Jekyll2021-07-20T14:41:46+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/feed.xmlAaron HaymanAspiring WriterFountain Pen Journaling2021-07-20T08:24:39+00:002021-07-20T08:24:39+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/fountain-pen-journaling<p><img src="https://photos.aaronhayman.com/uploads/medium/10934a68739451866c7903f5c21d60c9@2x.jpg" alt="Fountain Pen Woodcraft" /></p>
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<p>I bought a fountain pen. I purchased it on a whim at an art festival a couple weeks ago. I bought it from a local wood/pen maker, who crafts curios of a sort: pens made out of bone, crafted from wood, or shaped from a fifty-caliber bullet (really). Most of them were firearms based ball-point pens, but he had a few wood crafted fountain pens. I’ve never used a fountain pen, so under the guise of supporting our local community, I bought one.</p>
<p>It was expensive, as such things usually are, but I later spent far more on paper, a journal, a few types of ink, a nib or two, etc. Pen writing, it turns out, is expensive. It’s also just as much of a geekable world as any I’ve seen. Just looking for custom nibs is an exercise in price shock <sup id="fnref:1" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup>.</p>
<p>To complete my venture, I decided that I would not only journal, but I would journal only with my right (non-dominant) hand. It sounds stupid, and perhaps it is, but there is some reason to my madness. Despite being predominantly left-handed, I can in fact write with my right hand, albeit slowly and with a fair bit of messiness. Legible, though, or mostly.</p>
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<p>This was actually a selling point for me. Left-handed journaling usually involves accepting either smears or cramps, or both. Plus, I’ve probably engrained a whole host of bad habits in my dominant hand. Using my non-dominant hand was a chance to retrain myself in that fine art of penmanship. Also, fountain pens are almost exclusively the domain of the right-handed. It’s far better to drag the pen than push it.</p>
<p>It also forces me to write slowly. It forces me to slow down my thoughts to the point where the act of writing becomes a kind of meditation. My mind is often a jumble, and I especially have had a hard time falling asleep. I can loose hours as my mind jumps from subject to subject, whittling away my night while laying in bed. I’ve tried all sorts of things to help this: reading, meditation, yoga, playing iPhones games, sauna… they all fail. But Journaling at the pace of a turtle somehow succeeds. By the time I’m done, my mind is empty, my anxiety has fled, and sleep comes quickly.</p>
<p>I was talking with a friend about it, and he agreed that I’d effectively nerd-jacked myself. This is basically taking something you would not normally do (but feel you should) and turning it into something you want to do by attaching things you are interested in. I find this a much more effective strategy than spending such a valuable and limited resource as my willpower to do it.</p>
<p>Aside from the fun of trying to master a new art, there’s a more existential motivation for me to journal. I’m getting older. Having passed that invisible line people like to call middle age, I’ve found time slipping through my fingers at an increasingly rapid pace. It’s troublesome how five years now seem to pass quicker than six months of my youth. If you think about it, the reason is as simple as it is obvious. Life has become both hectic and predictable. As a child all the way through your teens and twenties, life is new. Possibilities are endless and so many experiences are novel. All of this conspires to force you to <em>pay attention</em> to your life. No matter whether you consider it good or bad, it’s interesting and engaging.</p>
<p>But after some point, that changes. You’ve got a job, a family, and a routine. There are challenges, yes, but the unexpected has fled for greener, younger pastures. It is at this point that I believe a lot of people stop paying attention to their life. Autopilot is engaged while we look endlessly to the next distraction. All the while, the sands of time slip quicker through our fingers.</p>
<p>I don’t want to live a life unobserved.</p>
<p>In the two weeks since I started journaling, I’ve become more aware, not only of myself but of those around me. I <em>notice</em> people more, and my family, what they’re going through. My thoughts have begun to settle, my anxiety has dropped, my sleep improved. By taking the time to observe my own life, I find myself engaging with it. Perhaps it is simply the knowledge that I must write something which drives me to stay alert. Or perhaps I’ve always needed to pay attention to my life. Perhaps not paying attention was me subtly, unconsciously devaluing myself. I don’t know.</p>
<p>Whatever the case, it’s worth it. It’s worth taking the time to slow down and reflect. It’s worth valuing yourself enough to pay attention to your own life.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote">
<p>No, seriously, I don’t get it. There seem to be two price range: $15 to $45 and… well, add a zero to the end of those. I could not, for the life of me, figure out why the jump. Quality of material? Writing smoothness? A sacrifice of virgins to the god of writing? All the comments gushed about how great the $30 nib was, whereas the $150 nib included comments like “had to insert a couple brass shims for it to write okay… 5 stars!” Huh? Why are you buying it then!? <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>I bought a fountain pen. I purchased it on a whim at an art festival a couple weeks ago. I bought it from a local wood/pen maker, who crafts curios of a sort: pens made out of bone, crafted from wood, or shaped from a fifty-caliber bullet (really). Most of them were firearms based ball-point pens, but he had a few wood crafted fountain pens. I’ve never used a fountain pen, so under the guise of supporting our local community, I bought one. It was expensive, as such things usually are, but I later spent far more on paper, a journal, a few types of ink, a nib or two, etc. Pen writing, it turns out, is expensive. It’s also just as much of a geekable world as any I’ve seen. Just looking for custom nibs is an exercise in price shock 1. To complete my venture, I decided that I would not only journal, but I would journal only with my right (non-dominant) hand. It sounds stupid, and perhaps it is, but there is some reason to my madness. Despite being predominantly left-handed, I can in fact write with my right hand, albeit slowly and with a fair bit of messiness. Legible, though, or mostly. No, seriously, I don’t get it. There seem to be two price range: $15 to $45 and… well, add a zero to the end of those. I could not, for the life of me, figure out why the jump. Quality of material? Writing smoothness? A sacrifice of virgins to the god of writing? All the comments gushed about how great the $30 nib was, whereas the $150 nib included comments like “had to insert a couple brass shims for it to write okay… 5 stars!” Huh? Why are you buying it then!? ↩The Wandering Inn2021-07-19T10:11:43+00:002021-07-19T10:11:43+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/the-wandering-inn<p><img src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41zGUBv9XHL.jpg" alt="The Wandering Inn Cover" /></p>
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<p>This “book” cost me months.</p>
<p>But, of course, it’s not a book; it’s a web series. It’s an important distinction, because if you approach this like you might a book or even a standard book series, you just may find yourself sucked into a world far larger than you anticipated.</p>
<p>Good luck with that.</p>
<p>I came across the series from the recommendation of several different authors I follow: Will Wight, I think, and Andrew Rowe? I don’t fully recall, but it was enough for me to Google the term, find the website, and immediately discover I could start reading the series on the web, now, for free, no strings attached.</p>
<p>Bleh. Who actually wants to read a book on a website? Seriously. I bought a kindle for a reason <sup id="fnref:1" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup> that’s not purely due to eye strain.</p>
<p>It turns out there <em>are</em> kindle books, three of them, that almost encompass three of the… eight volumes? Huh. And these are not small books; I believe one of them clocks in at around twelve hundred pages.</p>
<p>Still, I read the ebooks, and discovered I wanted more. I just had to sacrifice my soul on the alter of inconvenient web text and manual syncing.</p>
<p>It was not pleasant.</p>
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<p>I can’t count how many times I lost my place, then spent untold eterneties scrolling first scrolling through innovative chapter names like 5.42 and 5.43, then scrolling through ten to twenty thousand word chapters. At least once I accidentally skipped a chapter, which led to great confusion until I’d figured it out.</p>
<p>I like this series a lot, so let’s first get out of the way things I <em>don’t</em> like. There’s not a whole lot to the list, but there is some, and they mostly revolves around the prose itself. I should point out the writing itself improves greatly as the series progresses.</p>
<p>Actually, let me repeat that, dwell on it a bit: the writing <em>really</em> improves throughout the series. Turns out, writing two chapters a day for years will cause one to learn a few things. It’s rather delightful to see.</p>
<p>However, that still means you’ve gotta get through some of the early “janky” writing, and therein comes both the warning and the encouragement. Yes, some of it may be annoying or frustrating (or it is if you’re me), but it gets better and the story is well worth that price of admission.</p>
<h2 id="a-minor-list-of-issues">A Minor list of Issues</h2>
<h3 id="dialog">Dialog</h3>
<p>I <em>hate</em> the way they write dialog. This is probably my biggest issue, and one that never fades away. Pirateaba seems to subscribe to the belief that all dialog should always be on its own line. There is never other text. Never. Beats are placed on the prior or following paragraphs and often are… buried? That’s not the right word. The beat is always adjacent to the dialog, but it’s hard to identify as a beat when it’s part of an overall paragraph. It’s sometimes before and sometimes after the dialog, and sometimes there’s no beat at all.</p>
<p>There’s a school of thought that posits dialog should stand up on its own. If it doesn’t, then the dialog needs to be rewritten. Some authors will strip out their “he saids, she saids” and even remove the beats <sup id="fnref:3" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote" rel="footnote">2</a></sup> with this idea in mind. This sort of thing isn’t a bad idea <em>if</em> you’re practicing your writing; it’s a fantastic way to tell if the dialog is flat and relies too much on beats for character. Thing is, beats and tags are important to the reader, cause guess what?</p>
<p><em>It doesn’t matter if you don’t know who’s talking!</em></p>
<p>It doesn’t take long for me to look back (or ahead) and figure out from context who’s speaking; I’ve never actually not figured it out. It does, however, rip me out of the story each and every time. If this happened only once or twice? Okay, I can deal; nobody’s perfect. But there comes a point when I realize I’m doing this for the third time in a single chapter, and that’s just downright frustrating.</p>
<h3 id="foreshadowing">Foreshadowing</h3>
<p>So, there’s foreshadowing and then there’s <strong>FORESHADOWING</strong>. What’s the difference? With foreshadowing, an event or scene is written in such a way as to to imply or suggest something to come. It could be obtuse, such as a character experiencing some ominous feeling; it could be subtle, such that the way the scene is described suggests something to come.</p>
<p>Or, it could be <strong>FORESHADOWING</strong>, which often comes across like a bag of bricks to the head:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“And little did Erin know that this day was to be the worst day of her life…”
<sup id="fnref:4" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote" rel="footnote">3</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>Oh no! What ever will happen to my favorite character!</em></p>
<p>Does anybody actually think that? I despise this sort of thing. It feels as though the author could not be bothered to actually write a cliff hanger. When I’m reading, I want to read about what’s happening now. I want to be drawn in to it. What I don’t want, is for the author to rip me out and jab their finger into the future with impatient words about how great it’s going to be.</p>
<p>Stop trying to draw me into the future. I’ll get there in my own time.</p>
<p>To be clear, The Wandering Inn is great. The story’s been more than enough to keep me turning the page <sup id="fnref:5" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote" rel="footnote">4</a></sup> even after five volumes, which is what, like fifteen books at least? Also, this issue mostly goes away somewhere around volume six.</p>
<h3 id="periods">Periods</h3>
<p>This is a minor issue that could be easily be written off as stylistic choice. It doesn’t affect reading or the story or even detract much. It’s a missed opportunity is all.</p>
<p>Pirateaba has a tendency to break up perfectly good sentences into incomplete fragments using a period. It’s… fine. Fiction writers often feel free to break the rules of grammar; I have no problem with that. Personally, I think breaking the rules can be used to great effect. However, when it’s done too much, one of two things happen:</p>
<ol>
<li>The prose becomes garbled and difficult to read.</li>
<li>The violations fade away into the background and the effect is lost.</li>
</ol>
<p>Centuries of reading and writing have conditioned us to expect certain patterns in prose. Sentence structure, punctuation, and even word order are like a conductor’s baton, taking disparate noises and elevating it to harmonic symphony. <em>Breaking</em> those rules is a sour note. It draws attention, like a poem that rhymes until the very last word <sup id="fnref:6" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote" rel="footnote">5</a></sup>. The dissonance drives home that word like a hammer.</p>
<p>Breaking the rule of grammars is like that.</p>
<p>Pirateaba does it too much, but at no point does the prose become difficult to read. It just fades away. Given how our author uses the periods, I suspect they do it for pacing. The words are cadence in their mind, and the periods are an attempt to replicate that.</p>
<p>But here’s the thing: the English language has plenty of other punctuations marks that can do this. Take the humble comma, for instance. Yes, it is probably one of the most overused punctuations marks in any language, but perhaps that’s only because it’s really good at what it does. But if you don’t like the comma, it’s not like there aren’t other punctuation marks. We have a semicolon; we have a colon; we have an ellipses— we even have a dash or [gasp] a <em>long</em> dash. And, of course, there’s all sorts of brackets that can be employed.</p>
<p>There’s so many ways to structure language, so many tools available, and the author eschews all but one: a period.</p>
<p>As I said, it doesn’t exactly detract, but it’s a missed opportunity. It makes me sad, cause sometimes I stop to reread a paragraph and realize while it’s decent, it’s just a few punctuation marks away from being great.</p>
<p>A huge but: this issue <em>also</em> goes away. The writing progressively gets better as the series progresses. So please, don’t throw away perfectly good stories because the writing starts out a little rough.</p>
<h3 id="save-the-edits-please">Save the edits, please</h3>
<p>You can roughly divide all authors into two main camps <sup id="fnref:7" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:7" class="footnote" rel="footnote">6</a></sup>: those who edit, and those who don’t. There’s pros and cons to each: It’s easy for the “editors” to become bogged down in the pursuit of perfection and take years between their releases. On the other hand, those who don’t edit can often embed their mistakes with each new word they write.</p>
<p>Pirataba is not an editor, and they’ve said as much. Not only are they not inclined, but their very schedule doesn’t allow for it— two chapters a week are <em>a lot</em> to write.</p>
<p>This is not a complaint, but I feel it should be mentioned: The Wandering Inn is unapologetically what it is, errors and all. While there are three books on the Kindle Store that <em>have</em> gone through an editing process, it’s telling how far behind they are to what’s on the website. It’s also telling that most grammar and structural issues remain in those books as well.</p>
<p>If you want to enjoy it (and I highly recommend you do), you best get used to the issues. Ignore them, complain, roll your eyes, or whatever, but then move on and keep reading. Cause at the end of the day, what really matters is the story, and pirateaba has a great one to tell.</p>
<h2 id="the-story">The Story</h2>
<p>A great one? That’s wrong; it’s more like a plethora of great stories. Yes, there’s a main one and spoilers, it’s Erin, the one you start with. But to pay attention to just the “primary” story is wrong, simply because just about <em>every</em> story told in The Wandering Inn universe is equally good.</p>
<p>I would go even further and claim there’s a hidden character plot within (or constituting) all the others: the world itself. This is the benefit of writing the way Pirateaba does. They have space, room to flesh out the world in ways no novel or even series ever could. Each arc doesn’t just tell the story of a character, but also reveals more about a culture, nation, kingdom, species, etc in the world. That, of course, doesn’t guarantee good writing, and while not all of the stories are equally good, they are all good. More importantly, they’re unique so that very rarely do I feel like I’m reading the same story in a different character.</p>
<p>This would be good as it is, but I would be remiss to not point out that’s it’s not just one world, but ours as well. We never see ours directly, but most stories follow someone from our world trying to survive in a deadly medieval culture filled with magic and monsters. It’s equally fun and horrifying, yet always interesting to watch how our culture, ideas, and values not only translate into a reality not designed for them, but also not <em>prepared</em> for them either.</p>
<p>Where else can you find a story of a dragon addicted to an iPhone game?</p>
<h3 id="our-kind-of-story">Our Kind of Story</h3>
<p>First, let’s talk about what <em>kind</em> of story is being told:</p>
<ul>
<li>Massive world building: check.</li>
<li>Epic with lot’s of story lines: check.</li>
<li>Fleshed out characters that feel real and undergo authentic transformations: double-check… maybe even triple check.</li>
<li>Deep and consistent magic system: well, it’s broad. Not sure how consistent it is (literally, I’m unsure and I’m disinclined to research it), and there are hints of depth or deeper truths kinda thing, but so far it’s mostly just broad. Think: a lot of different spells broken up into tiers but with only very vague guiding principles.</li>
<li>LitRPG: sort of? There are levels and they’re really important to the world/people/plot. But the levelling system itself is simplistic (also a bit random) and there is a distinct lack of the character sheets common to the genre. Personally, I consider this a plus; I do not like skimming character sheets. Either way, let’s call it very, very lite LitRPG.</li>
<li>The classic Herione’s Journey: check.</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<p>Oh, I know this one! That’s like the Hero’s Journey, but with a bad ass beautiful female kicking everyone’s ass in skin-tight leather! <sup id="fnref:8" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:8" class="footnote" rel="footnote">7</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ah… no.</p>
<p>First off, some clarification: The Hero’s/Heroine’s Journey has nothing to do with a character’s sex or gender.</p>
<p>Ack! Even that’s not right. The <em>name</em> certainly does lean into stereotypes. Men are prone to go at it alone, women are supposed to be cooperative, ladedadeda, whatever. It’s disturbing. Our stereotypes are so deeply ingrained into our culture such that the best way to title our story types is to use them. I can’t help but feel like something went wrong there.</p>
