Is absolutely vital. As they are the ones who inspire the Audience/Reader to attempt and to Do Great and Important Things.
Yet every Secondary Character is also of enormous import as they are the ones who inspire the Main Character to attempt and to Do Great and Important Things. So in your Own Life, and in Real Life, always be the Main Character, but in the lives of others be a necessary and outstanding Secondary Character.
from Form and Function, The Literate Man’s Guide to Real Life
I disagreed with him on many things. I thought him an outright fool on more than one issue and occasion.
(Yes, yes, I know how literary “icons” and the modern intelligentsia and the types of men who believe politics to be the answer to all existence – human or otherwise – like to cluster around each other to breathlessly and mutually glorify their own supposed genius. But I am far more skeptical of “modern genius” in all its many fictional forms. As a matter of fact I rarely see any real evidence of the supposed “modern genius” of self-styled “modern geniuses,” and their numberless cohorts, ever, or at all.)
But narrowing his views down to the strictly literary disciplines I did often agree with him on these scores: there is a new illiteracy (not in the inability to read and write, but in the poverty of having ever read or written anything of any real value at all), and letter writing is dead and with it much of higher human writing.
Otherwise the Grass is dead too. I doubt it will ever green again.
Author of The Tin Drum and figure of enduring controversy
Günter Grass
Monday 13 April 2015 05.38 EDT
Last modified on Monday 13 April 2015 09.40 EDT
The writer Günter Grass, who broke the silences of the past for a generation of Germans, has died in hospital in Lübeck at the age of 87.
German president Joachim Gauck led the tributes, offering his condolences to the writer’s widow Ute Grass. “Günter Grass moved, enthralled, and made the people of our country think with his literature and his art,” he said in a statement. “His literary work won him recognition early across the world, as witnessed not least by his Nobel prize.”
“His novels, short stories, and his poetry reflect the great hopes and fallacies, the fears and desires of whole generations,” the statement continued.
Tributes began to appear within minutes of the announcement of Grass’ death on Twitter by his publisher, Steidl.
In the UK, Salman Rushdie was one of the first authors to respond, tweeting:
The Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk had warm personal memories: “Grass learned a lot from Rabelais and Celine and was influential in development of ‘magic realism’ and Marquez. He taught us to base the story on the inventiveness of the writer no matter how cruel, harsh and political the story is,” he said.
He added: “In April 2010 when there was a mushroom cloud over Europe he was in Istanbul and stayed more than he planned. We went to restaurants and drank and drank and talked and talked … A generous, curious and a very warm friend who also wanted to be a painter at first!”
A life in writing: Günter Grass
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Grass found success in every artistic form he explored – from poetry to drama and from sculpture to graphic art – but it wasn’t until publication of his first novel, The Tin Drum, in 1959 that he found the international reputation which brought him the Nobel prize for literature 40 years later. A speechwriter for the German chancellor Willy Brandt, Grass was never afraid to use the platform his fame afforded, campaigning for peace and the environment and speaking out against German reunification, which he compared to Hitler’s “annexation” of Austria.
Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig – now Gdansk – in 1927, “almost late enough”, as he said, to avoid involvement with the Nazi regime. Conscripted into the army in 1944 at the age of 16, he served as a tank gunner in the Waffen SS, bringing accusations of betrayal, hypocrisy and opportunism when he wrote about it in his 2006 autobiography, Peeling the Onion.
The writer was surprised by the strength of the reaction, arguing that he thought at the time that the SS was merely “an elite unit”, that he had spoken openly about his wartime record in the 1960s, and that he had spent a lifetime “working through” the unquestioning beliefs of his youth in his writing. His war came to an end six months later having “never fired a shot”, when he was wounded in Cottbus and captured in a military hospital by the US army. That he avoided committing war crimes was “not by merit”, he insisted. “If I had been born three or four years earlier I would, surely, have seen myself caught up in those crimes.”
Instead he trained as a stonemason, studied art in Düsseldorf and Berlin, and joined Hans Werner Richter’s Group 47 alongside writers such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Heinrich Böll. After moving to Paris in 1956 he began working on a novel which told the story of Germany in the first half of the 20th century through the life of a boy who refuses to grow.
A sprawling mixture of fantasy, family saga, bildungsroman and political fable, The Tin Drum was attacked by critics, denied the Bremen literature prize by outraged senators, burned in Düsseldorf and became a global bestseller.
