Assorted thoughts I'm thinking at the moment:

[capri0mni]

They're not really connected to each other (in any obvious way); they're rather like toddlers, engaged in "parallel play," if you know what I mean.

• I like this Irish proverb:
  
  

  The four least useful things:
  

  1. A headache,
  
  
  2. A worried mind,
  
  
  3. A bitter tongue, and
  
  
  4. An empty purse.

  
  Though, if I were to knock it down to the more common triad, I'd leave off the empty purse. An empty purse has less use than one filled with money, perhaps. But it's of more use than having no purse at all, in case you find something nifty that you want to keep (a purple pebble, for example).



• The thing about stories like those in the Harry Potter series is that moving the action and characters to a strange and dreamlike parallel world frees the author from worrying too much if her characters are three-dimensional and realistic. If J.K. Rowling had kept the entire story in the neighborhood of the Dursley's (that is Harry Potter's adoptive family, right?), she'd have had to worry about real-world social and economic pressures, and all that. But keeping the muggle family to act only as rather nasty parentheses to the real action, keeps the reader from wondering too much about why nobody's noticed that Harry is rather thin, or why it is that they hated his mother so, etc.
  
  I think one reason why I've been battling writer's block of late is that I've been worrying too much about realism, since my life has become rather isolated in recent years. So I think, if I want to get somewhere with my novel, I'll just do what Rowling did, and set it in a universe of make-believe.
  
  (BTW, would it be more accurate to say "Believe-making" than "Make-Believe"?)



• For those of you who have lost a close loved one: in those moments when you've forgotten they've died, where do you feel them to be?
  
  Usually, this happens to me when I'm sleepy, but still awake -- like playing Solitaire on the computer. I tend to sense that one or both of my parents are standing right behind me, looking over my shoulder. Other times, I imagine them puttering around in another room -- usually, it feels like I'll catch a glimpse of them if I turn and look behind me to my left (which is probably a sign that I'm feeling their pressence with the right hemisphere of my brain). Maybe this is one reason why I don't feel the need to believe in a sky-based afterlife, you know?

Comments

[trinalin.livejournal.com]

The other day on my way home, I had an overwhelming urge to visit Gramma Anderson & talk with her/share the day. I was crossing the street (um, jaywalking - I cut through the alley on my way home) and Gramma's old house is on the other side of the street. I think that's the first time, other than in dreams, when I've had such an urge. (The dream I had recently of Grampa Anderson was certainly interesting - I was taking Linus & Lucy (in arms) to his garage - a machine shop, for the most part. Only it was now about 12 stories tall, and the kitties had gotten away from me. It (the garage) eventually turned into a stadium. I found the kitties.)

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

I think those urges are often tied deep into our muscle memory, when, for example, your body remembers walking into your Gramma's home.

And that sounds like a freaky dream. Yay for finding the kitties!

[alto2.livejournal.com]

You have a point about Harry Potter (though I am pretty sure Mrs Weasley always tries to get him to eat!), but having just written a novel set in a world similar-to-but-not-quite-like ours, I gotta say, it's a whole lot harder than setting something in the here and now. You have to built that entire world from scratch AND make it work--and with what I did, you need to emphasize how it's NOT our world, in ways that you don't think would be necessary. Most of the comments I got from both advisors, and during the revision process, had to do with my world not being drawn well enough for a reader to step in and follow what's going on and why it's important.

So...no guarantees that you're making your job any easier. You're probably making it harder.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Well, it's hard work either way.

But setting it in an alternative world might (just) help me shut up the inner critic that keeps reminding me that I haven't had any 3-d social life, or at least not much to speak of, since I left grad school almost 20 years ago, and that I've fallen down as a human being and a social creature and am therefore made of fail.

If I set it in a dreamlike world, I have a stronger footing to talk back and say: "I know enough about humans to write them because I am human, and I have the capacity to empathize and imagine. So quit your griping and help me work out the logic of this situation, here!"

(Re: Mrs. Weasley -- yes, but the whole Weasley family is firmly rooted in that Otherworld that Rowling created. It's not the same as if the Dursley's neighbors across the street worried about Harry, and called the police to report abuse of him.... you know).