: "Are you enjoying the creation of your book?" "Yeah!......*sobs*." ( Source ) I tried something different this year, which isn't unusual--I am doing my best to grow as a writer, which means that I put arbitrary challenges on myself to see what happens and how I can improve (as well as what mistakes to avoid in the future)--but I may have gone a little too far. Firstly, I didn't have a single word written* before I went down. The past couple of years, I was in the middle (or near the beginning) of a book when I headed for the cabin . This time, h...

I try to keep a light touch on the publishing world, and I like to follow success stories about authors, even if I don't read their stuff. As a frequenter of bookstores (my closest is a Barnes and Noble, which hurts my help-independent-booksellers inclination, but spares my bank account, as I can get a teacher discount at B&N, plus not have to commute for an hour to get there), I see a lot of names on the shelves. My diet is dichotomously spread between classics and science fiction/fantasy , with some dabbling in the historical section, too. The large, mainstream fiction is relatively unexplored by me, though I occasionally venture outwards. And, since I always perk up when I hear about authors--and few current authors court as much controversy as Jonathan Franzen--I finally decided to buy a copy of Freedom . (In the interest of full disclosure, I bought it used for a dollar, plus tax, at a now-out-of-business used bookstore.) It's still sitting on my shelf. But an audiob...

I looked up the most lucrative authors of 2016 on Forbes , curious to see what kind of emphasis mainstream fiction has over the commercial fiction (which covers the speculative market). Here's the list (the gallery is obnoxious, so I'm putting the information here). Also, I've put the genre in which they write into parentheses so that it's easier for me to analyse. James Patterson (A) Jeff Kinney (MG) J.K. Rowling (YA/F/A/M) John Grisham (A) Stephen King (F/H) Danielle Steel (A/R) Nora Roberts (A) E.L James (A) Veronica Roth (YA/SF) John Green (YA/NA) Paula Hawkins (A) George R.R. Martin (F) Rick Riordan (YA/F) Dan Brown (A) If you've walked through a bookstore for any amount of time, you'll see these names. What's interesting here is the sprinkling of Young Adult books (though it's debatable if Rowling's presence on this list comes from her Adult/Mystery books or continual sales of Harry Potter ), but only one Middle Grade. The fa...