Günter Grass is my hero, as a writer and a moral compass
John Irving
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Speaking to the Swedish Academy in 1999, Grass explained that the reaction taught him “that books can cause offence, stir up fury, even hatred, that what is undertaken out of love for one’s country can be taken as soiling one’s nest. From then on I have been controversial.”
A steady stream of provocative interventions in debates around social justice, peace and the environment followed, alongside poetry, drama, drawings and novels. In 1977 Grass tackled sexual politics, hunger and the rise of civilisation with a 500-page version of the Grimm brothers’ fairytale The Fisherman and His Wife. The Rat (1986) explored the apocalpyse, as a man dreams of a talking rat who tells him of the end of the human race, while 1995’s Too Far Afield explored reunification through east German eyes – prompting Germany’s foremost literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, to brand the novel a “complete and utter failure” and to appear on the cover of Der Spiegel ripping a copy in half.
His last novel, 2002’s Crabwalk, dived into the sinking of the German liner Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945, while three volumes of memoir – Peeling the Onion, The Box and Grimms’ Words – boldly ventured into troubled waters.
Germany’s political establishment responded immediately to the news of Grass’s death. The head of the German Green party, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, called Grass a “great author, a critical spirit. A contemporary who had the ambition to put himself against the Zeitgeist.”
“Günter Grass was a contentious intellectual – his literary work remains formidable,” tweeted the head of the opposition Free Democratic party, Christian Lindner.
Günter Grass in quotes: 12 of the best
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The foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was “deeply dismayed” at the news of the author’s death, a tweet from his ministry said.
Steinmeier is a member of the Social Democratic party, which Grass had a fraught relationship with – after campaigning for the party in 1960s and 70s, he became a member in 1982, only to leave ten years later in protest at its asylum policies.
“Günter Grass was a contentious intellectual who interfered. We sometimes miss that today,” SPD chairwoman Andrea Nahles said.
While there were plenty of tributes recognising Grass as one of Germany’s most important post-war writers, social media users swiftly revived many of the controversies of his divisive career, bringing up his membership of the SS and his alleged anti-Semitism.
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Speaking to the Paris Review in 1991, Grass made no apology for his abiding focus on Germany’s difficult past. “If I had been a Swedish or a Swiss author I might have played around much more, told a few jokes and all that,” he said. “That hasn’t been possible; given my background, I have had no other choice.”
The controversy flared up again following by publication of his 2012 poem What Must be Said, in which he criticised Israeli policy. Published simultaneously in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Italian La Repubblica and Spanish El País, the poem brought an angry response from the Israeli ambassador to Germany, Shimon Stein, who saw in it “a disturbed relationship to his own past, the Jews, and Israel”.
Despite his advanced age, Grass still led an active public life, and made vigorous public appearances in recent weeks. In a typically opinionated interview for state broadcaster WDR, which he gave in February after a live reading from Grimms’ Words, Grass called his last book a “declaration of love to the German language”.
He also talked about how the internet and the loss of the art of letter-writing had led to a “new illiteracy”. “Of course that has consequences,” he said. “It leads to a poverty of language and allows everything to be forgotten that the Grimm brothers created with their glorious work.”
He also remained critical of western policy in the Middle East (“now we see the chaos we make in those countries with our western values”), and talked about how his age had done nothing to soften his political engagement.
“I have children and grandchildren, I ask myself every day: ‘what are we leaving behind for them?’ When I was 17, at the end of the war, everything was in ruins, but our generation, whether for good reason or not, had hope, we wanted to shape the future. That’s very difficult for young people today, because the future is virtually fixed for them.”
Real Reading is far more than just mentally decoding terms and words, it is psychologically apprehending and comprehending the very most subtle and sublime ideas and ideals that it is possible for man to ever understand.
Real Writing is far more than just encoding and transcribing phrases, it is transmitting, mind to mind and soul to soul, the very marrow of manhood and the very embodiment of human experience through script, so that it may be read again whenever needed into the design of the future.
My personal take on the true nature of real reading and real writing
I almost never face Writer’s Block. I almost always have the opposite problem, too many ideas to pursue at once.
But for those who do have Writer’s Block problems then maybe this will help.
by Maria Popova
“When you have made a thorough and reasonably long effort, to understand a thing, and still feel puzzled by it, stop, you will only hurt yourself by going on.”
