No, really: The Word is Story

Case in point: The Game of Real is one of mine; you can start reading it.

You can also view a trailer…book trailer? Novella trailer?

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Things I did not blog about this summer include the film The Last Airbender. I recommend just watching the original cartoon series Avatar: The Last Airbender. I promise there is a story told right and characters that still live when you’re not looking. I promise high stakes. I promise peril, joy, and often hilarity. Netflix has ‘em, watch instantly the last time I checked.

:::::::: N A W L Z ::::::::

:::::::: N A W L Z ::::::::. is an experimental webcomic.  It’s pictures, words, sound, animation. A world in which hackers overlay the real world with cybernetic dreams.  Think of building a webpage, peeling it off the Web and mapping it onto the real world.  Only more so.  And your avatar?  You can wear it like a suit.

I’m winding my way through the artist’s ‘scape, all eyes and ears.  There is a touch of story; things do happen.  I do not know the people well enough yet.

Caveat:  So not safe for work.  That’s http://www.nawlz.com.

Reading….

What am I reading, now?  The Book of Wool,  non-fiction, about…wool and wool yarn.  Really.  There’s story there, too, history, origins.  Here’s the thing about craft books, or any instructional/education book:  You are part of the narrative.  (Maybe that’s true of any book, fiction or non-. The existence of a narrative requires someone to receive it.  Even if you’re telling yourself stories…things happen, but if no one knows about it…)

Annnnnd…pulling back from the brink of that thought-line, just barely.  How ya’ll doin’?

Before that was a science fiction novel, the third book in Jeff Carlson’s Plague Year trilogy, Plague Zone.

I suppose the Plague Year trilogy could be considered a kind of post-apocalyptic tale (after all, the book starts out with the catastrophe already happened, a nanotech disaster that has nearly destroyed the ecosystem below a certain elevation along with a great percentage of humankind), but “apocalypse” implies an end.

Catastrophe, on the other hand, is part of a continuum, an ebb and flow.  If you haven’t been killed by it, there is still the hope of an upswing.

That is why there is a story here.  The tale isn’t just about the end of everything or even mere survival (though, to be sure, there is nothing “mere” about what his characters go through). It’s also about saving the world.

So:  disaster, science, geopolitical repercussions, cannibalism, duty, love, survival, death, dread and hope…

Good science fiction.  Those books again:  Plague Year, Plague War, and Plague Zone

Phonies Hurt Too…

I had every intention of writing a post about J.D. Salinger’s passing earlier, a little something about Catcher in the Rye…but it’s been years since I read it.  I remember being confused by Holden Caulfield’s railings against “phonies,” not altogether sure whom he meant.  Grown-ups as a whole, I suppose, and many of his peers.

All I can think in retrospect is that he was a young man with no understanding of why someone might find it necessary to have a public face as well as a private one.  It never seemed to occur to him to have one, so no doubt he felt raw and exposed.  But it’s a wonder he felt entitled to the most intimate selves of everyone, and felt gypped that he didn’t get it, especially considering the harshness of his judgments.

I wonder about Salinger, himself.  (Who doesn’t, even now that he’s gone?)  He seemed to have no public face either, by accident or design.  His solution was to withdraw.

A great portion of the world waits, hoping for more stories left behind by a man who insisted his fan mail be burned (see: J.D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91).  He didn’t seem to need the world.  Some portion of the world seems to need him, though, still.

True Believer

We’re all made of words. It’s how we construct ourselves. Everyone of us is made out of narrative and story. Try to answer the questions: “What did you do this morning?” “How was the game?” “Who are you really?” without telling a story. Granted, they aren’t always the best stories, but even the one word answer, “Fine!” can say volumes merely from the way it is inflected. Add past context and that “fine” can either uplift or break your heart to pieces.

Which leaves me here. Made of stories, trying to fabricate new ones. You can tell how well the battle is going by how much ink has been spilled. The same amount of blood on a good day would suggest I’d been murdered (or been murdering, brutally). Not so great, splotches like a nasty scrape. Usually on my fingers. These days, any amount is good.

I’m in love with story. All kinds: books (fiction and non-), comic books (fiction and non-), movies, television, animation, news, blogs). Act it out with stick figures, scrawl it in the sand, show me something marvelous. And then I have to tear myself away, or I won’t be able to make anything to show someone else. The slope, she is slippery.

Below, the quote that sustains me as a true believer:

“A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens–second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day’s events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.”[1]

1. ^ Price, Reynolds (1978). A Palpable God, New York:Atheneum, p.3.

(courtesy Wikipedia)

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