Being a teacher of history is being a purveyor of stories, and though I fancy myself a raconteur of sorts, I try not to be the guy who never lets facts get in the way of a good story. History, however, is far from stable, and conclusions about events or people can shift by new research, expansion of knowledge, or other unexpected twists. Moreover, there's always a frustration that hindsight provides. Clear mistakes to us were difficult choices in the past, and sometimes a person's decision to go one way instead of the clearly more logical choice leads to thinking that maybe there's something more sinister going on…
Yeah, sure, but I don't buy into most conspiracy theories. This is something that frustrates some of my students: Shakespeare wrote his plays, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 happened without governmental collusion, and we landed on the moon. Having these stances is less fun than being conspiratorial, but it's more accurate. Sure, history is a lot less disappointing when viewed from the pragmatic realization that mundanity is the norm, but I want fantastical plots and scintillating lies in my fiction, not my reality. Enter Rob Brotherton and his book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. This isn't a takedown of sundry, popular conspiracy theories (though he definitely brings up issues about things like the Truther movement or anti-vaxxers); instead, he looks at all of the reasons why we're interested in them in the first place. Familiar and common rhetorical and "logical" parts of discussing conspiracy theories with others are brought to light. For example, he points out that within the worldview of a conspiracy theorist, lack of evidence is more important--and more significant--than actual evidence. This sort of thinking is maddening for someone like me, who prefers seeing how things really are (inasmuch as that's possible). There are all sorts of psychological ticks that make people think the way they do, so it's nice for me to be able to at least understand why they're coming at the world the way they are. Brotherton writes clearly and has copious endnotes to back up his claims. The one I struggled with the most is the thesis of the whole book: We all believe conspiracies to one degree or another. And, with the messy difficulties of being human, we are unable to get the whole picture of anything--another frustration for someone like me. Perhaps what is frustrating is that there are conspiracies--they just tend not to be as convoluted, precise, or sinister as "crackpot" conspiracy theories. Because there are small-scale, relatively insignificant conspiracies does not mean that there are large-scale ones, though the desire for that to be true is (now, because I've read the book) more understandable. I guess I just wish that people were honest and we could believe the best about each other. For a person with depression, I sure have an optimistic hope for the world (just not as much for myself). If you're interested in learning about how people think, then Suspicious Minds is a good choice for you. I think it'll help open your eyes and blow the whole thing wide open. Read what They don't want you to know! Read Suspicious Minds. As an amateur, armchair paleontologist (I would say dinophile, but that's not actually a word, and, strictly speaking, it means "lover of terrible [things]", which doesn't sound particularly pleasant) now is a great time to be alive and loving dinosaurs. There are, according to Steve Brusatte (in his book, The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs, which you should read, because it's good), about 50 new species discovered every year. This means that, at the rate of about one a week, a fresh dinosaur is described.
Most recently is a bat-winged creature called Ambopteryx longibrachium (see the picture above) has caught some attention. It isn't the first bat-winged dinosaur ever discovered--that happened back in 2015 when scientists described Yi qi. And that's kind of my point: It's really hard to keep up with the past. This isn't just a phenomenon I suffer from with dinosaurs; being a history aficionado has this same peril. I recently learned about Virginia Hall, a spy for the French during World War II. A book about her life was just released (I haven't read it yet), and, according to the NPR article that let me know about her in the first place, there are three books about her, as well as two movies in the works. This, of course, is wonderful. Far too often the butchers and killers and maniacs of the war are the focus of our stories. And, as most of the soldiers and all of the generals are male, it's particularly nice to get a story about the contributions of women in the war. Moreover, I also have a hard time keeping up with already published (and purchased) books that cover the topics I'm interested. I have two books about living in Elizabethan England, too many about Shakespeare to even catalogue from memory, and a solid handful of Milton-related works. Most of these were purchased because I thought they'd be interested and I believed (as I always do) the lie I tell myself that I will find a way to squeeze in a bit more reading, one more book. Thinking back over my own past, there was a time when what I liked was more niche than nowadays. As a kid, I loved reading Spider-Man novels--not just the comics, which were too variegated for me to keep track of--because I could buy them as they came out. In the mid- to late nineties, there wasn't the glut of interest in superheroes that we're enjoying (and I am enjoying it immensely) today. Now, however, there are so many ways of getting into the spider-verse that it's honestly intimidating. I don't want to say that this is simply because of nostalgia-glasses, though that certainly is a possibility. I was a pretty oblivious kid (I didn't, for example, know that eighth grade GPA didn't "count" until the third term of that year was over), so there's a good chance that more was happening that I simply wasn't aware of. Nevertheless, I think it's fair to say that there really is just a lot more output of content now than ever before. Clearly, the internet is the conduit for this, but I'm still convinced that part of the reason this feels the case is because there is a way for smaller voices to be better heard. I mean, not in the Spider-Man case: Intellectual properties tend to be pretty tightly regulated. But just in general, I'm confident that people were making stuff that they couldn't get into the