Weasel Cheeseburger Disease!

Today's Burning Prompt Experience is inspired by my real life Tuberculosis Adventure:

Very few venture into the softlands, that ever-changing wasteland of illusion and danger, and even fewer travel to the Mouth of Chaos at its center, a twisting pillar of transformation that warps everything it touches. Mostly they are priests - come to close the Mouth of Chaos or to worship it, or try their faith against the softlands - magicians come to learn what the softlands have to teach about the nature of the world, or adventurers come looking for monsters to slay and treasures to sell. Some are desperate men, come in search of transformation, hoping the softlands or the Mouth of Chaos can change them in some way, remove some defect of body or character, or at the very least exchange a hunted face for an innocent one, however terrifying and deformed that new face might be. Cities have cropped up at the edge of the softlands, for these adventurers and madmen to spend their gold, and a few communities survive within its borders. A few.

No one knows when the sick man came to the softlands. No one will admit to having met him, succored him, even spoken to him, out of fear of reprisal. He probably suffered from some life-destroying disease, like leprosy or consumption. He had probably been cast out of his home and had nowhere else to go. Perhaps he hoped that the Mouth of Chaos would remove his illness altogether - it had been merciful in the past and might be again - or perhaps he had only hoped for death. Either way, he remained unchanged. It was the disease that enjoyed the full extent of the softlands' mad blessing.

Before, those who stayed away from the softlands were safe. Far from the edge of chaos, in sane countries, they could live in peace and enjoy whatever their lives had to offer. Before, those the softlands had touched could leave and travel the world, and though their strange or grotesque shapes might inspire admiration, pity, or revulsion - or some combination of the three - but never fear or hatred.

Not so once the Change Plague began. The mutant disease, born of one man's desperation, spread far and wide. Now a chance meeting could lead to infection, and infection invariably led to transformation. Some can carry the disease their whole lives without knowing, meaning that anyone touched by chaos - or, in fact, anyone at all - was suspect. And when the disease chose to blossom, it was as a terrible fever that changed as it killed, leaving the survivors with warped bodies and shattered minds, and the knowledge that one day the disease might blossom again, and again, and again.

Much of the world died in the anarchy that followed. Kingdoms fell and new ones rose in their place. Those who are touched by the chaos are carefully watched. In some places, they driven away or killed. The only place safe for us and those who become like us is here, at the edge of the softlands.

Welcome.

You know the rules; there aren't any! In comments (or with a link to your own blog), tell me a story of someone touched by the Change Plague, the softlands, or the Mouth of Chaos, or anything else in the above.

Burning Update Experience: Life Goes On

It's that time again. Time for me to imitate my inspiration, the inestimable Mur Lafferty of I Should Be Writing and come clean on how much writing I've actually been doing and what else is going on in my creative world.

• • •

When it comes to fiction, I am still caught up in the Burning Rejection Challenge, where I dedicated myself to collecting fifty rejection letters in the coming year. The goal - to explain it to those who, like my father, might view it as somewhat backwards thinking - is to get myself to send stories out. If I make getting acceptances my goal, I'm bound to be disappointed more often than not. Even the best author gets rejected a lot, especially at first. If I make the goal of the game to collect rejections, though, I transform it into a win-win situation. If I get rejected, I win! One closer to my goal of fifty! If I get accepted, I win! More importantly, so do my ego and my bank account!

So far, I've accumulated... one rejection letter. However, I have sent out not one, not two, but three stories: The Invisible Kingdom (Redux) to Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, Storm Seeker to Black Gate, and The Evil Eye to Weird Tales. Two factors have been slowing me down: the incredibly slow turnaround time on submissions (often upwards of two months!) and what I'm calling a creative pseduo-slump. While I've had plenty of energy when it comes to completing, rewriting, and generally making printworthy old stories, no new ideas have leapt out at me. I wrote The Evil Eye back in the fall, The Invisible Kingdom (v1.0) about three years ago, and Storm Seeker back in college, back before the Abigail and I were even dating! I'm not complaining, mind you. My habit of starting stories and never finishing them is a good one to break.

As I implied in my last post, I think this is a symptom of my long inactivity. Getting up in the morning and going to an actual job (well, an actual training for an actual job for five months, then a month off, and then an actual job) will be good for my creative muscles. With old input, I improve old ideas, with new input will come new ideas.

