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Like A Can of Tuna

Work and weekends have taken a toll on my production in the last small measure of days. I’m up early this Monday—though not terribly—hoping I’ll not sacrifice the writing today.

I dug out rocks again yesterday and again drifted into some thoughts on worldbuilding and mundane magic. Saturday I asked what the consequences would be if magic were used to sweep a floor or do dishes on a regular basis not just when your fairie godmother swings into town for the prince’s ball. I compared mundant magic to electricity, but didn’t explicitly make the connection to the way we ignore electricity everyday.

I think that mundane magic would experience the same troubles. People would no longer find it interesting. They’d find it useful and ubiquitous. When it ran out they’d still be flipping switches in the dark while their brains stared blankly like cats at a can of tuna.

I don’t exactly know how I got from there to this next stop. And I’m not sure how it becomes useful in a story world I ain’t writ yet. But I wonder if we real people like the idea of magic because of it’s newness, because it holds the possibility of giving our adult brains the chance to learn something new. Truly new. That maybe there is a feeling we get as toddlers and children as we experience everything for the first or fifth time and not for the five-millionth. The feeling of growing a brain. Of wet virgin neurons painting our lives on blank sheets. A feeling we crave without knowing. One the seems like it could be satisfied if only we could learn to levitate cars or transform lead into gold or become invisible or fly a broom.

Ok. So now stuff that into a plot and see what squeezes out the other end.

304 words on day 736

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Mundane Magic

I’m trying to think of a way not to do this two nights in a row, but I’m exhausted from mowing, and rock picking upping, and sun.

One thing I thought about while rock picking upping was that you hardly ever seem to see magic used in everyday life in fantasy novels. No one applies it like we do electricity. It’s imbued with substance and myth and religion. There never seems to be any mundane magic. And there are always consequences.

Can anyone tell me what the consequences of electricity are?

The reason I got to thinking about this was that I wondered what it might be like to use magic to pick up rocks as I was doing; sorting small stones from dirt and twigs. It occurred to me that such a task might be mentally quite challenging and could serve as a sort of wax-onwaxoff style training for a young mage. But magic is never mundane. It never picks out rocks, it never sews on buttons (Disney excepted), it never cleans a toilet, it never gets sold by the gram or ounce, it never goes stale.

I wonder if it did.

193 words on day 734

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Pah Facilè

I liked yesterday’s effort enough to return to it to fill in some blanks. The one obvious hole I placemarked and the lack of concrete character description, Please note: the French phrase title of this entry and it’s use in the body is purposefully misspelled.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/glennoi/1798325422/sizes/l/

The boatman assured the men, Victor, Lars, and Daniel, there was a bike trail on the other side, but Daniel continued to press him for details.

“First part hard…pah facilè?” Daniel asked. He pointed to the bank where the bow of the longtail was headed then sketched a diagonal grade up the cliff wall where he imagined the trail might be.

The boatman swapped grips on the motor, waggled his head, and said something in Vietnamese accented French. He pointed to the same spot on the bank then drew a vertical line up the wall instead. Four hours later the three made camp at the top of that wall by collapsing in the leaves and mud next to the last motorcycle hauled up.

“We should of paid him,” Daniel said. He brushed sweat from his forehead and red face with an equally wet arm. A patch of mud transferred as a stripe from his eyebrow to the part in his blonde hair.

Lars grunted and asked, “To take us back across?”

Daniel nodded.

Lars grunted again.

“We should have,” Victor echoed without lifting his head out of the dirt or taking his eyes out of the canopy and clouds. His stale blue t-shirt read “The Best Ride in Vietnam”; a new hole at the shoulder showed a little blood beneath.

“Jesus. You too? You two kill me sometimes.” Lars pulled himself into a sitting position, back leaning on Daniel’s bike. They were ten days into their journey and his once crisp Fu Manchu had begun to blend back in to the rest of his dark beard. “I mean, fine, we all know Danny’s a pussy, but you Victor?”

“What, me? I’m no pussy. That—” Victor’s muddy and bloody forearm went up at the elbow and dropped pointing in the direction of their climb. “—was four hours we could have ridden, Lars. Gotten somewhere.”

Lars fingernailed mud out of the shocks on Daniel’s front fork and sighed. “But the long way. I say this four hours saved us twenty or more down your road.” Daniel and Victor had heard this plea of Lars’ several times before breakfast, before they came across, before they climbed half a day.

“So you say, so says the pussy.” Daniel pointed to himself.

Lars snorted a laugh through his nose faster than he could get it out of his mouth, but Victor didn’t give him a chance to recover before he again echoed his twin brother, “So says the pussy.” Lars choked and sputtered after that.

[a paragraph of description for pace. Gah! Ran out of time again. Well this awesome mystery paragraph would have been packed with jungle sounds and ambience. It would have ended with an air horn sound coming from a boat in the river below; I probably would have made a deft, elegant, and ironic parallel to the sound of a factory whistle.]

“Well, we’re here now.” Everyone knew that. “Burning daylight.” Everyone knew that too.

519 words on day 732