Hello, friends!

The Failed Technomancer, chapter 35, is live… as is the rest of the book! That’s right, we’re close enough to the conclusion that I decided to share the rest of the chapters, all the way through 41 and the epilogue. Have fun!

Do you have a Sisyphusian task? Or, in other words, something you come back to, again and again, but never manage to finish, or whenever you return to it most or all of your progress is gone? Parents with kids living at home might refer to keeping the house clean as a Sisyphusian task. For me, I have a creative Sisyphusian task, and that’s writing my own unique tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) system. Yes… I’ve started that up again. I never use book-writing time to work on my TTRPG-writing time, but I am slipping in revising my old ideas and fixing up a half-written rulebook where I can, in moments I deem too small or too distracted for book writing.

Often starting a new novel or a new world is, at some point, paired with me restarting my Sisyphusian task. Whether or not I actually ever finish the TTRPG rulebook doesn’t matter to me as much as the novel itself—but I think the two projects feed into each other positively. When working on the same world but for a game, different parts of my brain engage and I develop different aspects of the world, which helps it to be more fleshed out as I work on the novel. (Note that I am not a LitRPG writer—nothing any weirder with that crowd than any other genre’s crowd, I’m just not in it—but these just happen to be adjacent creative endeavors for me.)

I imagine Sisyphus would have preferred writing something to pushing a boulder up a hill for all eternity, though.

Discussions—Outside and Inside

A little over a year ago this fantasy author—not super well known, you might have heard of him—called Brandon Sanderson wrote a blog post titled “Outside.” In this post he discussed his love of fantasy, how he felt that fantasy brought people together, and how fantasy novels, for him, have always been a critical nexus for very different people and ideas to meet and find commonality—whether that be real people bonding over a shared love, or just him connecting really well with a story.

I swear that this blog post was followed by a video of Sanderson narrating the post, as that’s how I remember first discovering (and being blindsided by) this beautiful, moving essay, but I can’t find that video, and (per his YouTube channel) this video was only posted a few days ago. Whatever actually happened, I listened to the video again, and found myself thinking hard.

I’ve experienced enough times in my life where I’ve been left outside. Not fitting in with the people I want to fit in with, having different habits or humor than the people I’m around, specifically being shut out of various spaces and circles. It happens.

I’ve also been the person who left others outside in the cold. As a funnier example of this, I remember, very clearly, one time where I agreed to pick up a friend from school so we could drive to a party together. I then completely forgot about my promise and drove myself alone, leaving the poor guy to walk to the party himself, to a location several miles away, while it was dumping water outside. He showed up, soaking wet, frigid, the party halfway over, while we were all inside, warm and dry; this was a more literal “outside” than metaphorical, as we all invited him in and rushed to dry him off as quickly as we could. Afterwards, I infamously became the guy who had left Sam out in the rain; Sam, being the wonderful person that he is, quickly forgave me, but still joined in the good-natured teasing, and I deserved it.

Just as I don’t want to be left outside—more than I have to, more than what’s good for me, anyway—I don’t want to be the person leaving others outside. Not if I can help it, anyway. Sanderson’s essay made me think hard about that, hard about why I write and why I write what I write.

I love the complexities of a good story. The real nuance that can be built into a stellar, memorable character who feels real in their strengths and their weaknesses, their beauty marks and their warts, even if, by nature of many stories, the character is in some ways exaggerated.

While listening to “Outside,” I found myself thinking of Olaf One Brow a lot.

Have you read The Sea of Trolls? That might be my most-reread book as a kid. I loved it. More than Harry Potter. One of the most interesting characters in that book is Olaf One Brow, a good(?) man.

I first met Olaf when his band of vikings were about to attack a Saxon village. A boy named Jack stopped him by summoning a fog so thick that the vikings couldn’t pierce it, so they decided to head off to the next village to raid, but not before kidnapping Jack and his sister. As the story goes on many sides of Olaf are revealed. There are nasty sides: the raider who kills coastal villagers to pillage their homes, the slave-trader, the berserker who doesn’t always control his anger as he should. But there are also good, honorable sides to the man: the loving husband, the gregarious neighbor, the engaged father, the hard-working craftsman. It all culminates in (spoiler alert) Olaf voluntarily sacrificing his life to save Jack and a girl named Thorgil. It’s a beautiful scene, an epic act of heroism, one that stuck with me even through my dense twelve-year-old skull.

