At some point during NaNoWriMo i heard of Tarot for Writers, which uses tarot cards to brainstorm character personalities and plot outlines. I’ve been lusting after it ever since and finally gave in and downloaded the Kindle version last night and have been drawing cards for my novel characters (especially the borderline random and unrealistic minor ones).

It’s far more oriented towards writers who are just starting their novels than those who have already written one and are trying to edit, but it’s still proving useful. At the very least it’s prodding me to be a bit more creative – most other tarot spreads, if they touch on personality or backstory at all, do so in the sense of how it all affects a bigger problem. The Tarot for Writers spreads don’t have the whole ‘real live person with a backstory you can’t change on a whim’ limitation.

It has awesome plot-outlining bits, too. I’m going to go nuts with this next November… i’m already having trouble resisting the urge to play around with the various plot spreads. Maybe by the time i’m done pulling cards to work on a whole small cult worth of character design the novelty will have worn off a bit.

random other stuff

• I somehow suspect i’m going to end up with a copy of Out of the Box & On the Page before i’m done editing. Right now i need more editing advice than idea-generating advice, though.
• The ‘post-literate’ Cat and Girl strip makes me giggle – though i admit to being on the pro-spelling side. And the comments below have devolved into pro- vs anti-spelling debate of most wondrous form, including at least one impromptu mini-poem.

dragged over from my art blog…

Been kind of slacking in the art department lately – working on bits and pieces of various stuff has been no problem, but actually finishing anything… yeah. I haven’t done anything traditional in a while, either. Forgot how much i love pen drawings.

So, for the Illustration Friday theme of ‘Renewal’ – a young woman ‘renewing’ herself by breaking the ties which have been holding her to a life she doesn’t like.

I sort-of tried to tie her into the Star card in the tarot, too, but almost everything i did along that line made her look worse instead of better… so i gave up pretty quick. It could still work as a Star card, i guess; the overall theme of freedom, hope, and inspiration is still there.

Semi-random tangent: i have been ridiculously obsessed with tarot art lately. I love seeing all the ways different artists have of interpreting the symbolism of the cards; i actually get really disappointed when i see a deck which has more to do with what the artist felt like doing than what the card normally symbolises. Okay, so tarot started out as, and in some countries still is, primarily just a card game; and while i don’t know the actual game rules i imagine the symbolism is pretty irrelevant – so it’s not like a deck which doesn’t join with the traditional symbolism is automatically useless or pointless.

Still, coming across such a deck while looking at more symbolic decks is like coming across a landscape at a portrait exhibit. There’s all these wonderful ways of depicting people; full bodies and faces and other body parts, active and passive, realistic and impressionistic and fauvist and abstract, and then, bam, there’s a sunset over a valley.

And it could be the most beautiful landscape in the world, there’s still going to be a what-the-hell-is-that-doing-here moment. Does it look like a person if you squint and tip your head sideways? Is it some sort of highbrow non-figurative portrait, where the colours represent the person’s aura and the environment represents eir birthplace and the buildings represent eir accomplishments? Is it just a really long-distance portrait and if you just look closely, you’ll see a tiny figure waving from the horizon?

Water-only for 19 hours, and tea-only for five hours before that, so i guess this counts as a successful twenty-four-hour detox.

Cushioned on one side by a ‘last meal’ of ice cream and on the other, a ‘first meal’ of pizza. I don’t normally eat so unhealthy and it seems extra-odd to put a water fast in the middle of that.

And i have been properly scolded for this; as part of my Tarot-learning attempt, i’ve been doing a little reading every morning. Today i focused on ‘cleansing my body’ and used a ‘situation focus-possible solution-inspiration’ spread.

Seven of Cups (‘um. you can’t just grab any “healthy” idea you like and run with it and expect it to work all by itself. you idiot.’), Four of Swords (‘foooocuuuus. hey! adhd-head! yeah. seriously, you need to focus on eating better, start working out again, that sort of thing.’), and Three of Clubs (‘oh, four of swords told you to put in some actual effort, and you come crying to me for sympathy? go find a guy who went bungee-jumping without a cord and ask him how he feels about lack of preparation.’)
Ha.

All that said, i’m still planning on doing this again, in six months’ time, but i think it will be padded out by mini-fasts of the ‘fruit and juice’ variety, instead of ice cream and pizza.

I still have pretty much no grasp on tarot cards as of yet, but i was watching some Bones last night and saw an episode including a psychic who used tarot cards. It was almost cool, except i knew the commonly accepted definitions behind at least half the cards shown on-screen and most of her explanations of them were way off. So, basically i know tarot just well enough to know when someone else is doing it wrong.

(For example, there is simply no way you can use tarot cards to figure out there’s a pile of bodies buried under a fountain. Even the ninety-nine-cents-a-minute phone-readers advertised at three in the morning wouldn’t try to pull crap like that.)

