stuff
In the year 2006 I resolve to:
Learn to play the guitar with my teeth.
Get your resolution here
I'd settle for learning to play the guitar, period.
I feel all warm and fuzzy after reading the latest issue of Mike Carey's Lucifer. Elaine comes into her inheritance (as we've always known she must), and takes Yahweh's place as God. Her entire story -- from childhood to her inamourment of Lucifer, then come loss of innocence, experience, the death of Michael and her receiving the power of Creation -- is something so grand and magnificent I want to go back and read the entire comic to date right now.
Future project (cross my heart, swear to god; if no one else does it first): try to get published a historical atlas of the world. Instead of one set of nations, borders, names, geographical landscapes -- it traces how these have all changed since the beginning of history. But then, considering how many people would be unavoidably pissed-off by it... Well, I guess it's a good thing I don't live in Turkey.
If you're a fairly new LJ friend (ie. added in the last six months), you might like to read my 50 Things You May Not Know About Me (and remember it is from more than a year ago).
- Bright Weavings is a terrific fan-maintained website for news, interviews, scholarship, reviews (conveniently aggregated), etc. about the books of Guy Gavriel Kay. His books have often been called "historical fantasies". Except for The Fionavar Trilogy, they take a moment or period in actual history and use them as both inspiration and a direct basis. Personally I love GGK's books for their complexity, characterisations, and humanity.
This article, "From Tapestry to Mosaic: The Fantasy Novels of Guy Gavriel Kay", is an excellent introduction if you're unfamiliar with the author. It's a dialogue between two contributors to the ezine Strange Horizons on his first 8 novels.
There's also a review from John H. Riskind, for The Washington Post Book World, that I especially like: "History with a Fantasy Spin" (3rd down on the page)
"Kay's work offers a unique fantasy world, one with the ambience and sense of place of a fine historical novel yet one that also mirrors the human complexity, loyalties and conflicts - and human evils - of our own. This unusual vein of history with a fantasy spin helps Kay to detach readers from their own cultural prejudices, and makes his story themes all the more universal."
- Two essays about worldbuilding: "Rowling as Worldbuilder -- Wonderful or Woeful?" (hp_essays) and "The Logic of Sacrifice" (Strange Horizons).
- George Monbiot: "The Struggle Against Ourselves", Dec. 2005
Ours are the most fortunate generations that have ever lived. Ours are the most fortunate generations that ever will. We inhabit the brief historical interlude between ecological constraint and ecological catastrophe.