Lift Up Your Hearts! All will be set right, out of the depths of sorrow, and of sacrifice · 4:47pm Sep 11th, 2015
(Readers of The Night is Passing please check the bottom of this post for a request you might find fun!)
Please watch this. Because its amazing.
I've been writing a LOT and doing it QUICKLY haven't I? Geeze its weird. I blame the insane amount of reading I've done. FOE: Project Horizons? That's over a million horsewords folks, and I'm on chapter 31 after two school days. And before that, half of SSE's gallery and End of Ponies. And I also brought back some Donita K. Paul from home, which I am kinda excited about.
Donita K. Paul is pretty awesome. She's probs the coolest grandma ever because she's writing fantasy perfectly targeted at a younger audience that is still enjoyable and in some ways even more so enjoyable to an adult. It's refreshing, earnest, heartfelt and honest without feeling preachy or unreal. Reading her dragon books always made me happy when I was younger, because even when things got hairy and the bad guys were out in force, those books were full of joy. I'm looking forward to reading them again. For like the fifth time.
Do you reread much?
I do. The book I've read the most? This one.
That Hideous Strength is the probably the most obscure thing C. S. Lewis ever wrote. Did you know he wrote sci fi? Cause he did, and he wrote a whole trilogy. Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength in that order, and while the second has some notoriety, the third is my favorite. It's the Lewis book that Orwell read and liked and agreed with before he got into writing 1984. (Lewis actually beat him to the punch by 4 years, and personally I think he was influenced by Hideous Strength's N.I.C.E. organization and their madness.) I've read this book something like... ten times? At least?
There's a scene in there, or really about half a chapter, that I hope I can one day match. Mark Studdock, the useless, slimy, pathetic male "protagonist" (in a sense) is in deep trouble with the evil NICE, a conspiracy of alliance between megalomania and nihilism. He has gotten himself trusted for candidacy for the Inner Ring of this pack of hell hounds, and his test for admittance is not so much a test as it is conditioning.
I like that part so much because the whole book, when we're with Mark, he has hemmed and hawed over moral choices. He has seen bad things happen right in front of him, been complicit in evil, even apologized and defended it as "necessary" but suddenly when confronted with it himself, when asked to commit petty evils, he can no longer fool himself. In trying to instill the casual cruelty some mistake for strength, his masters have erred. They meant to teach him to sneer and they instead teach him to weep; He has a friggin' moral awakening and its breath taking. It's incomplete, hazy, almost pathetic in its naive weakness, but a newly revived conscience is a beautiful thing.
TNIP news: Work on Night continues, always. Jannah Interlude II is now out, and its a bit of a doozy of weirdness. Jannah III will be the last chapter taking place in Jannah and you can take that how you want to. This means it is going to be long and it is going to involve me bleeding all my insecurities on a google doc for twice as long as normal. Not sure how long this is gonna take me, honestly. I might have it done in a week and a half. I might not have it done until this time next month. I'd rather that the chapter fall somewhere in between.
I've tagged this story with TNIP for a few reasons: First, I wanted to warn you guys that this third Jannah chapter... I don't know how long it will take. It will NOT take more than a month, and that's all I can guarantee. I swear on my father's face and my mother's voice that if I take more than 25 days I will post the google doc on a blog and let you guys read it early if you want to. Hold me to that. Why? Because the more time I waste, the more tired I will be in the long run. I have run the race, I wish to see the fiction meet its fate. I want to see its fulfillment as badly as any of you do.
Also, I wanted to ask you guys for some help. Got any music that you think would fit Jannah or Canterlot right now in the story? I'm running low on music for Jannah and some new tunes might help me push through my fatigue. Share below if you got this far.
If you read THIS far then ask and I will share a Cat Fact from my facebook. (I had a thirty or so comment thread where anyone who commented got a Cat Fact. They got progressively more surreal)
I don't want no fuckin' cat facts. Gimmie burrito facts instead.
Also I guess I gotta go check out Donita's dragons now. Tell me where to start.
3384558 Burrito Facts: Burritos are sentient creatures.
DragonSpell is the first book in her first dragon riders series. It's like Narnia in a LOT of ways, except Paladin is nowhere as cool as Aslan who is da coolest. She actually is technically on staff as a volunteer at a church in Colorado Springs. What for? Story teller. She writes things for kids and she tells them stories. It's super cute.