mainstream and so they languished. So, I guess it's actually pretty hard to assert that we have quantifiable more stuff. The difficulty remains, however: Keeping up with the stories of the past, the new ideas of our future, the important aspects of our now is no easy task. It's beyond what a full-time consumer of culture could ever hope to accomplish, like drinking the ocean. Then again, who needs to drink it? We can enjoy it in many other ways. Maybe that's what I should focus on, instead. The past month saw the lowest amount of writing that I have done since…I started noting how much writing I do in a month. Squeaking by with just over 23,000 words in April, it might be tempting to say that I have reached a low-water mark in my creative output. To a certain extent, this is true. By giving up the daily writing of non-fiction (these essays), I did not, as I had hoped, put my new-found time into writing more fiction. Instead, I played more video games than usual. Let me back up a bit: For Lent, I abstained from playing Overwatch (as mentioned here), which led to finding a substitute for what I'd given up. I would slide into a state of mental emptiness that I sort of looked forward to. I don't know if it's the time of year (the World Wars are a difficult subject for me to teach and require a large investment of energy and emotion) or what, but I seriously have no drive to do basically anything at all whilst I'm at home. Make some dinner, get after the boys for not doing their chores (they excel at ignoring me), and then, once the minions are tucked in bed, plopping down on the couch and zoning out. I will fold laundry during loading screens (helps me feel like I'm contributing), but otherwise I'm pretty sedentary. Sometimes, I don't even want to keep playing, but I do anyway. How do you stop addictions? All that being said, I have done something in the past month that is highly unusual for me: I've started composing, for lack of a better term, an album. Back at the top of April, I hit a sudden "mid-life crisis" wherein I felt like I needed a new guitar. I have purchased exactly three guitars in my life, now: One, when I was seventeen or eighteen, when I went with my dad to find a black acoustic-electric; two, when I was on my mission in Miami, Florida and got a ¾ size guitar to haul around and play on Preparation Day; and three, the one I got in April of 2019 (again in the company of my dad). So buying a new guitar was a bit of an exciting experience for me. We went to a guitar shop in Provo where the owner knew my dad (who's a professional guitarist, so that makes sense), and we played about on the sundry instruments for quite some time. I settled on one, but it needed a bit of work on the saddle and some new strings. My dad and I visited his mom in a retirement home for a half hour or so, then went back and picked up the new beauty. It wasn't 100%, but it was still a new heartthrob for me. (I couldn't play for part of the weekend because I had played it so much that my fingers hurt.) There were some kinks to iron out; once those were done, I was one happy player. The reason I picked up a new guitar, however, was because I was writing this "album". I had composed a couple of songs on my Washburn dreadnought and had felt that it wasn't sounding quite what I wanted it to sound like. I had had the guitar for almost twenty years--it's a good guitar and I still love it in that "first true love" kind of way--and it was, frankly, just not what I wanted. Hence the reason we were off to the guitar shop. (Interestingly, the reason I knew the songs weren't sounding right is because I had gone to my parents' house and, whilst there, tried out some music that I had only ever heard on my own guitar on a new instrument. Upon hearing the tunes on my dad's Taylor, I realized that it was my old guitar that wasn't up to snuff…at least, so far as what I wanted my songs to sound like.) The composition of the album has been an interesting experience for me. I'm not a good singer…at all. This isn't false modesty, either. I have a range that comprises maybe a solid octave: everything else is a crapshoot. Because I have no confidence in my voice, I'd never really tried to compose lyrics or melodies--it was too embarrassing. This time, however, I decided to buckle down and actually try writing some of what was in my heart. I came up with a simple riff and an interesting chord progression for a song I call "Falling Away", but the thing that really turned the tide is that a melody came out of my mouth. This had never really happened before. Zeroing in on that one part and then trying to pick out notes that fit inside the chord progression I'd formed, I was able to construct two-thirds of the song. All I needed was a bridge. I couldn't quite get it. So I set it aside, let it cool, and came back to it the next day. Then, with a bit more tinkering, I got the whole song down on a piece of paper. Part of my composition process it simply noodling around until I hear something interesting. Then I work out what key/mode I'm in, and then I start building around that. I found some interesting things about what I'm interested in writing:
One of the things I attempted while composing this album (and, since I don't have a drum kit, keyboards, or a bass guitar, it's an all-acoustic album…despite having some ideas of what I would like to hear from the rest of a band) was to refrain from having a filter. Despite the brightness of my life, I live with a pretty steady sense of depression, which chauffers me from moment to moment. Much of what I feel is a kind of comparative emotionally negative experience. I didn't want to censor that from myself and put on a happy face. Even in my most optimistic song, I have lines about death. That's part of who I am and I don't want to hide it. Yet, as I say that, I don't want people to see/hear my music. I'm tempted to say "not yet, anyway," as if it's merely the fact that the music is unfinished. And, to a degree, that is true. But that one piece of music I have up there is tough to read, tough to understand. I'm aware of my flaws and putting them down in ink and extoling them in song is an intimidating experience. Nevertheless, it might be (?) fun to try to get these musical ideas put together in a more concrete way. If only I knew someone whose entire career has been built on making music… If only. This is not a review of the book, Brave New World. As I may be teaching that next school year, I'll save that effort for another day.
