"Nice study. Who's your decorator, Edgar Allen Poe?"

Nah, just trying to set the mood a little. Try picturing me, a large overstuffed armchair, my pipe, a pair of reading glass half slipping down my nose, perhaps a glass of sherry sitting just to hand on a nearby table, next to the leather-bound books and an antique globe...

"Mmm. Sherry. Hey, I'll take a glass of that. Unless you've any port?"

Actually, we've neither. You should know by now, beer is the byword around here-- I was just trying...

"Well, pick some up the next time you're out"

Sure Prof. any other interruptions?

[he shrugs]

The sherry was just a suggestion, part of the mental image. Since this isn't one of our usual lectures, I thought we'd try a different format, more of an after-dinner conversation. Hence, the mental image of me in a victorian-era study-slash-library rather than the usual lecture hall.

We're taking a break from the usual lecture format, and I'm taking over the narration, because for the life of me, I can't get the Prof to say what I'd like to say on the topic

"and what is your topic?"

Well, I thought I might cover some thoughts on fiction and the writing process, and maybe what I get out of creating...

"*yawn* "

Hey now Prof, just because I'm giving you some time off doesn't mean you can go to sleep on me.

"I'll try to stay awake. Say, have you got any scotch?"

We're all out.

"Well, put it on the shopping list. Glenmorangie port wood."

"Yeah, and some Balvenie 12 year, while you're at it"

You stay out of it, Mitch. I can only deal with one figment at a time here.

"yeah, sure, just hand over one of them beers. And weren't you about to say something..."

Well, let me go back a bit and cover some personal history

[in stereo] "*groan* "

Shut it, you two.

As a kid I used to read just about anything I could get my hands on. I moved from Seuss to Alexander, then Lewis, then Tolkien fairly seemlessly. I finished the Lord of the Rings (the first time) when I was in 3rd grade, and was reading Dante by the time I hit junior high. Fantasy was one of my best friends, and if it weren't for the fact that I was riding my bike to the library every other day, I likely would have ended up even fatter and pastier than I am now.

I've read so many damn fantasy paperbacks that the plots run together. Occasionally, while reading something 'new', I then figure out around page 120 or so that I have in fact read it before.

All that reading was good for one thing, though. When I later read Campbell's "Hero with a thousand faces", it made immediate sense to me. Everything kinda clicked. And that may have been when I decided to be an author.

And given what I'd read, I wanted to write fantasy.

But here's where things get weird. I don't read fantasy anymore.

"Why not?"

well, I think three things have happened in the past couple of years. One of those things is Netflix. the second is my rediscovery of Anime. though even before that, I had started to abandon a lot of fantasy in favor of non-fiction books, because of Robert-frickin-Jordan and his gods-damned never-ending Wheel of Time series.

"Eh? run that one past me again."

Sure. I like fantasy books. The bigger and thicker the better. I like series, too-- and with Tolkein as a model a lot of authors churned out a lot of trilogies. And this was the model I'd come to expect. You take some time to get to know the characters, they grow and change, and eventually they win. Good vs. Evil, etc etc and the guy gets the girl at the end.

Well, Robert isn't playing that way. And the longer he drags on, the more the flaws in his writing style irk me. At some point between volume 8 and 9 (actually, I think it was when he went back a wrote a prequel for gods' sake, rather than the next book in the series) I just walked away. I didn't care anymore. I don't recommend the series anymore (though the first, say, 4 books are excellent, and if he could concentrate on one character and one story line at a time, I might be persuaded to read another one)

I hadn't outgrown Fantasy, but I had grown very tired of how folks were doing it. I've lost my taste for it-- or at least for hard cover epic fantasy novels. The flaws I had overlooked suddenly became apparent in not just RJ's work, but in a lot of other books I'd read. My primary recreational outlet was closed. I started drinking more

"*chuckle* *snort* Dude. don't do that to me, I just shot beer out my nose. There's no way you're gonna blame your alcoholism on that, is there?"

Well, no. I guess not. But that was a point where I did make a conscious decision to become little more than the sum of my bad habits.

But then I turned a corner. I found Netflix, and started watching movies. And for whatever reason, I decided to rent some cartoons instead of the crap Hollywood had been putting out. (I think, likely because five or six years ago I worked an odd schedule-- typically 5am-1pm-- so I had been watching a lot of movies in the theater, afternoons after work. I'd already seen most of that stuff, even before it came out on DVD.)

So, I rented a show I'd liked, but hadn't seen in a while. The first discs I got from Netflix were Cowboy Bebop.

And things went downhill from there. Right now I'm signed up for two plans, 8-at-a-time from Netflix, and 5-at-a-time from RentAnime. I'm churning through 20-25 discs each week. I'm watching worlds unfold, and it's all new to me. I love anime in the same way I used to love all those books.

These are my new worlds, where I spend my time. I don't even go out to the bars anymore... well, I still make it out about twice a month. (Old friends of mine could tell you: I used to be out drinking every other day) This is my escape from the everyday dullness that makes up a lot of modern urban life.

But I'm not just a recluse shut-in who compulsively watches movies. I a recluse who used to read. Massive quantities of fiction, fantasy, history, mythology, psychology, and all of it still relative fresh to mind, because (once again, old friends of mine could tell you) my memory is an extremely odd mechanism, and I retain all kinds of crap. The most useless information. It's handy for trivia games...

My background means I can bring a critical eye to what others would call 'just cartoons'. I see the story structures. I see the myth in anime.

We'll launch the next lecture from this starting point.


edit 28 Jul 06: and this is how it starts. I've decided to term this the "Anime Conversations" series, and we'll be doing it much like the Lecture Series, except, you know, different.

-- next --