Category: cabinet of curiosities (Page 1 of 3)

Don’t Call It a Resolution

I’m hoping to blog more in 2024. I have an idea for a series of posts about board games, and since this term I’m teaching British Lit, Short Fiction (which will mostly entail reading short SFF stories with my students), and Creative Writing, I figure I’ll have a few things to say about writing, literature, and the fantastical as it pertains to my work in the classroom.

For Brit Lit this semester, my focus is on monsters. We’ll start with Beowulf, then The Tempest (and perhaps A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth too), and finally Shelley’s Frankenstein. What makes something a monster? Are monsters made or born? How does our idea of the monstrous change over time?

Mostly I wanted to teach these three texts, so I created a driving question to link them all. But mostly, I just wanted to read them with my students. I’m curious to see their reactions, especially for Beowulf, which is always a harder sell in an all-girls school. I mean, I’m a woman and I love Beowulf, but when I’ve taught it to young women in the past, it’s been a mixed reaction. The only major female character is a monstrous fen-hag, and the other women in the story serve as peacemakers and such (to solidify alliances and end blood-feuds), so I get why for some of the young women I teach, there’s not much to engage them.

But I’m hoping some of them will come to love the action, the world-building, and the overall spirit of the poem. I myself read it in high school (part of it anyway), and I’ve loved Beowulf ever since.

I’m not making any kind of resolution to blog everyday or anything. Not that such a goal is bad; I’ve attempted every-day blogging before and it was great. But I can’t meet such a challenge this year, nor do I really want to. I’m more focused on staying consistent with my fiction writing and increasing my word count in that realm. But I still like blogging and don’t want it falling dormant. Thus, my commitment to a more regular blogging habit for 2024.

Maybe once a week? Maybe once every two weeks? Maybe several times a week? I don’t have firm plans as of yet. I’m waiting to see how these first few weeks of January shake out, how much time I can actually find to blog more frequently, and how easy it is to find topics to write about. As I mentioned earlier, I have plans, but maybe those plans aren’t tenable. Time will tell.

One of my biggest goals/ambitions for this new year, on a personal level, is to finally start playing more of the board games and role-playing games that adorn my shelves. We have an entire closet filled with board games we’ve (mostly) never played. This is so frustrating! I LOVE board games, and yet here in my very house there languishes a collection of sundry entertainments and diversions of which I have never availed myself. This is madness!

I plan to correct such mismanagement by taking one game out each week and learning to play it. I may play it with husband or friends, or I may play solo, but either way, I’m committing myself to playing the board games in my house. Carpe diem and all that.

I’m going to try blogging about the games too; I just need a snappy name to call this “regular” feature. (I have “The Things That Shaped Me” feature which I should also get back to, but maybe I’ll call my board game excursion “Cabinet of Curiosities” or something of that sort… which I know is already a tag on my blog, but this will just make it more official.)

Anyway, I’m not calling any of this a “resolution.” I make New Year’s resolutions, and I’ve already made a few in other realms of my life for 2024, so I’m not opposed to resolutions in general. But I’m not making a blogging resolution this year. Nothing that firm. This blogging commitment is more of a New Year’s inclination. An urge to blog more. Let’s see how it shakes out.

Further Thoughts on Middle-Earth

I have been thinking about why I love Middle-Earth so much. I know that lots of Tolkien fans have argued that Middle-Earth feels more real than any other secondary world, that it has such depth and detail and history, and that Tolkien wrote about it with so much love for the landscape and languages that it all feels as if Middle-Earth really IS our world, but eons ago, beyond the mists of our own knowledge. I would agree that Tolkien created a hyper-detailed sub-world, and that the history and legends and descriptions are so vivid that Middle-Earth feels REAL.

But is that all? Is this the only thing that makes me love Middle-Earth?

I’m not sure “world-building” is the only thing that elevates Middle-Earth above all other fantasy realms for me. If it were just “world-building,” then Westeros and Essos (from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series) would be just as enticing. I’m sure for some people, Martin’s world IS more enticing. But not for me. The intricacies of Middle-Earth’s history, or its landscape, or the depth of its lore aren’t what make me love it. Otherwise, Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere would be at the top of my list. Sanderson’s created world is arguably more intricate, more detailed than is Middle-Earth. But the Cosmere does not cast the same spell over me.

