Sunday, October 10, 2004
Yesterday, freed of the actual task of writing or trying to write, was a nice day. Spooky and I had hot dogs for lunch and wore our Halloween pajamas all damn day, most of which was spent camped out in the bed, reading aloud from Phil Hine's Condensed Chaos, with frequent pauses to discuss what we were reading. I am intrigued to have discovered that the phrase "consensual reality" (or "consensus reality") which I thought I'd invented about a year and a half ago, is a concept integral to chaos magic. I mean, I did invent the phrase, independantly, and am now discovering that others have found the concept or one very like it. I think, at the time I coined the phrase, that I was looking for something to help explain some of my feelings about dreams and the sloppy way we consider dreams. Specifically, countering the simplistic assertion that we can demonstrate dreams are "not real" and waking consciousness is on the basis of continuity or lack thereof. That is, there seems to exist little continuity from dream to dream to dream, while there seems to exist a great deal of continuity from waking to waking to waking, and a lot of people base their most fundamental beliefs about dream on the a priori assumption that there's a particular sort of correlation between continuty and reality, which, of course, has not been demonstrated.
What else? I had a rough night, and none of my vivid Technicolor dreams were lucid. I awoke feeling as though I'd hardly slept, even though I must have been in bed a good eight hours. Before I dozed off last night, Spooky and I talked through most of the prologue of Daughter of Hounds (and a little of the book beyond), and I'm beginning to solve a few of the problems that were making the writing so difficult last week. I'm hoping that I can sit down in this chair on Monday and get the frell on with it. I played a great deal of Sudeki last night. This game just totally rocks, even if it is hard as hell and frustrating and a lot more than my non-multitasking brain can handle. I appreciate it nonetheless. Buki is my new hero. Also, I've begun to realize one thing that made Morrowind seem so dull to me. I must have played, hell, I don't know, hundreds of hours it seems. And yet not once was there any skill involved. Proficiency at Morrowind seems to come mainly through the expenditure of time. There's no skill to the fighting, that's for certain. The outcome is largely predetermined by your stats. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a challenge whore. But I do need to be engaged.
We also watched an ep of Farscape ("Bringing Home the Beacon"). Just eight days left until the mini, so I'll likely be talking about Farscape quite a bit this coming week. The mini is approaching too, too fast. Soon it will be over, and I'll be left to wait until the next mini or the feature film or whichever direction the story takes. Anyway, do not forget, next Sunday night on the (ugh) Sci-Fi Channel:
Just click the banner to see the trailer.
There's a very nice review of both Silk and Murder of Angels at Blogcritics.org. I think it's one of the better reviews of my work that I've ever read, not merely because the author liked and clearly understood the books in question, but because it is a review, instead of being just a book report with a bit of opinion tacked on. I wish the critics at such presumably august magazines as Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus Reviews would try as hard to have something to say worth saying. My sincere thanks to the author of this review.
And I guess that's about it for today.
1:36 PM
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