Of course, i also don’t use my tarot for actual divination purposes, and the psychic in ‘Bones’ was portrayed as an actual, honest-to-goodness psychic. Presuming psychics can exist (and with a little poking around with mild telepathy and talents for examining subconscious thoughts, there’s at least plausible explanations for them), it wouldn’t have been completely ludicrous for the psychic to be simply using her tarot cards to guide and focus her psychic visions. In that case, she wouldn’t need to have even a basic understanding of ‘real’ tarot – ‘Hm, this card shows a person in bed. My awesome psychic intuition tells me it’s a literal depiction of a man you’re friends with being sick in bed.’

They didn’t actually explain that in the show, though, which irritated me to no end. At one point Booth is interrogating the psychic – because, let’s face it, you can’t just say ‘Hey, there’s a dozen bodies buried under the fountain, you might want to go check on that’ without the cops thinking you were involved somehow – and when she’s asked how she knew where the bodies were, the psychic basically says ‘Well, it’s difficult to explain what i do with the cards.’

I can do it in a single (albeit somewhat run-on) sentence, woman: You have stronger intuition than most people, but the exact details of your intuition are often fuzzy, so you use the cards as a focal point to help complete the visions. YAY.

I have no patience for people who pretend stuff cannot be explained, who act like it just is and if you can’t accept it, you’re too close-minded to deal with.

unrelated random somewhat-tarot stuff:

I’m finishing up the character matrix for my NaNo, which meant doing another tarot reading for one of my characters. By sheer accident, he’s basically a young male Sarah Palin. He’s certainly not going to be a duplicate of her by the time i get around to actually writing, but i find it somewhat amusing. And a bit frightening – she fits perfectly into the novel. As a villain.

Actually, pretty much all my current antagonists are the dragon version of the Republican party. That wasn’t really intentional at all – i needed evil dragon politicians and every time i pull a card for one of them it matches fairly well with the current Republican party’s beliefs, with just enough variation to make them individuals instead of GOPbots. Granted, i don’t think McCain has ever plotted to kidnap a half-dragon boy in order to prevent illegal immigration from an alternate dimension, but some conspiracy theorist can probably pull up a website relating a similar story.

I’d normally have updated earlier (sticking with #98 on my 101 list, ‘update weekly’), but my internet has been pretty shoddy lately. It works, then it doesn’t, then it does. Still doesn’t properly work, but whatever. I’ll not let that stop me. Though it does mean any update will be random hodgepodge ‘everything i meant to write all week and didn’t’ thrown together instead of anything coherent.

On the novelling front: lots of character-building, lots of world-building, lots of research. My current novel project is going to read like an urban fantasy, even though in my head it’s more of a hard sci-fi novel, so i’m basically creating alternate versions of the whole world and trying to work out plausible reasons for the alternate version to exist. I really hate stories in which there’s no logical explanation for why something happens the way it does – even a technobabble sem-logical explanation, ‘Doctor Who’-style, is better than nothing. Heck, even if the explanation isn’t in the story, if there could plausibly be an explanation, i’m okay. But ‘well, it just magically happens‘ doesn’t go over so well with me. So even though my novel involves alternate realms populated by dragons, and even though i don’t plan on explaining any of the actual science in the story, i’ve been doing a ridiculous amount of research on hyperspace. I think i’ll own every single book ever written by Michio Kaku by the time November is over… Then there’s the research i’m doing on fae and technopagans and coffee and Watergate and Buddhism. It’s a long list.

I’ve also been sort-of using my tarot deck – mostly simple readings for my characters. Someone on the National Novel Writing Month forums mentioned they have a simple four-card layout they use to determine a character’s fears, hopes, loves, and hates, and that plus one extra card used to determine a dominant personality trait has given me many wonderful ideas for my characters. I still have to look up the meanings behind just about every card, and i don’t have any traditional layouts like the Celtic Cross memorised yet, but i’m starting to get a feel for the cards.

Dvorak – i’m kind of hoping to have figured out before NaNoWriMo starts, but i’ve been slowed up a bit by my lack of consistent internet and my ‘hey, i can just use online programs!’ attitude of last week. I do have the home row more or less memorised now; that’s a start.

And as far as replacing my software with open-source stuff, i’ve actually gone backwards a step – i’ve switched, at least temporarily, from Firefox to Opera. Opera’s noticeably faster (important right now, when the next page load could be my last for twenty hours), and for whatever reason Firefox keeps crashing even when the internet’s working. I’ve heard people complaining about the latest version of Firefox but it seemed to be working fairly well for me for a while and only started crashing recently; maybe i’ll just reinstall the whole thing once my connection’s properly functioning again.