First principles for the magician

This is a repost of a piece I wrote in August 2016, while I was in the midst of a breakdown. I had forgotten I'd written it. Back then, every day was an aching, gnawing ordeal. Someone mentioned it today, and told me that they come back to it often.

We would see ourselves as the secret witnesses of the world, you and I, but that would be to overstate our importance; we live in secret, inasmuch as everyone does. And we pay our attention to the moment. We claim no special status beyond the simple fact that we are magicians.

Deciduous

It is uncontroversial among many people in the West that this last year finished has been in some way bad; in fact, all that happened was that the horrors of the world finally began to visit themselves on us in a mediated, creeping way, and in our arrogance we realised for once that we were going to have experienced a year that was, if not quite as terrible as most recent years experienced by people elsewhere, more on a par. It is sad that a great number of beloved public figures have died; it is appalling that our certainties that fascism would never return, let alone be accepted as part of mainstream discourse, have been proven so very complacent. 2016's electoral catastrophes in Britain and the USA are still far from genocides and crusades, but for the first time since 2001, we suspect that these things might come to our doorstep.

2016 was the year that it came to us that we had the same problems as everyone else, on a level beyond the purely intellectual. Inasmuch as a year is a period of time to which we ascribe a significance and a limit, 2016 was for most people in the world, a year like any other. All that happened to us was that we finally got to share some of it.

For me, the disappointments, failures and heartbreaks of 2015 continued into the early months of 2016. But by April, it began to turn around. I started to succeed again. Modestly, perhaps, perhaps on penalties, but a win in the penalty shoot-out is no less valid a victory. I won, this year gone. I won.

My wish for you, friend, and if you're reading this far, I'll count you a friend whether I know you or not, is that you will achieve your own victory in 2017.

Win. 

So

So. 

The Imperative for Kindness, the Duty to Retreat

Kindness is all.

What the Patrons are Getting

OK, it's October, and it's been a while since I've plugged my Patreon site, but it's still there and earning a modest crust, and I'm returning to putting out new stuff there. And I thought I'd post a bit of something that only the patrons get to see.

The Bible: Threats to Reason, Threats to Faith

I've been a bit slow on the apocryphal Roman history lately.

On villains

Nuremberg-ish.

Nazis are, if pop culture is to be believed, the bad guys it's OK to mow down in droves.

Imagination and creativity in role-playing games

To what extent is participating in a role-playing game an act of creation?

The myth of the virtuous gamer

One of the bigger game forums has rules about hate groups. If you're a nazi or neo-nazi, you advocate for nazi or neo-nazi causes, or you play devil's advocate, you're banned forever. It's obvious, sensible. I approve of that.

Inner Worlds, appendix: "Nothing about this hobby is OK"

I can say this is not OK because I developed it and so it's my fault.

So all of the Inner Worlds posts of the last couple weeks have inspired dialogue to some extent. On a Facebook thread discussing the most recent one, a game writer who is better known than me said this:

Be sure to let me know if you find a way to pursue this path of analysis without reaching the conclusion "nothing about this hobby is OK."

Freethinker

Apparently.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

Blake, London

I remember being in a panel debate about religion a few years back.

About standards, about genre

Good, but not game changers. 

I am so very, very ambivalent about genre writing.

A blessing of dismissal.

Go without knowing the destination or the direction;
Go without water or food or the net to catch you, should you fall;
Go blind but seeing only the hope that you will find;
Go and have the faith to carry the ones who love you,
Go without a thought of onward,
Go.

The Truth About the Truth About Sappho

The fiction that I'm now calling The Truth About Sappho is a collection of stories that I began properly in about 2004, although parts of it go back a decade before that.

This is Not a Picture

I want to talk about Ekphrasis.

Ekphrasis is when you write a picture. That's it. It's defined as the art of describing a picture in words, but it's more than that, in that the more detailed you are, the more solidly the picture ceases to become a visual thing. You pull it into the space of the imagination, transform it.

So Now I Have a Patreon

http://patreon.com/HowardDavidIngham

So now, now I have an account on Patreon. The idea of Patreon is that people pledge regular sums of money, as small as you like, and they get to support an artist's work and also offer feedback on it and maybe influence the direction thereof. Some people, people with bigger audiences than me, make a living out of their Patreons, and I have no illusions about doing that, but I have a decent number of readers now, so perhaps I can scrape some pennies in the way that my old anonymous project (now dead, don't bother looking because it's gone) indirectly netted me a hundred quid or so a month.

Write Something Perverse

I've written a lot of ghost stories, horror stories. It struck me some time ago that for horror, ghost stories, anything really frightening, to work, is has to be in defiance of what you actually believe. It has to be perverse.

On Sympathy

"Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity.

City of God #1: Inchoate History

While I've been waiting for the draft of Cosmic Memory to be polished off, I've started working and planning for Chariot's companion game, still provisionally titled City of God. 

These Long-Lost People

Rhadamanthes the Pacifist, who gets a write-up in Cosmic Memory.

It has been an interesting week.