Fantasist's Scroll

This is cute!
While looking for water gardening resources, or an old t-shirt that I can only half remember, or something, I found a fifth grade class’ creative writing assignment called The Island Project. The project was for the kids to imagine themselves stranded on an island and to describe the island on which they found themselves. Many of them also drew maps of their island. The project is from 1995-96, but, somehow, is still up on the web. It’s fun, actually.
And, not a bad way to get some creative juices flowing for a story setting, either. I have often gotten ideas for things to write by drawing maps first. So do Orson Scott Card and Holly Lisle, both successful writers, so it’s not just a fluke or a gimmick. It’s also a bit of fun.
So, if you’re stuck for something to write about, why not draw a map? Or, heck, if you’re not too full of yourself, why not just do the same exercise that the fifth-graders did? You might just be surprised at the results!

Here’s a little inspiration from The Writer’s Almanac.
Of course, most of us have heard about the release of the newest Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and the fact that J. K. Rowling made a huge amount of money the first day the book started selling. But, today that, in 1954, the first part of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy came out, The Fellowship of the Ring. It was the sequel to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, which came out in 1937. Tolkien had written The Hobbit for his own amusement and didn’t expect it to sell well. But, the Hobbit sold well, partly because C.S. Lewis gave it a big review when it came out. And so Tolkien’s publisher asked for a sequel.
Tolkien spent the next 17 years working on The Lord of the Rings. And, since he was a professor at Oxford, he had to write in his spare time, usually at night. His book became increasingly more complicated and, with the outbreak of World War II, he began to write in parallels to current events of the day. Middle-Earth’s enemies were in the East, just like England’s enemies during the War. Eventually, he complicated charts to keep track of everything and his son, Christopher, drew a very detailed map of Middle-Earth.
Finally, in the fall of 1949, he finished his manuscript. He typed the final copy himself sitting on a bed in his attic, typewriter on his lap, tapping it out with two fingers. It turned out to be more than a half million words long, and the publisher agreed to bring it out in three volumes. The first came out on this day in 1954. The publisher printed just 3,500 copies, but it turned out to be incredibly popular. It went into a second printing in just six weeks. Today more than 30 million copies have been sold around the world.
And, according to legend, it all started with stories to flesh out a people and history for some of the languages that Tolkien was developing. Rowling may be the latest “hot ticket”, but Tolkien’s been around for a long enough to withstand the test of time. She may or may not, only time will tell, but, either way, I thought the parallel success stories were interesting. I hope it provides inspiration to young writers out there debating about making the attempt. Not everyone succeeds the way these two authors did, but, if you work hard enough and dedicate yourself enough to your craft, you might just be next.

I finished Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov over the weekend.
It was an interesting book, though not quite what I expected. The story, as such, is told via an introduction and a series of comments on a poem. The commentor is, or believes he is, the deposed king of an Eastern European country called Zembla. He reviews and annotates a poem, called “Pale Fire”, written by his neighbor and friend in a little, college town named New Wye, where the former king now lives in exile and teaches Zemblan and Zemblan literature to students at the local college. Frankly, it’s a little hard to tell if we are expected to believe that the view-point character is, in fact, a deposed monarch or if he’s just quietly stark, raving mad. There is plenty of evidence for either argument, but, I believe he’s living out some kind of delusion that seemed harmless and charming to his poetic neighbor, who took pity on him and befriended him.
In any case, it was an interesting book and a literary departure for me. It was also not quite what I expected from the author of Lolita. It was far more accessable than I would have thought and, though sex and homosexuality was a minor theme, not as focused on abberant behavior as I feared it might be. The insanity or delusions of the main character were quite subtle and presented in that strange, calm, almost reasonable way that only the truly insane can present their view of the world.
One of the reasons I got this book was for that ficticious kingdom and language. I was a little dissapointed that there wasn’t more Zemblan represented in the book. The few words and phrases were really just there to spice and flavor the created kingdom of Zembla. Still, it does serve as an excellent example of how a little foregin flavor can go a long way. Again, I was impressed with the subtlty with which Nabokov presented his work. He paints his word-pictures with a very fine brush. The tiny details highlight the over-sweeping whole.
So, while it was not exactly “light” reading, Pale Fire was a very pleasant read, especially for a peice of “classic literature”. I heartily reccomend it.