<p>The definition, though, has nothing to do with gender. A Hero’s Journey could easily be taken by any gender, just as a Heroine’s Journey could. In truth, even the structure of the story could remain largely the same between them— hell, even the basic stages of a Hero’s Journey can apply <sup id="fnref:9" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote" rel="footnote">8</a></sup>. What’s different is <em>how</em> they take that journey, how they overcome their obstacles, and what the resulting tension and victory looks like. The result is a very different book, even if the plot lines are largely the same.</p>
<p>Take what I like to call the ‘isolation’ stage. In this stage, our intrepid hero is stripped of their companions. In the Hero’s journey, this would result in the hero turning inward, finding (or developing) their inner strength, coming to some kind of deep realization or self-actualization, and emerging stronger for it. Isolation ends when our hero finds the strength to overcome the external circumstances causing it or changes enough internally to leave it.</p>
<p>The Heroine’s Journey inverts this. Instead of becoming stronger, isolation makes our protagonist weaker (or at the very least stays the same). As they progress through this stage, they are met with failure after failure until they are forced to realize that they can’t do it alone; they need others to succeed. A good writer will force the protagonist to deal with their inner demons in order to accept this truth. Isolation ends when the protagonist overcomes the inner demons keeping them from accepting help.</p>
<p>The stage is the same but the form of it could not be different. Whereas the Hero’s Journey focuses on personal achievement, the Heroine’s Journey focuses on interpersonal relationships. This shift in focus changes not only the meaning of the struggles, but of the underlying tension and drama within the story. Within the Hero’s Journey, personal loss is often used an impetus for growth, whereas in the Heroine’s Journey, loss is just… loss. There’s no justifying it with personal growth. It causes damage and it hurts and it didn’t need to happen. That’s the point.</p>
<p>The Wandering Inn is a large epic plot of heroine stories. Yes, there are heroes; yes, there are battles, magic, and intrigue. But the bulk of the drama lies in the relationships and how they evolve. Pirateaba is a master at fleshing out characters, drawing you in, and then setting up plot lines that pit them against each other in a way that sets up war as a tragedy instead of some glorious self-masturbatory monument to violence and the unending quest for power.</p>
<p>This is, for me, an important aspect of The Wandering Inn. War is cast as the prisoner’s dilemma. Tension is created in conflict by getting us to invest in both sides first. We the reader are made to understand why it’s happening; both sides have believable rationale, but it’s based on imperfect information. We know, deep in our hearts, that if we could just get the two sides to sit down and talk, there would be no war.</p>
<h3 id="an-interconnected-mess">An Interconnected Mess</h3>
<p>A big draw of The Wandering Inn universe is the feel of it, a real, interconnected yet disjointed, messy world. Stuff is constantly happening, and not just around our main protagonists, but everywhere. Major events propel the world forward, and nowhere near most of our main characters, who often only hear rumors of world events too distant to concern them. It feels real in the way our world is.</p>
<p>A major reason for this is simple: Pirateaba is not constrained by the limitations of a book, or even of a book series. Their web series is open ended, freeing them to interject innumerable side characters all over the world without fear of blowing through some constraining word limit. It allows them to not simply conjure world events, but actually tell those stories at leisure. The patient reader is rewarded with an intimate perspective of a messy reality that conspires to move forward events in a progression that feels natural.</p>
<p>People are messy. They make the wrong decisions; they are naive or cynical; they’re prejudiced; they’re selfish and selfless; they betray each other and are betrayed and, sometimes, they perform incredible acts of loyalty and love. Sometimes this shakes the world. Sometimes, it shakes only the person affected. I cannot help but think our author either has a prodigious memory or else some incredible outlines. There’s so many interpersonal interactions, and they’re not incidental. When major events happen, they are because of the choices individuals make. Those events, in turn, drive personal motivations.</p>
<p>It’s… life, and not just a slice but all of it. It’s all woven together in a masterful tapestry of all colors and shades. I just can’t say this enough: it <em>feels</em> real.</p>
<p>It’s also… life. It’s long and sometimes boring. Whole chapters can move at an excruciatingly slow pace. Some chapters seem to have no point at all except the author wanted to write about a character, and so they did, and so we get to read about a walk through town to buy stuff. It takes a patient reader to slog through one of the slice of life chapters or when yet another character perspective is introduced.</p>
<p>And that’s a whole other issue: each new character perspective delays the stories you’ve already invested in. Every time one is introduced, I seriously start wondering whether it’s worth it. Likely, the story will be good enough to draw me in after a few chapters, but it’s still distance between other arcs I care about. This can lead to frustration, especially if the author isn’t as invested in “my” character. As more and more arcs are introduced, this frustration can only increase.</p>
<p>Of course, there’s nothing to be done about it. I would not ask Pirateaba to write differently. They interweave countless storylines together, they’re masterful at it, and whatever weaknesses or frustrations that come from it are simple part of the package.</p>
<p>Is it worth it? Well, I’m half way through the sixth volume <sup id="fnref:10" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:10" class="footnote" rel="footnote">9</a></sup> and I’ve yet to switch out for another book. Apparently, I think it quite worth it. Whether for you that is true will depend on what you’re looking for.</p>
<h3 id="them-themes">Them Themes</h3>
<p>Pirateaba is not afraid to take on difficult themes, and with a with a world so big, they have plenty of room to address them. I’ve been particularly pleased at the way they’ve taken on subjects such a rape and violence, omitting the gratuitous while showing how dehumanizing such acts can be.</p>
<p>But it’s more than that. It’s not uncommon for fan/sci-fi authors to have philosophical and/or idealogical viewpoints. In fact, I would argue this genre in particular is well suited toward expressing such things— it’s a part of my attraction to it at least. Yet I’ve been particularly pleased at the way Pirateaba addresses such issues. They almost certainly have an opinion — as all people inevitably do — but they’re not afraid of expressing the complexities of reality and — how can I say this? — of the valid pluralities of individual, yet limited perspectives.</p>
<p>I’m so tired of simplistic philosophy reduced to absurd ideology. Because, in the end, humanity — <em>people</em> and <em>individuals</em> — are not so easily reduced. We’re complex beings imbued with limited perspective. This is not a thing that can be changed. No matter how good, how <em>right</em> our hero is, at their core, fallible, if only due to their limited understanding of reality.</p>
<p>It’s this kind of thoughtful address of the human condition that I find a huge draw to The Wandering Inn. Take for instance Flo, the King of Destruction. He’s viewed by others as a tyrant bent on world domination. Yet Pirateaba spends a lot of time exploring why a tyrant might justify this in such a way that, somehow, you begin to understand and relate. He’s a good person trying to rectify gross injustice, and perhaps it is not the he who was wrong in his conquests, but the world who is wrong in its label.</p>
<p>Ah, but I love the doubt Pirateaba bleeds into their themes. It is never so cut and dried as our many ideologies would have us believe. Sometimes the tyrant is a good person; sometimes they’re not. Sometimes our monsters are self made; sometimes they’re just monsters. Sometimes evil is clearly cut and dried; sometimes it’s a murky bog of bad options. Of all the things they’ve done in their writing, this is possibly what I respect the most.</p>
<p>I’ve touched on some of the other themes interwoven into the series in my discussion of the Heroine’s Path, war, interpersonal relationships, etc. But there’s one main theme I want to explore:</p>
<h3 id="monsters-inc">Monsters, Inc.</h3>
<p>Perhaps the biggest theme interwoven throughout the series is the idea of what makes a monster, a monster. As in most fantasy, there are monsters and they are established from the very beginning. What Pirateaba does, though, is immediately blur the line. Goblins, for instance, are monsters, and as the series progresses they shown to be… monsters.</p>
<p>But they shift the definition right out from under you.</p>
<p>Monster are monsters: they’re a kind of mindless evil, a danger that threatens civilization. When confronted with a monster, you either attack or run, for it will always try to kill you. What you don’t do is invite it in for dinner and try to talk to it.</p>
<p>Which is exactly what one of the protagonists does.</p>
<p>Monsters are a word we use to excuse our violence. One doesn’t need to consider the morality of attacking a monster: by definition, they deserve it because of what they are. It’s obvious when something is a monster, yet over the course of the book we see this label applied over and over to anything alien to us, different from the civilization we’ve created. And what happens when an entire race is called “monster”?</p>
<p>What happens when we create our monsters by the simple virtue of naming them?</p>
<p>What happens when we become a monster simply because we believe it?</p>
<p>This power of naming and our abuses of it are, in my opinion, a central theme to The Wandering Inn. As our protagonists either descend into or reject the stereotypes of the realm, we the reader get to see the power of our labels: monster, person, individual, other, <em>them</em>. They can blind or reveal, trap or set free. Throughout the series, we see people do just that, not only of others but of of themselves. It’s a strong theme, and a poignant one, and it is explored well.</p>
<p>In the end, this one question endlessly repeats itself beneath all their writing: what if all the time we’ve been creating our own monsters, simply by labelling them as such?</p>
<p>It’s a question our world desperately needs to ask.</p>
<h3 id="take-aways">Take Aways</h3>
<p>I’ve spent the last couple months reading The Wandering Inn. Honestly, I haven’t written much during this time. There’s something here for me to learn, and until I do I’ve put my own story on pause. Instead, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of book I want to write or, more accurately, how I want it to end.</p>
<p>I started writing with an ambiguous desire to subvert the tropes I’d grown tired of reading. To call my motivation ill-defined is to understate it; it was more a simmering discontent than any true goal. I was annoyed so I started writing with the intent to explore my own irritation.</p>
<p>I’ve largely been writing the antithesis to the Hero’s Journey. Mine is story where the Hero’s Journey <em>doesn’t</em> work, where it goes wrong, and how it can create the evil we seek to destroy. But I’ve always felt it was missing something. The book is tragedy, but I’ve never wanted my series to end as tragedy. I’ve wanted an alternative, an answer to the question I pose: if not the Hero, then who?</p>
<p>In The Wandering Inn I’ve found something of an answer: the Heroine’s Journey. I resonate with this idea of cooperation over rugged individualism, and of the cost we accrue in trying to do it ourselves. In my book the hero has immense power, but he’ll learn that it cannot solve the problems he wants to solve. He’ll learn that in trying to become the Hero, he will have made himself a monster. But that can’t be the end <sup id="fnref:11" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:11" class="footnote" rel="footnote">10</a></sup>, and I’ve learned it no longer does it need to be.</p>
<p>I’ve also been quite impressed by the way Pirateaba has been able to create believable conflict between perfectly rational characters as they live their lives as people do. It’s something to which I aspire. It is, perhaps, harder to do when you can’t introduce new character perspectives at will, but the result is important. Characters need to have lives outside of the protagonist and it’s important the conflict between them is a believable, natural byproduct of living their lives. The “ominous evil” is just lazy writing. It’s easy to forget that when writing.</p>
<h3 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h3>
<p>It’s a great series, well written, and extremely long— at latest count, over eight million words. The prose is a little janky but the stories more than make up for it and the prose improves greatly over time. The biggest downside is also it’s greatest strength: it’s just very long. Much like its title, it wanders, and for that you can loose yourself, knowing that you’ll always have something more to come back to. Or you’ll become sick of the endless segues and move on to something more… curated. That’s okay; The Wandering Inn isn’t for everyone.</p>
<p>If you’re looking for a good “book”, a story you can read and be done with, this series is not for you. Instead, The Wandering Inn is a place you can stop in to visit whenever you want, read what you want, and move on if you need. You can always come back, knowing there’s always another story to be told.</p>
<hr />
<h2 id="info">Info</h2>
<p><a href="https://wanderinginn.com">The Wandering Inn Website</a><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07YH9X7V7">Amazon Kindle Series</a><br />
<a href="https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4240617">Patreon Page</a></p>
<p><em>I don’t usually do this, but since The Wandering Inn is free to read (on their website), I would ask you to consider supporting Pirateaba on Patreon if you enjoy their series. You can support them by buying their ebooks but if you continue beyond that, I would urge you to support them on Patreon.</em></p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Which I don’t use nearly as much as I’d thought because I always have my phone in hand whereas I must actually remove my ass from my seat to go get my kindle. But hey, still, kindle apps sync, and the website does not. I really wish it would, though. I’ve had some thought to manually copy each chapter from each volume of the series into a doc I can convert into an ebook using Calibri or something. It just that it <em>sounds</em> like a lot of work. Still… <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3" role="doc-endnote">
<p>FYI, A ‘beat’ is a short scene set alongside the dialog. It almost always (and probably should always) feature the person speaking. As such, it’s a way to avoid the “he/she said” tags by replacing them with (usually) more visual action. <a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:4" role="doc-endnote">
<p>I made this up; it’s not a line from the book. It <em>could</em> be, though. Really. Some of the foreshadowing is almost that bad. <a href="#fnref:4" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:5" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Or click into the next chapter? [Sigh] I really hate not having this on the kindle. <a href="#fnref:5" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:6" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Oh god, I’m mixing metaphors. I’m so sorry. Someone, please help! Stop me! <a href="#fnref:6" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:7" role="doc-endnote">
<p>No, no you can’t. That’s just stupid, as though any group of people can so easily slot into our nicely pre-packaged categories. At best, there’s spectrum, but most likely, the truth reflects categories we’ve never even thought of. Of course, while this is all true, it conflicts with my desire to make a point, and so thus will I ignore the pesky mess of reality and pretend everything is neatly packaged. <a href="#fnref:7" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:8" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Okay, okay. Let’s not be sexist. They could <em>also</em> be wearing a metal bikini. <a href="#fnref:8" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:9" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Which isn’t really surprising given just how broad and flexible the Hero’s Journey is defined. <a href="#fnref:9" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:10" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Yes, sixth. This review is taking <em>forever</em> to write. <a href="#fnref:10" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:11" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Or I suppose it can— lot’s of books do it —I just don’t want to. <a href="#fnref:11" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>This “book” cost me months. But, of course, it’s not a book; it’s a web series. It’s an important distinction, because if you approach this like you might a book or even a standard book series, you just may find yourself sucked into a world far larger than you anticipated. Good luck with that. I came across the series from the recommendation of several different authors I follow: Will Wight, I think, and Andrew Rowe? I don’t fully recall, but it was enough for me to Google the term, find the website, and immediately discover I could start reading the series on the web, now, for free, no strings attached. Bleh. Who actually wants to read a book on a website? Seriously. I bought a kindle for a reason 1 that’s not purely due to eye strain. It turns out there are kindle books, three of them, that almost encompass three of the… eight volumes? Huh. And these are not small books; I believe one of them clocks in at around twelve hundred pages. Still, I read the ebooks, and discovered I wanted more. I just had to sacrifice my soul on the alter of inconvenient web text and manual syncing. It was not pleasant. Which I don’t use nearly as much as I’d thought because I always have my phone in hand whereas I must actually remove my ass from my seat to go get my kindle. But hey, still, kindle apps sync, and the website does not. I really wish it would, though. I’ve had some thought to manually copy each chapter from each volume of the series into a doc I can convert into an ebook using Calibri or something. It just that it sounds like a lot of work. Still… ↩Sketch of me2021-04-16T09:43:29+00:002021-04-16T09:43:29+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/me-sketch<p><img src="https://photos.aaronhayman.com/uploads/medium/d3308817125fad19f97bb5415a2deed5@2x.png" alt="Charcoal Sketch of me" /></p>
<!--start-->
<p>I’ve always heard that sketching yourself was supposed to be hard. To be honest, I didn’t find this any more or less hard than sketching anything else. I was confused until I showed it to my mom and she asked me if I used a mirror to sketch from.</p>
<p>A mirror? To sketch? Why in the world would anyone do that? Why not just take a picture and use that?</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s a right of passage, and until you’ve sketched yourself from a mirror, you cannot call yourself an artist? I dunno. Luckily, I don’t actually care if I’m called an artist. I just enjoy sketching.</p>
<p>This one is different from the others in that I’ve done no blending. This was, in part, due to a request from my wife. Sarah wanted me to do something a little less photo-realistic <sup id="fnref:1" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup>, something a little more sketch-like, I suppose. I opted for charcoal.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>I generally start with charcoal. I like it; it’s versatile. In some sense, this is close to what my sketches would look like before I start blending them. However, in those cases, I would have stopped far before this point. Likely, some features might be a little off, shading wouldn’t be quite done, and a lot of the little detail work would be incomplete. All of those would fill out during blending.</p>
<p>It’s odd. Blending is easier in a lot of ways, even though the process itself takes a whole lot more time (like, days more worth of work). With blending, you can very easily “pull” the colors from surrounding areas. Because this isn’t actual charcoal, but an iPad app instead, the colors don’t ever thin out. This makes detail changes very easy. Erase, redo, then blend the edges to make it all seamless.</p>
<p>You cannot do that with charcoal, absent blending at least.</p>
