The Invisible Movement of the Sun

Today is a snowy day, gray but bright. The amount of light coming into my desk window is just right. I love the luminous weight of winter outside, how it defines things with its burdens. It's a good day to stay in and rest, think, and write.

A cold is building in my head and the resulting sinus headache is making the tasks for today difficult to accomplish. Lots of writing: a short review for SFSignal, my Apex post, and stories. I've decided to alternate in one-hour blocks between resting and writing; we'll see what I can produce in that manner.

I did manage to write a poem, inspired partly by the title of Jay Lake's Link Salad today, and partly by this ridiculous holiday:

I dreamt that the President of Mars

had asked us to stop driving cars

because the glint from our planet afar

made it look like a chunk of feldspar

and for him that was much too bizarre

he preferred that we shine like a star

but we cursed him in flippant Magyar

and said "You ain't our (káromkodás) tsar!"

and as we drove we all lit up cigars

'til we drowned on this drenched world of ours

making us, not him, our bête noire.

I wrote it in 20 minutes. It was fun to write.

I've been thinking about a topic for Apex, and I was leaning towards a response to this piece over at Black Gate, but I think that it is not worth my time to engage it directly. I feel that doing so just validates an incredibly subjective, pointless debate that really comes down to ideology. So, instead, I think I shall be inspired by this quotation from Jeff VanderMeer, pointed out earlier today by Paul Jessup:

"Fantasy doesn’t have to serve a purpose, really, any more than any kind of fiction. It’s often “just” deep exploration of what it means to be human, what our world is like, to try to capture some kind of truth about the world, I guess. And to entertain, which is often the same thing. Art and entertainment aren’t actually in opposition to one another."

We could do with having more barriers like these eliminated.