• • •

Speaking of input, I am currently reading a lot of podcasts. Er... listening to a lot of stories. You know what I mean: Podcastle, Escape Pod, and Pseudopod have been a big deal in my personal brainspace. I like to think that all this short fiction is also helping me improve the short stories I've been sending out, but we'll see.

I've also been slowly working my way through Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough. I don't know how many of you are aware of this, but I was a religion major in college (I actually wanted to be a rabbi), and I remain fascinated by the things people believe. There's not much diference between fantasy and religion - I say this with the utmost respect and affection for both. We are story creatures, designed to take in life and put out narrative, making sense of the world. Making a myth is one of the most beautiful and fundamentally human things we do, up there with love, heroism, and art.

That's probably why I find some of Frazer's attitudes frustrating. His insistance that magic is replaced by religion is replaced by science is pretty self serving - of course, Frazer and his buddies are the scientists - and Frazer seems to have no consciousness about this. Despite the fact that his book studies magic and religion, he seems pretty dismissive of both. The fact that Frazer also tends to use the "savages" of Madagascar and the Indies as examples sticks in my metaphorical craw as well. That said, I haven't finished the book yet, so I shall refrain from any definitive statements until I have. This is just where I am right now.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently purchased a whole mess of RPG books, which I've also been reading, which brings us too...

• • •

Gaming.

Actually, the world of gaming has been pretty slow lately. Both the Abigail and I have numerous other obligations which prevent us from playing with each other or anyone else nearly as often as we'd like.

Between the Abigail and myself, we are running Divine Fire, a highly fun, slightly goobery Mage: the Awakening chronicle about a former Promethean (zombie alchemists seeking the Golden Dawn of humanity) who turned Mage upon achieving her goal. In the previous chapter, Cleo discovered her secret past and helped her Promethean friends free themselves from an onerous enmity. In this chapter, Cleo has been discovering just how far she will go to keep her friends safe... and how far some other people will go to make this difficult for her.

I also had the honor to run a one shot of Changeling: the Lost for the Abigail, Becca, and our friend Nick. In this game, I experimented with an absent-yet-present Storyteller Character in the form of Auragas, the Summer King, who had recently died of complications during heart surgery. As his favored courtiers, the player characters had the opportunity to tell me who Auragas was through their narrative and the character creation questionnaires they filled out at the start of game. It turned out that Auragas was a basically honorable but ultimately complicated man who had tried to do his job well despite his foibles. However, Auragas could have just as easily turned out to be a total bastard who the player characters were happy to be rid of, or an utter paragon of virtue, which would have sent the session in a totally different direction. I had no idea who Auragas would be until game started, and it was tons of fun.

[For a more detailed write-up of the session, you can check out the Changeling: the Lost Livejournal Community].

• • •

Finally, lest I come across as a literary saint, I have something to own up to. I did not, as I promised, send anything to the Fantasy Magazine flash fiction contest. Perhaps it was unrealistic to expect that I would, given the crazy that had invaded my life at that point, but that's not the issue. The issue is that I said I would, and I didn't, which is a shame, because now I know for a fact that I won't win.

• • •

That about covers today's Burning Update Experience. As I posted yesterday, and in accordance to the new schedule, I'll see you again on Friday.

The Zeppelin Rides Again on the Winds of Change!

I have good news, and I have bad news.

The good news is that the final results are in, the Oakland Teaching Fellowship is mine! I will no longer be an unemployed freelance writer and author, but an employed teacher, who is also a freelance writer and author. With money to spend, money will no longer be on my mind. Even given that I will have the Biology grades of fifty-odd (or more!) Oakland Unified School District students on my mind, I'm sure my creativity will benefit. In fact, I'll probably be able to mine my job for material - sitting in coffee shops being stressed isn't exactly story material.

The bad news is that my life will certainly be a lot more busy now that I have a "real" job, and as the song goes "something's gotta give." Unfortunately, the Burning Zeppelin loses out in this calculation. It would be stupid to cut into my limited writing time to write in a blog about writing, for example. If I cut into my the Abigail time... well, let's just say I'm glad my angsty poetry phase is behind me. So, Burning Zeppelin it is.

