Haunted Mirror

I went to Eureka Springs with my family yesterday. That was fun, and the place is lovely. I'd love to go with people who shop, and also some sort of expendable cash.

But the real highlight of this trip for me is going to be Pea Ridge, a Civil War historic national park, a totally unexpected sort of thing.

I find the Civil War depressing--reading a book about the overarching politics and basic history was enough for me to feel informed on the issue. Delving into the atrocities and such is not appealing to me. This trip was more than an expedition into forest trails and coming across a great abrupt bluff with spars of rock spearing up below. I read the meatier information blurbs avidly, listened to Mr. Docent when he went into the more fascinating branches carefully.

Someone, I think at a Conestoga panel, mentioned that if you want to learn about war, read up on specific battles. They mentioned a few they thought were noteworthy, but I don't write epic fantasy (*much*) and didn't think more of it.

Until watching the video of the battle here (which in a few ways, including scale is a significant one) then driving and looking out over the actual area and putting a picture together in my mind that was so compelling and new of what it looked like to fight a war.

Generalizations are the bane of Truth, you know it?
And specifics are awesome.

I found out something fascinating and horrifyingly exemplar of the sort of country we have bullied ourselves into having this week. On the lines of "make everyone a criminal, fast!" like Internet

It involves wild horses. I kid you not.

While driving to an Agritourism event, it came up that my boss, legally, can't bury large animals on her property: if you need to bury a sheep (or other large animal) it has to be done more than 100 [ft? yards?] away from any neighboring property, where there is not rain-water runoff, etc. The only other option is to take it to a certain incineration plant, the only one that does large animals, one that's actually got a national monopoly on the trade. (Why?! Why monopolize this? I ask you.)

It's in Oklahoma City, a good 2~3 hours away from here. It costs more gas, time, and heartache to do this than any sheep, no matter how valuable it may have been, is worth when dead. This is irrationally hard work for a farmer who's time and money are at max, and who has enough heartache to live with from the weather, thank you very kindly.

So where do the wild horses come in? They come in because there are horses that would be destroyed because they're not worth their keep (time/money/heartache, again). And if they were euthanized, they'd have to be...

You got it: taken to Oklahoma City. Or whatever your state's monopolizing incineration plant site happens to be.
So, happen it be easier to dump your horse on certain unguarded land... Apparently in Tennessee this is much more prevalent, but there's a known place to do it in this area of OK, too.

Have fun creating that wild apocalyptic novel! Your loss if you can't fit in wild herds of three-legged, one-eyed, angry horses ravaging the land. Too bad for everyone writing as if this wild stuff didn't really happen...

After a month of being stopped on World Domination 101 revision, a little judicial reading seems to have stewed up the right conditions for Idea to spring forth.

It's funny how exposure isn't enough--there has to be that letting-it-sit period. At least for me. This time it felt especially slow since I wanted to have a monthly pace, of tackling aspects thoroughly and getting it done quick as I could.
I get that feeling right now, anyway, of needing the right intersection of input to get the right vantage on it. Queen's Play resurrected my thoughts on the culture-conflict lacking in Outlander, and introduced to me the fact that what I'd thought about on that wasn't in the manuscript.

Who knows? Maybe I wouldn't have been able to write this story I'm working on now the right way if I hadn't heard the song Unwinding Cable Car.
This train of thought often gives me philosophical heebie-jeebies, but I accept it.

Got anything particular in your soundtrack to writing now?

[gettin' mileage outta this feature]
Religion:

I have a very mystic worldview, and that affects both the magic I establish and the religions that come into play.
I try to be intentional about all my religious systems, because it has been far too easy to just let things slide. Being intentional about everything, really, is the lesson I’m learning as I mature as a writer. (I hope.)
The set-up of the worlds I put together is based on the way I perceive reality. I can handle that. Playing with the way I perceive reality is a good character exercise! As well as anthro practice, which I really enjoy—the whole perceiving another’s reality thing is big for me since I was immersed in Japanese culture as a teen (talk about cultural perceptions being exploded).
Symbolism is big; but in the culture I’m crafting right now, I’m trying to redefine everything I can, I want to know it so well, it will immerse the reader in the foreign, and yet be clear to them. Dogs are evil, snakes are grace symbols. Afo (cat-sized deer) are intelligent pets. They even helped with the city mail distribution for a few years!
Magic not only has to make sense to me, I have to really deliberate it, or it doesn’t happen. I’m way to pragmatic for this fantasy thing, I sometimes think.... In my current story, I want to show a shift in societal attitudes. In the more village-centric culture, the supernatural being called upon to happen is normal. In the queens’ hierarchy, a schooled talent for manipulating material things is the art that is encouraged (and in the artistic community, an outbreak of more natural talents that infuse power into handiwork is key to the revival of more grass-roots power). In the technological world, those in touch with the mystical affect things around them without a clear idea of how they are doing it, sometimes without knowledge that they are.
In my recently finished (1st draft finished, that is) folk fantasy, the only magic is the transformation of humans into animal shapes to fight spirits. That’s more like what my undeliberated magic turns to. I’m trying to grow, though. Someday I’ll have this down, and mages will hit the generator....
And then we have the superheroes, who are not at all explained. They just blow things up.
(Actually, I have yet to see anything blow up. I must rectify this error, or Miss Snark will have my _..._ posterior.)

Location...the Why of the Where
I put everything I have into what I’m working on at the moment. Granted, there is always more than one story in development, more than a few being written out; sometimes something won’t fit where I put it. Sometimes I have to scrub something that did, because something fit better with what I was trying to do. [i.e.: really original fantasy! Set in...Ireland? Oh. Well, those sketches were cool, but I think the Amazon Basin is really more appropriate considering your claims of trying for originality. ]
However, my imagination is generally funneled in one direction, and so I’m picking things out of my surroundings (be they magazine pictures, non-fiction articles, backways in the car) that I think can go with the basic concept, and then the other details I’ve picked out. I’m being much more intentional about this in my “currently conceptualizing” project. I am looking for a very specific ambience. One that can hold the character of the past I’ve given it’s country, one that can bring out the nature of the personalities I’m peopling it with, and one that can be fun enough to explore people will want to get lost there.
Short order, see.
In other words, how the heck do we do this, anyway?
There have been certain times I loved being in the city. Under the amber of streetlights, in the murk of blaring signs, the wide sidewalks unpeopled at (unholy) late hours, the whir and stream of the passing taxi. I’ve never actually lived in a capital-like city, though, so I don’t know how well that experience will translate. I lived on a campus in Pasadena, and a fairly important backwater city in Japan...and this place, the central city, was where the stories I was binding together could meet each other. All in different social times, all in varying layers of society, but bound together by the character of a country symbolized by the city.
The city has to carry a lot. It deserves a lot of attention, even if I don’t really know what I’m about.