On Reading, Writing, the Malaise, and Fantasy Literature

I am currently reading Luke's Gospel, Tolkien's Roverandom, and Rossignol's This Gaming Life. Luke is challenging me, but I'm not sure I'm rising up to the challenge. I like Roverandom so far. It is much more whimsical than Tolkien's other pieces as it is a children's story, even moreso than The Hobbit, in fact. The introduction to This Gaming Life seems to be out to prove a point in defending the value of games by arguing for their ability to sharpen the mental reflexes of gamers and increase their ability to process information from multiple sources simultaneously. That's all well and good, but I look forward to seeing what else he has to say about video games and gamer culture.

I'm considering enrolling in a course on Creative Fiction next semester as an elective, so I've been thinking lately about what kind of fiction I might write. I would like to write about the Malaise, but I'll have to come at it from my own angle. How does one such as me write about the Malaise in a way that people understand? The Malaise, for me, seems to stem out of tasks of mental abstraction. Ironically, some of the things I most love--computers and games--seem to be the triggers for the abstraction of my self from itself. If I want to write about the Malaise, I will have to relate it to those things somehow.

Of course, I could also make an attempt at fantasy literature, as I have had an interest in doing since my childhood. I tend to feel very critical of modern fantasy literature. Tolkien invented the genre and very few have done anything truly original with it since then. For some reason, fantasy novelists seem incapable of separating the genre of fantasy from the epic scale it participates in within Tolkien's literature. My theory is that most fantasy novelists would be better off sticking to smaller adventures, or fantastical travelogues, rather than trying to create their own worlds. Maybe I just feel this way because Fellowship was my favorite of the trilogy and I think a lot can be done with the journey theme, but I also know that Tolkien spent years crafting Middle Earth, and he did it from his viewpoint as a linguist--it seems a little foolhardy for so many authors to try to start where he finished.

My Introduction to the Sacred Romance

Hello. I haven't made a real entry in a while, and seeing as I had a new "follower" (Hello Aubrey; however did you find my blog?) I thought I'd make a quick one now.

I've been reading this great book called The Sacred Romance, it's written by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge. It's a book about the Great Story (or "the Sacred Romance") behind every one of our lives; ultimately, it's a book about God's passionate love and desire for us.

Most of us will agree that our lives are stories. They have some kind of plot (even if we don't know what it is), main characters, moments that makes us want to weep with sorrow, and moments that make us want to jump for joy.

What kind of story is this, though? Is it a love story? Is it a war story? Could it be both? Is it a tragedy? Is it some kind of modern comedy? Is it a fairy-tale?

Where can we find the answers to these questions? If we look at the whole thing, taken together, we can find the answers in the Bible. The Sacred Romance shows us how.

I highly recommend you take a look at the book. These podcasts are also excellent.