I've always been creating stories. Even before I could write, I made stories up in my head, or more often dramatised the lives of my Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles* action figures, or seen heroes rise and fall in the rankings of a company of pro-wrestling toys. My Star Wars Micro Machines smuggled spice and broke the record for the Kessel Run in the midst of a bedroom-engulfing civil war, and my Enterprise discovered strange, new worlds in the bathroom. That imagination never really went away, it was just honed and focused into what one might call more adult pursuits. Instead of going "pew pew" as tiny TIE fighters chase X-Wings across my duvet, I roll a dice as tiny TIE fighters chase X-Wings across a gaming board. The "pew pew" is silent.
In short, I'm a gamer and a geek, always looking for an outlet to play games, but through these games I am given the opportunity to do what has long been my passion - tell stories, create characters, and see what they get up to in their own world with their own rules. That is where writing is such a gift - it is the power to create your own world and its players, and trot them across the stage and manipulate them like a child playing with their dolls. To be able to build a reality and hopefully share it with someone else is a remarkable capability that humanity possesses, and one I feel tremendously lucky to be modestly skilled at (if I do say so myself).
Are you a writer? Is creating a story something you can't seem to help, something that you just love to do? Feel free to leave your story about creating stories. Until next time, here it is for your quiet reflection on how awesome the power to create stories is, your moment of zen:
*Yes, in the UK they were called Hero Turtles, not Ninja Turtles, because the word 'ninja' was considered too violent for British children. But that's ok, because on International Talk Like A Pirate Day, I'd just like to point out that ninjas suck, matey.
This took me a while to get up because the Smashwords site kept having odd glitches that prevented me uploading (or even accessing the site at all, for a time). Then they ran out of ISBNs, and I must admit I was starting to become concerned Smashwords was in trouble. I've seen a few sites and services start to go down that way - a few glitches here and there, maintenance not being done, running out of stock or space, then boom, like the promises to yourself that you're going to stick to a schedule and really read all your textbooks at school this year... it's gone.
Fortunately my concerns were likely just me being a paranoid cynic who thinks everything is going to die someday (it is, you know!) and it might as well be now. Now things seem to be ticking fine at Smashwords, and I'll not bother you with more rambling and instead bother you with an advertisement:
Available now, UnderWorld is a cross-generational fantasy novel set in a dystopian steam-punk universe where the oppressed population are kept underground after the surface was spoiled by war with magical weapons capable of destroying entire cities in an instant.
Here's the blurb. Think of it as today's moment of zen:
It was war, and that made it all right. A
servant girl is caught at ground zero of the Great Calamity, sparking a
war that forces the inhabitants of a fractured world together
underground in dreary subsistence. But her survival comes with a gift,
and a curse, passed on to her bitter, cynical daughter who wants nothing
more than to break free of the UnderWorld, and she's bringing down the
house.
This time it was at the offices of the Family Research Council, noted by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a homophobic hate-group whose campaigns against equality for same-sex individuals and couples pretty much guarantee a full house at a game of bigot bingo. Interestingly I have noticed that as the lefty dens of iniquity I frequent cover the story, they are at pains to point out that no matter what they might think of the FRC, shooting them is wrong. No shit!
Obviously much of this is to head-off accusations, from both the right-wing and the lazy, centrist media that can't think beyond binary because they are soulless robots, that the left must be pleased to see their enemies get mowed down or even had something to do with inciting it. And naturally, Fox News and co are drumming up the idea that this attack was inspired by the SPLC declaring the Family Research Council a hate-group, which apparently just opened the door for somebody to think "oh, that means they have to be killed".
Naturally Fox are being enormous hypocrites, since they decry any responsibility of themselves or the right-wing echo chamber for putting the idea in people's heads that doctors or Mexicans or brown people are so dangerous that they have to be stopped - even if they literally do call somebody a murderer repeatedly on television and wring their hands about the fact that nobody is saving innocent babies. But they have something of a point with the SPLC vs FRC issue.
Words have meanings. Words symbolise things. And when you call an obstetrician a murderer, you're saying they are killing innocent human beings repeatedly and getting away with it. You're putting the idea out there that a mass murderer is operating in the neighbourhood unchecked. If somebody takes you at your word, and they have the means and opportunity to stop the slaughter, what do you expect to happen? Similarly, when you call an organisation dedicated to imposing selected parts of their particular dogma on people whose lifestyle they disagree with "a hate-group", you are expressing the concept that this organisation hates homosexuals and wants to interfere in their lives and make them worse. Which is pretty damn accurate, as it happens. The religious right have got to stop hiding from the terms bigotry and hate, because they are bigoted against homosexuals and they do hate them. Their words say it and their actions say it. Maybe they should look in another big, thick book for a change - the dictionary.
The Southern Poverty Law Center's description of the Family Research Council is accurate, because trying to make people's lives worse because you believe they're sinners is hate. They have said this group hates gay people because this group hates gay people. They have not said this group is trying to kill gay people, which makes claims of their classification of the FRC as a hate-group being the inspiration for somebody walking in and shooting at people somewhat hollow. Even if the perpetrator were to cite the SPLC, their violent reaction to what the SPLC actually said is not supportable. It doesn't follow in any real sense. Again, words have meanings, and torturing something they didn't mean out of them is just as dishonest as trying to pretend they don't apply in situations that quite clearly warrant them.
Now before we go back to talking about writing (going well by the way, I have a honest-to-goodness novel in editing right now), here is your moment of zen:
