Weeknotes

week 51 / 2024

Snoozing on a tree-branch, dreaming of tasty, crunchy mice—OK, so maybe the owl is not the shoo-in candidate for WEEKNOTES spirit-animal that I thought it might be. (That said, NO REGRETS!) This week, pods have been casted and loose ends tidied, and interiority is explored.

This unbelievably mellow owl is from a 1904 calendar by Theo van Hoytema | image courtesy Rijksmuseum

Welcome back to WEEKNOTES at Worldbuilding Agency.

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Allow me to remind you that I am a consulting critical and creative foresight practitioner, and that I would like to help you or your organisation think through what it might mean (and look like!) to do what you do in a world where the climate and the culture are changing way faster than the technology. So maybe you should hire me to do that, or send your friends to hire me to do that? Drop me a line, and let's discuss the possibilities.

I'm trying very hard indeed not to do that whole "omg how can it be the end of the year already" thing, not least because I feel like I've been saying that to everyone I've met since some time in mid-September.

Furthermore, the odds are good that—if you're reading this at all—you're probably doing so in between (or as a temporary distraction from) various wintermas activities... so I doubt you're gonna be too fussed if I just skip us straight to the chase this week. Right?

Right. On we go, then.

ticked off

Eight hours on a little copy'n'proof job for my good friends at Media Evolution.
Four and a half hours prepping for and recording a podcast episode about narratives. (An episode which will probably become two episodes, though not—or at least not entirely?—due to my tendency to go on a bit. More details when the hosts are ready to put it out there.)
One and a half hours discussing the next steps on PROJECT HORNIMAN. (Early material has been well received, but we're still working out what sort of shape we want this thing to have, and where it might eventually be placed... and that's a bit of a chicken-and-egg question, really.)
Ten and a half hours of admyn. (Well, it's that time of year, isn't it? Tidying up loose ends, little bits and bobs that don't merit a codename of their own, trying to work out how to make best use of Null Week.)
Ten hours of undirected writing and reading. (You know the drill by now.)

If the totals seem a little low this week, it's because I took Wednesday afternoon off to wander around town. It's a tough life, this freelance thing; you've gotta avail yourself of the perks from time to time.

kinmaking

I guess the podcast mentioned above counts pretty strongly toward this week's kinmaking quota? And when I say "I guess", what I mean is "I've decided that it does". My weeknotes, my rules!

(It's harder than usual finding people with free time for open-ended convos at this time of year, for reasons which presumably do not need explaining. Truth be told, though, I haven't exactly been busting my butt looking... )

reading

Finally got round to reading Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse. Now, there's a title whose relevance to foresight work may not be immediately obvious, eh? But if you wanted an example of the capacity of long-form prose fiction to carry interiority—a property arguably unique to written fiction, over all the other popular forms—then Woolf's pioneering stream-of-consciousness technique is well worth witnessing. It probably also illustrates the risk of taking it too far; I can imagine modern readers, increasingly starved of interiority in written fiction (see below), struggling with the way Woolf's POV leaps from character to character, not to mention with their individual meanderings of thought.

(The sf writer who feels to me closest to this approach is probably Gwyneth Jones, who is a rare writer for many reasons, not least among which is her regular use of the inaccurately-named "objective" third-person mode, which is comparable to Woolf's shifting of POVs herein. And if you're thinking "I've never read any Gwyneth Jones", well—have I got a new year's resolution for you!)

a clipping

This one's from a few week's back, but the heavy interiority of To The Lighthouse put me in mind of this recent ramble from Lincoln Michel, which is basically all about interiority in fiction—or rather the burgeoning lack thereof:

Thinking in fairy tales is different than thinking in hardboiled detective fiction. Thinking in aphorisms is different than thinking in longform essays. So on and so forth. (This is likely why so many artists can excel in one area but struggle in adjacent ones. Short story writers who can’t finish novels. Actors who flop at directing. Etc.) Probably all this is obvious, but I was—sorry—thinking about this after discussing a few issues in contemporary fiction that all seem to add up to the same thing: novelists thinking not in prose but in TV.
Lincoln Michel https://countercraft.substack.com/p/turning-off-the-tv-in-your-mind

I'll likely return to this piece, or at least reference it; there's some really useful entry-level discussion of POV (point-of-view) as it differs across various media. But that's all the more reason for you to read it now!

(Though, fair warning: beware of the Friends gif. Amazing how just a few seconds and a few thousand pixels could give me a Proustean flashback to just how much I loathed that show.)

OK, we're done here for now. WEEKNOTES will return in Null Week, because I am a weird hermit and I like to keep my habits going without regard to such socially-constructed fripperies as "holidays"... but of course, you are in no way obliged to read them! Indeed, I hope you'll instead be having whatever flavour or denomination of winter-solstice-adjacent festival/holiday (or lack thereof) that you most prefer.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 51 of 2024. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe. If you are already subscribed, please send to a friend who you think might also like it!

Have a good weekend.