This doesn't mean that the Burning Zeppelin is going to crash, but it does mean that my promise to blog every single day is complete, as of today. I don't know what the final schedule is going to be, as I've got a lot of stress and life changes on stack for the coming months. For now, however, the Burning Zeppelin will fly on the following schedule:

Wednesday (when I have nothing going on in the evenings anyway)

Friday (when I can stay up as late as I dare)

Sunday (is a Sunday).

This schedule may make minor adjustments. Once per month, for example, when my man-cult meets on Saturdays, the Friday post may, in fact, appear on Saturday afternoon. I also reserve the right to make major course corrections as life keeps on coming at me, so Wednesday may become Tuesday, Friday may become Thursday, and Sunday... is likely to stay Sunday, but you never know. I do promise that the Burning Zeppelin Experience will continue to update at least three times a week with cool, compelling content, and other things that start with the letter "C."

• • •

I'd like to kick things off with a discussion of writing under stress. On some level, making time to write is just that. You make the time to write, you don't find it (under the couch?). That said, however, I'm sure there are a great wealth of coping strategies for writing under duress, and I want to hear about yours.

In the comments.

That you are going to post.

Now.

= 1k Words

Please allow me to direct your attention to the Fantasy Illustration Blog by Cynthia Shepphard (not, apparently, entirely unlike tea). I've been a follower of Cynthia's on livejournal for some time now, and I really like her art. Cynthia's paintings are wonderfully lush and full of incredibly intense colors. Her compositions are striking and dynamic, and she has a firm grasp of the fantastic and the surreal. To call Cynthia's work photorealistic would be a disservice - her paintings are far too real to be merely real. If you are at all a fan of fantastic art, I recommend checking her out, subscribing to her blog, and sending her money.

Of course, if you're into sending people money, you could also send me money. I wouldn't complain.

Cynthia hasn't posted any information regarding licensing yet, so you aren't going to see any of her paintings posted here as creative prompts. However, I have left her an LJ comment pointing her in the direction of Creative Commons licensing. If she gets on the Creative Commons train, I can guarantee that you'll see her art here on a regular basis. She really is that good.

Finally, please don't take my failing to add Cynthia's blog to my blogroll as an indication of a lukewarm endorsement. This blog is primarily about fiction, which Cynthia's paintings - however beautiful - aren't. I endorse Fantasy Illustration Blog (still not entirely unlike tea) whole-heartedly.

Wednesday Bonus Burn - Personal Effects: Dark Zeppelin

I regret to say that I cannot endorse Personal Effects: Dark Art by self-made fantasy sensation J.C Hutchins. This is not because anything is wrong with the book, but rather for this simple reason: I haven't read it and I'm not likely to for a while.

We all saw what happened last time I made the mistake of talking about a book I hadn't read yet, and that's not an experience I'd like to repeat.

Don't you hate it when this happens? You get an Amazon gift card as a gift from your Hebrew school job and you stretch it admirably so that it covers World of Darkness: Inferno, Seers of the Throne, Summoners, Compass of Terrestrial Directions IV: The South, and Compass of Celestial Directions V: Malfeas. Then, the day after you spend the last imaginary cent of your gift card you discover thanks to I Should Be Writing Vidcast Episode 8 that this book that was hovering on the edge of your consciousness - Personal Effects: Dark Art - is actually something you want right now. And today is the official launch date. And you can't have it because you're out of gift card money and you're still really, really unemployed, so you're out of real money, too.

Yeah. It's a pain.

So, unless someone reading this has a spare copy of Personal Effects: Dark Art (or an extra $16.47 plus shipping and handling, or, you know, a spare job) lying around and would like to send it my way out of the goodness of your heart, it looks like I'm going to be behind the curve on this one.

What is it about Personal Effects: Dark Art that - belatedly, alas - attracted my attention? It began with the fact that J.C. Hutchins is a frighteningly effective self-promoter. He has been producing video and audio blurbs by famous writers and directors of horror and distributing them to his allies in the podcast community, running competitions on his website, and generally selling this project hard and fast.

