Meme: Five questions from maps_or_guitars

(Five questions...comment here and I'll throw them your way!)

1) I've been re-visiting Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (whacking good yarns, if not particularly gender-issue-transcendent) and I'm steeling myself for the time when I finish the whole lot. Is there anything new that's worth reading in the sword & sorcery field, that you know of?

Believe it or not, I never really got into the whole sword & sorcery thing...for some reason it never clicked with me. I'm more of a magic fantasy person, to be honest. And if anything, I always say that you can't go wrong with Kate Elliott in that respect, because she's a damn fine writer who creates absolutely beautiful worlds.

2) Thinking back to the games you had on older platforms (say, the C=64) are there any games you'd still play if you could get them up and running on your current machine?

Every now and again I have this hankering to play Lemonade Stand and Jungle Hunt and all the other games I had on floppies in high school. I'm pretty sure they have emulators out there that have these games now, I'd just have to look for them.

3) How's the Squier working out?
Quite nicely, actually! Believe it or not, I haven't yet plugged it into the tiny practice amp I have, so I don't really know how it sounds amplified. I pick it up every now and again to practice, and I'm slowly getting back to the level I was at years ago. Which of course means I still have a hell of a long way to go to actually be good, but still...it's a hell of a lot of fun to play.

4) Have you found a beatbox yet?
Not yet, actually, but I haven't been actively looking. Any suggestions? I don't need anything big and shiny, just something that does what it needs to do and doesn't get drunk before the show. ;)

5) Onomatopoeia skills, ENGAGE: the sounds of the Republican prospective candidate of your choice being loaded into a trebuchet and flung in the general direction of a herd of buffalo.

*grunnnk* *grunnnk* *grunnk* *clik* FIRE! schwwwaaaaaaaaaAAAAAFWOOOOOOOOOMPH!* *thweeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaooooooooooowwwwwww* *skff skf nom nom mrrrp nom skff skuff* *....fffffwwwwwwaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-- *SKLORNCHT* *MROOOOOOOOOOOOWW!* *tkoink blat clonk [cuckoo-cuckoo]....BOOMF*

Scintilla Project 6: What Your Soul Sings

Q: Talk about an experience with faith, your own or someone else's.

If people ask me, I say I'm more spiritual than religious. It's not that I disavow any churches or their doctrines (outdated or conflicting though some of them may be)...I'm actually kind of fascinated by the multitude of religions and faiths out there in this crazy world. I love the idea of community in a parish, the peace of meditation, the love of earth and spirit. I was brought up Roman Catholic in a small town and enjoyed the sense of community and friendship it gave, but I walked away in college because I wanted to explore. (That's not to say I denounced my faith or my membership, I just moved away from it is all.)

In the mid-90s I had a few revelations (as it were). The first was an invitation to a circle ritual for a few Wiccans I knew. I found myself fascinated by the idea of--well, not so much a religion or an organized faith, but a mindset of peace and balance, which I desperately needed at the time. Skeptic that I sometimes am, I didn't completely and blindly give in to Wicca, but I studied it quite a bit over the course of a few years. I didn't really focus on the rituals, because they were the main reason I left the Catholic church in the first place--I found that religious ritual, over time, kind of loses its meaning for me unless I change it up now and again. I liked the idea in Wicca of not so much having a set ritual that everyone followed, but to have your own, as long as the outcome was to thank nature for what it's given you, and to follow the tenet of 'an it harm none, do as thou wilt'.

This seeped into my writing about this time. My aborted novel with Diana, True Faith, contained a number of scenes with magic of a spiritual bent. The one problem with the plot, however, was that I was trying to shoehorn a non-diametric belief system into a good-versus-evil story. I was going to hit a lot of roadblocks (not to mention step on some toes) if I kept heading down that road.

By late 1996, I'd moved on from Wicca as well as from that relationship. Not that I'd immersed myself wholly into it to begin with, but I had come to a stagnation point--I was still intrigued by its belief system, but I just couldn't quite bring myself to ever completely give into it.

Then the oddest thing popped into my life--a book about aliens. Hear me out on this one, it's kind of fun. :)

Now, this was one of your typical throwaway paperbacks you'd find in a supermarket about whether or not aliens and alien encounters were real. I picked it up partly as a lark, and partly because I was interested in why someone would believe such--I considered it research for my writing, as I kind of liked the "aliens among us" idea. What got me, though, was an intriguing spiritual theory I'd never heard before: what if the human soul wasn't just bound to Earth? What if the soul reincarnated several lifetimes, not just to learn or to 'spread the message', but just to experience life? And most of all, where would these souls come from?

My first thought was Hot Damn, that's a story line right there! And that's how the Eden Cycle was born, first as a single novel (The Phoenix Effect), then as a trilogy (A Division of Souls, The Persistence of Memories and The Process of Belief) written over the course of nearly ten years. I'm currently revising them now (I have early versions posted at edencycle in extremely friends-locked posts, if anyone's interested).

I was so intrigued by that idea that I followed it for a good few years more, reading quite a number of different books. I read Barbara Hand Clow's The Pleiadian Agenda, parts of The Urantia Book, books about Billy Meier and FIGU, visited a number of online bulletin boards, and even tried a bit of automatic writing. I took it all with a good heaping grain of salt, of course, as I wasn't expecting a spaceship to pick me up and "take me home" any time soon. What I got out of it was another sense of community and insight--it was less about blindly following what others claimed to be true, but more about focusing and parsing what I'd learned. It was sort of like a roundabout meditation, in a way.

(ETA: I should probably add that this was why I was so angry when Marshall Applewhite led the Heaven's Gate cult to a mass suicide--this was both blind following and abusive leadership, both of which I find abhorrent in spirituality.)

I let that go probably in 2000 or so, as my focus veered away from the alien spirit idea and more towards my Eden Cycle novels. I haven't really thought about spirituality or religion since then. The current political weather has made me irritable, of course, but that's really due to the blatant misinterpretation and abuse of what religion and spirituality should be about. I'm not angry at believers in general, just the ones who are exploiting their beliefs for selfish and sometimes violent ends.

If anything, I still think of myself as spiritual in a universal sort of way. I still don't expect P'Taah to come picking me up anytime soon...but when I look out into a night sky and see the countless stars out there, I'm glad I'm part of this universe too, in my own way.