<p>Instead, I found myself having to erase and redo entire portions of the sketch, just to change one small detail. Erasing meant I had to match the replacement exactly or else it would be very obvious. It can be very hard to make that work, especially in the lighter sections. It was often simpler and easier to erase that entire section of the sketch and redo all the shading so that everything matched.</p>
<p>To be completely candid, there is some blending in there. When I first started the sketch, before I had decided to keep it pure charcoal, I blended out the base color on the light side of the face. It was very subtle. My goal was a base tone for me to work off of and I never bothered to erase it. I am not bothered by this.</p>
<p>I intentionally left some parts of the sketch a little underdone, especially the top portion of the hat and the light side of the jacket. In both cases, the photo itself had a light blur. I considered replicating that, but I like the idea of leaving it just a little unfinished instead. Not sure why. Perhaps we can call it artistic license; perhaps it’s just laziness.</p>
<p>Overall, I like the effect. The sketch definitely <em>looks</em> like a charcoal sketch, which I find as appealing as my wife does. It’s also quite a bit quicker to do, and at my current stage of development, rapid sketches will likely help me improve my artistry quicker, I think.</p>
<hr />
<h2 id="links">Links</h2>
<p><a href="https://photos.aaronhayman.com/#16113393858894/16185776437341">Full Image</a></p>
<p><a href="https://photos.aaronhayman.com/r/16113393858894">Sketch Album</a></p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Not that my prior stuff even approached ‘photo-realistic’. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>I’ve always heard that sketching yourself was supposed to be hard. To be honest, I didn’t find this any more or less hard than sketching anything else. I was confused until I showed it to my mom and she asked me if I used a mirror to sketch from. A mirror? To sketch? Why in the world would anyone do that? Why not just take a picture and use that? Perhaps it’s a right of passage, and until you’ve sketched yourself from a mirror, you cannot call yourself an artist? I dunno. Luckily, I don’t actually care if I’m called an artist. I just enjoy sketching. This one is different from the others in that I’ve done no blending. This was, in part, due to a request from my wife. Sarah wanted me to do something a little less photo-realistic 1, something a little more sketch-like, I suppose. I opted for charcoal. Not that my prior stuff even approached ‘photo-realistic’. ↩Poetic Physics2021-04-15T08:20:53+00:002021-04-15T08:20:53+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/poetic-physics<blockquote>
<p>And thus no force, however great, can pull a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line that shall be absolutely straight.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I have no idea who the original author was, but it was recited in a <a href="https://writingexcuses.com/2021/03/21/16-12-singing-versus-speaking/">Writing Excuses Podcast</a> I was listening to, where one of the hosts recited it from an old physics book that’s no longer in print. It was written with no indication that it was supposed to be a poem and surrounded by completely mundane, boring physics text. It was just this one line that, somehow, managed to be written in a beautiful couplet.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And thus no force<br />
however great<br />
can pull a cord<br />
however fine<br />
into a horizontal line<br />
that shall be absolutely straight</p>
</blockquote>And thus no force, however great, can pull a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line that shall be absolutely straight. I have no idea who the original author was, but it was recited in a Writing Excuses Podcast I was listening to, where one of the hosts recited it from an old physics book that’s no longer in print. It was written with no indication that it was supposed to be a poem and surrounded by completely mundane, boring physics text. It was just this one line that, somehow, managed to be written in a beautiful couplet. And thus no force however great can pull a cord however fine into a horizontal line that shall be absolutely straightInstrument of Omens2021-04-14T10:04:37+00:002021-04-14T10:04:37+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/instrument-of-omens<p><img class="sm-img" alt="A Testament of Steel" src="https://davisashura.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/A-Testiment-of-Steel_Davis-Ashura.png" />
<img class="sm-img" alt="Memories of Prophecies" src="https://davisashura.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Memories-of-prophecies_Davis-Ashura.jpg" /></p>
<p><em>by: David Ashura</em></p>
<!--start-->
<p>Somewhere in the preface to the first book, David mentions that his source of inspiration revolves around greats like Tolkien and Jordan. I usually roll my eyes when I read something like this, not because Tolkien and Jordan didn’t write great books, but that naming them as inspiration is so often done it’s become something of a trope at this point. They practically defined entire genres of fiction. <em>Of course</em> you took inspiration from these source, who hasn’t?</p>
<p>But it did get me thinking. The Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time are both massive works, and in this way they are something like the Bible: two different people can take very different, if not diametrically opposed, interpretations of it. It is no surprise that many books inspired by these greats can so often look nothing like each other.</p>
<p>So what does David Ashura think makes those works great? How did he weave those elements into his books?</p>
<p>More importantly, what can I learn from this?</p>
<p>Note: Spoilers, maybe? I’m gonna discuss some plot elements I do not really consider spoilers, but some might. There will be serious spoilers for TLOTR and WOT, though. Reader beware.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>Cinder Shade wakes up face down in a well. No, scratch that. Cinder Shade dies, <em>then</em> he wakes up face down in a well. This all happens in the prologue and first chapter, setting the stage for the book. And already we have our first element:</p>
<h3 id="the-chosen-one">The Chosen One</h3>
<p>It’s a really common trope, but it’s an attractive one. Who doesn’t want to have a destiny, to discover themselves the hero in some grand story <sup id="fnref:1" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup>? In this case, David starts the story with a mysterious protagonist that doesn’t remember their past and is so obviously someone else. We’re immediately drawn in to the mystery of who might this character be as he demonstrates powers and skills <sup id="fnref:2" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote" rel="footnote">2</a></sup> and knowledge and wisdom far beyond his years.</p>
<p>At least until chapter 4, maybe, when someone whispers to someone else about some sacred hero who’s destined to return <sup id="fnref:3" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote" rel="footnote">3</a></sup> and oh but dear, whatever could that mean?</p>
<p>And yes, Rand al’Thor is the Dragon Reborn and Frodo will deliver the ring to the flames of Mount Doom and save the world. It’s the same story, recycled over and over, and yet we <em>still</em> read it because we’re all addicted to the idea of being the chosen one.</p>
<p>David Ashura does not disappoint in this. Our protagonist is indeed the chosen one, and he will save the world <sup id="fnref:4" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote" rel="footnote">4</a></sup>, and if you’ve read David Ashura’s <a href="https://davisashura.com/the-castes-and-the-outcastes/a-warriors-path/">other</a> series, you do, in fact, know <em>exactly</em> who our character really is.</p>
<p>There is nothing new here. There’s no real twist or even a re-imagining of the trope. It’s just the trope, thank you very much, and please hold the spice. Does this sound like a criticism? Cause it’s not. It takes real talent and skill to understand a trope well enough to distill it down to its essence and manage to write a story with it that is <em>still</em> interesting and enjoyable.</p>
<p>This will become a theme with David’s writing: There’s nothing new here, but what is here is good, and enjoyable, and we still read it because David is a good writer and knows what he’s doing.</p>
<h3 id="power-progression">Power Progression</h3>
<p>I’ve mentioned power progression before so I won’t belabor the point here. We like seeing our protagonist overcome odds and gain power. The “what will he do/learn next” is a powerful addictive, enough to keep the pages turning as our protagonist moves from school to school, always starting at the very bottom and yet somehow ending up first in class against all odds while he acquires powers “his kind” should never have.</p>
<p>And now I’ve ruined almost the entire first book.</p>
<p>You’ll still read it though, cause if you like power progression you already knew how the story ends. You’re not reading it to find out anything you don’t already know. You’re reading it for the fantasy of the journey itself and, probably, you close your eyes with dreams of yourself in our protagonist’s proverbial shoes.</p>
<h3 id="the-underdog-that-isnt-really">The underdog that isn’t really</h3>
<p>It’s usually tied to power progression, but I think it deserves it’s own element. We like underdogs, we like seeing them succeed, and we like seeing arrogance brought low and our bullies wallowing in the mud. And so the protagonist is cast as the underdog even though he’s the chosen one, while the book brings on the stereotypical, two-dimensional bullies that are really only there to reaffirm that bad people are only bad because they are bad people.</p>
<p>Sigh.</p>
<p>I will give David this: while every bully starts out pretty much the same, he does try to flesh them out over time. I will be honest, though, in that it felt like little more than sleight of hand. While the bullies do end up seeing the error of their ways, so often what really happens is they come to accept our protagonist’s actual greatness cause what else could they do when he’s showing them up so damn thoroughly?</p>
<p>But the only reason the bully is a bully is because they believe their superiority entitles them to be so. And so the only possible solution is to “put them in their place.” Show them they’re not superior, you are.</p>
<p>There’s no exploration of the human side of being a bully and that is always a disappointment to me.</p>
<h3 id="our-world-threatening-evil">Our world-threatening evil</h3>
<p>It’s evil, and it threatens to destroy the world, maybe even all of reality.</p>
<p>And that’s all you need to know. Just like the bully, evil is because it is evil. All you really need to know is that it must be destroyed and it’s only weakness is in its propensity to monologue its plans to anyone willing to listen. Perhaps there’s a reason; perhaps the evil had been offended by someone; perhaps someone died ten thousand years ago and the evil is still trying to burn the world down over the injustice; perhaps the evil is just insane. Does it really matter, though? It’s evil, and any other justification for its deeds are merely side dressings.</p>
<p>In this, the endless slog of paper bullies provide a more meaningful dread.</p>
<h3 id="the-prince--princess-trap">The Prince | Princess Trap</h3>
<p>I… don’t think Tolkien or Jordan ever really integrated this element into their stories. Frodo, certainly, had no forbidden love with royalty and Rand sort of did, but then that was more like a harem and so does it really count?</p>
<p>Either way, forbidden love is a common trope and when that love is a forbidden princess (and foreordained on top), there’s plenty of tension for the author to play with. And he does, and it’s good writing. It also breaks up all the school scenes in a satisfying build up.</p>
<p>A trope it may be, but it’s one I wish more authors would use. I hate harems and too often true love comes across as little more than hormone-ridden teenage angst, which I admit is not something I find pleasant reading.</p>
<p>My biggest issue is when the entire point of the princess is the hero, like, that’s her reason for existing at all. It’s subtly but deeply misogynistic (or misandristic… <sup id="fnref:5" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote" rel="footnote">5</a></sup>), and David tries to avoid it by fleshing out the princess as a person the best he can. The subtlety creeps in during those fleshing-out scenes, when you realize the entire point of them is <em>still</em> our hero.</p>
<p>To be fair, this isn’t just the princess problem. She’s not the only one who’s only thinking about our hero; everyone else is too. All of reality, it seems, watches eagerly for what they will do next. This is to be expected to a certain degree; the book is about our hero, after all. The problem arises when you never catch a glimpse of people living their lives outside of our hero’s warm glow.</p>
<p>David does not veer to egregiously into this, and he does do a lot to try to flesh out some of the other characters, but there did come a point where I started to feel as though I’d arrived in an uncanny valley where everyone’s attention was trained solely on the hero.</p>
<h3 id="racial-tension">Racial Tension</h3>
<p>David has a history of trying to address racism, although he tends to depict it in a decidedly un-American way <sup id="fnref:6" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote" rel="footnote">6</a></sup>. His “Uncastes” series literally has it in the title. In the “Instrument” series, the overt castes has been replaced by actual races: Elves, Dwarves, and Human, mostly. This sets the stage for most of the bullying seen in the book. The Elves are superior, and they have an unhealthy obsession with bullying the weakling human race because… they can? I never quite figured out why.</p>
<p>The tension between the races drives a whole lot of the plot, and it feeds right into the underdog/bullying element.</p>
<p>It also felt thin.</p>
<p>Does all racism boil down into a type of bullying? Is it racist to take a whole race and depict them as racist bullies?</p>
<p>David doesn’t quite go there as much as he <em>starts</em> there, and then works to flesh out individual characters. He first paints the broad strokes of a society dominated by their own chauvinistic tendencies, then pulls individual characters out of that culture and gives them depth as they begin to realize their mistakes.</p>
<p>On one hand, I like seeing characters change; I like seeing depth. On the other, the culture he paints feels flat to the point that the only thing any character can do to gain depth is to abandon the painting into which they were born.</p>
<h3 id="a-greater-whole">A Greater Whole</h3>
<p>David has, indeed, absconded with all sorts of primary elements from his inspired classics and used them wholesale in his stories. He’s done very little, if anything at all, to change them. There’s almost no twist or gotcha; there’s no reinventing the wheel; there’s no surprise here. They’re all rather ordinary, really.</p>
<p>What he does do, though, is weave together a bunch of common elements into a very good story. He doesn’t need to be original when he can turn standard parts into a greater whole. And despite my criticism of each element, I cannot criticize how he’s put them together.</p>
<p>I really enjoyed the books, and I’m quite looking forward to the next one in the series.</p>
<p>Just because something is common or ordinary doesn’t mean it isn’t good. It doesn’t mean it’s lost its draw. More importantly, you can tell David loves this stuff; he enjoys writing it. That comes out in his writing. He’s retelling a story you already know, but he loves this story and so do you, and you don’t care if you know it already, you just want to hear him tell it all over again.</p>
<hr />
<h2 id="info">Info</h2>
<p><a href="https://davisashura.com">Author Website</a><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Davis-Ashura/e/B00HTNYM8C">Amazon Author Page</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B087F44LSV">A Testament of Steel (Amazon)</a><br />
<a href="https://davisashura.com/a-testament-of-steel/">A Testament of Steel (Author)</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08XMRLQ12">Memories of Prophecies (Amazon)</a><br />
<a href="https://davisashura.com/memories-of-prophecies/">Memories of Prophecies (Author)</a></p>
<p>###</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Me. I don’t. Really. Have you really thought about what it takes to be a hero, how miserable and absurd your life would be? Strip away the special effects and really look at the hero’s life. It’s shit. Who cares if you have all this power and saved the world, if in the end you’re miserable and possibly insane? The wisest thing Frodo could have done was to say “Fuck you,” to Gandalf and stayed in his happy valley. Let someone else throw a stupid ring into lava. I’m gonna grow some grapes, ferment them, and enjoy the view from here. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote">
<p>or skillz. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Nod nod. Wink wink. <a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:4" role="doc-endnote">
<p>I presume. The series isn’t finished. I might like to see the hero fail, the world to end, and the multiverse to shrug and move on. <a href="#fnref:4" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:5" role="doc-endnote">
<p>So, misogynistic describes someone deeply prejudiced against women, misandry (misandristic?) is someone who’s prejudiced against men, but what is a gender neutral word that describes someone who is prejudiced against anyone not of their sex (including orientation)? You could use sexist, but that term is heavily loaded, frequently used as an insult or curse, and tends to be used to describe men (if someone is sexist, you almost always assume they’re male). I am annoyed there isn’t a more neutral term that can apply equally to anyone. <a href="#fnref:5" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:6" role="doc-endnote">
<p>We don’t have a caste system in America, and it’s deeply offensive to even suggest something so obtuse. No, we prefer to dress up our racism in the practicality of law so that we don’t have to notice it’s there. That way we can pretend equal opportunity and quickly lay blame on those who don’t rise to the top on their own laziness and/or inherently inferior culture. <a href="#fnref:6" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>by: David Ashura Somewhere in the preface to the first book, David mentions that his source of inspiration revolves around greats like Tolkien and Jordan. I usually roll my eyes when I read something like this, not because Tolkien and Jordan didn’t write great books, but that naming them as inspiration is so often done it’s become something of a trope at this point. They practically defined entire genres of fiction. Of course you took inspiration from these source, who hasn’t? But it did get me thinking. The Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time are both massive works, and in this way they are something like the Bible: two different people can take very different, if not diametrically opposed, interpretations of it. It is no surprise that many books inspired by these greats can so often look nothing like each other. So what does David Ashura think makes those works great? How did he weave those elements into his books? More importantly, what can I learn from this? Note: Spoilers, maybe? I’m gonna discuss some plot elements I do not really consider spoilers, but some might. There will be serious spoilers for TLOTR and WOT, though. Reader beware.Irrational Rationality2021-03-23T10:12:03+00:002021-03-23T10:12:03+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/irrational-rationality<p><img src="https://photos.aaronhayman.com/uploads/medium/8405a0b115ffea939928518e85dc3754@2x.jpg" alt="Jenga Tower" /></p>
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<p>Why do some people believe clearly false ideas?</p>
<p>It’s a question I’ve been turning over in my mind for… ah, no reason, really, just random thoughts, definitely not anything political. And since these random-but-clearly-not-political musings are bouncing around my head, I figured I could examine a couple non-politically charged ideas:</p>
<ul>
<li>QAnon? Nope, staying far away from that.</li>
<li>Holocaust deniers? Hmm… no, if only because it turns my stomach.</li>
<li>Chem trails? Meh… so last decade.</li>
<li>Illuminati? So last century?</li>
<li>Bill Gates seeding the world with metal snow? A little to far into the crazy.</li>
