Season Two

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]