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Magic is an integral part of fantasy. It is also a core plot device in my writing but the question becomes, how does it all work for my characters? The closest thing I can do is relate it to my own current, incremental, learning experience with mathematics.
Math, and Algebra in particular, have always been something I’ve avoided but like a Byronic hero you can’t hide from some things forever. So there I sit, Saturday after Saturday, learning the ropes of everything from fractions to polynomials and surprise: I’m not bad at it.
I’m on my third tier of remedial learning and so far it’s all As. Last night, like a foreign language, I was dreaming about it. Math is a background item. You don’t need to know how your car operates to drive it just as you don’t need to know how your computer’s CPU works to surf the net or write your blog. Don’t get me wrong for an instant: math does not come easily to me. I am working hard at getting it. My key to success is knowing when my frustration limit has reached its peak. I walk away for a few hours or a day then return to the problem. The difference between the me of now and the me of high school is that I would have walked away for a year or a decade. As I learn, incrementally, I begin to appreciate Physics and the knowledge that math does in many ways shape our world.
For my characters, the magic is usually just as ever present, but just as unseen as wind. They feel its effects but for those who aren’t in the know of the why, its a puzzling situation. Like me, every Saturday for what feels the rest of my life, they are learning by baby steps to move towards what makes the world work. They are finding within themselves the strength to move forward. They are falling a lot but even then they are taking steps.
Math is a science just as grammar is. Since I’ve started learning math, a number of friends have expressed a desire to write. All of them wanted to know how to get started and I found it very complimentary considering I’ve yet to achieve any commercial success. My response was to just start: put pen to paper and take those first steps into an unseen world. Learn the rules as you go. Practice your grammar but most of all don’t get frustrated and walk away.

So I continue to settle into my new home. The library/spare room is starting to look livable and both the lemon trees survived their transition. I’m slow to settle by nature, as the books take a lot of unpacking and sorting. Having one BA in History and another in English Literature makes for a lot of hardbacks.
My art and swords are hung and I’m finally ready to go through that last box of old poetry. If I ever need to feel better about my writing all I have to do is pop open some of that stuff. Never I think was there a more angsty teenager than I had been. That’s some bad stuff handscrawled on legal pad (I was still using lined paper then). And though angsty, I was a prolific young fellow.
A funny story with some not so funny outcomes is what happened the last time I sorted. I tossed out enough of stuff to fill a dumpster and the next morning it was gone. In the night, people had come through the alley to take it all away. I say people because this was not a one person job. I had been careful and frankly a home shredder wasn’t going to do the trick but I must have missed one copy of an account number somewhere along the way. A month or two later, poof, someone attempted to put a pretty big check against my bank account with a really old address. And all that time I’d been thinking they were just reading my old stuff for some low quality entertainment!
Who takes that much work and goes through it for information? I was a pretty tortured kid, most of it self inflicted. Sure they got a bank account out of it, but I hope the bad poetry at least stung them a little. My bank caught the check and now I’m all freshly accounted but I keep thinking about that old, bad poetry. It’s still out there, circling, inflicting badly written angst on casual eyes. It’s like toxic word waste lying about, emitting background melodrama into a perfectly filthy alley. Even worse, people who stumble into this sticky emotional floatsm won’t know who is responsible as none of it is signed. They’ll curse my anyonymity even as they try to wipe the green goo of teen heartache from their shoe. Next time it’s shred and recycle for the safety of us all.

On the ipod right now: Ani diFranco, Pulse

It is a very gray day in my adopted city and if ever there was a day to call in from my regular job and curl up with the laptop, this would have been it. Unfortunately I have an important presentation today so it wasn’t really an option.
If there are two things I miss about the southern midwest where I’m from, they are the manners and the rain. If there two things I need to remind me about why I left they are the intolerance and overt, ignorant, racism. In Denver it rarely rains. My colleagues in other states ping me to ask how the snow is going and I constantly have to stress that while the Rockies get dumped on, the city has as much sun as San Diego. It’s quite hard to get a good emo mope on with all this daylight!
Today the city isn’t just gray, it’s drizzly and my skin feels like it can breathe again for the first time in a long while. I dawdled too long around the house and missed my first bus, resulting in a half hour wait outside and it was delicious. Denver in Sprintime is incredible but I miss the temperate air of back home, where you could let yourself get a good autumn soak and just feel clean.
But a guy has to eat and this brings me to a Room of One’s Own. The mental gymnastics Woolf goes through to prove her points in that essay are elaborate and regardless of one’s sex, there the matter of money strikes home. Whether male or female, you need food to write. The romantic notion of the starving writer has never worked well for me. When I was hungry and cold I had a surplus of angst but not a great amount of creative connectivity. Woolf understood that you have to eat in order to do your work. You must be well fed for all the right neurons to fire. I used to think that being happy might be a detriment to my writing and I have to laugh at that David of ten years ago. I’ve never been happier, better fed, or a better writer. A lot of that is practice and a lot of it is having a comfort zone to work in every day.
I have to add something else to Woolf’s premise: you need space and food, but you also need life experience. My day to day work experience fuels my writing as well. Even as a fantasy writer, I don’t think secluding myself to a room and writing would be good for the stories I want to tell. As a reader, I cannot connect to a protagonist whose life is too radically different than my own. There has to be something familiar and human about a character, no matter how morally flawed or heroic they might be.
It would have been a great day to seclude and type but it’s a good day for gaining some experience too.