In addition to having authored my all-time favorite book, Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll was a man of extraordinary and frequently prescient wisdom on matters of everyday life — his nine commandments of letter-writing offer timely insight into how we can make modern digital communication more civil, and his four rules for digesting information are a saving grace for our age of information overload. In The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (public library; free download), this blend of timelessness and timelines so characteristic of Carroll’s thinking comes vibrantly ablaze, but nowhere more so than in an 1885 letter to one of his child-friends, a young lady named Edith Rix.
Carroll addresses the age-old question of how to overcome creative block. More than a century before psychologists identified the essential role of taking breaks in any intense creative endeavor, and long before our earliest formal theories about the stages of the creative process, Carroll offers spectacularly prescient counsel on how to work through creative difficulty and seemingly unsolvable problems — a testament to the fact that in the study of creativity, psychology often simply names and formalizes the intuitive insights artists have had for centuries, if not millennia.
Carroll offers young Edith three tips:
When you have made a thorough and reasonably long effort, to understand a thing, and still feel puzzled by it, stop, you will only hurt yourself by going on. Put it aside till the next morning; and if then you can’t make it out, and have no one to explain it to you, put it aside entirely, and go back to that part of the subject which you do understand. When I was reading Mathematics for University honors, I would sometimes, after working a week or two at some new book, and mastering ten or twenty pages, get into a hopeless muddle, and find it just as bad the next morning. My rule was to begin the book again. And perhaps in another fortnight I had come to the old difficulty with impetus enough to get over it. Or perhaps not. I have several books that I have begun over and over again.
His second tip is particularly noteworthy for the way it compares and contrasts Carroll’s two domains of genius, writing and mathematics — for, lest we forget, behind the pen name Lewis Carroll always remained the brilliant mathematician and logician Charles Dodgson. He writes:
My second hint shall be — Never leave an unsolved difficulty behind. I mean, don’t go any further in that book till the difficulty is conquered. In this point, Mathematics differs entirely from most other subjects. Suppose you are reading an Italian book, and come to a hopelessly obscure sentence — don’t waste too much time on it, skip it, and go on; you will do very well without it. But if you skip a mathematical difficulty, it is sure to crop up again: you will find some other proof depending on it, and you will only get deeper and deeper into the mud.
In a way, this dichotomy also illuminates the difference between reading and writing. Writing is almost mathematical, in the sense that it requires a clarity of logic in order for the writer to carry the plot forward. A reader may be able to read over a muddled sentence and still follow the plot — but only if that sentence was unmuddled for the writer in carrying the plot forward. In that sense, while Carroll’s advice to Edith considers her experience as a reader, his advice to a writer regarding creative block would be more closely aligned with the mathematician’s experience — if a writer were to skip over a difficulty in the construction of a story, which is essentially a logical difficulty, it too “is sure to crop up again.”
Illustration by Tove Jansson for ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ Click image for more.
Carroll’s third tip is at once remarkably simple and remarkably challenging to apply for anyone who has ever tussled with the mentally draining but spiritually sticky process of creative problem-solving:
My third hint is, only go on working so long as the brain is quite clear. The moment you feel the ideas getting confused leave off and rest, or your penalty will be that you will never learn Mathematics at all!
The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll is a wonderful read in its entirety, full of the beloved author’s thoughts on happiness, morality, religion, identity, and much more. Complement it with the best illustrations from 150 years of Alice in Wonderland, then fortify this particular bit with the psychology of the perfect writing routine and more ideas on overcoming creative block from Brian Eno, Carole King, and some of today’s most exciting creators.
It has occurred to me in the past that if God is omniscient, omniprescient, and omnipresent (and He would be as a part of his natural set of attributes or He wouldn’t be God now would He) then there is no way the human soul can be ultimately eradicated or destroyed. As a matter of fact the same could be said of anything and everything – ultimately. As long as God has created it (it exists) and as long as it is observed (continuously) then it cannot be eradicated.
For if God is omniscient and omnipresent and omniprescient then two things are occurring simultaneously (if the term simultaneously even applies – actually a new term should be developed, such as omnitaneously) from God’s point of view – 1) time has no meaning whatsoever and simply does not exist (at least not as we think of time – with past, present, and future and in relation to space or spatial consequences), and 2) God’s observational clarity of anything and everything is absolutely perfect at all times (both in and out of what we think of as time).
Therefore given these two things – time being meaningless as an observational factor to God, and God possessing perfect observational clarity and perception at all times it therefore becomes impossible (metaphysically and physically – or in any other way) for God to observe the absolute dissolution or destruction of anything.
