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🍂MY FAVORITE SEASON IS FINALLY HERE FOR 2023!!!!!🍂
Today is finally the 🍂Autumnal Equinox🍂 AND it’s 🌧️ grey and rainy 🌧️ AND Kelly and I have the run of the house. 😻 I may pass out from gloriously happy delirium! 😻
🍂 Hygge 🍁 Harvest 🍂 Season🍁
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. ~Albert Camus
It will come as no surprise to you that I absolutely love the current season. It has always been and shall always be my favorite as long as I live somewhere that has the colors, the chill, the lack of bugs, the enhancement of comfort, the flavorful squash, the spiced treats and all the other great things that 🍂Autumn🍂 is to me.
I have switched over from summer shorts to cozy lounge pants. I can wear long sleeved tees. I can use the oven without Kelly griping about how it makes the house hot.
It is simply glorious.
As with all things in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, when the body is in comfort, it frees up the mind for higher-order functioning.
So, in addition to the overall hygge vibe of 🍂my🍁favorite🍂season🍁, I’ve now got full speed on my internet. This has helped me catch up on work so that I’ll actually have some brain cells left at the end of the day to apply to my writing.
I’m not caught up yet, but I’ll be able to do that a lot easier at 500+mbps than at 0.18mbps…
🍂Classically 🍁 Autumn🍂
Vivaldi Autumn The Four Seasons
I am singularly blessed to live way out in the rural expanses of Pennsylvania where the scenic vistas undergo a spectacular transformation around this time of year.
Things are still largely green, but I have been seeing little traces of the yellow, orange, red and brown of the current season.
For this, I am well and truly grateful. Among the many blessings of the season, the eruption of color in the world around me is one of the most sublime.
From a purely empirical standpoint, fall colors are about deciduous trees going to sleep for winter. From a personal standpoint, it’s a riotous work of art that inspires me every single year.
🎃 Pumpkin ☕ Spicy 🎃
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation. ~George Bernard Shaw
Okay, let’s just say it. Writing is an act of putting your brain on the page. Whether paper or virtual, these pages reveal your perspective to the world.
The reason that Agatha Christie’s writing is different from Charles Dickens’, Mary Shelly’s, Ernest Hemmingway’s or anyone else’s is because she has different lived experience, different social norms and other factors that ensure that only she would write a story the way she did.
Me? I’m a bit spicy. If you’ve seen some of my antics on Facebook, you’ll consider that a given.
My Holiday Season Serial Romances typically are not. Part of that goes with the genre. Part of that reflects my generally non-spicy love of the holiday 🎄 season.
The spiciness of The Sentinels, Tales Of Olde Auringia and Far-Flung Reaches will also be flavored by their genres, but will be less inhibited than my Christmas stories.
As longer-form stories, I intend to spend more time delving than I would in a Hallmark Channel-style holiday RomCom. Although, it must be said that since I am continuing to write these year after year, the Holiday Season Serial Romances could also be considered a sort of long-form content.
For instance, Merry 🔔 Bells is a somewhat of a sequel to Holly and Ivy. Even though it is primarily about Meredith and Toby, it hinges on Ivy and Ian’s wedding.
Carol’s Christmas will be taking place in Laurel Ridge where All 🍪 I 🍪 Want was set and will include some of those characters.
Why will my primary genre fiction be more spicy than my holiday RomComs? Well, as previously stated, it doesn’t fit with the genre or the holiday spirit. They’re supposed to be quick, cute and fun.
Superheroes, high fantasy/sword & sorcery and space opera all have plenty of room for spicy-spicy-spiciness. Note that this is okay in fiction for the moment.
Unfortunately, opinions are being made illegal and punishable by imprisonment and re-education projects out here in the real world.
Note to the annoyingly self-righteous immoral minority: this is how right-wing death squads occur.
Cancel culture is fun when some basement-dwelling soy boy or purple-haired shrieker gets to create an army of bots to try to turn themselves into an apparent but fraudulent “moral majority” so they can ruin someone’s life for having the temerity to have their own opinion, but it won’t be quite so fun if the tables turn and somebody starts giving out Pinochet-style helicopter rides.
Maybe, we could get our heads out of our collective asses before it gets that far. Maybe, but not likely. The actual majority is too busy trying to live our lives to be worried about the cancel culture mob. If they ever piss enough people off with their deranged antics, it’s going to make the French Revolution look like a picnic.
Another note to the annoyingly self-righteous immoral minority: if you mess with the bull, eventually you will get the horns.
So, anyway, back to fiction. One thing about writing fiction is that you can make your opinion widely known based on your world-building. Whatever suppositions go into your milieu reflect your own mindset.
In some cases, it’s a deliberate thought exercise by a largely neutral author. There’s nothing more seminal than a good What If…
Sometimes, it’s that the author has an axe to grind. Results may vary.
One of the common overtones these days is addressed very well in this video about “Realism”. The growing tide of cynical pessimism led to the popularity of Grimdark settings in the guise of “realism”. Thing is, reality (or simulated reality in fiction) doesn’t need to depend on “gritty”.
For a lot of people, “reality” can be largely convivial. People get along. Patience is rewarded. Bad guys get their comeuppance. We have a right to plant our characters in any flavor of “reality” we choose.
I suppose, that the new flavor of gritty gives more room for conflict to drive drama. Results may vary on this.
For one thing, it’s been done to death. For another thing, it depends on a modicum of pessimism and paranoia that may not reflect the author’s perspective.
I am, by nature, an optimist. It’s not likely I’ll be doing much gritty. I like pre-Frank Miller classic superhero stories. I like classic PG space opera like Star Wars, Star Trek, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and Star Blazers.
As for the Tales Of Olde Auringia, while I really like classic Technicolor medievalism like Tony Curtis in Black Shield of Falworth, The Vikings and Taras Bulba, Erol Flynn’s Robin Hood and other family-friendly stories in the genre, it’s largely an offshoot of my own D&D campaign setting. Monster hunting is naturally grim. Liches, dragons, demon cults and other such things are not inherently PG. I don’t need it to be. I don’t want it to be.
I’m not as gritty as George R. R. Martin, but I don’t plan to be clean-cut and technicolor. I’ll be aiming somewhere in the middle when I get to those stories.
In any case, I’m working on Carol’s Christmas and The Sentinels at the moment. So, that’s what’s in the works at the moment.
That’s all for now. I’ve got to get back to enjoying my favorite season. I hope you’re having a lovely weekend.