I think one of the most important ways that good books bring everyone inside is by intelligently and empathetically making characters human, especially those we might dislike or disagree. (Even those characters not literally human.) With another writer holding the pen, Olaf and his people may have been reduced to brutish savages, raiding and raping and pillaging with hardly any redeeming qualities to them, rather than being given nuance that tries to grapple with the good, the bad, and the hard reality. The Sea of Trolls does challenge aspects of Olaf’s lifestyle, but also provides compelling reasons why he, and other vikings, doesn’t change. And, in the end, though there were pieces of Olaf I didn’t like, I still saw Olaf as a man with exceptional good in him, deeply nuanced, and I loved him.

I think what I’m trying to say is that in fantasy, more than any other genre I’ve read, I’ve found pure empathy. I’ve been able to get into the heads of people I profoundly disagreed with and at least feel like I understood them. Sometimes that’s led to me having revelations of sorts about why people might think certain ways, and even made me question myself. Sometimes that’s led to me becoming even more firm in my opinions. Most of the time it was simply experience, but experience that I believe was good for me. Trying to write from other perspectives and ideas has helped me in this way, too.

This isn’t too far from what Sanderson talked about in his essay, but I still wanted to share my little thoughts. Not everyone reads fantasy, and that’s fine. Enjoy what resonates with you best. But, for me, nothing brings people inside like fantasy does.

Bloggyness Story—The Booger

And in a wild shift of tone, here’s a story from my childhood that I thought you might find amusing.

I went to a magnet school growing up, one focused on the arts. It was a K–8 school, and eighth-graders all participated in a big art project as part of their graduation—an art project that would be permanently affixed to the school.

What the project was changed every year. My year the project happened to be a mosaic-like sculpture. Each student would create a little sculpture that represented something they had learned, or something important to them, and all the sculptures would be connected to each other with metal rods.

It was genuinely a cool project. I got to work with professional tools, we had several sculptors come in and talk to our class. Other students made things like rocket ships, text books, sports balls, animals, and so forth. The creativity on display was astounding, particularly for eighth-graders.

I made a big booger.

Note that I was not… I don’t know the right way to say this, “into boogers.” And I was not lacking in creativity. I took pottery classes and had great fun making dragons, elephants, insects, and all sorts of other things that excited me as a young boy, in addition to doing painting and such. But I took all of that artwork home and put it on my shelf, where I and my family and friends could see it regularly. This long-term project would be affixed to the wall of a school I had been attending since the second or third grade, one that I would probably never see again as long as I lived. As best as I can remember the logic of my 13-year-old mind, I just wanted to see what I could get away with, and apparently I thought what I could get away with was a booger.

Of course I told the teachers it was something else—I think an amoeba. I’m perfectly confident that they saw right through me, but, with nothing concrete to accuse me on, everything went forward until my booger was affixed to the school wall where, as far as I am aware, it stands to this day, outside, just high enough that passing kindergartners can giggle and slap it as they walk by. Maybe mine got placed lowest on the overall structure in the hope it would get torn off and conveniently never replaced.

Discussions—The Sign

Are you an adult Bluey fan?

My wife and I love Bluey. We haven’t actually started our daughter on the show yet… but we’ve seen every episode, several multiple times. It’s incredibly impressive how well this children’s show can speak to adults.

But, for me, this actually makes conversation around Bluey difficult. Ultimately, Bluey is a children’s show. If it entertains kids and gives them good, unobtrusive messages, it succeeds. The fact that it speaks to adults so well significantly elevates the show, and is a large part of the reason why Bluey is the cultural phenomenon that it is, but is probably best seen as a cherry on top. Obviously it would be a tragedy if Bluey stopped striving to elevate itself to so consistently touch all audiences, and it would be a negative mark on the quality of the show if that elevation went away, but Bluey could still be a success and hit its goals as a children’s show if this happens.

Bluey is not going downhill. This preamble might sound a bit down on the show, but I’m just trying to lay some groundwork. I’m an adult. I watch the show from an adult’s perspective. Many—but not all—of my absolute favorite episodes feature Bandit or Chili and in some way grapple with the issues they face. I have been deeply moved by many of the episodes of this show, and very consistently entertained throughout all three seasons regardless, and I think the writing has just gotten better over time. But I’m aware that I’m not the primary audience.

