H. P. Lovecraft Was A Sickly Child

Lauren just emailed me the link to how to change themes, so now my boldly middle aged male sensibilities are satisfied with something that looks –Robertish.

I love landscapes. I love nature. I draw and paint almost as much as I write and almost as well as I write.

So naturally finding one that didn’t either look like the techno-geek who knows more HTML than Bold and Italic (a definite fraud) or girly or worst of all, “Cute” was perfect. Cloudy sunset thing in muted deep blues and grays.

I could paint something like that when I’m not in the mood to haul out all the brights in the box and do a sunset or some flowers.

There’s a difference though between flowers ala Impressionists or realism and flowers ala cute and stylized or girly. I love the Victoriana or the Steampunk look but found a good theme on page two, so didn’t keep going till I found a Steampunk one that’s all brass gears and Victorian ornamentation.

Besides, Steampunk takes someone who’s more of an engineer geek than me, someone who actually does remember enough chemistry to know how to age-treat bits of brass paraphernalia and has the power tools to go cutting and soldering it into shape.

That would be my son in law.

He’s even planning on making the goggles. I love the steampunk look, but I’m more the guy with the notebook sketching the velociraptors and geeking on natural history. Then applying it within fantasy worlds and asking myself how the magical levels of the setting would affect the evolutionary pressures on various sentient and nonsentient beings.

There’s a bit of science fiction in my purest fantasy — from all the social sciences on up through natural history. There’s a bit of fantasy in my SF hich always seems to involve epic stories if I do it, along with archetypes, hero’s journey and characters pretty much larger than life.

So I have to just look at myself as a speculative fiction writer, draw on the sources I have and backgrounds I’m familiar with, then read up on things if it starts going off my beaten path. This is good though. I do it once in a while when the story demands it.

“Medicine Show” this year actuallly took a significant amount of non-writing time zipping back to Wikipedia and other webpages for backgrounds on 1860 and history in the West and the South and San Francisco street maps, all sorts of things that don’t normally go into my novels. When I make up the setting, all I need to do is stay consistent with what I already did. In a novel with a historical setting or even a contemporary one, I have to watch out for people telling me “that neighborhood doesn’t exist” or “that movie didn’t come out in 1975.”

Some very good Star Wars jokes got left out of the Greenwood Series because the kids were from 1975 instead of 1978.

Oh well. Such is the life of a novelist. Maybe I’ll relax with something that’s completely made up one of these other times and not have to go checking Facts and Dates so much.

Dave Barry writes 100% Fact-Free columns, so why shouldn’t I bring that same artistic style into fiction?

It’s not like it hasn’t been done. I can’t count the number of good fantasy novels I’ve bought that are a whole lot like medieval Europe except for the overwhelming religiosity and religious pogroms. Or it’ll be carefully renamed as something else and turn up as the bad guys while the good kingdom in Fairyland has, like medieval Iceland, royally mandated freedom of religion.

Yet I buy all those books and love them. The real middle ages were grim and in a lot of ways, they’re depressing to read about. The stories set up in Mythic Storyland are very different and should carry modern messages of ethics and meaning. They are our stories.

They may be set Long Ago and Far Away but they are about where we live now and who we are now. That includes a lot of people who’d rather not have the story interrupted by the version of annoying religious-right that showed up with torture implements and massive armies just a few centuries ago. If that’s not what the story’s about, then it’s extraneous violence.

So there’s today’s ramble on writing — hope you like my new theme as much as I do!

Same for the altogether modern themes in my books — wow, I actually managed to connect the topic and the subtopic. Go me. Maybe I’m even learning to blog intelligibly.