Overcoming Inertia - Part 2 · 28 January 2008
Thank you all for your comments on the last post. Your responses are just another reason I’m amazed and awed by those who have the touch of popping in here and there, visiting dozens of blogs each day and making insightful and interesting comments on them, sending the perfect email just to keep in touch, or calling up old friends to start new adventures. I never mastered the art of efficient social networking. Instead, I tend to immerse myself in a small number of things with a small group of friends, poking my head into the deep recesses and dark corners of my few chosen pursuits. But the blogosphere is big, quick, and breezy and my attempts to adapt my style of minute inspection into a culture of skimming led to a bit of frustration.
I realized that some of the reason that I haven’t been writing is because I don’t think I can commit to the community. I hate doing things in half-measures. Looking back on my New Year’s Post from last year, I see myself trying to convince the me going into 2007 that I didn’t have to accept half-measures, that even if I couldn’t do everything I could still dream I could.
Dreams are wondrous things. They give us the power to believe we can do things that we can’t see a clear path towards. They inspire us as children to say we’ll become exotic professionals like paleontologists because we love dinosaurs or lawyers because we like to argue, even before we have half an idea what a paleontologist or lawyer needs to know. As adults, they provide the impetus to keeping working through hard times, knowing that we have worthy goals at the end of our labors.
But broken dreams are dangerous. They teach us that sometimes just trying out best and believing in ourselves isn’t enough to make us successful in our dreaming. And if we don’t learn to accept our failures, our dreams can sour, and haunt us instead of helping.
The me coming out of 2007 has spent January reminding myself of the many successes of last year, and taking myself to task for dwelling on the few failures. I gave myself some good advice at the beginning of 2007, dream big, but accept realistic progress so I should have no regrets in saying that last year was a year of progress. With that worked out in my head, my one resolution for the year is to shake the New Year’s slump that has had me feeling a bit “blah” lately.
So, here’s looking forward to a great 2008, to catching up on some housekeeping tasks on Honeyed Words, to continuing to progress in my studies, to honing my writing, and to accepting that I’ll never be a social butterfly but that there is room in the blogosphere for a couple of ponderous bookworms too.
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Overcoming Inertia Part 1 · 16 January 2008
Thank you, thank you, thank you to those who popped me a line to make sure that I was okay after I stopped posting here.
When last seen, I was re-entering the smoldering county of San Diego after the aptly named Firestorm 2007 As you might imagine, taking an unexpected week out of the office so soon after a long vacation didn’t help out my projected schedule for catching up at work. Compounding my lack of free time were winter finals and a website development deadline fast approaching. I found myself leaving the house at 8:00 a.m. each morning and crashing into bed near midnight, stopping work of one kind or another only for the bare necessities of food and maintaining my closest circle of friends. Exhaustion quickly set in and despite good intentions, I found it impossible to keep up Honeyed Words.
I missed it.
And yet, when finals ended in late-December and I was released from the madness of 14 hour work-days, I didn’t immediately start posting again. Never one to balk at an opportunity for self-examination, I decided this week was the time to figure out and face up to the reasons I’ve had a month in which I could have posted, and haven’t.
After finals I hadn’t read for pleasure in over a month, much less cooked anything more exciting than rice and beans. I had been traveling a thousand thoughts per minute on the serious path of work and study, and when I screeched to a halt after finals, I crashed. Even the thought of gathering the spark of creative energy needed to start an inspired Honeyed Words book/food pairing was exhausting. And so, even though I’d occasionally stumble onto an idea I could have turned into a post, I didn’t develop it, knowing that I didn’t have the energy to turn it into a coherent themed series. Instead, I wrote nothing.
The first thing I made myself realize this week was that I had to stop seeing Honeyed Words as an obligation, an all or nothing proposition in which anything less than meeting all my goals was unacceptable. Until this week, I felt hemmed in by my vision for the site, bound to post on-topic or not at all.
Therein is my regret, that because I wasn’t willing to make allowances for myself, I posted nothing. So dear readers, I hope that you come here because you enjoy it, and I hope that I’ll continue to deliver posts that make you want to come back, but for now bear with me, because instead of talking myself out of posting by making myself get back on the regularly scheduled topics of books and the food that is inspired by them, I’m going to be rambling a bit.
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Fire Update and Hal Duncan Promises Fires of the Apocalypse in Vellum · 24 October 2007
“A burning map. Every epic,” my friend Jack used to say, “should start with a burning map. Like in the movies. Fucking flames burning the world away; that’s the best thing about all those old films,” he said, “when you see this old parchment map just . . . getting darker and darker in the center, crisping, crinkling until suddenly it just . . . fwoom.” – From Vellum, The Book of All Hours
I continue to be impressed with the amount of information that the private news services are providing. All local stations are reporting on the fire and making sure that information on locations, shelters, insurance resources, and medical support are broadcast. For the first 48 hours, even the major networks were entirely commercial free (at least on the web). For this cynic, who actively spends time thinking of what I’d do in end-of-the-world scenarios, the response to the natural disaster has been quite heartening.
Yesterday additional mandatory evacuations were called, up to 513,000 residents from the 250,000 reported Monday. Today has been a mix of people being allowed to go back to their homes (mine included, huzzah!) and new people being evacuated, so I’m not sure where the numbers stand now.
I’ve been spending my time waffling between being glued to the webcasts and trying to get a minimum amount of productive work in. I had started reading Vellum: The Book of All Hours by Hal Duncan last week but despite the good news that my home will probably be safe, I wasn’t really in the mood to finish a story that seems headed for gloom and doom and the fiery apocalypse. I’m about halfway through the book, and since I’m still displaced and away from my usual compliment of blogging resources, I’ll offer a partial review here of Vellum.
The book starts with a treasure hunt, oddly reminiscent of the one from the movie National Treasure complete with generations of batty members of the Carter family searching for the lost Book of All Hours.
However, the apparent protagonist, Reynard Carter, disappears off the face of our earth and into a lost and lonely alternate reality quite early on in the story. Therein begins the meat of the book, as Duncan merges and mixes characters, telling the tale of the coming of a war between “good” and “evil” (yes, without capital letters and in quotes).
Duncan has taken his characters and turned them into archetypes in a deliberate manner. There are books in which characters have little personality and become mouthpieces for the themes that the authors are trying to get across. Most of the time this effect comes across as a cheap trick, a way to get themes into a story without the effort of creating a believable vessel for the them.
In contrast, Duncan has created a handful of characters that have more personality than seems possible for one soul or one body. He ties their lives, past, present, and future, together with the unifying concept of their “mark,” a distinguishing feature that causes these beings to behave similarly over time, and seems to doom them to repeat their mistakes over the millennia.
At the beginning of the book, myth and reality seem quite separate, but as the story progresses, they are merged together so that it seems that myth creates reality, which begets more myth. I’m sure this is all building up to some climactic showdown between the organized forces, but I’m really not sure what part the main characters are going to play in it. In a way, it’s very refreshing to read a book and not have a clue how it’s going to end.
Duncan has an amazing way with description and even though there are some sections in which I still have no idea what he’s talking about, it’s a great read, especially if you’re willing to take each segment as a myth or story unto its own. I’m really looking forward to finishing this one when my frame of mind shifts a bit. Until then, I’m vegging out with the remake of FFIII for the DS. The super cutesy characters are just the kind of entertainment that I’m looking for to keep San Diego’s smokey reality at bay.
Photographs of the San Diego Witch Fire are courtesy of vissago on Flickr via the creative commons license.
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