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Comfort Colors Wednesday
It’s really, actually, officially 🍂Autumn🍂 and Kelly has begun switching over the clothes for the season. There’s something deeply satisfying about transitioning to clothes for colder weather. You can always add layers depending on how cold it is and layers present plenty of options for unique color and texture combinations.
Small Deeds
The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention. ~John Burroughs
There have been a lot of things that wanted doing this year and whatever I’ve actually accomplished has depended on doing what I can when I can.
Small steps among the random chaos get things done.
Well, things are revving up again despite my impending No Mondays Policy. Even so, I’ve got things I need to get done outside the day job’s requirements.
Work-life balance comes more sharply into focus as I struggle to get Merry 🔔 Bells written before Thanksgiving and more work sprouts up like mad.
Getting it all squeezed into a collection of four-day weeks should prove to be interesting…
O Brother…
Hot Damn! It’s The Soggy Bottom Boys! | O Brother, Where Art Thou? | TUNE
Taking a slight sidestep from my usual mid-post nerditude, I wanted to share this little ditty from one of my favorite movies.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? is such a funny story. It features a trio of nincompoops who escape a chain gang in the Deep South during the Depression.
The interplay of the silver tongued raconteur, the trusting goof and the irritable grump as they navigate a series of bizarre encounters is brilliant in itself. These encounters overlap to the point where things build to a handful of near-calamities.
If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend that you take the time. It’s hilarious.
Pretty Lies
Art is the most beautiful of all lies. ~Claude Debussy
Here’s the thing we always need to remember: this stuff is all made up.
People get so obsessed about the details of imaginary things, my goodness.
Okay, such gripes aside, there’s something to be said for consistency.
This is what’s known as world building.
Whether you’ve got a realistic world because you’re writing cozy mysteries, police procedurals, legal dramas, war stories or general contemporary fiction of any kind, it’s somewhat of a given that nobody’s going to whip out a magic wand, a photon blaster pistol or a pet demon.
If you establish your story’s world as being “realistic”, even if you make up a completely fictional town or region, you’ve established that everything will conform to people’s expectations of what they might encounter in their own lives.
Readers will take that to heart and expect things to be “realistic”. The hazard is that people will expect you to conform to reality. They’ll obsess about brands and properties of guns, behavior and capacity of animals, brands and styles of home goods or clothing.
If you write fantastical stories, it’s still on you to define what “normal” is.
Harry Potter learned the ins and outs of the world of wizards over the course of seven books. Rowling established it as a secret society within the normal world. Magically adept individuals are identified and taught to use it according to the rules of the subculture. They have a ruling council, schools and a very scary jail.
The world of A Song of Ice and Fire introduces various regions of Westeros and the world at large over the course of chapters and books. Martin established that it was a gritty, faux-medieval world that was largely bereft of magic. It seemed that there had been some semblance of magic in the past and that it was beginning to creep back in.
You can have completely fantastical worlds like you find in D&D or you can have seemingly real worlds that you find in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Dresden Files or Men in Black.
Either way, you have to establish what the “normal” is for that place. “Normal” is different for Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and Flash Gordon. “Normal” is different for Middle Earth, Camelot, Faerûn, Greyhawk and Mystara. “Normal” is different for DC, Marvel and indie comics.
Once you establish what “normal” is in your world, you will be held to it. Certainly, you can subvert expectations if you set it up with appropriate foreshadowing.
Simply doing something that is completely world-breaking for the sake of being shocking will be greeted with howls of anguish. People complain of being “thrown out of the story” by subtle details, so imagine how much cognitive dissonance will ensue if you suddenly introduce something that deviates wildly from your established norms.
You can do this if you can reasonably redefine normal in the face of this radical change, but you need to do the work or people will stop reading.
As long as you provide a reasonable explanation for why something absurd or unbelievable is happening, people will follow along.
This is one of the reasons why people specify a genre. If you’re writing a horror story, it’s typically a real world situation in which some kind of monster turns up. No matter how otherworldly the monster is, simply specifying the genre will prepare the reader for the unreal elements of the story that will turn up.
In the end, whether you do something that’s heavily grounded in reality or utterly fantastic, readers depend on you to establish and adhere to some level of consistency.
I did tell you I was busy. Gotta keep it short since this is my last full work week of the year. Hope you’re enjoying the 🍂Autumn🍂 colors while they last.