Tolkien, of course, often writes in a “high style” that feels archaic and shrouded in the long-forgotten mists of time. Is it this tone, perhaps, that makes Middle-Earth weave its spell upon me? I do indeed think that Tolkien’s tone and style are part of the equation.

But I also think it’s more than tone. It’s the particulars of his myth-making: the Trees of Valinor, the Silmarils, the Ents and Balrogs, the Dwarves and dragons and barrow-wights, the Elves, the hidden kingdoms like Gondolin; it’s Gollum and the Nazgul. All of these things — the essence of these imagined things — are what draw me into the world. The simple things too, like the light of the stars or the flowers of Lorien. All of them stir my heart deeply. I do think they beckon to some yearning in my imagination, a desire for the real world to become somehow deeper and more wondrous, to resemble the wonders of Middle-Earth…

Tolkien gets at this idea in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” when he explains that fairy-stories (and all fantasy) help us with “recovery”:

Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining — regaining of a clear view.

This regaining allows us to see the natural, physical world with fresh eyes. Things like rocks and leaves and flowers are renewed in our imagination because fantasy stories have helped us recover this “clear view” of them:

Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give. By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and rock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory.

This is why Middle-Earth works so strongly on my own imagination. It recovers for me that clear view of the world, of nature, and even of abstract things like goodness, evil, courage, honor, envy, friendship, longing, love. As Tolkien puts it, the particulars of Middle-Earth — the Silmarils, the Ents, the Elves, the Misty Mountains, the Shire — all of it helps renew in me a love for stars, and trees, and songs, and mountains, and green hills and summertime. I return to Middle-Earth again and again, loving it more and more each time, because it helps me regain something I’m always on the verge of losing: my wonder and joy for our world, for the world of God’s creation. Tolkien helps me recover this wonder and joy; his Middle-Earth is “made out of the Primary World,” and in being so made, manifests the real world’s glory.

That is why I love Middle-Earth so much.

The Things That Shaped Me: MERP

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My parents always loved making a big deal out of birthdays, but my tenth birthday was by far the biggest deal they ever made. They decided we were going to drive to Chicago for a family trip (we lived in Michigan, for geographical frame of reference). Why Chicago? Why my tenth birthday? I have no idea, but I made no objections. Who wouldn’t want to go to Chicago for her birthday? We were going to stay at the Water Tower Place hotel, eat at Ed Debevic’s, visit the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium, AND — this is the thing my ten-year-old brain was inexplicably most excited about — we were going to bring a portable TV/VCR in the minivan so my brother and I could watch movies during the long drive (this anecdote tells you how old I am that DVD players and screens didn’t come pre-installed in vehicles).

We rented a slew of movies, but the one I remember most was The Hobbit — not Peter Jackson’s Hobbit franchise (which hadn’t been made yet) — the Rankin-Bass animated movie from the 1970s.

This movie… let’s just say, this movie will make a future appearance in The Things That Shaped Me series.

We watched it on the way to Chicago and then on the way home to Michigan, so it served as a bookend to the birthday trip, an opening act and a closing act. I was obsessed with The Hobbit — book and movie — and by extension, Middle-Earth. But only The Hobbit-version of Middle-Earth. I hadn’t read The Lord of the Rings yet.  At ten-years-old, I wasn’t a good enough reader to handle the lengthier, weightier Rings books.

20200602_152858But I loved Tolkien’s world: the forests; the mountains; the dragons, goblins, elves, and dwarves. Mirkwood was as real to me as the little patch of woods that surrounded my grandmother’s house. The Misty Mountains were unspeakably enchanted, a world within a world filled with treasure, ancient lore, and shadowy creatures; I longed to travel there. And the map of the “Wilderlands” and Thorin’s map were like sacred manuscripts.

Although the trip to Chicago was exciting, what I wanted more than anything for my tenth birthday was something much simpler, and at the same time much stranger: I wanted the boxed set for MERP: Middle-Earth Role-Playing.