Everything God observes is in a continual state of existence at all times, even while it is being destroyed (in relation to other things). It is impossible for God to “look away” and to be unobservant and therefore you are left with a very bizarre and totally unique application and occurrence of the “Observational (Effect) Phenomenon.” (It also happens to be a peculiarly unique application of the Laws of Conservation.)
As long as God observes something it cannot be destroyed, and God is always observing everything everywhere perfectly.
I call this unique God perception of all events, objects and times the Zero-Effect, the Zero (or God) Observational Phenomenon, or the Un-Unobservability Effect. It might also be called The Law of Observational Constancy or Conservation.
I have had this idea for some time but it has recently occurred to me that I might be able to devise a mathematical proof to express the idea.
I am going to write an essay on the matter and attempt to devise a corresponding proof.
Excellent little article on a simple mnemonic technique. As many of you know this is a subject which has fascinated and interested me for decades. So I’m gonna recreate my response to the article here:
I first became familiar with ancient and Medieval mnemonic techniques after reading the book, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, which still has a favorite place in my personal library. I highly recommend the book. I was in college at the time. After that I spent about ten years researching ancient and Medieval mnemonic techniques.
After that I built a memory palace in my own mind, and eventually that led me to build a Memory City in my own mind called Agapolis. Complete with maps and buildings and parks and so forth. I might have already mentioned Agapolis here, I think I might have. The design I adapted from the City of Constantinople (New Rome).
Eventually after reading some of the works of Archimedes (on mind-laboratories) I turned Agapolis into a real city (still just in my mind) with laboratories, churches, temples, stadiums, banks, hospitals, parks, places I can live, study, write, etc. This kind of city I am sometimes tempted to call a Civis Imaginaria, but I still have yet to develop a term I’m really satisfied with.
Now if I’m sick I visit the hospital in Agapolis to help with my illness or injury. If I want to write I go to one of my writing retreats in Agapolis and write in my head if I can’t on my computer, and thereby store the story or poem or song there for later retrieval. I do that a lot while working outside, then retrieve the whatever it is later on from my head.
If I’m working on a scientific project or a math problem or an invention I go to the Museus (originally Greek museums, such as in Alexandria) were not artifact storehouses, but invention laboratories) in Agapolis and work the project there.
If I want to work on a business project then I go to one of the offices there.
If I want to talk or hang out with God I go to one of the churches or temples or to the countryside outside of the city.
Yes, I still use the buildings and objects and people (I populate the city with famous people from history as well as fictional characters I’d like to hang out with or talk to) as memory storage and retrieval tools but I also use all of those things for much wider applications as well.
I recommend it.
__________________________________________________
In the memory forum, Cole linked to a fascinating illustration of a memory palace for memorizing historical dates.
I’ve re-posted the illustration here:
I found a short description here:
The “Temple of Time” is a three-dimensional projection of historical chronography. In the temple, the vertical columns represent centuries, with those on the right showing names of important figures from the Old World while those on the left show figures from the New World. The floor shows a historical stream chart. The ceiling functions as a chart of biography.
The “Temple of Time,” created in 1846 by the pioneering American girls’ educator Emma Willard, draws on the tradition of Renaissance “memory theaters,” mnemonic devices that allowed people to memorize information by imagining it as architectural details in a three-dimensional mental space.
Here is the link to the Mnemonics article: http://blog.mnemotechnics.org/memorizing-historical-dates-using-a-memory-palace-1916.html
Here is the link to the Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci: http://www.amazon.com/The-Memory-Palace-Matteo-Ricci/dp/0140080988
It being Sunday and all I thought I’d post this. Ordinarily I would put a post like this on my personal blog, the Missal. But I haven’t imported it to WordPress yet.
My friend Edie Melson put up a very interesting post on the Line between the Secular and the Sacred. I responded but I think my response was too long for her blog to eat. But because I too find this subject so fascinating I’m posting my response here. You’ll find her post link at the end of my post.
_______________________________________________________________________________
“I thought many of the responses were quite excellent. And this is a topic that interests me intensely Edie so I appreciate you discussing it.
This is my opinion on the matter:
There shouldn’t be such an imaginary line between the Sacred and the Secular. In my studies for the priesthood I learned that the early church did not use the term secular in the way it later came to be adopted (what in Latin and English would be to us the term: profanus). Rather they used the term as a type of classification of the laity and the secular clergy, meaning clergy of the people rather than the Ecclesiastical hierarchy (administration) of the church itself.