(And, yes, this also appeared, yesterday, on my other blog, Diary of a Network Geek. So sue me!)

Making art is fun and easy!

I’ve never understood people who spend all the money on high-end graphics software only to claim they still can’t produce any art. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it’s not the tools, it’s the workman. I’ve seen artists who painted with coffee and rusty water. I know a guy who takes old bill-board canvas and makes collage art out of that. (In fact, I hear it sells for a pretty penny!) But, me, I’m a computer geek, so I make computer art. Hmm, I wonder if it’s worth putting a copyright statement on these?
Oh, you may notice that this is a square instead of my regular full-screen rectangle. “Why?”, you ask? Well, simple. I was over at Cingular, looking at graphics, and it occured to me that I could use their custom picture tool to send a nice picture that I created to my new phone. So, I made a square graphic that I can compress with their program and fit onto my phone’s little, square screen. It may have taken all night to render, but, I think it was worth it.
In any case, I hope you enjoy it.

I love Dune.
I love the Dune Encyclopedia even more. I have a now very rare, hard-back copy of this wonderful book, but it is sadly out of print. I treasure my copy and will, on occasion, simply thumb through the pages randomly reading entries. The imagination that generated the source material for the Dune universe, and the creative people who created the Dune Encyclopedia are equally brilliant, in my opinion.
In any case, you can get a fairly good PDF of the Dune Encyclopedia for free by simply clicking on the link. It’s worth the 10 megabyte download. Trust me.

Not just water and rocks!
Nope, this time, I included some free science-fiction objects with their “skins” mapped differently. In their original forms, they weren’t shiny enough to be science-fiction. If it’s not sparkly and shiny enough, it just can’t be high-tech! (Hmm, I should make sure my brother in R&D at Motorola knows that…)
Anyway, I created this because someone who reads my site complained that my digital art was all a little too antediluvian for his taste. And, I have to admit, it all did seem somewhat, well, “prehistoric”. Now, keep in mind, these pictures are all done with the FREE version of Vue d’Espirit which is several revs behind the full version and severly lacking in features. Also, all the good free stuff is done for the newer versions, so my subject matter is fairly restricted. Still, I think I do a fair job, all things considered. I can only imagine what I could accomplish if I spent the money on the full version. Someday, perhaps, someday….

Yep, that’d be me.
I did this with a free version of a neat 3-d program called Vue d’Espirit. And, I did it all myself! I’ve really always wanted to do this kind of thing, but, well, personal reasons kept me from getting into it. If I showed too much interest, it was frowned upon by someone I cared about, who saw it as a kind of competition. Which is sad, really, because we could have had fun doing this together. Or, maybe not. In any case, it’s something that has interested me and, when I saw this free version in a magazine, I decided to play around with it. Not bad, considering it took me about an hour and I used nothing but free software.

A favorite topic of mine.
Of course, you poor people who are regular readers here, besides being often frustrated at my lack of content, know that I love invented worlds. In fact, I’ve been playing a game in one called Ghyll. The game, as you might be aware, involves creating a fictitious world by way of writing a fictitious encyclopedia. It’s been loads of fun. But, we’re not the first folks to do it. I know of at least one other invented encyclopedia that describes a world other than our own: the Codex Seraphinianus.
Not only did the somewhat mysterious author invent a world as vast as his imagination, but he also invented a language and script to go with it. So, this entire book, which is now quite rare, is in an unknown language. A dead language of dreams. The entire book is like an artefact from aother world. And it’s quite beautiful.

I hope that makes up for last week’s less than spectacular Friday Fun Link!