<li>Flat Earthers? Ah, so I kind of feel like that one’s cheating.</li>
</ul>
<p>Actually, let’s go with that: flat earthers. There are a not insignificant number of people that believe the earth is flat, truly. On the face of it, this is a remarkably obvious and to many, a stupid belief. There’s an astonishing amount of ‘proof’ that we live on a very large sphere called a planet. Not only are there clues to this on the ground, but if we just look up at the sky, we can see pretty much everything else out there also is a sphere. Then there’s all the videos and images from the international space station, satellites, the shuttle, etc, and it becomes pretty hard to believe that we’re living on anything but a spherical planet.</p>
<p>It might seem the only way to <em>not</em> believe the earth is a sphere is to dig a deep hole and bury yourself deeply within it. Yet I guarantee they’ve seen it all.</p>
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<p>Give them this proof; I dare you; see what happens. Because for every piece of proof you give them, they will have a well-thought out rebuttal that ‘proves’ the proof is either wrong or has been faked. They will form a consistent, if somewhat elaborate chain of theories that each sustain the other. They will question your assumptions of <em>where</em> your knowledge came from and how you can be sure of it (can you truly trust anything from the media or the government?). They will pull from a deep well of alternative evidence and string the pieces together in an elaborate tapestry that just might have you doubting whether the very foundation of truth itself.</p>
<p>They do, in other words, exactly what we do. Their evidence will look like ours and sound like ours and even feel rational and sane <sup id="fnref:1" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup>, as though it were possible that any prevailing mass opinion of truth could actually be wrong. They will point out that humanity has often been wrong.</p>
<p>They’re not wrong.</p>
<p>Humanity has often been wrong. We all once thought the world was flat and all the heaven’s circled us, the very center of the universe. When you look over the course of history, you’ll find all sorts of peculiar beliefs embedded so deeply into the society of the time that it might as well have been truth for all that it shaped people’s lives. Even in the present day, you simply need to move a little outside of your community to find alien ideas entrenched in strange cultures, all held just as deeply as our own. They are foreign and clearly wrong, perhaps even a little childish, but behind them all you will find the same kind of rationality, of logic and experience combined with unshakable belief, that comprises our own closely held truths.</p>
<p>This becomes much more pernicious when you pit a deeply defended belief against prevailing public fact. Because prevailing public facts aren’t really thought about much. We don’t spend a whole lot of time wondering whether the world is flat or round. We’ve been provided the evidence, given the rational behind it, and let’s be honest: for that vast majority of us, it really doesn’t matter does it? Round or flat doesn’t change anything about our day to day life. We don’t need to build hard proofs for why it’s true and we don’t have the time anyway. We’ve life to live and only so much time to do it in.</p>
<p>Yet doubt digs at the back of the mind. What if we’re wrong? And why is it that people who are clearly wrong can be so convinced otherwise. How is it that they have so much proof, and why does it look just like ours?</p>
<p>Surely there must be some way to tell?</p>
<p>Perhaps. Perhaps not.</p>
<p>The problem is, all rationality is built on the tip of an ice burg of assumptions. As I’ve mentioned before, all logic is true, but only categorically. The moment you apply it to the world, logic looses it’s ‘truthiness’. The very process of applying logic to reality necessitates this. Reality is otherwise too big, too messy, too complex. Trying to question all our assumptions would only lead to paralysis; we simply don’t have the time.</p>
<p>Let’s take an example. By day, I’m a software engineer. As a software engineer, I’m often tasked with producing software dreamt up by people who do not write software. Some clients don’t understand at all why software takes so long, or how it’s possible to have a bug <sup id="fnref:2" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote" rel="footnote">2</a></sup>, or why some feature will take so long, or why it can’t be done at all. If software is just telling the computer what to do, then if the computer has done something wrong, it’s because you told it wrong.</p>
<p>Well…</p>
<p><img src="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dependency_2x.png" alt="XKCD Dependency Comic" /></p>
<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/2347/">XKCD Comic: Dependency</a></p>
<p>Software, like knowledge, is built on an absurd number of assumptions, except in software development we call these ‘dependencies’. We can’t build modern day software without them <sup id="fnref:3" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote" rel="footnote">3</a></sup>, but within those dependencies are hidden bugs, wrong assumptions, bad code, and poorly communicated interfaces. Even worse, software developers (being people), don’t often agree on the best way to do things. So some dependencies don’t work with others or do so poorly or cause your app to crash in the weirdest place. And because this is all happening deep within the dependency stack, it would take weeks of effort to comb through thousands of dependencies built with millions of lines of code. So we don’t. Instead, we hack a solution <em>around</em> the problem and plant a flag that says “Here be dragons; enter and die.”</p>
<p>This is why we can’t know the truth and why people believe lies. It’s not that truth isn’t a knowable thing, it’s just buried so deep within a million assumptions of life that to truly dive down and tease apart with logic and rational thinking would take the rest of our lives… or more.</p>
<p>I recently read an interesting <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/quantum-mischief-rewrites-the-laws-of-cause-and-effect/">article in Wired</a> about quantum physics and causality. Specifically, some scientists are starting to believe that the effect of a thing could actually occur <em>before</em> the cause of it. This, of course, is absurd. A cause must precede an effect… except maybe it doesn’t. We’ve already learned from quantum experiments some things can be more than one thing at a time occupying more than once place at a time. Recent experiments suggest time and causality itself also may not behave in the way we’ve always assumed.</p>
<p>Put another way, we’re realizing that to understand our world better, we must break some of the most foundational assumptions of how we believe the world works.</p>
<p>Will there come a day when our very conception of causality will be looked upon as childish and simple, the way we now look on those who believe the earth is flat? Will there one day be a contingent of theorists consummately amassing an army of evidence to restore the faith in such an outmoded way of thinking?</p>
<p>All of our carefully constructed evidence, rationality, and logic will always look the same, no matter how true it is. Building more evidence or constructing more logic won’t make it any more or less true. Perhaps rationality and logic was never intended <sup id="fnref:4" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote" rel="footnote">4</a></sup> to ‘know the truth’. Perhaps it is, at most, a tool, a functional piece of our mind that stitches together our experiences into a seamless narrative with duck tape, glue, and false assumptions. Yet it’s an effective tool that conjures the illusion of a seamless whole that looks and feels real because <em>it works</em>.</p>
<p>And perhaps that’s all we can ever expect from our minds. We want to have the certainty that we have grasped the truth itself, but perhaps all we’ve ever grasped was something effective. Never mind that lots of people believe lots of different things just as passionately as us, and with all the same kind of logical evidence backing them. Never mind their views of the world can work just as well as ours and sometimes even better.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most rational thing to do is eschew rationality, accept as true what we must to live, and plant in all the cracks of our ideas flags that say: “Here be dragons; enter and die.”</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote">
<p>At least in that singular moment before you stick you head up for air and bathe once again in the prevailing opinion of the masses. You will then breathe easily, snug and secure in the knowledge that everyone around you actually agrees with you. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Because surely a bug means the developer has made a mistake and why should I pay for your mistakes? No kidding, I’ve had clients tell me this before. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Okay, technically we <em>can</em>, maybe. It would just take an absurd amount of time. We’d either have to start from the beginning and rebuild several decades of computer science, only to make an app/program that probably has more bugs than the dependencies we eschewed because those dependencies came from thousands of people smarter us working far more hours than he have available in our lifetime. <a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:4" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Whether by God or evolution or both or aliens, I will not comment. <a href="#fnref:4" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Why do some people believe clearly false ideas? It’s a question I’ve been turning over in my mind for… ah, no reason, really, just random thoughts, definitely not anything political. And since these random-but-clearly-not-political musings are bouncing around my head, I figured I could examine a couple non-politically charged ideas: QAnon? Nope, staying far away from that. Holocaust deniers? Hmm… no, if only because it turns my stomach. Chem trails? Meh… so last decade. Illuminati? So last century? Bill Gates seeding the world with metal snow? A little to far into the crazy. Flat Earthers? Ah, so I kind of feel like that one’s cheating. Actually, let’s go with that: flat earthers. There are a not insignificant number of people that believe the earth is flat, truly. On the face of it, this is a remarkably obvious and to many, a stupid belief. There’s an astonishing amount of ‘proof’ that we live on a very large sphere called a planet. Not only are there clues to this on the ground, but if we just look up at the sky, we can see pretty much everything else out there also is a sphere. Then there’s all the videos and images from the international space station, satellites, the shuttle, etc, and it becomes pretty hard to believe that we’re living on anything but a spherical planet. It might seem the only way to not believe the earth is a sphere is to dig a deep hole and bury yourself deeply within it. Yet I guarantee they’ve seen it all.Spinning Silver2021-03-22T09:47:28+00:002021-03-22T09:47:28+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/spinning-silver<p><img src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/516KQqmKjzL._SY346_.jpg" alt="Spinning Silver Book Cover" /></p>
<p><em>by Naomi Novik</em></p>
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<p>Okay, so having read “A Deadly Education”, I decided to finally go back and read “Spinning Silver”, a book I kept seeing recommended but never read because I just <em>knew</em> it was a stupid retelling of a story I already knew <sup id="fnref:1" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup>.</p>
<p>And I hate stupid retelling of stories I already know. I really do.</p>
<p>Except this was not that. Novik more takes the bones of the original story and rearranges them into something almost entirely different. Perhaps it would be better to say she took the original as a kind of inspiration, but there’s no doubt it is her own creation.</p>
<p>And here’s the thing: this was a great story. Really. I loved the <em>story</em>. It kept me reading as a story should.</p>
<p>But, oh my god did it do it in such a painfully laborious way.</p>
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<p>Okay, let’s just get this out of the way cause it’s clearly on my mind. Naomi loves, and by ‘loves’ I mean she absolutely adores with unadulterated passion, endless segues into her character’s minds as they opine over their past in exquisite detail.</p>
<p>Instead of “Rachael [not her name] looked at the farm with longing,” we are instead treated to a six page recitation of just <em>why</em> she looked on the farm with longing.</p>
<p>…and, I kinda of get it.</p>
<p>I currently have… well, not pages, but perhaps many paragraphs of exactly the same kind of thing, where I recite to the reader the character’s past so that <em>they can understand them</em>. I mean, I’ve spent who-knows-how-long coming up with their past and how can the reader expect to understand them if I don’t expound on how and what exactly brought them here and why they’re doing what they do and every little causality inherent in their decision process, and oh but look at how real my characters are!</p>
<p>Except, in the end, “Rachael looked at the farm with longing,” is exactly all that we, as the writer, need to use convey the longing the character is experiencing. Why not leave it to the reader’s imagination? Having learned about so-and-so for half the book, our readers can very easily understand why she would want a farm of her own. In fact, I would argue the reader’s imagination just— <em>just</em>— might be better than our own. More to the point, all this explaining distracts from the actual story, forcing the reader to either skim for the good parts, postpone the plot and possibly loose interest, or slog through the details with glazed eyes..</p>
<p>And I do not mean to imply that all such exposition is inexcusable. There are certainly times when a character’s past must be understood in order to grasp the current situation. But that situation is, I believe, quite a bit rarer than most authors might believe, and there’s a lot of other ways to expose the past without detailing it out in our character’s head.</p>
<p>Let’s move on to my second complaint.</p>
<p>I can’t quite say the same thing about her choice to use multiple first person perspectives. The problem with the first person is the narrator very rarely refers to themself. This isn’t a problem when there’s only one point of view, but multiple view points force the reader to divine the person speaking through context. You can’t just say “Joe woke up”; it’s always “I woke up”. Problem is, who is the ‘I’ speaking?</p>
<p>Dialog, location, and circumstances are natural places for the reader to look, but it can take time to figure those out. In meantime, the reader has potentially consumed paragraphs without actually knowing who’s doing the talking. In the case of Spinning Silver, more than once I read an entire section believing it was of one person, only to come across something later that made me realize I’d actually read a completely different character. They’d been travelling together, so almost all the clues were the same.</p>
<p>I am of the opinion that the best way to deal with this is to create a unique tone for each character by imbuing the character’s personality and emotional state into the narrative writing style. Done right, the reader will know who’s speaking almost immediately, sometimes without any context at all, merely by virtue of the words used. In other words, each character perspective should <em>feel</em> like it was written by a different author.</p>
<p>For instance, I’m writing a character <sup id="fnref:2" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote" rel="footnote">2</a></sup> who’s very particular, somewhat neurotic about their clothes, and has an impeccable, almost unnatural sense of time and space. Nothing ever takes only a few seconds; nothing is ever close or far. That character would never admit to such vague terms. Instead, it took four seconds, and the door was eight paces away (and there were twelve boards between them and the door). No other character does this, so the moment we see “four seconds” instead of a “few seconds”, we know of whom we’re reading.</p>
<p>And that leads right into the ‘show don’t tell’ mantra so often repeated to newly budding writers. How do you give to the reader a sense of who their character is? As writers, we often (and should) have a clear image in our head of our character; we know them intimately. We want the reader to know our character as well as we do, and so there is strong temptation to tell them who our character is, what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, their past, and why that character does what they do. While this tells the reader who their character is, it reads more like something you might read in the news; it’s distant, like gossip, and the reader doesn’t really know the character intimately as much as they know facts <em>about</em> the character.</p>
<p>This difference between knowing about a character and knowing a character intimately, is the difference between having your characters come alive on the page and reading a vaguely interesting story about other people.</p>
<p>This is where I felt disappointed by “Spinning Silver”, for while I thought the story was great, I never truly connected to any of the characters even though I knew so many things about each of them. I even began to confuse them, mistaking one for the other until it almost didn’t matter who was who.</p>
<p>None of this is to say it was not a good story. The actual plot lines were very tight and well integrated. The story itself was interesting and managed to keep me engaged even through what seemed like an endless retelling of ruminations of recited backstories. And while the narrative perspective for each character all sounded the same, they still acted with their own, believable motivations. They really <em>were</em> different; it’s just their differences were painted over with the same tones.</p>
<p>A final thought: “Spinning Silver” was written several years before “A Deadly Education” and, having read them back to back, it’s very clear Novik has improved her writing considerably, especially when it comes to creating unique first-person tones. If you’ve read <a href="https://aaronhayman.com/2021-03-15-a-deadly-education/">my review of “A Deadly Education”</a>, then you will have noticed a theme: I <em>still</em> think she spends too much time in her character’s head reciting the past, but it’s a lot better than here and her improved master over tone goes a long way toward making those segues palatable.</p>
<p>In fact, I would say that while I’m clearly not a big fan of reciting a character’s past in their own head, the more entertaining the author can make those trips down memory lane, the less I seem to mind.</p>
<p>But would I recommend “Spinner Silver”? Yes, I would, just so long as you know what you’re getting into. Behind the bland tones is a story well worth reading.</p>
<hr />
<h2 id="info">Info</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.naominovik.com">Author Website</a><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Naomi-Novik/e/B001IGNGVK">Amazon Author Page</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.naominovik.com/spinning-silver/">Spinning Silver (Author)</a><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Spinning-Silver-Novel-Naomi-Novik-ebook/dp/B077WXP3KG">A Deadly Education (Amazon)</a></p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote">
<p>I really don’t. I looked into and realized my entire understanding of Rumpelstiltskin comes from the TV show “Once Upon a Time”. Yes, I am ashamed. I should rectify this some day. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote">
<p>In a book that may actually someday be finished. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>by Naomi Novik Okay, so having read “A Deadly Education”, I decided to finally go back and read “Spinning Silver”, a book I kept seeing recommended but never read because I just knew it was a stupid retelling of a story I already knew 1. And I hate stupid retelling of stories I already know. I really do. Except this was not that. Novik more takes the bones of the original story and rearranges them into something almost entirely different. Perhaps it would be better to say she took the original as a kind of inspiration, but there’s no doubt it is her own creation. And here’s the thing: this was a great story. Really. I loved the story. It kept me reading as a story should. But, oh my god did it do it in such a painfully laborious way. I really don’t. I looked into and realized my entire understanding of Rumpelstiltskin comes from the TV show “Once Upon a Time”. Yes, I am ashamed. I should rectify this some day. ↩A Deadly Education2021-03-15T11:15:58+00:002021-03-15T11:15:58+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/a-deadly-education<p><img src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41hU2U1muhL.jpg" alt="A Deadly Education Book Cover" /></p>