Therefore the early church did not classify the world as Sacred and Secular but rather of Godly and of the People, or put another way, as we would say, the Laity.
That’s a totally different view of Sacred and Secular than the current modern one and modern set of definitions and a far more accurate way of looking at Sacred and Secular to me than the one normally assumed by modern people. For rather than meaning it is an uncrossable line (pun intended) it is rather a People moving along a pathway towards becoming ever more holy and Godlike.
As for shaming Christ I don’t think you can. I do not disagree at all that certain behaviors are Christ-like in nature and certain other kinds of behaviors are not Christ-like in nature and that Christ will always choose his followers to pursue the Christ-like behaviors. That is not my point and I so I don’t want people thinking I’m disputing that fact. I am not.
On the other hand it is simply a huge mistake to assume (and if you read the New Testament carefully it is impossible to assume) that Christ went unexposed to or was naïve and ignorant of the very worst forms of human behavior. They were all around him, he saw them constantly and spoke of all of them. Murderers, thieves, cheats, rapists, Zealots (so called because to the Romans they were what we would call terrorists and to many Jews they were guerillas), adulterers, drunks, brawlers, sinners of all kinds. Jesus saw and heard and lived in and around things that most sheltered, comfortable, protected, mild-mannered, middle-class, Western “Christians of today” would not long endure and could not long endure. Many modern Western Christians are simply too pansyish and fragile and intentionally self-sheltered to have long endured the currents in which Christ swam. Christ’s world tended to be far more brutal than many of our modern ones, especially most of modern American society. You could immediately and easily shame many modern Christians by simply uttering the word “Damn!” in a fit of anger, you could not do that with Christ. He constantly and easily saw and heard much, much worse. It did not shame him at all.
(And in that sense I mean you could not shame him. Now real evil did anger him, and often easily so, and that’s an entirely different story, but you could not shame Jesus with either petty vices or great evil as he was entirely unafraid of either. You could not shame Jesus with wrong because he understood human nature far too well and was far too used to being daily exposed to all facets of human nature. Unlike many modern Christians who go out of their way to avoid any exposure to sin or vice and certainly many seek to avoid evil at all costs – because it so easily frightens them and makes them so uncomfortable. Jesus on the other hand was a daily hand to hand combatant with both minor vices and with great human evils. And his share of supernatural ones. You could not shame or embarrass him away from such things. He sought them out.)
Believe me, read the Bible carefully, especially in Greek and you will know that many of the Apostles and Disciples were far more “profane” than the vast majority of modern Christians. (At least in public.) Yet many of those ancient and early Christians also tended to be far more Christ-like (and self-sacrificial, and unafraid of evil, and willing to hang around and befriend other sinners) in the really important senses of the term than many modern Christians.
And I get that and even understand the dichotomy and fully understand why so many modern Christians prefer seeking to become holy (far more like Ekklesiastical Clergymen) rather than be more like Secular Clergymen or laity (and to some degree I think it is entirely justified). They do not wish to imitate or become the very thing they eschew. On the other hand if you look at Christ and the Apostles then you just have to accept the true and real facts of the matter: they all spent the vast majority of their time at secular ministries rather than seeking self-holiness or to separate themselves from the world or its sins.
The actual Truth of the matter is that they delved and penetrated deeply into the Secular world in order to overcome sin and reform the world, thereby erasing or eliminating the line between the Sacred and the Secular. They did not seem interested in overthrowing the secular world, or of ignoring and condemning it, certainly not of hiding or sheltering themselves from it, as much as they were in reforming and rebuilding it. Keeping what was worth saving and replacing what needed to be replaced with far better things. In other words a great deal of the whole idea concerning the Kingdom of God is to make the Secular World Sacred by bringing it into complete harmony with what is truly holy in the most important ways. Small and fleeting was the time Jesus spent in the synagogues or near the Temple compared to the times he spent in the “secular world.” That is where Jesus specifically chose to spend most of his time and with good reason, it is the patient who needs the physician. Then again the physician does not fear the disease nor does the disease embarrass or shame him. His job is to cure the disease, not be repulsed by it. If he is either repulsed by it, or afraid of it, or does not wish to be made dirty or infected by it then he cannot possibly cure the disease. Only the fearless man can fix the world. The man who fears evil is the victim of evil, not its conqueror. At the very best the man who fears fights a rear-guard action, he is simply far too afraid to take the fight to the enemy. The one who actually conquers goes straight for the throat of the enemy, for you actually win by offense, not defense.
