Those who crave fame don’t truly appreciate anonymity. And those who have it, desire to find a way to hide from it. We live in the world where everyone seems to want their 15 minutes of fame and attention. For artists and writers having a wide audience is must if they want to sign with large agencies to represent them, if they want their work to be bought and sold. Or even if they want representation by an agent or a contract with a publisher — everyone wants an established market for stories.
The past is gone. The future hasn’t happened yet. The present is a liminal space between two non-existent things. We’re encouraged to stay present and live in the moment. But who really does that? Primarily, it’s young children and adults under duress. Young children live in the moment; their time is now. A toddler of a certain disposition doesn’t understand that taking a nap now will make them happier later. That kind of thinking requires conceptualizing a future self and taking actions now for its benefit. Those concepts take time to develop. Children typically develop time perception roughly equal to that of an adult by about eight years of age. [(2021) Development of Young Children’s Time Perception: Effect of Age and Emotional Localization] Another set of humans who are trapped in the moment are people caught in disasters — be it wars, personal attacks, illness, weather events, or earthquakes. Like young children, these individuals are also anchored in the present. When faced with the immediate demands of a catastrophe, there is little room left to consider the past or the future. Typically, as adults, we find ourselves oscillating between the past and the future, seldom pausing to embrace the now.…
Setting and characters dictate how the story will play out when told. The same story can be told in a Victorian setting, as a space opera, or as a modern day fiction. “Pride and Prejudice” in space? Sure! Darcy can be a dashing if deeply flawed space captain alien. The setting won’t change the story’s emotional tone all that much, but the details will be substantially different. Darcy can be a mage…or a dragon…or a merman…or a an enchanted sward in a fantasy novel. Darcy can be man or a woman or anything in between — it’s the character traits that matter. Imagine “Beauty and the Beast”. How many different ways can this story be told if the setting changed? Millions! In fact, we know that some readers look to read the same story over and over again set in another time and place and variations of characters. Humans get a lot of pleasure from repetition and the ending we expect (happy or not). This is one of the reasons that some people read exclusively in one genre — when personal life is complicated and unpredictable, a little surety is appreciated in one’s entertainment. People search for emotional resonance that…
It’s the start of a summer and thus a start of a county fair season. This year felt different — the carny people were gone!
Phrontistery is an ancient Greek word meaning “a place for thinking.” I love cool words and phrontistery not only feels good on the tongue, but its meaning really appeals to me — it describes a space specifically dedicated to thinking! For many people, bathrooms are a perfect phrontistery. They are for me, too. Showers score high as well. But I think I do my best thinking when I write. With my fingers on the keys, I can clarify my thinking and also discover ideas that must have been hovering around my subconsciousness, ready to be revealed to my eyes through my fingers. Writing is a metaphorical phrontistery for me. And probably in the days when diaries and journals were popular, many others found capturing words in a tangible medium clarified one’s thoughts and opinions on all sorts of matters. Luckily for my friends and family, I write mostly fiction — my phrontistery cleverly hides the true identities of many. Lately, I have been devouring books at a high rate. As a result, my little collection of notes (over a thousands and counting) has been growing. I consider my notes app as part of my phrontistery. I jut down ideas for…
Stress is an actor in all our lives. As we grow up, our stress grows too. We perceive that stress as a sign that we are coping with more than our historical share. Every generation believes that their stress surpasses that of the generation before. So it is probably just an illusion — or delusion. What’s most important is how we cope with stress. Not all stress coping mechanisms are learned. Some are probably encoded — they come for free with our genetics. It can be easier to see these mechanisms in action by observing animals — particularly pets, whose behaviors we know intimately. Take, for example, two very different species that we have had as pets over the years — Terri the tortoise and Kushy the ferret. Terri comes from an ancient lineage of chelonians (Greek word for tortoise), who have walked and swam upon the Earth for hundreds of millions of years. Kushy the ferret is of the Mustelidae family — weasels and skunks. Kushy was a descendant of a domesticated breed of ferrets that first became pets about four thousand years ago. We bought Kushy at a pet store; Terri was a rescue. Terri’s natural habitat is…
There is a whole genre of coming-of-age stories — stories that describe a transition from childhood to adulthood. The transition could be fast, forced by some external events, or painfully slow. And sometimes, it might not happen at all — we all know people who we charitably describe as having “arrested development” issues. This is how Wikipedia defines the coming-of-age genre, too, adding: “Coming-of-age stories tend to emphasize dialogue or internal monologue over action, and are often set in the past. The subjects of coming-of-age stories are typically teenagers.” But is it correct to place teenagers as protagonists in coming-of-age books? In Victorian times (1937 to 1901), the female protagonists used to be about fifteen or sixteen — girls of marriageable age! For these children, coming-of-age meant going directly from playing with dolls and right into a marriage bed. Boys were perhaps a bit older, 17, their swords changed from wood to metal over the telling of their coming-of-age stories. Think of The Vicomte De Bragelonne or The Count of Monte Cristo, written in 1847 and 1844, respectively. The young count and Edmond were just teenagers when their stories got started. Edmond got to live to be an old man.…
