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This week: The Moon Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god, but a great rock, and the sun a hot rock.
-Anaxagoras
The earth together with its surrounding waters must in fact have such a shape as its shadow reveals, for it eclipses the moon with the arc of a perfect circle.
-Nicolaus Copernicus
There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.
-George Carlin
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The moon is dark.
Oh, I don't mean it's in shadow. Half of it always is, just like every other world. I mean that, on average, the surface features of the moon absorb more light than they reflect. They're a kind of dark gray. The only reason we perceive it as bright is because the sun is very, very bright and that makes the moon the brightest thing in the night sky or the second brightest thing in the day sky.
In other words, the moon is dark, but pretty much everything else is darker.
It's been proposed that the moon is one reason we're here to study it and other things in the sky. Ancient tides would have left early marine life stranded on land, and most creatures died - but some evolved, and spread across the land, and eventually some of them became us.
The moon helped to make us, just as surely as the sun did.
And tides were bigger back then, because the moon was much closer, an enormous ruddy orb in the prehistoric sky, like one of those otherworldly paintings you sometimes see on science fiction book covers. It's been retreating ever since, slowly, inch by inch, as a result of those tides - or possibly, because it desperately wants to see the rest of the galaxy up close.
Long after everyone who's reading this is gone, the moon will be much smaller in the sky. It will cross the sun occasionally as it does now, but it will no longer blot the sun entirely. It will more properly be called a transit than an eclipse, assuming there are people around to call it anything. The epoch where the moon is usually the same size as the sun, and often matches it perfectly in a total eclipse, is short by cosmic timescales. This epoch just happens to coincide with a time when there are organisms on earth that can look up and understand what an eclipse is. There's no reason for this, no correlation.
As far as we know.
And we've been there, some few of us. In the greatest triumph of human science and vision, we've been there.
And yet, the moon still inspires poets and philosophers, dreamers and musicmakers. Its shine may be a mere pale reflection of the light of that giant fusion reaction at the center of the solar system, but it is real, and it is still an inspiration and a symbol of something to strive for.
So, shoot for the moon. If you miss, you'll be adrift in airless space forever. |
Just some lunatic writings...
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Last time, in "Holding Back" , I talked about what not to talk about.
Elfin Dragon-finally published  : I love that you used "Pulp Fiction" as an example for this newsletter. Tarantino, I think, has some tremendous plot twists with his backstories in his films. But I agree on using backstory carefully when writing. It's how I'm actually starting my own novel because my character has lived such a long life. I drop little bits so readers will get to know her better as the novel goes on.
While Pulp Fiction isn't fantasy by strict definition, good writing is good writing and transcends genre. But the way he plays with time in that movie is one example of how to reveal some of the backstory - a lot of "future" scenes make more sense when you come to a "past" scene.
Lawless - Proud Pantser  : One thing I feel I should bring up on the subject of revealing things slowly...
While I agree with the idea, one must keep in mind that, especially in Fantasy, there can be a group of however many people, creatures, races, whatever, and there will be different motivations for each. In my WIP I don't have many characters, but each of them have their own reasons for doing what they are doing.
I don't think the trick is so much in revealing things slowly as much as it is in picking WHO'S motivations you are going to make the focus.
The obvious answer would seem to be the MC, of course. But you will normally have at least two or three other "not quite" MC type characters that you can use to keep the reader from looking too hard in a direction (the motivations of the main MC) that you may not want them looking.
Agreed in principle - the only thing I'm really warning against is telling us all about the characters up front rather than showing us their characters as the story progresses. You can say "Randalf was a brave man" all you want, but it only becomes etched in a reader's mind when he faces down a dragon - or whatever.
And that's it for me for October - see you in November! Until then,
DREAM ON!!!
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Fantasy: October 22, 2014 Issue [#6618]
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