That’s true of conquering disease, and it’s true of conquering evil. Or anything else you can name for that matter.
That is, you save the world by overcoming evil and reforming the vices of the Secular World, and by not by making the Sacred World an artificial and sterile and unobtainable otherworld. You do this by making the secular world a fully Living World in which Secular Things become Sacred.
(This is not to say that I believe there are no Otherworlds, such as Heaven. I do. I have a very firm and totally unshakeable confidence in many Otherworlds, including Heaven and Hell. What I am saying is that when this world behaves in a way so similar to Heaven that if you were in either place it would be hard to tell the difference between the two, then will the Kingdom of God be complete and real victory achieved. If the dichotomy between this secular world and Heaven is so stark than many could say of our world that is is Hell instead of Heaven – and many alive today can certainly say that now – then the Kingdom of God is at best a shadow of what it could be and we have much territory yet to take. But we do not want an artificial and fake Kingdom of God on Earth, a mere impossible pretense of holiness, but one that is naturally sacred and fully secular at the same time. Meaning they’ll be practically indistinguishable from one another.)
The point therefore to me is not to create an artificially sterile and impossible Sacredness of the Secular World but rather to transform the Secular World to such a degree that all the really important things become Sacred (again) as it was actually always meant to be.
Now all of that being said I am not taking issue with the idea that Jesus would have been ashamed to do evil or to harm others. As a matter of fact it embarrassed him so much he refused to sin and to harm others.
Then again neither did he fear or feel shamed by or embarrassed by, nor did he retire from the Secular world. Instead he penetrated deep into it and fight there. The Secular world was his battlefield. The secular world was exactly where he thought the battle for the Kingdom of God ought to be really fought, and he thought if he could win there then the Kingdom of God was bound to triumph. After all you don’t reconquering territory you already possess. You seek to conquer what you don’t yet control. So Jesus fought here, and the secular world was his battlefield.
And if you ask me he was sure as hell right.
You win here and Hell itself has no where else to retreat. In a very real way the Secular World is Hell’s last battlefield.
And how do you win here?
You infiltrate. Like Jesus did.
Jesus was a master infiltrator. And he was God-awful good at it.
To the world there are always frontlines and rearlines and battlefronts and homefronts. And this frontier and that line of demarcation and on and on it goes.
To the real infiltrator there is no such line, and there are no such divisions. And there never has been and never will be.
Jesus was the master of Godly Espionage. He knew exactly how to do it.
We could learn a helluvah lot from Jesus about how you really do this, and how you really kill Hell.
You do it from the inside out. You do it by going to the heart of Mordor and killing Sauron where he lives.
Everything else is just sit around and wait for a world that will never come.”
http://thewriteconversation.blogspot.com/2014/06/weekend-worshipthe-imaginary-line.html
Yesterday I was in a highly creative and inventive mood. Don’t know why but I was firing hot all day long. So I took a break from writing my novel and instead worked on my Science-Fiction book series. About the Curae and God Technology.
I was able to invent all kinds of new things: human and alien ship designs, weapons and defensive systems, exploratory systems and capabilities (detailed designs), information and sensory systems, nanotechnology and bionanotechnology applications, etc. All of these things I was able to sketch out in a fairly well developed fashion, some of them, such as the new weapon and information and sensory systems in highly elaborate detail. I was up until 0300 making notes, drawing design sketches, etc.
Adding these things to the previous ship and drive designs I’ve created should add a great deal of flesh and structure to my science fiction series.
I don’t know why I was in this particular mood yesterday but I certainly was and I was focused like a laser on that task. The inventor in me ran crazy.
I think one of the reasons I like writing science fiction so much is that it allows me to invent into the far future. To invent things and devices which I can foresee but for which current technology and materials are insufficient to actually create as workable devices.
Actually, a small percentage of these things I can foresee as being producible in my lifetime, and concerning those things I both write fictional accounts and work them myself as part of my own invention projects. But some things I envision are obviously well beyond our current technological and scientific capabilities, and for those things I still like to develop detailed designs and sketches to give some idea to future peoples of how they might eventually be built.
Anyway yesterday was one of my Hephaestian Days. I was hot at the forge going at it hammer and tongs.
And I enjoyed it immensely.
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