Five Things Ferrett Has Been Up To Lately
1) I’m Refitting My Van.
Last fall, Gini and I bought a spanking-new Ford Transit 2020, with the intent of converting it for travel. I’ve wanted to build a tiny house for years now, and this is the next best thing!
So yeah. We’ll be installing a floor, insulation, an electrical system, cabinets, a toilet, crude plumbing (not for the toilet), windows, the works. We started this weekend when we installed a swivel seat in our van, which felt very much like breaking the seal: it felt like major work, unbolting chairs and moving them around.
(We will be cutting holes in the side of our perfectly good van to install windows and fans, which is, to be honest, frickin’ terrifying.)
And even better, we’re documenting the whole process! If you remember my video 3 Reasons The Trench Run is the Best Action Sequence in Star Wars, that was a dry run for us filming this whole transformation. It’ll take a few weeks to get video up, as I’m new to editing, but… it’s coming.
You can tell I’m happy because it made my Board o’ Happiness ™:
And if you have any advice on refitting vans into travelling homes, well, I’m listening. Unless your advice is “Don’t do it,” in which case save ya shekels, bud, we’re committed.
2) I’m Writing Articles For Tor.com!
One of my goals for 2021 was “Pitch more articles to other sites,” which I’ve done pretty consistently, and so I’ve been publishing musings on Tor.com about books and media.
Hey, I’ve even got an archive page! So I’m pretty thrilled to be selling articles elsewhere.
(Also, I have my newsletter, where I’m in the second part of a three-part series on How To Create Fictional Magic Systems – being more consistent in my newsletter sendouts was one of my other goals for 2021, and I’m managing that.)
3) Gain a teeth, lose a tooth.
The good news is, after having no front teeth for pretty much all of 2020, I now have a permanent bridge – just in time to potentially start smiling at people.
The bad news is that I had my first bad tooth – a root canal with a post – get a cavity, and it had to come out. So my dental woes will never end, and I will never get used to chewing because the shape of my frickin’ mouth keeps changing.
My jaw hurts. It will one day stop hurting. One can hope.
4) Oh, yeah, the podcast.
Still doing it. It has a tiny audience, but this is a weirdly personal project so I don’t necessarily mind – I’m studying good books, and it’s encouraging me to read both more and widely, so this is like a little garden I’m tending to. I don’t expect I’ll hit the big leagues with it, but it is teaching me how to record myself, and so that’s useful.
5) I am studying Sumerian mythology.
Why? Because I have a book I’m planning (not writing yet, just planning), and I think I wanna bring elements of Sumerian mythology into it. But these tales are weird, man. Not “weird” in the sense of “FLAMING TENTACLE APOCALYPSE,” but rather “…did these people know how to tell stories?” There’s repetitions for no payoff, characters who serve no purposes, and even accounting for the incomplete nature of many of these stories, there’s frequently no endings.
It’s fascinating, but the fascination mostly comes from wondering whether there was something about the culture that filled in gaps in these stories with their own expectations, or whether the story structure in those days were tuned to a whole different audience, or whether the translation issues/missing volumes have rendered this alien.
Either way, it’s kinda fun!
I’ve heard off-hand that examples of repetition in older writing are often because people gathered together and combined a bunch of local tellings – inserting little local “Go Tampa! Woo!” moments in to the story.
I get the broader impression that the written version we get is best thought of more like a sketch of an RPG adventure: you take the framework and tailor it to your audience, and storytelling is expected to be a lot more improvisational and even interactive.