Best of all, the book itself is a metatextual experience. It turns out that the book comes with a packet of documents - fake credit cards and driver's licenses, birth and death certificates, creepy looking artwork that J.C. refuses to comment upon - several of which lead to an ARG that lets the reader in on the action. There's the book you read, but if you're interested, there's also the book that happens to you.

I've got to wait until I've read it to comment decisively, but man, do I want this book. I don't know how good it really is, but it sounds great.

A Pullman, Paolini, Pierce Podcast Passion

Tamora Pierce, Phillip Pullman, and Christopher Paolini have collaborated to produce a nine-episode podcast discussing such varied topics as worldbuilding, religion, inspiration, and animals. The entire series is available at one convenient imaginary location, and I recommend it solely based on the cast. I'll certainly listen to it myself when I get the chance.

I think my opinion of Tamora Pierce has been made clear. While I might not believe that Shakespeare is a demigod of the stage, I will gladly concede that Pierce is a demigod of the young adult page. My thoughts on Phillip Pullman are a little more complicated. I think he is a very good writer, and the series that brought him to my attention - His Dark Materials - is really a remarkable piece of fiction. However, it isn't that I object to his philosophy, but rather that I think he pushes it little too hard and makes it a little too obvious. Pullman is for me what many people have told me C.S. Lewis was for them. Descriptions of Paolini's books have never called out to me, but if he impresses me on this podcast, I may have to give them a chance.

In any case, enjoy! I'll post more thoughts on the series when I've listened to it myself.

The Bard

You'd think after my post about paladins, this one will be about the bard as a roleplaying and fantasy concept. Not so, alas. Instead, I would like to direct your attention to this article at Flashlight Worthy, a site of book recommendations and reviews. The article lists some of the best fiction set in Shakespeare's world, a world like Shakespeare's world, and/or featuring Shakespeare as a character.

I must confess that most of these premises do not thrill me. Though a theatrically inclined guy, I have never been an enormous fan of Shakespeare. Oh, sure, I appreciate the artistry of his verse and the sophistication of his plots and characterizations - especially when compared to some of his contemporaries - but I really see him as one brilliant author among the many brilliant authors and playwrights of the past, not a theatrical demigod.

What I really don't get is exactly what this post is about: Shakespeare adaptations and riffs. I don't find Shakespeare's plots to be the most fascinating thing about Shakespeare. Most of his stories are historical adaptations, fairly transparent farces, or iterations of plots and themes are were as old as dirt when Shakespeare was alive and are even older now. What makes Shakespeare brilliant, in my mind, is his artistry... which is exactly what you lose when you "adapt" Shakespeare or make him a character in a totally different story.

To complete my true and total alienation of my audience: I also think that arguing over who Shakespeare "really" was is completely goobery.

All of that said, however, a lot of people I really respect - including my wonderful fiance, the Abigail - never get tired of seeing Shakespeare plots finding new life, so there must be something there. If any of my audience wants to take a look at the books listed on the far side of the link and let me know which are the best - or make a recommendation of any kind in regards to this subgenre - I'll be happy to take you up on it.

While I'm on the topic of the Bard, I ought to confess that despite everything I wrote above I once did it, too. The game was Exalted, the player was the Abigail, and the character was Delicate Orchid, a rich merchant's daughter with a bad case of asthma, and had thus been raised in a wealthy "gated community" situated in the tall, air-conditioned (and more to the point, filtered) apartments of a First Age ruin. Orchid is a good example of mixing humor and drama in a game, as the character exalts as a Lunar and comes to grips with being a member of a society composed primarily of self-consciously barbarous barbarians... and she a Delicate Orchid who has never been outside because before the gods fixed her lung problem, a bad case of hay fever would have killed her. The best part was when she nearly panicked about the thought of being allergic to herself.

In any case, the moment I'm referencing took place during Orchid's rites of passage. She was tasked with arranging a marriage between a pair of star-crossed lovers in a half-civilized border town with a strong ethic of dueling and tragic/heroic suicides. I had a lot of fun playing those two hormone-crazed teenagers as really, really keen on killing themselves for love (just like so-and-so from the epics!), with Orchid acting as their divine patron, delivering messages and desperately trying to keep them alive. Her parting advice "take this girl to your aunt's in the country and get her pregnant as fast as possible!"

So, I suppose there's life in old Shakey yet.