It's All About Story...

 One of the things I run into a lot these days is, people don't read. I am not talking about the quick snippet on the great google machine, or the next greatest post from your favorite influencer, I am talking about literature. With regularity students in my courses, when asked what was the last book they read, will say, "..uh, I don't read." Actually, the response usually is, "you mean books? No." It breaks my heart.  Reading is one of the greatest remedies to the stresses of the world. I often have this conversation when students are suffering from artist's block. I tell them they need to step back and read. The look I usually get is like I have just fed them some camphor oil mixed with ipecac... yes, I wrote that. But it's so true. We need to let our minds relax and begin to paint their own pictures. Hard to do that when we are bombarded with images from the google machine all day. Sitting down with a good book allows your mind to disconnect from ...

Once again, too many years in between posts... my struggles with discipline are real... and also my really crappy ability to sustain a visible presence online. Which is odd, because I teach marketing. Doh. So, new thoughts, centering around Frank Herbert. When I read with the goal of transporting myself to some otherworldly realm, I gravitate more towards the Fantasy genre than to Sci-Fi. It's probably a 60/30 thing, most of my library contains works from authors like Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Robert Howard, L. Spraque de Camp (when writing Conan), Robert Jordan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Terry Brooks, Joe Abercrombie, Patrick Rothfuss, Brain Sanderson, Duncan Hamilton, etc... but I do have almost every work by Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and one book by L. Ron Hubbard. Yes, I read through "Battlefield Earth." Curse John Travolta for that crappy film... yes, I watched that as well.  This leads me to Frank Herbert's "Dune." This has got to be one of m...

  This is definitely a reading household. Between myself and their mother, my kids have been introduced to books all across the spectrum. So, it should come at no surprise that we have read through the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings books. As a matter of fact, Dad here is a total sci-fi and fantasy nerd. The four books that got that started: The Hobbit, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, and A Wrinkle in Time. If you have kids, I highly recommend setting aside some time on a Sunday evening and reading these to them. Anyway... I get caught up personally in linking The Hobbit & LOTR and the Narnia series to the messages we find in the Bible. Most of us know that J.R.R. Tolkien was a devout Christian, as was his good friend C.S. Lewis. These two wove their understanding of faith into their work, it's perhaps a bit easier to see it in Lewis' work, but it is there in Tolkien as well. Because I am the tangent King here, I will say if you want a g...