20200602_153018Back in those days, I had never played a role-playing game before. Frankly, I didn’t have anyone to play a role-playing game with. But I wanted MERP. The cover illustration alone was worth it. Also, there was something dangerously appealing about role-playing games. These games came with a dark reputation back in the 80s and early 90s. I was forbidden to play D&D; I had to work hard convincing my parents that other RPGs were okay and not gateways to Satanism. Somehow, I convinced them that MERP was alright. Maybe they figured a Tolkien-influenced game couldn’t be too bad. But the mystique, the forbidden quality of RPGs was still there, even if the cover said “Middle-Earth Role-Playing” and not “Dungeons and Dragons.”

The old MERP game came in a box, with the core book and several other supplements, including cardboard playing pieces and two ten-sided dice. Whenever I see pictures of the old MERP books — the core book, the different supplement books for the peoples and creatures of Middle-Earth — an overwhelming wave of nostalgia washes over me. I can’t quite explain it; like all old memories, it’s both intense and inexplicable. I can see and smell and sense all the moments from those old days, but I cannot make you see and smell and sense them in the same way.  Memories are like dreams; once we start to tell about them, they inevitably lose their magic, they become pedestrian and plain, they don’t capture the electricity and potency of what we see in our heads. Opening that box-set on my birthday and seeing those Angus McBride illustrations, holding the cardboard cut-outs and the ten-sided dice — it’s a feeling I find hard to describe. When the opening pages of the core book promised that “this game lets you step out of this world and stride boldly into Middle-earth,” I believed it: I was going to stride into Middle-Earth. I was going to experience adventures I’d never experienced before.

20200602_152810This memory is so strong, so central to my childhood, that I know I cannot convey to you what it really felt like. Flipping through the old MERP books brings me back to the past, to being ten-years-old, to being in the backseat of our minivan, watching the Rankin-Bass Hobbit, to being a kid who loved fantasy and who felt like she had to hide that love from the outside world. And there was the forbidden danger of role-playing games: the thrill of reading something that was maybe a bit too adult, a bit too beyond my ken.

Whenever I look at those MERP books now, after all these years, I feel the excitement of ten-year-old me, the sense that I’m about to embark on a strange, unknown, wondrous adventure — like Bilbo stepping outside his door to find the Lonely Mountain. But how can I make you feel these same feelings, or catch a glimpse of what they mean to me? I can’t. I can only hope that perhaps you loved MERP as a kid too, or that you know what it feels like to watch The Hobbit while the moon is rising between the clouds on a summer’s night.

A Wizard of Earthsea and How Great Books Can Inspire My Writing

earthsea_coverWhen I wrote the second draft of The Thirteen Treasures of Britain, I was also reading The Last Unicorn. Even though my story and Beagle’s had little in common, the music of his prose, the vitality of his world made an impact on me while I was writing. I wanted my book to capture some strain of the magic that I felt The Last Unicorn possessed. Even though I knew my own novel would never equal Beagle’s masterpiece, I wanted to try. In short, The Last Unicorn was inspiring. It energized my writing, and I found myself more joyful while I read it, and more joyful while I was writing my own story.

It’s no secret that I’ve had trouble finishing my second novel, Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess. I’ve had babies, become the mother of three children all under the age of five, struggled to navigate the demands of teaching, mothering, and adulting, and all the while, I’ve felt less joyful and more overwhelmed. My writing time has evaporated, and with it, a lot of my enthusiasm. I’ve still managed to push on, to write even when it feels like a slog through the Swamps of Sadness, but without that spark of joyfulness that I felt when drafting The Thirteen Treasures. So this second book is taking an eternity to finish.

Curiously, at this very moment, I’m reading another classic of fantasy literature (A Wizard of Earthsea), and I’m finding myself suddenly joyful and energized again, inspired to sit down and work on the draft of my own novel.

Just like what happened with The Last Unicorn.