On the ipod: Black Hawk Down Soundtrack
In the backpack: American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips

Frank Herbert will probably never be topped. He wrapped up conflicts of resource so tightly in his Dune series that I doubt you can get a better Mideast Oil allegory going. I’ll stick to religious conflict but there is definitely some interesting details to our modern resource conflicts.
I’ve read a lot of history in the pursuit of one of my BAs, most of it ancient, so I’m used to dense books but Kevin Phillips weaves so much information into his writing that I’m having a hard time following all of his information leads while keeping pace with his point.
He made a brief appearance on Bill Maher’s show a week or two back and impressed me enough that I wanted to read his book. A few chapters in, I’m finding that he does a great job of tracking our relationship to oil, the most important resource of our time, back through the years. He ties this to religious beliefs in our country and the Middle East, which led me back to Dune.
We move from one resource to another in our history. Sometimes these are realworld items: gold, water or land. Sometimes they are less tangible concepts, with concrete effect, such as feudal power.
I’m thinking a lot about sub-motivations in my characters lately and the concepts that define their ends. Political safety and privacy are a large root of many actions in the Dioscuri series. The fear of exposure definitely has my sneakiest character working it as hard as she can to keep the truth under wraps. For her the only resource she’s hoarding are secrets. She’s set against the main character of book two, Prodigal, whose main resource is freedom. The third main character is starting to define his resource as knowledge. These are pretty broad intangibles, distilled down for each character to work with but it doesn’t hurt to think about how they’ll deal with local, realworld, resources either. The world they inhabit lives on grain and for that control of land is an important goal. It’s been a motivation for war in their recent history and it’s a motivator intrigue in their present. All these motivations are starting to come together, conflict and if I’m doing my job right , explode in a fantastic but believable manner.

So Germany is tomorrow and it’s looking rather cold. I finally replaced my long wool coat and while it’s not the full on blanket my Ralph Lauren was, it should still provide me with some warmth and a sense of cloak in the streets of Trier.
I’m the most excited for the first leg of the trip. Worms looks like it’s going to be the best of everything I want though I’m also afraid I may just stay forever in the antiquities on Museum Island in Berlin. There are some definite pieces there that should help my research on the Dioscuri though my mentor, Dr. Miller has warned me that the Germans weren’t too careful with the preservation of the early marbles they acquired.
All of that aside, I won’t be taking my laptop for once and instead will be switching back to pen and notebook for two weeks. I don’t get a lot of productive writing accomplished when I travel: just larger ideas that take time to filter down into the work so I’m not too concerned about going low tech for a bit.
I wanted to have the next Hraefn/Kinos sections online before I left but I feel like they still need a bit of editing.

She had a great voice and brought a lot of insight. My friend Alfred Utton introduced me to her some years ago when he was completing his Literary Criticism capstone class. I hate to know that such a unique talent won’t be inspiring us any longer. At 58, she died far too soon. I got the news from Broadsheet on Salon but followed scifi.com’s reference to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. site:

http://www.sfwa.org/news/2006/obutler.htm

If you haven’t read Parable of the Talents, now is a good time:

http://www.tatteredcover.com/NASApp/store/Product;jsessionid=aBoBxA3sw_K6?s=showproduct&isbn=0446675784

or:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446675784/sr=8-1/qid=1141073638/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-6390233-3776714?%5Fencoding=UTF8

It’s been a long two years since I left the country and I’m ready for the break. Now that I’ve finished Neophyte and have started the submissions and agent queries, I feel like a head-clearing trip before I dive into the publishing challenge is in order.

It all starts in Trier, which sounds like a great blend of classical ruin (Roman baths) and medieval fortifications. The transition from ancient history to medieval and the effect it had on the larger population is a real point of interest to me right now as I seem to create worlds that have gone through that shift and are living in the bones of whatever kingdom or hegemony came before.

I’m also anxious to see the reconstruction in Dresden and the Museum Island in Berlin. I bought some German language lessons and uploaded them to my ipod. Hopefully, by the time I land I’ll be able to do more than order coffee though that’s really all I need.