<p><em>by Naomi Novik</em></p>
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<p>This was a delightful book, and the problem with delightful books is they’re hard to critique. Instead of making mental notes, I find myself enjoying the story. As a reader, this is great; it’s exactly what I want out of a book. As a writer looking to learn from other people’s writing, this is kind of the worst type of book to read. I’m left with ‘wow, that was a good book’ and not with lessons I can apply to my own craft.</p>
<p>First, of course, is why I bought the book in the first place. Naomi Novik isn’t an author I’ve read before, though I’ve been aware of her for a while now. She’s shown up in recommendation engines, but always the premise of her books hasn’t been strong enough for me to purchase them. The one I see most frequently, Spinning Silver, is a retelling of Rumplestiltskin. It’s highly recommended with lots of good reviews and I just haven’t wanted to read a retelling of an old story, so I didn’t. A Deadly Education, though, was something new, and this time when I came across the recommendation, I picked it up.</p>
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<h3 id="what-worked">What Worked</h3>
<p>The biggest thing that comes to mind is the author’s tone. The story is written in the first person, and the tone of the protagonist is unique, witty, engaging and, perhaps most importantly, <em>unreliable</em>. This isn’t a first person account of what happened, it’s a first person account of what the protagonist <em>thinks</em> happened.</p>
<p>I personally think first person perspectives should be unreliable; they’re a perspective, after all. In practice, though, I’ve found most authors don’t do this, and I can understand why. It’s hard. As an author, you know what happened because you made it up. But then you have to write it in a way that is not only a valid interpretation of the event, but is also one that aligns with the character’s personality. Worse, if you’re main character can misinterpret the event, so can everyone else; and they should if you want the story to feel real. You’re basically writing multiple stories at once. Worse, you’ve gotta keep them consistent. If a character is prone to a certain type of misunderstanding, the next time an event of that type happens, they need to misunderstand it or the character will feel fake to the reader. Keeping all that in your head as you write is hard. Most authors just tell you what happened and use the first person to go a little deeper into their head.</p>
<p>More impressively, Novik does this in a way you don’t realize at first. I was a good way through the book before I realized the narrator was unreliable, that her version of events didn’t always align with what other people said or thought. Once I realized what was happening, though, my understanding and empathy for the character deepened considerably. I would say Novik’s greatest strength as a writer is her ability to do this.</p>
<p>The rest of it was good. The world itself was very small and constrained, but well fleshed out. They’re stuck in a school that exists in a pocket dimension, cut off from the world until graduation. The rest of the world is experienced through conversation or first-person explanations of the protagonist’s past. I’m not sure if Novik intends to take this series out of the school (the next book is senior year), but if so, she’s sketched out enough detail to make it interesting.</p>
<p>The magic system is messy and, I think, intended less as a system and more to evoke a kind of Harry Potter-ish mystery. I think it does a reasonable job at this. In particular, I liked the ‘malicious’ aspect, where taking magic from another creature yields power, but also corrupts. It provides some excellent plot mechanics, tension, etc. The good aspect of magic, though, was a little weird. The rest of it, though, will need to be explained in the “what didn’t work” section.</p>
<p>The plot mostly revolves around the teenage drama of fitting in, with a bit of the apocalyptic thrown in for ramifications. Teenage drama can easily turn me off, especially when it’s done wrong <sup id="fnref:1" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup>, but in this case I really enjoyed it. For one, she starts out with the stereotypical roles (even the main character is basically anti-social goth), but then immediately starts tearing them down. In the process, we get to know the real people behind those facades. The rest of the actual plot was somewhat predictable but still enjoyable. I did expect a kind of big-reveal which didn’t happen, though in retrospect I think that was the better choice.</p>
<h3 id="what-didnt-work">What didn’t work</h3>
<p>The author’s greatest strength is, in this case I think, her greatest weakness. She’s very good at getting in her character’s head. At the same time, I think she spends far too much time in her character’s head, especially as a mean to relay information to the user. Vast swaths of the book are taken up with the character explaining their past to the reader. I can accept this at the start of a book if it’s necessary to setup a premise to the plot, but I start to feel the author is just being lazy once it continues too far. There are other ways to expose the past to the reader: dialog, flashbacks, user’s actions, etc. I think there’s a lot of missed opportunities by having the character tell instead of showing the past.</p>
<p>In a similar vein, too many of the character’s actions are over explained to the reader. I don’t need to know why a character does every little thing. As long as it’s consistent, I’m smart enough to figure out their motivation and it helps me invest in the character. Worse, all that exposition gets in the way of the plot, which can be frustrating when you just want to know what happens next. It practically invites the reader to skim.</p>
<p>The magic system, while interesting, was also a bit random. As I mentioned, the malicious aspect was well done, but the good side, the <em>mana</em>, is a little weird and inconsistent. Mana is generated by living beings doing things. So we often find our characters doing push ups to generate mana… or crocheting, apparently, because it’s creative? I’m unsure. Why then doesn’t writing create mana, or studying, or why don’t people do laps? None of that is explained, and in a book that really wants to explain everything, it comes across as an omission. I hope the next book goes deeper into the system.</p>
<h3 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h3>
<p>With well written, relatable characters struggling in an interesting setting, the book deserves the praise it’s received. While I found some things to gripe at, especially the amount of exposition, I also recognize a bit of that comes down to preference.</p>
<p>All said, though, if you’re looking for a interesting Harry-Potterish-like-but-not-really world with some teenage drama, a well written fitting-in story, and some excellent character development, this book is probably for you. As for me, I’m looking forward to reading the next book in the series when it comes out.</p>
<hr />
<h2 id="info">Info</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.naominovik.com">Author Website</a><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Naomi-Novik/e/B001IGNGVK">Amazon Author Page</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.naominovik.com/a-deadly-education/">A Deadly Education (Author)</a><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B083RZC8KQ">A Deadly Education (Amazon)</a></p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Wrong means too much: he said she said, filling roles with stereotypes, wish fulfilment, idealizing scenarios, etc. It’s usually pretty easy to tell when the author has painted over their past with a sheen of nostalgia. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>by Naomi Novik This was a delightful book, and the problem with delightful books is they’re hard to critique. Instead of making mental notes, I find myself enjoying the story. As a reader, this is great; it’s exactly what I want out of a book. As a writer looking to learn from other people’s writing, this is kind of the worst type of book to read. I’m left with ‘wow, that was a good book’ and not with lessons I can apply to my own craft. First, of course, is why I bought the book in the first place. Naomi Novik isn’t an author I’ve read before, though I’ve been aware of her for a while now. She’s shown up in recommendation engines, but always the premise of her books hasn’t been strong enough for me to purchase them. The one I see most frequently, Spinning Silver, is a retelling of Rumplestiltskin. It’s highly recommended with lots of good reviews and I just haven’t wanted to read a retelling of an old story, so I didn’t. A Deadly Education, though, was something new, and this time when I came across the recommendation, I picked it up.Shadow and Bone2021-03-09T08:28:03+00:002021-03-09T08:28:03+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/shadow-and-bone<p><img src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61ps8PnWnNL.jpg" alt="Shadow and Bone Complete Trilogy Book Cover" /></p>
<!--start-->
<p>This book— oops sorry, these <em>books</em> are well written.</p>
<p>Actually, let’s start there first: in my head, they’re a single book. This is, perhaps, an artifact of buying an entire trilogy packaged into a single Kindle Edition racking up a page count equivalent to many epic installments. So while I speak of this work as a single piece, it might help to realize my view is a little skewed. Were there cliffhangers? I’m not sure. If there were, I didn’t really notice as I simply turned the page.</p>
<p>I picked up the book after watching a Netflix trailer for a cool looking new fantasy series with the same title. A few minutes later, I’d downloaded the trilogy <sup id="fnref:1" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup>. My general assumption is a series must be at least somewhat good if people are willing to throw millions into turning it into a TV/Movie series.</p>
<p>And it was. Good, that is. I’m sure a lot of people really liked it and I can see why Netflix took it up. It just… wasn’t great. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.</p>
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<p>I would be thrilled to produce something this good. It’s hard to make something good, as can be attested by the flood of mediocrity saturating ebook stores today <sup id="fnref:2" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote" rel="footnote">2</a></sup>. Making something great is even harder (of course) and risky. To make something great, the author generally has to break the established rules and patterns that make for good books, and do it in such a way that it doesn’t ruin the whole thing.</p>
<p>And this is how a lot of great authors fall flat on their face.</p>
<h3 id="the-plot">The Plot</h3>
<p>Leigh Bardugo does not fall on her face. The whole series is well written with a good plot, interesting characters, and a magic system in a world that was… well, a little flat, to be honest, but it was a good story at least.</p>
<p>It was also very predictable. By the end of the first chapter I’d predicted the end of the book, and correctly. To be fair, there were a few times I thought Bardugo was going to buck the standard and do something different but no, she didn’t, and I admit to some disappointment at that. That being said, I rather suspect something different would have alienated much of her readership— this is a specific type of story, and readers <em>want</em> that ending where [spoilers].</p>
<p>But I have to reiterate: it was a good story. I can’t recall a point where I wanted to skim the pages. I was interested in what was happening, even if I knew where it would lead.</p>
<h3 id="the-magic">The Magic</h3>
<p>It’s called the “Small Science” in the book and I have to agree: the magic system is very small. Magic users are called gisha, and they’re slotted into only a few categories: healers, heart-renders (anti-healing), inferno (fire), squallers (wind), tidemakers (water), and finally a tinker class for making things (sorry, can’t remember the name). Then there’s the darkling who controls darkness and the sun summoner who controls light.</p>
<p>I think that’s it; it’s all I can remember at least.</p>
<p>There is a deeper magic that revolves around creation instead of manipulating energy, but there was precious little actual detail behind it and to me it came across as more of a plot device.</p>
<p>Actually, on second thought, the whole magic system really did feel more like a plot device than a living, breathing part of the world. That’s fine if it’s what the author intended. If the story itself was the point of this book and not delving into a deep, complicated magic system, then that goal was accomplished quite well.</p>
<h3 id="the-world">The World</h3>
<p>The world was only barely more fleshed out than the magic. Despite the whole “save the world” motif running throughout the book, it all takes place in what feels like a very tiny part of said world. Even the nation of Revka, where the majority of the book takes place, felt small and almost claustrophobic to me. There seems to be only one or two cities combined with a smattering of small, forgettable towns. The politics are essentially non-existent. You’ve got a shallow and capricious king and queen, both of whom are mostly just figureheads behind the real power of the darkling. I think there are other royalty, but they come across a little more than bodies meant to fill ballrooms.</p>
<p>In a similar vein, religion was shallow. There are saints whom may or may not have been gisha (probably were), and people pray to them. Without spoilers, a new religion is born in the book, but it’s not any different than what I just described. And while it plays a somewhat large role in the plot, there was very little depth, where adherents do little more than mindless hero-worship and the only real leadership are little more than cynical, ambitious power mongers.</p>
<p>The other nations of the world — all three of them? — came across a little more than cardboard cutouts of ill-defined stereotypes. At one point, a native of one of the other nations responds to an offhand comment about her country with, (paraphrasing here) “There is more than sand in our nation.” I couldn’t help but think, “Are you <em>sure</em>?”</p>
<p>This lack of depth to the world undercuts the whole “save the world” imperative the author was attempting to drive home. The world was just too small to feel consequential in that way.</p>
<h3 id="the-characters">The Characters</h3>
<p>The character development is where the author truly shines. The main characters in the book feel real, with their own motivations and actions that don’t feel like they’re there to simply drive the plot. Relationships are fleshed out and interpersonal to an impressive degree. They’re complex and ever changing in the natural, messy way relationships tend to be.</p>
<p>This alone makes the world feel real. It draws you in and distracts you from the props that comprise so much of the rest of the book. The shallow magic system and the flat, constrained world don’t really matter. They’re not the point. The <em>people</em> are the point, and the author invites you to take part of their struggles. Forget everything else, people are what matter, and here is where the author nailed it.</p>
<p>There’s only one small problem, and I didn’t even realize it until the end: move just a little outside the protagonists circle, and the characters become quite flat. Yet so good was the central character development that you don’t quite realize this at first, and maybe not at all.</p>
<p>There’s a few scenes where one character visits another… in spirit? Not sure; doesn’t matter. In those scenes, everything but the two characters is fuzzy and nondescript. So long as they focused on each other, it didn’t matter. The fuzzy rest wasn’t the point. The book is like this. Everything within the bubble of the main character is so well thought out and feels so real, you don’t notice that everyone else isn’t.</p>
<p>This came to light when I realized that too many characters were too focused on the main character. She had become all the world in a sense, and while the relationships feel real, this fact that she’s become the center of everything most decidedly does not. There is a plot reason for this, but even that isn’t enough to justify it.</p>
<p>Once I realized that, I started looking more closely at the distant characters, the ones not central to the plot. Once again, I found cardboard cutouts.</p>
<p>Now, there’s only room for so much. Each of the book’s trilogies totalled maybe three hundred pages each. That’s not a lot of room to develop out other characters. But the author got really close to me not noticing this. Her slight of hand was really good. I think if she’d just hinted of more plot/relationships/stuff-happening outside of the realm of our main character, stuff interesting but not exactly related to her specifically, I probably would never have noticed.</p>
<p>Either way, character development in general is clearly a strength of hers. Just a little more effort into non-critical characters, and I can see her work becoming great pieces, at least so far as characters go.</p>
<h3 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h3>
<p>I liked these books. They were good. I can’t say they were great, but I didn’t need them to be. I was entertained, I felt stuff, and even toward the end she may have pulled out a tear or two. These books will never be a favorite of mine, but I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them.</p>
<p>As for the TV series? Well, all those cardboard cutouts? Those are great places for a show to elaborate. The sketches provided by the author could easily be filled in and made to feel real. I hope they do.</p>
<hr />
<h3 id="info">Info</h3>
<p><a href="https://www.leighbardugo.com">Author Website</a><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leigh-Bardugo/e/B005ZZ8XQS">Amazon Author Page</a></p>
<p><em>Book Series</em><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007NKMQGQ">Shadow and Bone</a><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AAYF8TY">Seige and Storm</a><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GVRVEG0">Ruin and Rising</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0176VPIFW">Combined Trilogy</a></p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote">
<p>This is common for me. I came across Game of Thrones the same way. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote">
<p>And again, if this sounds like a judgement of those authors, it’s not. I like a lot of that “mediocrity”. And while I pick apart these novels, cringing at recycled plot lines and hacked together prose, I still read them; I still <em>like</em> them. They’re not great, but they’re good enough, and they’re entertaining, and I don’t always want to read “great” books. Sometimes (often), I just want to be entertained. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>This book— oops sorry, these books are well written. Actually, let’s start there first: in my head, they’re a single book. This is, perhaps, an artifact of buying an entire trilogy packaged into a single Kindle Edition racking up a page count equivalent to many epic installments. So while I speak of this work as a single piece, it might help to realize my view is a little skewed. Were there cliffhangers? I’m not sure. If there were, I didn’t really notice as I simply turned the page. I picked up the book after watching a Netflix trailer for a cool looking new fantasy series with the same title. A few minutes later, I’d downloaded the trilogy 1. My general assumption is a series must be at least somewhat good if people are willing to throw millions into turning it into a TV/Movie series. And it was. Good, that is. I’m sure a lot of people really liked it and I can see why Netflix took it up. It just… wasn’t great. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is common for me. I came across Game of Thrones the same way. ↩An Illusion of Distance2021-02-16T08:24:26+00:002021-02-16T08:24:26+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/illusion-of-distance<p>One doesn’t exist.</p>
