Posts Tagged "demon boy"

• Just Because it’s Cool…

  Steampunk

  

  Steampunk is cool because . . .

  5. The birth-pangs of Industrialization sacrificed the lives of millions of workers in the service of the machinery of capitalism; mill workers, coal miners, piece workers, painters of ceramics, sewers of seams, and countless more, slaved from childhood to premature death at 14-hour works days, six days a week. Their labor should by rights have led us into a better future than the one currently ruled by the internal combustion engined. With Steampunk, the visionaries of fiction offer us, instead of diesel fumes and engine noise, the stately dirigibles, the brass and rosewood machines, the clever and comprehensible gears and wheels, to show us what we might be, and what all this civilization is for.

  4. Steampunk offers us a chance to rabbit down legs of the trousers of time that we didn’t take; legs that seem a lot more fun than the current messes we are entangled in. Steampunk, in all its endless iterations, hearkens back to an age when we were able to be naive enough to believe that civilization meant more than exercising control, when there were still vast unspoiled wilderness to explore, amazing discoveries to be made, and when progress trotted along at a comprehensible pace, rather than flipping pages on the world every five years as it does today.

  3. Steampunk hearkens back to an era when human interaction was governed by a certain ceremony, and one’s station in life was defined as much by one’s mastery of a code of conduct, than one’s birth or one’s job. Formality as a lifestyle, can be stultifying, but what we sacrifice for our present-day uninhibited insouciance is the grand gesture, the bow, the salute, the action that gives an exalted meaning to the things we do.

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• Out and Back Again

  Wolf Pack of One?

  My mother got her Masters in Psychology studying under David Keirsey, who wrote the Keirsey Temperament test, a version of the Myers-Briggs temperament theory. Whenever my mom got into something new (about every two years), she’d call me up to tell me all about it, saying, “You’re going to need to know this for your writing!” And she was right, because what in all the worlds can we be certain we won’t, someday, need to know for our writing?

  According to the Keirsey, an extrovert is someone who gets energy from being with people, while an introvert gets energy from being alone. So, when you are tired and sad and raddled by the world, if your impulse is to go hang out with friends or go to a bar or a club, you’re probably an extrovert. If, instead, your need is to take a long, solitary walk in the rain, or head for the hidden alcove in the back of the library, or someplace where you can shut a door on the world, you’re probably an introvert.

  According to Keirsey, about 70% of Americans are extroverts, and 30% are introverts. Thus, being alone by choice is frowned on in American culture. Note how anyone who acts out his criminal insanity is always, in retrospect, classed as a “loner,” even by all the guys he used to hang out with.

  “I have to be alone now,” in our culture means something must be wrong with you. However, “I have to go and write now,” is socially acceptable. I once met a writer who has a theory that introverts become writers so that they are allowed to be alone as much as we must be for our health and sanity.

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• Soup, and the Making of a Novel

  Introductions

  

  Carol Wolf and Tay

  About ten years ago I moved up to a ranch in the foothills of the California Sierra Nevadas, about six miles off the paved road. One adjustment that happened, since we could no longer hop on our bikes and ride to the local pho house, as we did in San Jose, or drive a mile to have our choice of Indian food, or Japanese or Mexican, like we did in Los Angeles, is that we learned to make soup. Soup, because you can generally make it from whatever’s in the larder, without having to drive up over the pass to the store. Soup, because it lasts for several days. And every day, it gets better.

  I’m Carol Wolf. Summoning, my first published novel, is about a girl who is one of the wolf kind, who can change form at will. I’ve been asked half a dozen times this month where the novel came from, and I keep think about making soup. Because it’s not made of one thing, of course, but of many things, all cooked up together.

  Here’s one. For many years now I’ve been hanging out with a guy who, having been raised in the Southwest, has talked to Coyote. It may have been conversational self-defense that got me thinking about shape changers, especially ones for whom shape changing is not a disease, but part of their essential make-up. So, that became the basis of my soup. Wolf girl runs away from an impossible home situation, hides out in Los Angeles. (more…)

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