It’s because Bluey sits in such a high position of praise for me that I was disappointed with the special, “ground-breaking” episode The Sign.

Spoilers ahead—you have been warned. It’s less than thirty minutes, I recommend going and watching it now on Bluey+. (Some programmer keeps screwing up the logo and showing it as “Disney+,” but we all know there’s only one show worth watching on that streaming service.)

The core emotional struggle at the center of The Sign is the Heeler family preparing to move. Bandit believes he will be able to provide a better life for his family if he accepts a higher-paying job that requires them to live in another city. Bluey is heartbroken about this fact, and Chili, we later discover, is also struggling with the move, but doing her best to support her husband and put on a brave face for the kids. (There’s other important stuff going on in this episode, stuff that is beautiful and handled extremely well, but irrelevant to what I’m talking about here.)

Here’s the big spoiler: the Heelers don’t move. The status quo remains exactly the same.

There’s a dual set-up for what, initially, completely convinced me that the writers were going through with this bold decision. The first was a preceding episode called Ghostbasket, which was entirely about Bandit and Chili helping their girls prepare for the fact that they were selling their house. I think it’s worth noting that, in that episode, Chili seemed completely onboard with the move. Then, in The Sign, we are reminded of the move at the beginning of the episode, and Bluey’s teacher shares with her a cute little parable that I thought had a message of “life is what it is and you can choose to make the best of it or not,” meaning that though hard things happen you can find the good opportunities in them. That seemed like a really good thing to teach kids who were going through distressing life transitions, like a big move. Not the most comfortable message, but very good for growth and development.

Unfortunately, many parts of the rest of the episode set about undermining this setup. Despite family members learning valuable, hard lessons about loving and supporting each other, making the best of the situation they were in, and moving forward hopefully into the unknown, The Sign did its best to also make the move as easy to undo as possible (with no consequences whatsoever)—which is exactly what happens. This takes all of the weight out of so many lessons learned in the episode, and I think sends the wrong message to kids of “If you don’t like something, just blindly hope hard enough and you will get exactly what you want anyway.”

My wife liked the episode more than I did, and the family choosing not to move worked better for her than it did for me. I’m sure a lot of people will love this episode, and love that the many side characters that they’ve grown attached to won’t disappear as the result of Bluey’s family moving. As a kid’s show, I wouldn’t rate this as one of the best Bluey episodes, but it’s still really good. (A bad Bluey episode is remains better than anything else on children’s television, after all, and this was not a bad episode by any of the imagination.) But… well, as an adult in the middle of a move, who has had to deal with a lot of hard life transitions and didn’t have the option to just wave his hand and keep things in a safe comfort zone, I was really disappointed that Bluey took the easy path. It’s a show that doesn’t like the easy path, and has many times before tackled difficult topics with wonderful emotional intelligence. Setting up this difficult change for the characters over two episodes, teaching them important lessons about it, in many ways handling the transition well, and then undoing it all doesn’t feel, to me, like the level of growth and positive discomfort I’ve come to expect from Bluey.

This detail doesn’t matter much, but this episode also comes right before the show takes a several-year hiatus. Is there a more perfect time for the Heelers to move? We have a bittersweet goodbye, then come back to Bluey in a new town, dealing with new things, and doing her best, us doing it all with her? I was excited to go on that adventure.

Bluey has not fallen off. Ultimately, this is a creative decision that I don’t agree with and that the show writers will prove, when Bluey begins again, was the right decision. I have a lot of trust in those guys. I’m willing to have that trust tested a little, because I think they will pull through. Or, it’s possible I need to remind myself that Bluey is a kid’s show, a safe place that people go to for refuge from the ills of the world, and despite all of the uncomfortable growth zones the characters find themselves in, some growth zones are outside of the show’s sphere now and possibly forever. And that’s not a bad thing, it’s just not what I had hoped for.

I love Bluey. And it’s not just my show. It’s so many people’s show. I’m hoping for nothing but the best for the writers, voice actors, and animators for Bluey as everything moves forward, as they recharge their creative batteries, as they work on other projects.

Writing Updates

I am finished with my revisions! That’s right, scenes have been shuffled around, some things have been cut, other things revised or added, and after two or three weeks of editing, I’m sitting on about 72,000 words. I want that number to start EXPLODING in coming days. Hazel Halfwhisker is taking off once again!

Send-Off

What does fantasy mean to you? Why do you read what you read? Why do you watch what you watch?