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Three Kings Of 2021
Today is Epiphany. Christmas is officially over (unless you’re Eastern Orthodox) and we can get back to being pissed off about election irregularities…
Resistance Is Futile?
It’s easier to resist at the beginning than at the end. ~Leonardo da Vinci
That’s as may be, but things are continuing to be all kinds of jacked up. There is just so much fuckery these days, it’s hard to know where to start.
There’s supposed to be a massive protest against the election irregularities in DC today. We’ll see how that pans out. I’m not counting on much.
Every time somebody comes up with a “well, this could work” idea, it fizzles almost as soon as it’s stated.
It’s worth noting that Mad Max took place in 2021, so we could have a rough year ahead of us…
We Three Kings
We Three Kings – Hugh Jackman, David Hobson and Peter Cousen
One of my favorite Christmas songs is We Three Kings Of Orient Are. There’s a lot of symbolism packed into this.
The three kings or wise men are (if you didn’t already know) representative of the three sons of Noah (Shem, Ham & Japheth). The point being, that they represent all of humanity coming to pay homage to the newborn King of Kings.
The gifts they bring are also symbolic. They mention this in the text of the song:
🎼 Glorious now behold Him arise / King and God and Sacrifice! 🎶
Melchior brings gold to symbolize that Jesus is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Caspar brings frankincense to symbolize that Jesus is holiness incarnate. Balthazar brings myrrh to symbolize the death that Jesus must suffer to serve as the final and perfect sacrifice for the world’s sins.
People tend to kind of write all of this off but it was intended as a deliberate foreshadowing. So, all of the fundy kooks who like to write Christmas off as some kind of pagan holdover… C’mon, man! Every story has a beginning. If you’re going to write off half of the freaking story because you’ve got spiritual ADHD, go back to Bible College until you’ve got your heads straight.
I don’t go for that…
Which Ones To Keep
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. ~Scott Adams
So, I literally just got done the Holiday Season Serial Romance and I was really flying by the seat of my pants. There were some plot lines I wanted to get to but didn’t. I think the whole thing holds together alright. I’ll have to wait until the print copy comes out and check on it.
When you’re running against a hard deadline, it can be rather difficult to make everything tie together. I’m hoping not to have that problem this year. The mistake not to keep for next time around is waiting too late in the year to get started.
It was pretty hard coming up with jolly holiday topics for the Christmas site last year. When everybody’s in a funk due to government lockdowns and gubernatorial shenanigans, stolen elections and all-around fuckery, maintaining the holiday vibe in order to get the monthlies done was simply pretty rough. I’ll need to give myself a lot more lead time than I did last year.
I’ll also need to get on the stick and start properly planning out my Sentinels series. I’ve tried a couple of times to pants it but it’s way too easy to paint yourself into a corner that way. I hate having to backtrack away from dead ends. I’ve got the how-to books. I just have to spend the time to actually read them and process what works for me and what doesn’t. Connor had some good ideas to offer on starting at the end and working backward in order to make all of the relevant characters, breadcrumbs, plot twists and all of that good stuff actually fall into place properly.
Comically enough, I’ve made some retro-references in this year’s and last year’s RomCom that will need to be factored in when I’m reverse-engineering the whole Sentinels saga.
I was also trying to regain some of the research that I lost when my laptop crashed last 🍂 Autumn 🍂. I had a lot of stuff on my laptop and it just went poof when I had to do the complete wipe & reinstall of Windows. 😠 What a PITA that was…
I’m doing some research on how to craft a unique society that fantasy fans won’t be bored of before they’ve even read it. Lots of people complain about being tired of Tolkien knock-offs, but the shelves and virtual bookstores are chock-full of elves and dragons. I don’t think people are so much tired of Tolkienesque fiction as they are of unimaginative knock-offs and general sword-porn.
Worldbuilding is fun, but it’s too easy to get caught up in it and never get any writing done. That’s where pantsing comes in handy. The stuff that pops out of your subconscious through dialog or exposition while blindly beating keys is often more fruitful than trying to lay it out on purpose. Planning helps maintain consistency but you tend to get tunnel vision. When you just let your characters roll around and talk about it in their own context, stuff turns up that facilitates the worldbuilding in a more organic and spontaneous way.
This year is the year for experimenting with new systems. I think I’m going to have to spend some time creatively spewing and then trying to harvest something useful from the random meandering rather than trying to sit down and whack out a coherent narrative from end to end. If I can start at the end, as Connor suggested, and weave all of the salient points into the story in reverse order so that I can actually plan the big reveals and red herrings; we should have a lot more interesting stuff to put into print.
It’s late and I need to get to bed. I hope you’re having a productive week and I hope somebody can pull the plug on Jomala before things get out of hand…