Last Week’s Story:

Last week’s prompt took awhile to speak to me, but I got there. I started the story on Tuesday, let it flounder for a couple of days, then finally finished it this morning. The story is called “Hessa and the Tree of Life”, and it’s sort of about a female half-orc warrior who goes on a journey of vengeance. There’s hints of colonialism in there as well as some other themes that I’ve been dabbling with off and on over the years. It’s incomplete, though, I can feel it. I basically wanted to write an adventure story after I had a conversation with a friend of mine over on Threads, and this is what came out.

The name “Hessa”, by the way, comes from my wife. I asked her to name a female half-orc warrior, and that was her response. She’s good at naming things.

This Week’s Prompt:

A scoundrel wants to destroy the world with a damaged artifact, but their community will reject them.

This was drawn from the main Story Engine deck. I’m thinking of implementing a system where I roll a four-sided die to determine which deck I’ll be drawing from. I’ll try it starting next week and see what comes of it.

Meanwhile, for this week’s prompt, I’ve got some ideas already. One of the things I’ve been interested in for a long time is the Antikythera mechanism (see the featured image above). I’m interested in all sorts of things like this: things which seem much more advanced for their time than they should be. Artifacts. Strange artifacts. I don’t believe in ancient aliens or anything like that (although my parents did buy me a copy of Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods? when I was young and I read it in one sitting); I just think ancient peoples were a lot more clever than we generally give them credit for. The same thinking applies to the Mechanism. It’s ancient, it’s advanced, but the Greeks were clever. They may have had plenty of these devices, and this is the only one that survived. Who knows? But if our scoundrel in this story can find a way to destroy the world with it, more power to him. Or less. You know what I mean.

Anyway. I’ll start the story tomorrow, and hopefully have it ready (and complete!) by the end of the week.

This Week’s Recommendation

Last week I finished reading How to Be Perfect by Michael Schur, whose name you may recognize as the creator of that wonderful NBC show The Good Place. I loved that show, even if I figured out the twist of Season One pretty much from the beginning (having read No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre did that to me). It was an utter delight. And this book is a romp through the various branches and schools of moral philosophy throughout the ages, and how folks can use those ideas to improve their own moral compass, even as the rich and powerful in our country choose to ignore their own moral compasses in favor of more money and power.

My biggest takeaway from this book, though, is how there are so many people on this Earth who don’t have the luxury of the time or leisure to examine their moral compass and the theories that lead to them; they’re simply trying to get by. Schur proposes that as we gain power and influence, we are even more obligated to aim our moral compass in the direction of helping out other people. I agree.

Schur also talks about luck and how much a role that plays in our lives. He quotes John Scalzi’s brilliant blog post, “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is” (which I re-read every year or so just to remind me of how lucky I am). Hard work and tenacity will get you only so far, but luck plays a role in your success. As that line in the musical Pippin goes, “It’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart.”

Anyway. I recommend that everyone read this book.

Best wishes. Be safe. Be kind.