Mindset Cafe: 2012-12-21

200th anniversary of 'Brothers Grimm', Hans Christian Andersen story resurfaces and something on the nature of happiness.


Stories for stories

Let's go science fiction this week. The conspiracy theory that the moon landings were faked is about as old as the moon landings themselves. Read a polemic on the topic, here...  IO9 provides some useful alien fodder with seven good reasons why there might be life on other planets.  And the future looks like quite a tough place,as a series of short BBC videos on surviving the future shows.

Reading and writing

I worked on my erotic horror story this week. It felt very anecdotal and 'light', so I began to develop my protagonist a bit more, and posed and explained some of the questions that I didn't get down to in the first rush to write it. The story gained depth very quickly. One learning moment, and there is another learning curve ahead. I read somewhere that Stephen King is a master at characterisation, and thinking back to what he writes, I realise that characterisation is another part of the craft that I have to begin developing (that I can no longer leave to luck). I am not entirely sure what I will be writing next week, but either way I will have reference material on the topic of character alongside me.

Now here's something interesting. In last week's 'Mindset', I riffed a bit about fairypunk. It turns out that 2013 is the 200th anniversary of the Brothers Grimm compendium. Last week there was a whole programme around the thing, no doubt getting ready for various opportunities in the coming year.  With the additional focus of the anniversary, there should be plenty of opportunity for fairypunk.

It's quite possible that I will begin to write something derivative of those Grimm stories next week.

Here's something very interesting that will have to be handled well within the various reader demographics. A significant part of the Grimm's collection involves implied relationships between humans and other creatures, for instance frogs and beasts. Fierce Dolan talks about aspects of shifter kink here... It feels difficult. Maybe it should be implied, as the Grimms did. I don't know.

While we're here, I forgot to add this to last week's 'Mindset'. A forgotten Hans Christian Andersen surfaced last week. It's called 'The Tallow Candle'. You can read it here...

Mother Nature and other terrifying things

Nuclear power has been the bugaboo for a number of years now, but a number of respected environmentalists are coming to its defense. The point is that the renewable sources of energy come with pitfalls and costs that verge on insurmountable at the moment. For instance, think about the environmental cost of storing energy from solar and wind in batteries. The point is that coal emissions are destroying the planet, but nuclear is relatively emission free. It's not a popular position, but it has to be considered. Read this...

And finally...

..what is happiness? There's a new  book out on the topic containing memories and musings of well known people. Brainpickings gives a digest of some of its contents. Take a look, here...

Happy Christmas.