Le Guin’s prose, the depth of her world and her themes, the way I become completely immersed and lost in her story, the way it feeds my imagination — all of these things remind me of what it’s like to be a fantasy writer, to dream up characters and places and fantastical creatures. And when I do sit down to write, I feel nourished by Le Guin’s story. Great writing makes us as writers see what’s possible, what can be achieved with words, and when I know there are storytellers out there who have reached greatness, then in some small way, I hope I can reach it too. I know I won’t; that’s not the point. It’s the striving for greatness that gives me energy, that helps me find joy in my writing.

I am, at times, haunted by Ray Bradbury’s maxim to “write with gusto.” So much of my writing over the last year and a half has not been filled with much gusto. But when I read a great book — fantasy or otherwise — I gain some measure of gusto, some “kick-joy” (as Kerouac? would say), and I begin to wonder why I don’t just read great books all the time. If these books work like a tonic on my brain, why wouldn’t I imbibed every day? Why am I spending time on things that don’t fill me up with this kind of excitement and awe?

I suppose it’s because we don’t know which books will contain the magic until we start them, and I’m the sort of reader who hates to abandon a book once I’ve started it. There are a few that I DNF, but they are very few. And I also feel obliged to read widely in my genre, most particularly the books being published right now; I can’t exactly restrict myself to the Great Classics of Fantasy if I’m trying to keep up with what’s being written currently. Of course, I’ve read some current fantasy that has indeed been the magical-kind-of-great that I’m describing in this post, but without the benefit of time and distance, it’s hard to know which of these books will be The Ones, and which won’t.

Maybe I need to constantly have a great book on hand, for those times when my verve seems a little limp. I can always read more than one book at a time; I’ve been that kind of reader since I was a kid. But now I realize that I DO need to keep pumping blood into my imagination via these great books. I need Ged — naming the otak, struggling against the shadow, overcoming his pride — and others of his kind to journey with me, keeping me on the path of adventure, like Gandalf and the dwarves leading Bilbo to the Lonely Mountain.

Inspirations: Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG

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The Time: Free RPG Day 2017

The Place: a FLGS in Howell, Michigan

The What: Finding a copy of the 2017 Free RPG Day Dungeon Crawl Classics Quick Start Rules

The Result: Nothing.

I skimmed through the rules, liked the idea of The Funnel (where players create 0-level characters, like farmers and urchins and such, and then run them through an arduous dungeon and see who makes it out alive; livers get to become 1st level characters), and promptly moved on to other things.

I wasn’t really looking to run a new rpg. I had given up being a GM after some rocky experiences with a couple of game systems, my husband was taking over the GM role, we were looking at maybe playing some indie games or maybe even The One Ring RPG, but Dungeon Crawl Classics was just this little slim booklet with the cool cover.

But man, that cover. Every once in awhile, while working at my writing desk, that cover would peak through the stack of books surrounding it and I’d start dreaming. The strains of a Led Zeppelin mixed tape would waft through my brain. The feeling of forbidden adventure would beckon, as if I was ten-years-old again, hanging out at the library and gazing greedily at the AD&D 2nd edition books on the shelves, wishing my mom and dad would let me read them, wishing I could travel across Krynn, down into the bowels of a sorcerer’s underground fortress, to speak with dragons and steal magic swords. The cover of DCC’s rule book made me feel all that and more. It tempted me. Intrigued me.

But still, I didn’t go back to it. I was done GMing. We hadn’t role-played or even played board games in a long while. DCC was just a neat cover with some crazy rules inside. I wasn’t going to get caught up in it.

And then, about two months ago, I did. I grabbed the quick start rules again, read through them, loved the artwork, got somewhat inspired to Game Master an adventure (called “Judging” in DCC), and then told myself I was just flipping through the book to get ideas for Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess. But in the midst of my inspiration-seeking idea-getting I found out I was kinda falling in love with this game. The art. Did I mention the art? It’s so freakin’ old school it makes my ten-year-old heart swoon. The game play (especially the magic) is all about wild, unexpected and chaotic shit happening; I loved the unpredictability, the anything-goes ethos. It WAS inspiring; I felt like my fiction had become too staid, too boxed in, and then DCC came along and said, “Go ahead, do something crazy. Nothing is off-limits. Fantasy doesn’t have to fit into neat boxes.” And now I’m ready to write almost anything, to let my imagination go wild, to write as if I’m a kid again, which is what DCC makes me feel: like a kid.

