It’s been a long, long day, readers. It’s past midnight here and I’ve only just finished meal prep for the week. I’m exhausted and I didn’t get to handle any writing today. Either that means I have twice as much work for tomorrow, or I start telling myself that Sunday is my personal day off.
After managing to clean up the desktop version of the site (organizing the stories to their own menus so it’d look presentable) and scheduling a review for this morning, I went to bed thinking I had made progress on this whole “Can Swift manage his own website?” question rather well.
Imagine my surprise and chagrin when I checked the Mobile version this morning and found it messed up and trying to hold to the very first design I had put down.
I’ll take a look at it later tonight and see what I need to learn to fix it. Or WordPress will do an Internet thing (update) and it’ll look nice before I log in again, this securing me in my belief that I am starting to know what I’m doing.
Let me believe, people.
With that, I’m also debating on just what else I can do here. I was also shown that I can set the site up for people to pay for certain content, so now I’m struggling with that conundrum.
Do I want people to pay me for my writing? Yes, absolutely. But do I want to make people pay me to read my stories here and not via buying a book, thus getting their money’s worth? That’s a struggle.
I’m also enjoying taking the old books I know and love and showcasing them here. I think I’ll try a couple series of this, showing stories and writers I’ve admired over the years. The problem there is that if I started, it’d only be a matter of time before I dived into the Star Wars: Expanded Universe (Legends, now that Disney said my childhood is no longer canon) sagas, and that’s one hell of a rabbit hole to dive into.
We’ll see what happens as the year progresses, but you can expect more stories, occasional essays, and more photos of family chicanery to come.
While we may consider JRR Tolkien to be the father of fantasy literature, giving us the settings, people, and cultural influences that would later help create numerous book series and uncounted D&D campaigns, I think I can be justified in saying Piers Anthony is the fun uncle of fantasy literature. Yes, you can have swords and sorcery. Yes, you can have intrigues and manipulations.
But you can also have puns. Puns, just everywhere, and the story is just as wonderful to readers young and old.
I was first introduced to this book series when I was around 12 years old (making that a 24 year-long fanboy of me, and shameless in admitting it) and with this book, I learned two very critical things to writing: it’s okay to not take your work so seriously that you can’t use humor, and writing humor is hard work and should be taken seriously.
This is coming from someone who is so socially awkward that he does feel the need to practice jokes in his head before he ever tries them out on another person. I’ve accepted this shortcoming in my personality and worked it into my routines, up to and including figuring out which jokes to try on certain friends to get the feel of a type of humor.
(That makes me sound like I don’t have much of a personality. Unfortunately, the mail doesn’t require me to have one, just to be able to walk long distances, and it’s not like I get to do much socializing when on the job.)
When I saw this story, I marveled at the idea that puns could (and would) be taken seriously as an aspect of the magic system. I thoroughly enjoyed the idea of individual magic, making even the boring people in the background seem interesting, if just for the fact that their magic is making splotches of color drift around their body. This was draping over the setting of a heavily isolated community, cut off so thoroughly that it needed to be invaded occasionally just to have a sustainable population. Where the magic of the setting was so pervasive, people were slowly being turned into magical creatures. The royalty system was based on who had the most powerful magic talent (being a magocracy before Dungeons & Dragons made it a concept for nerds to capitalize on), and if you could not prove to have a magical talent, you were shunned and exiled.
This story showed both sides of this concept in great detail, down to the idea of an Evil Magician being considered evil while still being honorable and ethical in his practices. It did so in a very blatant approach of both ‘show and tell‘, but that might also be because the main protagonist was so biased toward his truths that he had to have everything explained to him.
(A concept I wish I could emulate, if just to more thoroughly dive into the mechanics of storytelling through the work)
Through this book, we are introduced to the source of Earth’s legends. If there was an isthmus anywhere in the world, there was the chance of finding a path that led to a magical land that strangely, always resembled Florida. After you read this book, you’ll have the opportunity to continue the series.
Through 45 more novels. And the puns never end.
Also, a personal note. When I was 12 and just discovering this series, I was an enthusiastic fan. I managed to look up Anthony’s address and write to him about the books, and he sent me an autographed polaroid. He’s an interesting man, beyond his books.
It’s been a long while since I’ve been able to post any of my writings on here, but I managed to 1: Be home from work all day, 2: Be by myself all day, and 3: Be so sick that I was told (forcefully) to not do any chores and to just write all day.
This translates to some 20-odd pages written down, spread through three different stories.
The Star Wars adventure is almost ready to go up, but in the meantime, please go through my pages for my personal science fiction idea “For the Honor of the Queen” and the fan-fiction project “Sherlock Holmes, Wizard”.
I also have 5 different essays sitting in my drafts, so I’ll eventually go looking through them to see what’s worth publishing.
Swift's Corner 