How Did Women In 1817 Read Wentworth’s Letter To Anne And Not Immediately Start Running Through The

Hello! I just wanted to write to thank you.

One of my favorite lines I've ever read is “Jim was already familiar with the incessant activity of that cool, curious mind as it tirelessly hunted answers. But now he saw where the activity came from - Spock’s utter certainty that there was no higher purpose for his life than to burn it away in search of truth, and to give that truth away when he found it. More, Jim saw what fueled and underlay that certainty: a profound vulnerability paired with a great, unreasonable joy”. That, combined with the YW series (which I recently reread), is very good for my soul.

You and your work are truly an inspiration to me! That Wounded Sky quote resonated with me for the theme that joy and curiosity really can underpin an entire, happy, successful life. Young Wizards has so much of the same - books and libraries are magic, but so is nature, and space, and manmade machines, and whales and sharks. Your stories strike a balance I can't always put into words - that curiosity and joy can be self-sustaining. They are not dependent on a single field, a single datum, a single discovery. They can be a lens and a philosophy and they can fit in your pocket for everyday. Curiosity as a mindset, and an exercise in loving and engaging with the world; joy as a result of realizing how many exciting things there are to love and be curious about.

On a parallel note, I am fascinated by how you seem to blend fantasy and sci fi - your Star Trek feels loving and magical, and your fantasy feels grounded and tangible. I am in awe of how many things you've been a part of creating, because it gives me hope that I, too, might avoid having to pick a narrow niche. But in the meantime, I am so grateful to be able to escape into your books, because I fall in love with them again every time, and then I come back and fall back in love with life.

I’m glad to hear it! Thanks for letting me know. ☺️

Also: generally, I think niches are best left to statues. Create what works for you and makes you happy. Life’s too short to waste doing otherwise.

this poem. bro

(by joseph fasano)

I cry when I go to the beach because I really really love sitting in windy places, it makes me feel clean and loved at the same time. I don't know how to sail but one day I want to learn more about sailing and boats.

I love Jimmy Buffett - Cheeseburger in Paradise is a banger that my whole family sings on roadtrips, but Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes or A Pirate Looks at Forty or Son of a Son of a Sailor are all some beautiful songs about life, he sounds like he's singing to friends.

I had a massive horse phase in elementary school that I've stopped talking about, except to laugh at my horse statue collection. I never quite left the horse phase, or at least I rediscovered it when I saw someone reference The Black Stallion series a month ago. The Black Stallion was my favorite, but Black Beauty, National Velvet, bunch of others I'm currently forgetting, I read a bunch of fiction about them. The nonfiction was interesting, but the horse phase centered around a truly irrational and excessive love for horse souls and motifs of freedom, which the nonfiction stuff didn't cover.

I love Russell Crowe's Javert because I saw the movie before I ever saw a theatre production of Les Miserables, and I've never quite been convinced that I'm wrong. I love the music in Les Mis a ton, but I appreciate how, in the movie, the singing can explore soft, conversational volume instead of having to belt everything in a theatrical style. For songs like 'Stars', I think that introspective tone is more intimate and more effective.

I have a theory that being angry and complaining online is the default for most because it's inherently scarier to be earnest and vulnerable. So I invite whoever reads this to reblog and tell me about something you love un-ironically that doesn't make you look more intelligent or conventionally hip.

The rules are if I see anyone giving each other shit over a thing someone likes I'm going to send them an ask that's just a picture of wet, sad cat with zero context. Same if someone claims that they like to complain and it's their god-given right to do it as often as they like and wherever they want. Of course you do. It is not interesting to defend your right to talk about all the small things you hate when no one is really challenging them in the first place. You can complain forever until you die and that's totally fine.

Anyways I'll start.

I love Jimmy Buffett.

It's not because his music is so bad I think it's amusing. I actually think his music is really good. If he was still alive I'd absolutely spend money on a Jimmy Buffett concert because that sounds like a super fun time.

Fruitcakes is a fucking banger. Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On is only one of his many songs that give big Good Dad energy when shit is rough. People mostly only know him for Cheeseburger in Paradise - but honestly? That rocks too. Sometimes I also want a cheeseburger.

People try to give me shit because he sold his likeness to the Margaritaville restaurants and hotels. I'm not even upset about this. The man struggled to be financially stable enough to play music in the beginning of his career, and sold his name to get money to make music and play concerts. He did a good handful of charity shows. He delivered tents to Haiti after the earthquake. He's not like known for philanthropy, but the vibe I get from him is that he's a pretty good guy who just wanted to make music and hang out with his loved ones.

He was literally in the middle of finishing an album when he died last year. He just made music as often as he could right up until it was his turn to go. His last words, according to one of his daughters, were have fun.