<p>Does that sound strange, or is it obvious? On the one hand <sup id="fnref:1" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup>, the word ‘one’ means nothing without a reference. For it to have meaning, you must specify. One person? One table? One pencil? One… yeah, you get the idea. So one alone, is meaningless.</p>
<p>On the other hand, there are innumerable examples of one. There is only one me, one of my wife, one of each of my children. There is an infinite supply of examples that we can point to and say: that is only one.</p>
<p>But what <em>is</em> one? What does it mean?</p>
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<p>At some level, it’s a foundational aspect of common sense. You don’t <em>need</em> to examine it because it’s so clearly obvious. There’s very little (read: none) ambiguity when a person says: There’s only one apple.</p>
<p>But what is one? What if we decide to question its existence <sup id="fnref:2" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote" rel="footnote">2</a></sup>? Does such a thing as ‘one’ even exist?</p>
<p>Well, I would argue the definition of one come down to the definition of division or, perhaps, a container. It’s a gestalt configuration of inside (what is), outside (what is not), and clear division between them. It is, in essence, categorical; it’s a collection of smaller definitions that comprise the one, of which the not one does not have, either in whole or in part.</p>
<p>We know me from the air around me by their definitions. I am flesh and blood in a specific, recognizable configuration, and I act in a consistent way that reliably identifies me to others. Air has none of those things.</p>
<p>This idea of a division between things is really important, and not just in our definition of the idea of one, but in the very thought processes of our mind. We cannot in any way think without divisions. We <em>must</em> have categories in order to process the world around us.</p>
<p>If that doesn’t seem obvious, flip it on its head: If everything is everything else, then how can you reason about anything at all? If a tree is a person and a person is a planet, how can you make any deductions about them? Just the idea itself assaults our common sense. We know, instictually, that a person is not a planet. We know we can reason about a person separately from a planet without any real confusion between them. One is clearly different than the other on so many levels that any real confusion between them belongs to the realm of the insane.</p>
<p>What constitutes a division? Where is that point at which I stop and the other begins? We can see me, and we can see not me. But let’s get just a little closer. Where’s the line?</p>
<p>Well, if you’re speaking of a person, then perhaps the outer layer of skin signifies the division between that person and not. Skin, though, isn’t really a good definition. Apple’s have skin, but they’re nothing like our skin, and there’s lots of things that are singular yet have no skin at all. Even a cursory glance will tell us that skin is not a good definition of a boundary.</p>
<p>We need to get closer.</p>
<p>Cells? Better, but we’ll quickly run into the same problem: not all singular things have cells. A fork, for instance, is clearly singular, but had nothing like cells.</p>
<p>So, closer.</p>
<p>Atoms? Yes, here we can see a clear division. Indeed, for a long time we thought atoms were, in fact, a singular thing to which could define boundaries. There seemed to be a clear boundary between what was and what was not an atom. Because of this, we could easily define (or conceive of defining) atoms that were or were not our singular subject.</p>
<p>And then science came in, looked a little closer, and ruined it all. Turns out, atoms are mostly empty space. There’s a core, a whole lot of empty, and something called electrons which, it turns out, are little more than little pockets of energy.</p>
<p>What is that energy? Does it have a boundary?</p>
<p>Not really. It’s more like a wave. Or perhaps we should think of it as a kind of gravity well that holds the energy, much like our sun holds our planets in place. It’s a wave that circles the nucleus like our planets circle the sun.</p>
<p>Not even the nucleus is a single thing. It contains protons and neutrons, which in turn are comprised of quarks, but we haven’t actually seen quarks because they’re just too small to detect. We can however, smash atoms together and tear them apart so thoroughly that we can detect them.</p>
<p>In fact, the closer we look, the stranger it gets. Quantum physics arose from experiments that showed light itself behaved like a wave in all the ways we know waves behave <sup id="fnref:3" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote" rel="footnote">3</a></sup> and yet it can only ever be detected as a particle. Further experiments demonstrated that all particles behave in this way all the way up to complex structures such as bucky balls and molecules.</p>
<p>Can you define the edge of a wave?</p>
<p>Before you answer that, I would point out that whatever your definition is, it must depend on distance because it must depend on the point at which you can detect change. Move closer, and that definition will change.</p>
<p>We’ve come to some twisted variation of Zeno’s paradox: you can’t finish the race because you must first pass the half way point, and as soon as you arrive at the half way point, you have yet another half way point to traverse, ad infinitum. It was supposed to be an argument of absurdity, showing how mathematics can prove things to be true we know for a fact are not.</p>
<p>Yet no matter how close we look, we cannot find a boundary we can use to define the existence of one. Perhaps it does exists and we simply haven’t crossed enough “half way points” to discover it.</p>
<p>Or perhaps the very concept of one was always an illusion of distance.</p>
<p>Perhaps our very concept of division, of categories, and of the useful modes of thinking we engage in were only ever that: useful. Our thoughts don’t reflect the world as it is, but instead reflect our ability to shape the world.</p>
<p>In other words, we think the way we do because it works, not because it’s correct.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Badum bum. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote">
<p>I created this footnote with a sarcastic, witty, comedic comment that would certainly have made you laugh. Then my daughter (who is presently taking a bath) screamed at my youngest son (also taking a bath) and I jumped up to mitigate the danger of either of them drowning because who the hell knows what siblings trapped in in a small container of water are capable of. I certainly don’t, but my eldest son (yes, I have three; don’t judge) jumped out a few minutes earlier under the odd suspicion that it might be dangerous for his health and perhaps he should just go ahead and play with his godzilla-shaped-pressed-plastic-play-toy downstairs, where drowning was not so much a concern. So now you have this weird, admittedly sarcastic story of my kids instead of the sarcastic witty comment that has long since fled my mind. Also, congrats for reading all this. Seriously, you’re a trooper. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Example: interference patterns. For instance, take a perfectly still pool and drop two pebbles in. They each will create waves in the pool and those waves will either reinforce each other, creating larger/higher/stronger waves, or else cancel each other out. This behavior is called interference for obvious reasons. Light behaves just like that. We can easily design experiments that demonstrate this. Problem is, whenever we actually observe light, it’s a particle. We’ve never <em>seen</em> light as a wave. We’ve only observed it’s behavior. And the freaky thing: if we send a single <em>particle</em> (whatever that means) of light at a time, it will still interfere with itself as if it were a wave travelling down all possible paths, just like a pebble dropped in a pool radiates outward… except that when we detect the light, we detect a single particle and nothing else. <a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>One doesn’t exist. Does that sound strange, or is it obvious? On the one hand 1, the word ‘one’ means nothing without a reference. For it to have meaning, you must specify. One person? One table? One pencil? One… yeah, you get the idea. So one alone, is meaningless. On the other hand, there are innumerable examples of one. There is only one me, one of my wife, one of each of my children. There is an infinite supply of examples that we can point to and say: that is only one. But what is one? What does it mean? Badum bum. ↩Deceitful Logic2021-02-13T11:10:08+00:002021-02-13T11:10:08+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/deceitful-logic<p>I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m becoming convinced that logic cannot prove anything. Or, perhaps, I should say it cannot prove anything material.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>if A equals B, and B equals C, then A must equal C.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Categorically, this is true. The problem with this statement (and all logical derivatives) comes not from its definition, but from its application.</p>
<p>Specifically: we can’t apply it.</p>
<p>What is A? What is B? What is C? How do we “prove” they are equal?</p>
<p>The moment you attempt to apply this to the physical world, it breaks down. To prove A is equal to B, we must be capable of fully defining A and B.</p>
<p>We can’t.</p>
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<p>Philosophers and scientists have been searching for as long as history itself for an answer to what makes a thing, a thing; what is reality? Every time we think we’ve discovered the fabric of reality, we not only discover we were wrong, but that it’s much weirder than we anticipated.</p>
<p>Newtonian physics ruled until Einstein came around and showed us space itself could warp, and with it time itself. Just as we got used to that idea, we discovered Quantum physics, from which we’ve realized that particles move like waves until you observe them, and only then they’re particles.</p>
<p>We really have no clue <em>what</em> reality even is. Nobody knows how or why particles travel like waves. We just know they do, and that it’s very weird.</p>
<p>Plato claimed there were perfect ideas set apart in a higher plane of existence <sup id="fnref:1" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup>. In that claim, he supposed there was a perfect representation of a table, by which all tables measured up. A thing was a table by the degree to which is approached this perfect ideal. All things that could be have their perfect definition somewhere in that unreachable plane. It is there that logic can prove all things <sup id="fnref:2" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote" rel="footnote">2</a></sup>.</p>
<p>Of course, no one has ever agreed on what a perfect table is or really, on what a perfect anything is at all <sup id="fnref:3" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote" rel="footnote">3</a></sup>. All our definitions of existence, and thus equality, are categories we’ve made up. The reason table A and B are equal is only because we’ve assigned them both the table category. It’s arbitrary; the moment you dive into specifics, definitions diverge and exceptions abound.</p>
<p>Logic depends on definitions. We must know A to prove it is equal to B. But we don’t and we can’t.</p>
<p>There can be made an argument that a definition can be sufficient without being exhaustive. If we define a table as a flat, horizontal surface held up by four legs, and apply that definition to A, B, and C, then the logical proof has worked.</p>
<p>They’re not wrong, but this often becomes a trap.</p>
<p>All we’ve really proven is that we can apply categories and our categories can be consistent to some degree <sup id="fnref:4" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote" rel="footnote">4</a></sup>. But tables can have five legs, or six, or more, and some have none, but are suspended or attached to walls. There are any number of exceptions that force the logical proof into ever narrowing definitions.</p>
<p>And more importantly, the therefore becomes a lie unless it too becomes as narrow as our definitions.</p>
<p>This leads us down the path to self delusion and sophistry. We <em>say</em> A equals B because they are both tables, but then draw conclusions as though they were actually equal in reality. This confusion between our definitions of what things are and what they actually are persists in just about every aspect of our lives.</p>
<p>This can become particularly pernicious when we apply our definitions to each other. We see someone exhibit behavior that’s consistent with our personal definition of a category. We thus apply the category, assume absolute equality, and use it to generate the therefore.</p>
<p>Everything John does is evil. We know this because he is evil. We know he’s evil because he does evil things.</p>
<p>The sophistry is easy to see. Clearly, John can do both good and evil things, just as all humans can. Yet I swear this logic is the backbone of most political discourse.</p>
<p>None of this is to say that logic is not a useful and powerful tool; nor do I suggest that it can’t provide understanding and insight. In fact, I would argue the opposite. Because it is such a powerful tool, it, like any powerful tool, is subject to abuse. But it can also lead to incredible discover and insight when used properly. The whole field of mathematics, for instance.</p>
<p>My point is we often think we are proving something true when, in fact, we are applying categories to reality with a breathtaking number of assumptions and then drawing conclusions from our ignorance.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote">
<p>I’m strongly paraphrasing here. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote">
<p>And, incidentally, the idea that logic is something separate from us, a thing that can be used by us, but it not part of us. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Except, perhaps, mathematical shapes. But then, those too are categorical ideas not seen in nature. Ironically, everyone can probably imagine a perfect circle, and even agree on its definition, but we can’t prove or demonstrate that we’re imagining a perfect circle, nor has one ever been observed. How could it when space itself is warped? <a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:4" role="doc-endnote">
<p>This is arguably not only useful, but essential to our very intelligence. An inconsistent application of categories could easily be interpreted as a form of insanity. <a href="#fnref:4" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m becoming convinced that logic cannot prove anything. Or, perhaps, I should say it cannot prove anything material. if A equals B, and B equals C, then A must equal C. Categorically, this is true. The problem with this statement (and all logical derivatives) comes not from its definition, but from its application. Specifically: we can’t apply it. What is A? What is B? What is C? How do we “prove” they are equal? The moment you attempt to apply this to the physical world, it breaks down. To prove A is equal to B, we must be capable of fully defining A and B. We can’t.A Magician’s Guide to Defensive Baking2021-02-12T08:09:15+00:002021-02-12T08:09:15+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/defensive-baking<p><img src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51ADdpWrU5L.jpg" alt="Book Cover for A Magician's Guide to Defensive Baking" /></p>
<p><em>by T. Kingfisher</em></p>
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<p>So I picked this one up off a Kindle recommendation. It was fantasy, it looked entertaining, it had a ton of good reviews, and it was on sale for a dollar. It wasn’t even an impulse buy— my impulse to purchase it arrived after I’d pressed the button. It was also going to be a quick read, so I didn’t feel like I needed to finish any of my other books before starting this one, a nice interlude before I return to whatever ongoing epic fantasy I’m currently consuming.</p>
<p>A Magician’s Guide to Defensive Baking (henceforth referred to as Defensive Baking for the sake of sanity) is a Story, capital S. In the fantasy/sci-fi world, writers will often try to bring a strong sense of realism to their worlds. They are, after all, already assuming an unrealistic premise of magic and/or technology that might as well be magic. But there’s also a segment of authors that lean in to the unrealistic, practically turning their story into it’s own metaphor.</p>
<p>Defensive Baking is one of those books. It leans in toward the ridiculous, humorous, and the fantastical. It reads more like a fairy tale and a delightful one at that. It was a thoroughly enjoyable book, easy to read, and inviting to pick up. Kind of like a warm chocolate cookie, I found myself enjoying the simple process of reading a good simple story.</p>
<p>Defensive Baking is also a children’s book.</p>
<p>It’s telling that I did not realize this until after I’d finished the book.</p>
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<p>I probably should have. About halfway through the book, the behavior of the adults, specifically one of the rulers of the city, started to feel off, perhaps even a little childish. Without the context of actually knowing this was a children’s book (albeit, for older children) my mental model shifted from “fantasy” book to “fairy tale” book.</p>
<p>I didn’t mind. Already, I’d come across some ridiculous, but entertaining scenes. The book was entertaining enough that I shrugged and wrote it off as necessary to the plot mechanics. Perhaps there was a way to make a more realistic plot, but I’m not sure it could be done <em>and</em> keep it as short and entertaining as it was.</p>
<p>And so instead of realizing it was a children’s book, I attributed to the author a certain amount of cleverness and craft.</p>
<p>It’s not unearned. Perhaps this sort of thing is endemic to children’s books <sup id="fnref:1" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup> <sup id="fnref:2" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote" rel="footnote">2</a></sup> but if so, that only proves how hard it is to write children’s books.</p>
<p>Let’s pick it apart.</p>
<h2 id="the-hook">The Hook</h2>
<p>The book starts with a murdered dead girl lying in the bakery. I would put in a spoiler warning but it’s literally the first sentence. In fact, we know this long before we learn our protagonist’s name, or age, or sex.</p>
<p>In other words, it’s a hook, and an excellent one at that.</p>
<p>The author immediately pulls back, of course, introducing us to the bakery and what our protagonist does there in a rambling first-person tone, then moves on to the actual process of getting around the body. We don’t learn her name til the end of the chapter; I don’t recall when we learned her age. But the intro takes all of a chapter and most of it is explanation (tell, not show), yet it’s also quite succinct and, once out of the way, we’re quickly ushered into the story’s events.</p>
<p>The hook is a common but important technique that is often ignored by fantasy authors, including me. A big part of the reasoning for this is simple: most fantasy worlds need a lead in; they’ve got a learning curve. Putting the reader directly in the action could easily end up confusing the reader more than hooking them, especially if the scene depends on a base knowledge of the world.</p>
<p>So the author introduces the world slowly, letting you learn of the world and grow comfortable with the characters. There may be (and probably should be) some hints of whats to come, some tension built, some minor events to reveal characters and grow attached to them, but often the opening event occurs several chapters into the book. The author is, in effect, banking on the reader’s trust.</p>
<p>My book currently takes five chapters to get to any real hook. That’s a whole lot to ask of the reader, especially from a debuting author. The chapters aren’t bad and those who’ve read it even tell me they’re entertaining, but is it enough? Do I need a hook?</p>
<p>I don’t know, but I’m giving a lot of thought to rearranging my first chapters. I’m already using flashbacks, and several of the opening chapters <em>could</em> be folded into those. But it’ll also require I rewrite some of those chapter and compress the “tutorial”. This may not be a bad idea but it’ll take a lot of thought.</p>
<p>I’m worried a little that I’ll set unrealistic expectations. I do spend time with the characters, building tension slowly instead of driving the character from scene to scene; I’m not writing a suspense or thriller; this <em>is</em> a fantasy epic. Or is that just an excuse? I’m not sure… and yet I can’t help but think that it’s worth a try.</p>
<h2 id="a-lot-with-a-little-progression">A lot with a little progression</h2>