3384625 you probably should be
Plaintive and especially dark if you know what's going on in the story/game at that point.
While the 'Mother' in the lyrics could refer to the (semi-) antagonist Zulf's own mother, vaporized in The Calamity along with nearly everyone else, fans speculate instead that it refers to his people's goddess of loss and longing, know as 'Micia, the Lorn Mother'. Either he's finally accepted that death is coming inexorably, or that he deserves it, or that he prefers it to facing the future, or perhaps all three.
I can picture Twilight standing over the burning body of the dead Zebra, not knowing any Zebra funerary songs, when this little dirge comes to mind unbidden. It's the sort of thing she might have half-heard once when the world was brighter and she had less need of laments.
Also, if we're leaving Jannah, we have some idea where Twilight (at least) is headed:
Fuck yeah Space Trilogy. Hobo Merlin for President 2016.
Have you ever read Lewis' The Dark Tower manuscript? If you haven't, you ought to sometime. It's an incomplete, aborted sequel to Silent Planet which would have taken the series is an even stranger direction.
swear ta gahd 'm gunna catch up wit' dis story one o' dese years :V
This is what Jannah makes me think of instinctively. I think the whispering and discordant, menacing rhythm is what does it for me. Although, at the same time, I think it's a bit off, in that it doesn't rouse the same kind of feelings that your story does for me.
This song, I think, captures the tone right for me. I also think the name is bizarrely appropriate.
Give me a dragon fact. Dragons are basically scaly cats, anyhow.
3385246 all dragons are dirty Commies
yes hello i was told that i could here request a free feline fact?
3385676
We totally are.
Music for Jannah. Going with prog rock and a little lofi.
Neutral Milk Hotel. A band i hated in high school because even I thought their concept album (In the Aeroplane over the Sea) was too pretentious. And my favorite band is Radiohead, for God's sake. I discovered them anew about a year ago. At least 15 years too late for the bandwagon, as usual.
Coheed and Cambria's "Ten Speed of God's Blood and Burial." From the gold standard for concept albums in the Aughts. Is called "Good Apollo, I'm burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear through the eyes of Madness". And you thought "The Night is Passing" was too long of a title.
The third volume of the Claudio Sanchez's graphic novels. This one was written from the perspective of the author of the other volumes. I believe in this song, the Writer is arguing with his Ten Speed bike about whether to kill off the character Ambellina, who is the mary sue in the Writer's graphic novel for the Writer's love interest. Oh, also, the Writer may be aware that he is a character in a graphic novel. Or something. Because prog rock.
For something a little heavier and slightly less mad, the track before, coming home:
Lol like cynewulf doesn't know coheed.
I'll dig through my iPod for something good. Probably something like HIM's Vampire Heart. You should also listen to That Hideous Strength by Thrice. They do a lot of Lewis references.
I'm also thinking Jefferson Airplane. and that I needs my cat fact
3385754 I offered cat facts to all commenters on a Facebook status. There were so many cat facts. Cat Fact: Cats invented humans in the 19th century to replace sentient AI, whom they were bored with
3384983 ain't read it but know bout it. Man I love the space trilogy
3385171 Dark Souls was mean to me. It stole my lunch, called my mom fat, and pushed me in the mud at preschool. :P but a beautiful game.
3386192 Man, Coheed is my favorite band! :D Good Apollo 2 was my first Coheed Album, but my favorite is probs In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth. Good Apollo 1 has that awesome crazy dark vibe tho
I have a story on here called Absolution that was written almost exclusively to their Afterman albums.
3384954 aw man I love Bastion. Gonna build that wallll up to the skyyyyy-yyyy
Thanks for la musacks!
You're reading all of Project Horizons right now? All the way through?
I think it was around chapter fifty-something that I lost the ability to read the whole chapter and just read a little of the beginning and a little of the end. I was still able to piece together the story in spite of that.
3394095 I'd have to check my phone, but I think I'm on 56? I've been reading constantly. More than I should. Shit I should do school at some point... aw well.
My initial read through didn't reach 50. Blackjack having crazy delusional sex with Stygius infuriated me to no end. It was an almost physical pain--in a lot of ways, I felt personally betrayed. By Blackjack. I get really invested in characters. I saw some of myself in both her goodness and her self destructive, self targeted badness. When that happened... I was so angry.
I skipped that chapter this time, because I already knew what happened, and I find that I am way happier than I was with it. I might finish it by tomorrow or wednesday.