And kids play. Kids make up crazy shit. Kids aren’t bound by what’s expected or what’s “part of the genre.” Kids just know what feels fun, what excites them. DCC does that. It’s the rpg that speaks to my inner twelve-year-old.

I feel like games can be an awesome source of inspiration. They aren’t “literature” in the typical sense, but they do possess many of the features of narrative: setting, characters, conflict. With tabletop rpgs especially, players are encouraged to create a story together, to weave a narrative from the various numbers and statistics and dice rolls of the game. And with board games too, the imaginative elements are there for crafting stories. What else is the book Jumanji all about, after all? As soon as I finished rereading the DCC quick start rules this last time, I started writing a short story based on the zero-level funnel included in the book, “Portal Under the Stars.” Rpg fan fiction, basically. Something I have never done in my life, but DCC inspired me to do.

So yeah. I bought the core book. I’m reading it now and having all kinds of ideas. I haven’t GMed a game yet (planning on doing a modified version of Beyond the Silver Scream), but when I do, I hope it’s as fun and kick-ass as the game in my head. Regardless of whether I play the game or not, DCC still serves as fertile ground for my own storytelling. The feeling of the book — the vibe it gives off — is energizing. It fills me with the gusto I need to be creative.

The Things That Shaped Me: Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves

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Image courtesy of AV Club

OKAY, so Kevin Costner is kinda ridiculous in this movie: his “accent,” his blow-dried hair, his not-British-ness. He makes Christian Slater look like Daniel Day-Lewis. But hot damn, I LOVED this movie as a kid! Yes, I had ALL THE ACTION FIGURES.

(And secretly, I still love it. Watched it with my husband a couple of years ago, and even though we made fun of it in places, we got caught up in the story, in the adventure, in the fabulous over-acting of the fabulous Alan Rickman. *sniff* RIP, Sir. Also, THIS COMMENT on the AV Club article I linked above sums up my feelings about this movie EXACTLY. Just go read it and relive the Prince of Thieves memories.)

This move is not high art. It’s a big Hollywood blockbuster from an era when big Hollywood blockbusters were a bit goofy. And yes, it is dated. But it’s fun. And it’s larger-than-life. There is something exhilarating about it, despite the silliness and awkwardness. I got the movie soundtrack as a Christmas present last year, just to relive old memories, and I swear, as soon as that opening fanfare kicked into gear, my heart was soaring and I wanted to go sword fighting and adventuring and storming the castle right then and there (and yes, The Princess Bride will be a future Thing That Shaped Me post).

I’ve noticed over the last few years that swashbuckling action-adventure movies like Prince of Thieves not only don’t get made (unless the movies include Pirates and Caribbeans), but that things that do get made (various Robin Hoods, the latest King Arthur attempts, etc.) are all either too bloated, too ironic, or take themselves too seriously. Everything nowadays is done with grim “realism” (something that Prince of Thieves somewhat ushered in, with its more “gritty” aesthetic). Everything is either uber-serious or coated in irony.

There’s nothing wrong with seriousness or irony. In fact, the sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean could use a bit more seriousness (and a little less irony). But Prince of Thieves is serious without being pretentious; big without being bloated; sincere without being (too) sappy. It wears its big heart on its equally big puffy sleeves. And yes, it’s corny. And yes, Costner is not really very good at big speeches or British accents. But the look of the film is fantastic. When I played imaginary Robin Hood adventures as a kid, in my mind’s eye, I was seeing THIS version of England, with its lush forests, gurgling brooks, stony castles, and sunlit glades.

I’m listening to the Prince of Thieves soundtrack right now and my soul is roused. For all its “grittiness” at the time, Prince of Thieves is really a sweeping classic adventure. I’m curious if a film like that would work today. Could a story with that much sincerity and bigheartedness and over-the-top cheese survive our jaded culture? I’m not sure. It’s a flawed film that rightly deserves some snark. But all I know is that “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” is coming up next on my stereo, and I’m gonna listen to it and love it without a hint of irony.

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