<p>Power progression books are very popular. It’s satisfying to see the underdog work hard and overcome impossible odds. This can come about is a whole lot of ways as the protagonist gathers magic, skills, tech, or even just experience points. However it’s done, readers find it satisfying to watch a character grow and overcome. We identify with the main character; it’s wish fulfilment, escapism. It sells.</p>
<p>Yet too often authors confuse the underlying attraction and substitute genuine power progression with what I like to call “candied badassery”. They substitute genuine progression with flashy action scenes, often overpowering their own character and undermining the very draw they want to convey.</p>
<p>Defensive Baking is one of the best kinds of power progression. It does, for the most part, do away with any “candied badassery” <sup id="fnref:3" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote" rel="footnote">3</a></sup> and replaces it with knowledge progression combined with the engineering dilemmas in magic form. And even when the author does ramp up the visual effects, it veers more into the fantastical and even comedic.</p>
<p>It works, and the reason it works is the author gets it: it’s not about flash; it’s about overcoming the obstacle (whatever it is); it’s about the way they overcome the obstacle; it’s about the growth in the character. It is not about action scenes; it’s not about beating the opposition to a pulp.</p>
<p>In retrospect, the protagonist isn’t anymore or less powerful than she started out. She just grew as a person and learned more about herself and the power she always had. That is, in my opinion, one of the most compelling kinds of power progression.</p>
<h2 id="a-standard-suite-of-plot-devices-well-done">A standard suite of plot devices well done</h2>
<p>The story is a classic hero’s journey, condensed. All the elements are there: leaving home, discovering oneself, coming home as something more, and using what you’ve gained to save your home.</p>
<p>All I can really say is they were all well done. There’s nothing revolutionary here, or even innovative. The author executed it flawlessly and injected a dose of the fantastical and comedic. It’s a reminder that you don’t need to reinvent things to make a good story.</p>
<p>In the end, this isn’t an author I’d go to for epics or drama or unique style, it’s an author I’d go to because she knows her craft and executes it well <sup id="fnref:4" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote" rel="footnote">4</a></sup>. For that reason alone, I tap the follow button.</p>
<h4 id="author-info">Author Info</h4>
<p><em>Amazon</em><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/T-Kingfisher/e/B00LBKVU3E/">Author Page</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Wizards-Guide-Defensive-Baking-ebook/dp/B08CJ86Y1W">Book Page</a></p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote">
<p>And I wouldn’t know cause the last children’s book I read was when I was a child. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Perhaps I should change that habit. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Not that most of that stuff would work well in a children’s book anyway. <a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:4" role="doc-endnote">
<p>It’s not fair to judge an author by a single book unless, of course, they’ve only written that single book. I will likely try to read some of her other stuff. <a href="#fnref:4" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>by T. Kingfisher So I picked this one up off a Kindle recommendation. It was fantasy, it looked entertaining, it had a ton of good reviews, and it was on sale for a dollar. It wasn’t even an impulse buy— my impulse to purchase it arrived after I’d pressed the button. It was also going to be a quick read, so I didn’t feel like I needed to finish any of my other books before starting this one, a nice interlude before I return to whatever ongoing epic fantasy I’m currently consuming. A Magician’s Guide to Defensive Baking (henceforth referred to as Defensive Baking for the sake of sanity) is a Story, capital S. In the fantasy/sci-fi world, writers will often try to bring a strong sense of realism to their worlds. They are, after all, already assuming an unrealistic premise of magic and/or technology that might as well be magic. But there’s also a segment of authors that lean in to the unrealistic, practically turning their story into it’s own metaphor. Defensive Baking is one of those books. It leans in toward the ridiculous, humorous, and the fantastical. It reads more like a fairy tale and a delightful one at that. It was a thoroughly enjoyable book, easy to read, and inviting to pick up. Kind of like a warm chocolate cookie, I found myself enjoying the simple process of reading a good simple story. Defensive Baking is also a children’s book. It’s telling that I did not realize this until after I’d finished the book.Conan (Sketch)2021-02-10T07:54:05+00:002021-02-10T07:54:05+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/conan-sketch<p><img src="https://photos.aaronhayman.com/uploads/medium/f3ed0011409df56e68ef4effc9cf68fc@2x.png" alt="Conan Sketch Image" /></p>
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<p>I almost called this one “I hate plaid.” I chose the reference photo because of his smile, which is very ‘him.’ I didn’t even think about the shirt. Nolan’s shirt was basically a black blob, so it was easy, but I’d done Fiona’s shirt before and that one had a bit of detail.</p>
<p>Plaid? Eh. Just a few lines.</p>
<p>Right.</p>
<p>Well, the rest came out pretty well, I think.</p>
<p>Let’s pick it apart.</p>
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<ul>
<li>Shadows, again, were a struggle, but this time mostly because the reference photo just didn’t have much in the way of them. I ended up exaggerating them a little to give the sketch more depth. I’m not sure if that’s something that’s needed for sketching in general, or if I’m just not sophisticated enough yet with my sketching techniques to capture the kind of subtlety needed for more even lighting conditions.</li>
<li>Hair was an issue, as usual. Whereas Nolan’s hair required attention to the details of each curl, Conan’s hair was more about texture. I made some original attempts to do each piece (mini-lock?) with detail, but that ended up looking far to piece-meal. It was also very time intensive. In the end, criss-crossing my strokes did a whole lot better job at mimicking the look, especially in the shorter parts. Even the longer parts were done largely this way, albeit with longer strokes. Some of the key features were done with more detail (the parts that stick out).</li>
<li>Yes, that stray curl was in the reference photo. It took me many tries to get it right.</li>
<li>Features came out really well this time. I’m definitely getting better. Oddly, I had very few issues with the nose.</li>
<li>The mouth I had to do some work on. Conan wasn’t just smiling; it was a kind of half-smile grimace, where he pulls his lips back. Again, very him. I captured some of it, but not quite the entire expression. There was a little less smile and more grimace in the original. That said, I’m pleased I managed to reproduce what I did. It was not easy.</li>
<li>The bottom lip pops just a little too much.</li>
<li>Eyes came out well. Those are definitely his eyes. I was also refining their shape right up to the end. Literally, last night I was tweaking them. It still amazes me how sensitive humans are to the shape of eyes. Impossibly small changes can make a huge affect in how we perceive a person’s look. They’re really important. I need to pay more attention to people’s eyes.</li>
<li>Yes, there’s something in his ear. It’s a hearing aid. When Conan was born, they had to give him antibiotics which ended up damaging his hearing (tones in the verbal range sound muffled to him).</li>
<li>He somehow ended up looking slightly older than the reference photo. It’s like I sketched him more as he is now than then. It’s weird. I dunno if I was doing is subconsciously, or whether it’s simply hard to get age right when sketching. The young especially can be difficult as the proportions of their face change subtly, but consistently over the years.</li>
<li>Plaid… err, let’s make that a separate section.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="plaid">Plaid</h3>
<p>I almost didn’t do it. I knew it was going to be a lot of work, which made me doubt whether I should (no one would know). But it was also something I’d not done before and the challenge enticed me. If I knew what a pain it would be, I might not have done it.</p>
<p>I did first what I normally do: rough sketch; don’t worry about accuracy; just get the outline in; then refine later.</p>
<p>First off, it’s <em>hard</em> to sketch multiple parallel, wavy lines. Ugh. At some point after erasing for the hundredth time, I got frustrated and just drew the damn thing; I’ll refine them later.</p>
<p>Refining, though, turned out to be even <em>harder</em>. For one, there’s two techniques for drawing a line:</p>
<ol>
<li>Draw a single line, slow and stead, carefully. But the line ends up wobbly, spaced not quite right, wavy in all the wrong ways, and often with uneven coloring (depth, uh… how hard you press).</li>
<li>Draw small quick strokes. Spacing, size, and even coloring come out much more even and accurate. But, there’s now all these individual stokes that somehow need to become a solid line.</li>
</ol>
<p>In either technique, refining is a pain. Solid strokes have to have their color evened out and their edges smoothed. Even then, the spacing where the lines diverge from parallel is really hard to correct. It’s hard to shift a line like this in refinement. Also, the overall color shifts are hard to correct. Consider: each crossing is a different color. If one line is incorrect over the crossing of a dozen small perpendicular lines, you’ve got over a dozen little boxes to correct, each with their own color correction.</p>
<p>Small quick strokes create half circles at the ends of each stroke. Those things are anathema. Plaid has square edges, not circles. So I spent an absurd amount of time smoothing those out while not ruining the plaid squares. I ended up creating my own brush, a square one, I could use to get into the edges. And because the brush was square, I had to angle the pencil perfectly to align the brush. It took a week for my back to recover.</p>
<p>The end result is okay, I guess, if you don’t look at it closely. The front of the shirt is the best. It seems to follow the curves of the shirt well. The arms… not so much. I’d redo them except I don’t think my back could take it.</p>
<p>Next time I do plaid I intend to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Create the shadows first. Originally, I drew the lines and added the shadows later. But the shadows could be really good guidelines for how the lines are supposed to be wavy.</li>
<li>Use the small quick strokes, but a whole lot more and not as a rough sketch. I wonder if I can do so many of them, all extremely light and stacked, that the effect would be for the ends to disappear. Dunno, but it’s worth a shot.</li>
<li>I considered using the square brush to draw the lines, but I’m pretty sure it would result in disaster for my back and shoulder. Otherwise, I’d get a bunch of jagged/angled ends that would probably be worse than the curves.</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>Overall, I’m pleased. It does look good, and I think I’m steadily improving, which is a big part of the point. I learned new techniques and produced a sketch of my son that I can be proud of.</p>
<h2 id="links">Links</h2>
<p><a href="https://photos.aaronhayman.com/view?p=16129191184886">Full Image</a></p>
<p><a href="https://photos.aaronhayman.com/r/16113393858894">Sketch Album</a></p>I almost called this one “I hate plaid.” I chose the reference photo because of his smile, which is very ‘him.’ I didn’t even think about the shirt. Nolan’s shirt was basically a black blob, so it was easy, but I’d done Fiona’s shirt before and that one had a bit of detail. Plaid? Eh. Just a few lines. Right. Well, the rest came out pretty well, I think. Let’s pick it apart.The Honorable Judge Aaron Hayman2021-02-09T09:59:08+00:002021-02-09T09:59:08+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/the-honorable-judge-aaron-hayman<p>So, I’m having a rather entertaining debate with a friend on Facebook who thinks the election was stolen. We are currently arguing over what constitutes evidence. I’m mostly sharing this cause I had a lot of fun writing it and believe it’s entertaining. It also just happens to reflect my stance on things.</p>
<p>Also, I spent almost two hours on this and I didn’t want it to get lost deep in a Facebook comment thread.</p>
<p>Names have been redacted to protect the innocent. Except mine, but then, I can hardly be called innocent.</p>
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<hr />
<p><strong>[Redacted]</strong><br />
If your bar for evidence is something for which no other rational explanation can be given, then consider a man who kills another man by cutting the break lines in his car. Your honor, the lines could have been old, they could have been severed by accident by the last mechanic to work on the car. There are a dozen explanations for how this could have happened. The honorable Aaron Hayman would dismiss the case, as there were many different rational explanations for how the man died, none of which were true.</p>
<p><strong>Aaron Hayman</strong><br />
We are in danger of degrading this conversation into a debate. I love debates. I also recognize that my enthusiasm can be frustrating for others. So, if at any point you wish to desist this dangerous debating debacle, just let me know and we can shelve it for never.</p>
<p>Let’s set aside that my personal standards of evidence probably shouldn’t be foisted on the justice system. Of course, it’s pretty safe to assume that nothing personal of me should be foisted on others, ever, but for the sake of argument, let’s say the justice system has thrown out all semblance of sanity and decided that Aaron Hayman has achieved enlightenment and his standard of evidence is the only acceptable standard.</p>
<p>Let’s just assume that doesn’t break the world.</p>
<p>You’ve practically made my point for me. Perhaps the lines were old; perhaps the mechanic did accidentally sever them; or perhaps the accused man standing before the Honorable (ha!) Aaron Hayman did, in fact, sever the lines with the intent of killing our poor victim.</p>
<p>As the only Honorable available (cause that’s about the only way I can imagine this happening) how would I know?</p>
<p>The justice system is predicated on “innocent until proven guilty”. We don’t kill people (anymore, supposedly) just because we think they performed murder. It’s the burden of the accuser to prove guilt, not the burden of the accused to prove innocence. This is a really, really important aspect of our judicial system. The honorable judge kills honor the moment he sends the innocent to die.</p>
<p>So we require hard proof.</p>
<p>Eye witness accounts are a form of evidence, but generally considered one of the weakest. Eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable, biased, and self contradictory. They are useful, though, especially when back up by “harder” evidence. So someone saw a shady figure with the same body type as the accused lurking around the victim’s car. The witness is absolutely certain it was the accused. No doubt, whatsoever. But still, we need more.</p>
<p>What is harder evidence?</p>
<p>Well, the line itself, for one. Can we inspect it? Was it old? If it wasn’t old, then we can rule that scenario out easily. What about the cut itself? Was it a clean cut? Did it tear? Are there burns? Did it disintegrate?</p>
<p>How the line was severed will tell us a lot and would be, generally, considered “hard” evidence.</p>
<p>Let’s say the line had disintegrated, and further investigation had revealed a very unique kind of acid had been used on the brake line to cause it to fail. We check, and sure enough, the mechanic doesn’t generally have access to something like that. Moreover, he has no motive. Turns out, killing your customers is horrible for business.</p>
<p>Our accused is looking more and more like our perpetrator. There’s no other suspects, but we still can’t kill a man simply because he’s the only one left in the room.</p>
<p>So we investigate further, and discover fingerprints on the underside of the car’s chassis and a hair was discovered wedged in nearby. DNA reveals a match to our accuser.</p>
<p>Wait, accuser? Yes! Shocking twist! The audience goes wild.</p>
<p>We learn the accuser, also known as the victim’s husband, had taken a life insurance policy out only a couple months ago, about the same time she started sleeping with the accused (who, by the way, has tearfully broken down at this point… because drama). Also, her husband is a chemist who worked in a chemical factory for over two decades. Also, on second glance we realize he and the accused do have similar body shapes. The wife, apparently, had a type.</p>
<p>Investigators rush out the room, the camera zooms on the husband, the courtroom goes wild, and the now red-faced Honorable Judge Hayman is repeatedly banging a comically undersized gravel in an attempt to regain order.</p>
<p>Ten minutes later the investigators rush back (cause you can’t really ask for the audience to wait the 3 days it actually takes to process evidence).</p>
<p>Traces of the acid are discovered in the basement workshop (the only place murder is ever planned); the empty bottles of their constituent parts are discovered in the not-yet gathered trash bags out front. The husband’s fingerprints are all over everything. Everything has been fully analyzed at this point. Yay! Go super investigators!</p>
<p>The eye witness sneaks out of the courtroom, embarrassed, to go drown their sorrows in a bottle of whiskey… again.</p>
<p>Okay, let’s take a step back from this comically contrived scenario and take another look. Each piece of evidence, from the eye witnesses to the cut line, the dna, etc, each are not enough to convict anyone. But when you add them up together, you eventually run out of alternative explanations. There comes a point where you have little choice but to say: “Yeah, the husband did it.”</p>
<p>What about a mass conspiracy to commit election fraud? What kind of evidence do we need? In this case, we’re not talking about a single person, we’re talking about possibly convicting dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people.</p>
<p>And so I hear about judges on both sides of the political spectrum throwing out the mass election fraud cases before they can even reach trial. You claim they’re unwilling to look at “possible evidence”, but the judicial system (especially the criminal system) does not work off of possible evidence. They look at the actual evidence provided and decide whether the case has any chance whatsoever of surviving a day in trial. Because again, the accuser has to prove guilt.</p>
<p>And while I suppose there’s a possibility that we’re looking at some mass conspiracy to thwart justice and undermine America’s electoral system, I find it much more likely the judges each looked at the evidence provided and found there was none.</p>
<p>Also, the final and probably most important lesson learned here is this: I should never be a judge.</p>So, I’m having a rather entertaining debate with a friend on Facebook who thinks the election was stolen. We are currently arguing over what constitutes evidence. I’m mostly sharing this cause I had a lot of fun writing it and believe it’s entertaining. It also just happens to reflect my stance on things. Also, I spent almost two hours on this and I didn’t want it to get lost deep in a Facebook comment thread. Names have been redacted to protect the innocent. Except mine, but then, I can hardly be called innocent.They Laughed2021-02-07T08:03:05+00:002021-02-07T08:03:05+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/they-laughed<blockquote>
<p>They laughed at Columbus and they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>Carl Sagan</em></p>They laughed at Columbus and they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. Carl SaganCategorical Illusion2021-02-02T10:07:29+00:002021-02-02T10:07:29+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/categorical-illusion<blockquote>
<p>There is no reason whatever to believe that there is a disembodied reason or that the world comes neatly carved up into categories or that the categories of our mind are the categories of the world.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Philosophy in the Flesh</strong><br />
