Without really
intending to I disappeared from this blog for a while. There are all
sorts of reasons for this, but what was really interesting is that
after a while I found I was having all sorts of interesting ideas
which I wanted to write about. I apparently need an outlet like this
for the growing landscape of my thoughts.
I also realised how
important good ideas are to my enjoyment of fiction. I don't mean
the clever setting or plot, but that fact that sometimes it is
obvious through the course of the story that there is more going on
in the author's head beyond just those factors. The Mistborn
trilogy (by Brandon Sanderson) which I recently read is an
excellent example of this. It is a well plotted and all over a
wonderful story, but there are also some really deep themes about
faith and loyalty explored throughout the books which struck more of
a tone with me than any of that other stuff *. With that in mind I'd
like to keep up my practice, keeping my thinking muscles exercised so
that they'll show through the tight t-shirt of whatever I choose to
write.
Two perfectly good, and
perfectly arbitrary, reasons to swallow the embarrassment of failing
and get back to posting here.
With that in mind, this
is the announcement of season two of my blog. It will be every
Thursday as before and with any luck this time I will be able to
keep myself from having too many unexpected breaks. As for how long
a 'season' will last. I have no idea, most likely it will last for
as long as it takes for the world to interfere again or until I
temporarily run out of ideas, whichever comes first.
Finally I thought it
would be interesting to give a quick sneak peak at some of the ideas
which are clamouring to escape my mind in the coming months. Here's
a few sneak peaks at a few ideas which are coming up:
- After a few fruitless
political arguments, I'm keen to do a piece about why politics and
passion get mixed and why they definitely shouldn't be.
- 'Do the hard thing'
has become something of a motto of mine in the past year or so. I'm
going to explore that idea fully and explain how as society steps
into the future it will become ever more important.
- I have a rather
strange idea about how the creative people of society have failed us
all, leaving us to endure constant re-runs of Britain's got talent
and CSI what-have-you.
- I've always been
curious about the morality of harming our own creations. That is,
having written a story with actual story people in it, why is it okay
to let such horrendous things happen to them? I expect this will be
an awful mess and, after meandering a little, I will end up claiming
that reality isn't really real... sounds like fun to me.
All of that and who
knows how much more coming up in season 2 of Mea Tulpa. I'm looking
forward to it and I hope you are too.
*[By contrast I
recently saw the Avengers film and I was surprised that, though it
was really enjoyable, there wasn't actually anything going on under
the hood. Although this didn't really detract from the film for me,
it did keep it from being an absolute classic in my opinion]