No, instead I'm talking about a new world that I've been working on. Since my birthday, I've been stewing on what I love about both Innistrad in the Magic: The Gathering world and Overwatch. A Venn diagram of the two doesn't have a lot of overlap: one is a dark, grim, vicious world filled with vampires, demons, devils, zombies, ghouls, werewolves, angels, and much more. The other is a video game with vibrant, bright, charismatic characters set in a near-future world and tells a story through subtle, in-world nods and extra-medial storytelling (comics and web-videos, for the most part). Tonally, they're hardly anything alike. And, with that in mind, why would I be so interested in such disparate things? As far as the tone is concerned, I think it's a matter of variety. I am an open anglophile and much of Europe continues to fascinate me. As far back as I can see, my family's roots are European (nearly 50% English, too), which connects me to the past in a personal way. Additionally, I've always been a werewolf fan to a certain extent--ever since I saw Michael Jackson's Thriller music video (and was convinced that dragging the garbage can out to the curb at night was how I would die, because the Michael Jackson werewolf was awaiting me in the darkness between my childhood home and the white picket fence). Zombies have been my bae since Resident Evil 2, and though vampires are kinda meh to me, the paradigm of angels versus demons, while maybe overdone in pop culture (according to agents' wish lists I've seen), are descendants to Paradise Lost. Toss in Innistrad's distinctive look of soaring cathedrals and Tudor-style houses and you've a perfect mix for my interests. Overwatch, on the other hand, is polar opposite: Bright and energetic, with an optimism that permeates the diverse crew, Overwatch is an addictive experience. The sets are reminiscent of Disneyland, and the carefully constructed yet thoughtful presentation makes the game immensely enjoying. Not only that, but the variety of the characters lends itself to continual exploration (even if I do main Ashe and Hanzo), and the diversity of races, languages, orientations, genders, and play styles are all exceptional. I've gushed about Overwatch before, so I'll let you follow the link if you want to know more. The point is, there's a lot to recommend Overwatch, not the least of which is the type of subtle storytelling that, I've come to learn, is something that I appreciate. I've found, in looking over my own fiction over the years, that I like to have small things matter in big ways later on. A letter that shows up early on in a novel will have an impact on how the story ends. What seems like a random detail of a pager at a restaurant is actually a deliberate action from one of the bad guys. Both Magic and Overwatch are games that focus on story happening outside of the main purpose of the hobby, giving them rich lore that is often elliptically or obliquely understood. The more that one dives into the extracurricular (as it were) lore, the more rewarding the game becomes. Since I write novels, I don't think I could easily pull off what happens in these games. Brandon Sanderson has his Cosmere and tons of tiny details that loyal fans will be able to see and obsess over, but those are almost all in-text. And, frankly, there's a lot of Sandersonian text to work through. While I like to pretend that I have the creative wherewithal to do something likewise, I probably don't--at least, not when I have a full-time job that taps a lot of my creativity and mental energy. So, I thought it might be interesting to pull some of my favorite things about Overwatch and Magic and turn it into an experiment of storytelling. I'm currently building a new world, one that has the danger and grimness of Innistrad, with the heroic, "gotta save the world" attitude of Overwatch in the hopes of getting to an enjoyable ending. However, to get to that ending (which could be inspired by Endgame, if I'm being honest), I want to get readers attached to characters quickly. So, I'm thinking of having five or six novelettes, which could be read in any order, all building toward a novella at the end that ties the stories all together and gives the big-arc story its conclusion. That way, rather than spending multiple years with a group of characters to build toward an ending, it can be the entire experience in a single volume. There are a lot of potential problems with this, not the least of which is that I'm a verbose writer and I need to establish a world in five different stories without any of them feeling too boring/familiar. (I think back to my Animorphs readings and how I would always skip over the descriptions of transformation, as they were tedious and added nothing to the story; I want to avoid that.) I need to create a new world that is diverse enough and strange enough and yet understandable enough that I can play in that world with ease and enjoyment. I have to fuse the familiar magic tropes with enough newness that it doesn't feel tired, and yet at the same time, I have to take all the shortcuts I can because there's so much ground to cover. I've tried writing differently before. It ended up not really working, with me stopping the story after getting only about one fifth of the way through. So it's likely that this isn't actually something that will work. Add to that the fact that I'm still working through my Shakespeare MacGuffin chase story (though I may be winding down on that) and suddenly I'm rather busy with potential stories. And while I'm excited about that--it's a nice change from the drought I've been driving through lately--it also makes me a bit leery. I'm out of practice and often out of patience. How am I supposed to make this worthwhile? How am I supposed to make this work the right way? I don't know. I'll have to jump in and try in order to find out. |
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