<em>George Lakoff</em></p>There is no reason whatever to believe that there is a disembodied reason or that the world comes neatly carved up into categories or that the categories of our mind are the categories of the world. Philosophy in the Flesh George LakoffHeaven’s River2021-02-01T13:18:37+00:002021-02-01T13:18:37+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/heavens-river<p><img src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41S-0lqypRL.jpg" alt="Heaven's River Book Cover" /></p>
<p><em>by Dennis E. Taylor</em></p>
<!--start-->
<p>Okay. Sci-fi, clearly, if the book cover didn’t clue you in. Heaven’s River is the fourth book of a series written by Dennis E Taylor. Given I haven’t written any reviews of his previous series, this’ll be a bit of an overall review of the series that’ll dive into a more detailed review of the later book.</p>
<p>Note: [MILD SPOILERS!]</p>
<p>I can’t really talk about the series without giving away mild spoilers for the first book. To be fair, I think the very title of the first book is about the level of spoilers I’ll reveal <sup id="fnref:1" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup>. But still, they are plot points, and it’s almost impossible to talk about the series without them. If you’re sensitive to that sort of thing, I suggest you just go ahead and pick up the first book.</p>
<p>Clearly, I like the books; I’ve read the whole series to date. If you like Sci-fi and ships, and some weird premises, this a good book to read.</p>
<p>I usual, I spent time trying to figure out why I like this series. As an aspiring writer, I want to be able to identify the core elements that draw me in and, I hope, will draw others in in my own writing. So as I read this latest installment, I paid close attention to what areas I found myself engaged in. What I discovered is something I’m tempted to call it’s own kind of sub-genre:</p>
<p>The Engineer’s Dilemma.</p>
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<p>The engineer’s dilemma is a deceptively simple draw: there is a problem and it needs to be solved. Describe the problem in absurd detail, attach some stakes, insert a clever protagonist, and you have a recipe that will…</p>
<p>Wait, does this sound boring? Cause even as I type it, I feel like this would be boring. People don’t want to read about other people solving technical problems, do they? I wouldn’t think so. Even though I happen to <em>know</em> I like this kind of book, I have found it best not to assume everyone is like me.</p>
<p>And yet, there is this, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Martian-Novel-Andy-Weir-ebook/dp/B00EMXBDMA">The Martian</a>, with over 42 <em>thousand</em> reviews <sup id="fnref:2" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote" rel="footnote">2</a></sup>. And that book is almost entirely made up of engineering dilemmas.</p>
<p>This isn’t a review of The Martian, clearly, but it does represent a kind of gold standard for these kinds of book, or it does in my mind, at least. Stakes in The Martian are high, like, “will I be alive in the next ten minutes” high, and I’m tempted to say this is the most important factor, but no, I won’t cause I don’t believe it. Essential, yes, and high stakes <em>do</em> draw me in, but in the end, the sheer delight in seeing a problem solved with cleverness, wit, and good old-fashioned knowledge is really what kept those pages turning. Even when there was no current problem, I knew there would be and just beyond the horizon would be an interesting solution I hadn’t thought of.</p>
<p>And here’s a thing contrary to most writing advice: the more detail, the better. Don’t just show, don’t just tell, explain the ever-living-shit out that problem. Make it <em>feel</em> real, intractable, impossible to overcome. And now, make it so the protagonist must solve it within ten minutes or they die.</p>
<p>The Bobiverse is very much a series of engineering dilemmas. But unlike The Martian, Bobiverse starts off with a very… out-there premise.</p>
<p>Bob, our protagonist, wakes up in a rocket, his mind uploaded to be the core software of a von Neumann probe <sup id="fnref:3" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote" rel="footnote">3</a></sup>. Humanity hasn’t figured out an AI sophisticated enough to handle the task, but they can scan a brain and upload <em>that</em> instead. Add in a future where humanity is at war (far-fetched, I know) and on the brink of killing each other off and… well, what could go wrong?</p>
<p>Needless to say, there are many dilemmas to be solved, which I won’t go into because spoilers, but on the whole I found them satisfying enough to keep reading. The sci-fi premise also practically invites discussion of post-humanism, metaphysics, and philosophy, and Dennis has no quarrels exploring them. Again, also stuff I like.</p>
<p>The stakes are not high in these books, which I know seems counter to the premise I literally just detailed. Or, perhaps I should say there are high stakes, but not <em>immediate</em> stakes. There’s very little sense that the problem needs to be solved right this instant.</p>
<p>This is what almost convinced me that stakes aren’t important to engineering dilemmas. They need to be there — the protagonist can’t be able to just “walk away” — but you don’t <em>have</em> to make it so the protagonist dies in the next five minutes or else.</p>
<p>I could almost say any stake would work. It took me all the way to the fourth book to realize why that’s wrong. The Bobiverse doesn’t have much tension, but the problems and how the protagonist overcomes them were interesting enough to draw me through three books. About half way through the fourth book, though, I began to wish for more.</p>
<p>Heaven’s River is a long book. Were the other books this long? I dunno. They never struck me as long, but that could easily be attributed to how engrossed I was. I could check page counts but honestly, I don’t really care and I’m too lazy to look it up.</p>
<p>What matters is how the book felt. When it starts to feel long, I suspect something went wrong <sup id="fnref:4" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote" rel="footnote">4</a></sup>. In this case, I believe (just a theory) that the author was trying to add tension: there’s trouble brewing in the Bobiverse, a friend is danger, [redacted] must be be infiltrated, and there’s hints that it’s all connected.</p>
<p>Aaaand, I struggled to care. The individual elements of the story should have worked — he’d certainly thrown in all the right ingredients — and yet there was this disconnect in my interest. By far, the most tension was generated in the troubled Bobiverse. At the same time, the most interesting <em>problems</em> (and story in general) was to be found in the infiltration story line. Yet those two were so distant from each other that for most of the story they might was well been two different books. Even where they intersected, the problems it caused were post-facto. Never did the issues of the Bobiverse create additional tension in the infiltration story and, indeed, they actually removed an aspect of the infiltration I was really enjoying: (spoiler) <sup id="fnref:5" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote" rel="footnote">5</a></sup>.</p>
<p>And finally, I couldn’t remember who the “friend” in trouble actually was. The name sounded familiar and I garnered from context the initial situation, but I couldn’t actually recall him. Also, I wasn’t about to back and read the other books just to find out because… I didn’t care.</p>
<p>This brings me to a particular thorny problem inherent in the very plot devices the author is using:</p>
<ol>
<li>The book is told from the first person perspective.</li>
<li>The story shifts perspective between the “Bawbs”.</li>
</ol>
<p>The results in a story that feels like it has only one character in it, even if that character essentially interacts with multiple versions of himself.</p>
<p>Part of the problem is reader expectation. The vast majority of first-person books maintain a single perspective. If the perspective shifts, the author inevitably switches to the third, making the transition very obvious. This is so consistent I’m tempted to view it as one of those rules writer’s like to make for themselves.</p>
<p>This expectation of a single first-person perspective naturally colors how we consume a first person novel. Ergo, no matter how you name your varied protagonists, they’ll all end up feeling like the same person unless the author expends the extra effort needed to distinguish them.</p>
<p>Dennis does not expend that effort.</p>
<p>It’s possible, maybe even likely, he didn’t want to. Perhaps he wished for them to all feel the same. If so, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. After all, it gives even more opportunities to put our protagonist(s?) in situations that needs to be resolved, and so far as engineering dilemmas go, they don’t need to have heavy character arcs.</p>
<p>But this plot device makes it very hard to create real tension in the individual character. Do we care if Bob or Bill or Will or Howard or [insert generic name here] actually makes it? They might care, sure, but if catastrophe occurs, the reader will only experience a shift in perspective to another character that feels absolutely the same to the reader.</p>
<p>This de-fangs a large number of plot devices traditionally used to racket up the tension. This is made worse when the protagonist is often not in any real danger at all due to the magics of subspace-like instant communication over long distances. Wise for the Bawbs, not so much for scene tension.</p>
<p>It’s not impossible, though. One of the reasons the “threat” inside the Bobiverse worked so well in Heaven’s River is precisely because the Bobiverse felt like it’s own character. I’m tempted to say that the Bobiverse is a better and more fleshed out character than even the individual Bawbs.</p>
<p>I felt that tension. It just didn’t tie back to the individual Bob arcs in a way that mattered. When it came to the individual characters, the Bobiverse tension felt like little more than a plot device even though it was generating an overall tension that felt critical and important.</p>
<p>For me personally, this disconnect between immediate character tension, and the overall story tension is an important lesson in my own writing. I have something of a similar problem. I have two characters that don’t interact for much of the book, but over time tension is built between them as they become each other’s antagonists. This arcing character development is important and, arguably, the bigger part of the story. However, I’m realizing that I can’t use it to carry each individual story. Those individual threads must be compelling enough to carry themselves. If not, then I’ve failed my goal, no matter how epic the arching plot may be.</p>
<p>Do I recommend this book? Yes. All books have hole and issues, even if it just came down to personal preference. But while the Bobiverse is starting to feel a bit thin for me, it’s not yet to that place where I don’t want to read the next book in the series.</p>
<h4 id="author-info">Author Info</h4>
<p><em>Author Website</em><br />
<a href="http://dennisetaylor.org">http://dennisetaylor.org</a></p>
<p><em>Amazon</em><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dennis-E-Taylor/e/B07K1VJL8K/">Author Page</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Heavens-River-Dennis-Taylor-ebook/dp/B08P3NTSSR/">Book Page</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0753LBFQ7">Series Page (Bobiverse)</a></p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote">
<p>“We are Bob” can only have so many explanations, and this is not a book on psychosis. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Yes, yes. Okay, and a movie that may or may not have had a famous actor in it. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3" role="doc-endnote">
<p>A space-faring vehicle designed to replicate itself over and over in order to accomplish far-fetched tasks like, for instance, terraforming a planet. <a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:4" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Badum bum. <a href="#fnref:4" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:5" role="doc-endnote">
<p>The group dynamics. Initially, there are four people involved in the infiltration, but the Bobiverse problem removed all but one. Thing is, I was really enjoying the group dynamics. In one sense, removing the other three made the problems harder, but I also felt a bit of disappointment as the other three characters were suddenly demoted into the background. <a href="#fnref:5" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>by Dennis E. Taylor Okay. Sci-fi, clearly, if the book cover didn’t clue you in. Heaven’s River is the fourth book of a series written by Dennis E Taylor. Given I haven’t written any reviews of his previous series, this’ll be a bit of an overall review of the series that’ll dive into a more detailed review of the later book. Note: [MILD SPOILERS!] I can’t really talk about the series without giving away mild spoilers for the first book. To be fair, I think the very title of the first book is about the level of spoilers I’ll reveal 1. But still, they are plot points, and it’s almost impossible to talk about the series without them. If you’re sensitive to that sort of thing, I suggest you just go ahead and pick up the first book. Clearly, I like the books; I’ve read the whole series to date. If you like Sci-fi and ships, and some weird premises, this a good book to read. I usual, I spent time trying to figure out why I like this series. As an aspiring writer, I want to be able to identify the core elements that draw me in and, I hope, will draw others in in my own writing. So as I read this latest installment, I paid close attention to what areas I found myself engaged in. What I discovered is something I’m tempted to call it’s own kind of sub-genre: The Engineer’s Dilemma. “We are Bob” can only have so many explanations, and this is not a book on psychosis. ↩Just Wars2021-01-30T09:12:49+00:002021-01-30T09:12:49+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/just-wars<blockquote>
<p>That’s the thing with Just Wars - they never end and never will because Justice is a weak god with too many names… no matter what language it spoke, it’s followers could not understand it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Reaper’s Gale</strong><br />
<em>Steven Erikson</em></p>That’s the thing with Just Wars - they never end and never will because Justice is a weak god with too many names… no matter what language it spoke, it’s followers could not understand it. Reaper’s Gale Steven EriksonTyranny2021-01-29T11:11:14+00:002021-01-29T11:11:14+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/tyranny<blockquote>
<p>Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even specially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>The Closing of the American Mind</strong><br />
<em>Allan Bloom</em></p>Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even specially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities. The Closing of the American Mind Allan BloomCertain Doubt2021-01-29T09:13:32+00:002021-01-29T09:13:32+00:00https://aaronhayman.com/certain-doubt<p>I’m pretty sure I’m broken.</p>
<p>I had a ~conversation~ debate with my boss; he literally owns the business of which I am an employee. He has very specific political beliefs <sup id="fnref:1" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup> and he wants to debate them. He’s not just trying to get you to agree; no, he actually appreciates a difference in opinion.</p>
<p>Yeah, I know. Crazy. We get along great.</p>
<p>Yet it was during one of our weekly conversations that I realized I am truly broken.</p>
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<p>I am incapable of accepting certainty.</p>
<p>There was a point in my life when I <em>knew</em>. There was a point when I was certain of the truth. And it was a life built on a foundation of that certainty. From that foundation, I explored. I never cared so much to prove what I knew to be true, but to explore the many facets of it.</p>
<p>Yet in that exploration I discovered doubt.</p>
<p>And doubt destroyed everything.</p>
<p>A whole lot of people thought <sup id="fnref:2" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote" rel="footnote">2</a></sup> I turned my back on “The Truth”, declaring it to be false; but nothing could be further from it. I didn’t discover it wasn’t true. I discovered I didn’t know. I realized I couldn’t know.</p>
<p>I had made assumptions in my certainty, and for much of my life they had remained unexamined. When I did analyze them, I discovered not that they were false, but that I couldn’t know if they were true.</p>
<p>On paper, this doesn’t sound that bad. Yet I’d unknowingly built a fragile life, one whose certainty needed but a hammer in just the right place to shatter. It took years for me to put myself back together, but I was never the same.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
<em>Voltaire</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The end result is that I cannot be certain of anything, and I am incapable of accepting the certainty of others. When presented with it, I will immediately try to tear it apart.</p>
<p>Let me be clear: I infuriate most people.</p>
<p>In most debates there will come a point at which the other person will throw up their hands and declare that facts are fact and if I can’t accept that there is an objective truth, why speak anything at all?</p>
<p>They miss the point. I don’t believe there is no truth. It’s the ‘therefore’ I don’t trust.</p>
<p>“Given x, therefore y.” …well, maybe.</p>
<p>At least in Western society, Aristotelian logic has reigned supreme for thousands of years. If A equals B, and B equals C, <em>then</em> A must equal C. This is a categorically true statement. There is nothing false about it.</p>
<p>This logic, or some derivative of it, is the foundation for much of how we view the world. It’s a powerful tool, and our use of logic has translated directly into our science and math. It’s with this foundation we’ve built our civilization.</p>
<p>Yet like all powerful tools, it can be misused. It can deceive us, luring us into a false sense of certainty. It allows us to take our assumptions and dress them up. It allows us to paint over the ugly complexity of reality with something that looks categorically true.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>John did x, and we all know x is evil. Therefore, John is evil.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is the therefore that lies to us; it is the equal sign we can’t trust. Within it lies a thousand assumptions, and from it we reduce a person to a label. It the essence of over-simplification and the form of dehumanization.</p>
<p>It is the therefore I attack, and with it all those underlying assumptions of truth. It is the absolutes I don’t trust and seek to take apart.</p>
<p>And I might even agree with you. I might believe that what John did was wrong, even evil. I might even believe that John is a horrible human being. But I cannot abide such absolute labels as good and evil. I abhor the reduction of any person to such an over simplification, especially when it’s used as a call to war and an excuse for our own evils.</p>
<p>When my certainty shattered, I embraced doubt. Perhaps is was Stockholm; perhaps it was simply the only way forward for me. Whatever the reason, it is the way I view the world.</p>
<p>It’s not something I’d be willing to give up, even if that were possible. Doubt was an uncomfortable state for a long time, but then it became a form of freedom for me. No longer chained to one way of viewing the world has allowed me to explore possibilities I’d never been able to conceive of. It broadened the world for me and made it a bigger place, a more interesting place. It’s a place filled with mysteries and ideas to explore.</p>
<p>Looking back, it’s clear to me just how restricting my certainty had been. It was like a prison for my mind, one with walls I couldn’t see that kept me from exploring all but the little room I had made for myself.</p>
<p>I refuse to ever go back.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote">
<p>No, I will not discuss the details. They’re not the point. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Probably, they still do. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>I’m pretty sure I’m broken. I had a ~conversation~ debate with my boss; he literally owns the business of which I am an employee. He has very specific political beliefs 1 and he wants to debate them. He’s not just trying to get you to agree; no, he actually appreciates a difference in opinion. Yeah, I know. Crazy. We get along great. Yet it was during one of our weekly conversations that I realized I am truly broken. No, I will not discuss the details. They’re not the point. ↩