You can tell me you don't like his music, but you can't listen and tell me you don't think he'd be a fucking chill hang when the only real answer I got from searching "Jimmy Buffett controversy" is that he got caught with a bunch of ecstacy in '06 and paid a fine before being released. I don't even do ecstacy but holy shit my one exception would be trying it with Jimmy Buffett can you imagine??

Anyways. Your turn, friends.

Writing?

Hello!! I started writing again recently, I've been learning some things about how stories go together!! WORDS ARE APPEARING ON THE PAGE and it is like magic. I am in a great mood! I hope you are all having a lovely day out there! Writers, the words haven't abandoned you forever!!

If anyone out there is writing, and wants to put our heads together to giggle about starting to write, reach out and say hi!!

Terry Pratchett about fantasy ❤

Terry Pratchett interview in The Onion, 1995 (x)

O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?

Terry: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.

O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.

Terry: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.

O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.

Terry: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus.

Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.

Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.

(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.

One of the things that’s really struck me while rereading the Lord of the Rings–knowing much more about Tolkien than I did the last time I read it–is how individual a story it is.

We tend to think of it as a genre story now, I think–because it’s so good, and so unprecedented, that Tolkien accidentally inspired a whole new fantasy culture, which is kind of hilarious. Wanting to “write like Tolkien,” I think, is generally seen as “writing an Epic Fantasy Universe with invented races and geography and history and languages, world-saving quests and dragons and kings.” But… But…

Here’s the thing. I don’t think those elements are at all what make The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings so good. Because I’m realizing, as I did not realize when I was a kid, that Tolkien didn’t use those elements because they’re somehow inherently better than other things. He used them purely because they were what he liked and what he knew.

The Shire exists because he was an Englishman who partially grew up in, and loved, the British countryside, and Hobbits are born out of his very English, very traditionalist values. Tom Bombadil was one of his kids’ toys that he had already invented stories about and then incorporated into Middle-Earth. He wrote about elves and dwarves because he knew elves and dwarves from the old literature/mythology that he’d made his career. The Rohirrim are an expression of the ancient cultures he studied. There are a half-dozen invented languages in Middle-Earth because he was a linguist. The themes of war and loss and corruption were important to him, and were things he knew intimately, because of the point in history during which he lived; and all the morality of the stories, the grace and humility and hope-in-despair, was an expression of his Catholic faith. 

J. R. R. Tolkien created an incredible, beautiful, unparalleled world not specifically by writing about elves and dwarves and linguistics, but by embracing all of his strengths and loves and all the things he best understood, and writing about them with all of his skill and talent. The fact that those things happened to be elves and dwarves and linguistics is what makes Middle-Earth Middle-Earth; but it is not what makes Middle-Earth good.

What makes it good is that every element that went into it was an element J. R. R. Tolkien knew and loved and understood. He brought it out of his scholarship and hobbies and life experience and ideals, and he wrote the story no one else could have written… And did it so well that other people have been trying to write it ever since.

So… I think, if we really want to write like Tolkien (as I do), we shouldn’t specifically be trying to write like linguists, or historical experts, or veterans, or or or… We should try to write like people who’ve gathered all their favorite and most important things together, and are playing with the stuff those things are made of just for the joy of it. We need to write like ourselves.

Can't believe Diane Duane invented the nerd we all want to be

Can't believe Diane Duane invented love with this passage that's so crazy

make bad art or you will always feel bad about your art. Make bad art until you find joy in the crooked lines and the off colours. Make bad art because art is about expression and artwork is never ugly because it was made by someone who has lived a life no one else will ever live. Make bad art and find love through ugly. Make bad art so you make art at all. Make bad art.

Y’know an awful lot of Terry Pratchett’s books are concerned with how powerful women are when they get angry and how important anger is as a driving force to defend what is right and to tackle injustice. 

A lot of his most interesting and most deeply moral characters are angry ones. Granny Weatherwax, Sam Vimes, Tiffany Aching. All are to a large extent driven to do good by anger.

And that honestly means a lot to me.

What makes me love this even more is seeing this stay the same no matter what year you met it in, what series or medium you started with, or how old you were.

It feels like it is all made for all of us, and we get to love the whole franchise, and the whole fandom. And then it's impossible not to love the little Trekkie roots in ourselves.

i think star trek will stay with me forever.

it has injected me with a permanent joy and whimsy and helped me unlearn shame/cringe culture. most importantly, it makes me see the good in humanity.

star trek has affected me in ways i never knew media could affect me. it keeps me optimistic about humanity’s future, and inspires me to do what is right no matter what. star trek makes me unashamed to be myself, however nerdy or silly I may be.

star trek is so important to me and i have a feeling it always will be.