Hello, hello! For those that followed up with me, my COVID-induced brain fog is largely gone. Unless I lapse and am completely incomprehensible at some point today, in which case I blame the virus.

I’m very good at taking responsibility for my brain’s ability to comprehend basic things in that way.

Before I get started on the rest of today’s things, I wanted to share a little story about my toddler. She loves to explore, and she especially loves to explore places she doesn’t often (or ever) get to go. There’s this one door, in particular, in our house that my wife and I don’t let her enter, and she throws a fit whenever I tell her “No.” Well… I discovered a new strategy to kindly take her attention away from the door, one that appears to bond us rather than divide us. She points at the door and starts asking, “Please? Please? Please?” and I grab the handle… and magically turn into a total door-incompetent for a minute or so, struggling with all my might to get the door open and utterly failing. Then I turn to her, shrug, and say something along the lines of, “Sorry, baby girl. I can’t.” Her response? To pat my leg softly and babble something that almost sounds like, “It’s OK, dad. Doors are hard.” Then she runs off and has fun with something else.

The strategy is very effective, but it does make me feel a little guilty each time I get completely unearned empathy.

The Failed Technomancer has had chapters posted all the way through chapter 26, the very end of part 2. You can read that over here. I also finally posted my (very) incomplete draft of The Precious Burden of Joy over in Stuff to Read, so if you feel like getting a little taste of the World of Murid before I’ve actually shared official, final, canonical stories from that world, go have a little fun.

Quick Bloggyness Review: Ocean Son

I’m sharing this just because I feel like sharing it. No one has asked me to, or has paid me to. (Or even knows, prior to this getting posted, anyway.) My cousin is a singer/musician/songwriter, and I happen to genuinely enjoy much of the music he makes. His first song in particular, Heartbeat, captured the hearts of me and my wife. We listen to this song often—especially in the car on long car trips, for some reason. I’m not sure why that environment brings me to this music more than any other.

The song makes me happy, and if it makes you happy, too, that’s cool beans.

Discussion: Small Mouse, Big World

As you know, I’m currently writing a novel set in a genre I (somewhat obscurely) call “epic muridae science fantasy”—in other words, grand-scale mouse fiction. Apparently our tech overlords managed to connect me in small part to the greater world of little-creature-themed fiction, because I discovered the following video about an hour after it was posted, despite having no prior experience with this YouTube channel before:

“Small Mammal, Big Adventure/Scary World” is a pretty good way to describe this kind of story, though.

Anyway, the reason I brought this video up is because I was enthralled by the speaker’s discussion on “dramatically ironic cosmic horror.” While everything else in the video is interesting, I think this combination of ideas is a big part of what makes this genre of story interesting to me.

So let me break down that phrase.

“Dramatic irony” happens when the reader knows something the character doesn’t, often something of great importance to the character—an example in a mouse story being the reader recognizing something from the human world as very dangerous to the little mouse, but the little mouse doesn’t know that, and as such may put itself in great peril—or die—because of this ignorance.

“Cosmic horror” is a literary tool that, to the best of my knowledge, was primarily pioneered and popularized through the works of HP Lovecraft. In a variety of ways, cosmic horror creates horror through the crafting of creatures and scenarios that are incomprehensible, unknowable, utterly and fundamentally beyond the human ken. And also just so happen to be extremely unhealthy for our minds and/or bodies.

These two tropes/tools might seem completely paradoxical to put in the same story—and normally I’d agree that they are—but “small creature, big adventure/scary world” stories are really unique in being able to blend these ideas anyway. To borrow a very strong example from the video, Watership Down makes frequent use of “dramatically ironic cosmic horror” through having rabbits interact with human things utterly beyond the rabbit’s comprehension, yet the human readers are able to comprehend what the rabbits are interacting with (and how dangerous those things are for the rabbits). There is a critical bit of the story where the rabbits find a train track—and since they can’t comprehend trains, they don’t know how dangerous it is to be on the track—run along it, and then nearly get run over. However, when some of their enemies get killed by the passing train, they do their best to understand the scenario by saying it was an act of God that protected them and killed their enemies.

This blending of contradictory ideas might not be possible with any other group of creatures simply because dramatic irony requires the reader to fully understand something, but cosmic horror requires the characters of a story to be completely unable to understand the danger they are in. Trying to craft such a scenario with humans—or intelligent, human-like fantasy or science fiction creatures—would be exceptionally difficult, especially if the story were set in an environment that required a lot of explanation.

I don’t think I had anything particularly deep to add to this conversation. I just wanted to share these things that, well,

Now I’m going to go find more stories in this vein to read, because my current read (Murtagh) just isn’t doing it for me.

Writing Updates

Hazel Halfwhisker is at just a little more than 23,000 words, which means I made about 4,000 words’ worth of ground last week—just under my preference of 5,000 words a week. Considering how much revision I did, I’m pretty pleased with this word count. Hazel is officially booted out the door and off on adventure.

And this is coming completely out of context with no further explanation, but I’m also taking the antlers off the birds. Having mice flying birds is cool. But putting antlers on those birds? I dunno. I like the idea, but something feels off as I’m writing it, and I think it’s that this story works best when, blood wizards aside, I keep the mice specifically as grounded as possible.

Inner Demon is still sitting in the Baen slush pile, and The Courage in a Small Heart is experiencing the same (more or less) over at Writers of the Future. I’ll start sweating over those two in March if I don’t hear back on anything before the end of February.

Send Off

Are you a “small critter, big adventure/scary world” fan? Do you like Redwall? How about Warriors? Are you in the group of people that’s actually read The Secret of Nimh? I just recently discovered Scurry, a webcomic about mice surviving in a nuclear winter. If you’re familiar with these types of stories, feel free to share what you’ve read (or watched) and share why you like it!