“Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”-Dr. Seuss
“One of the best things about folklore and fairy tales is that the best fantasy is what you find right around the corner, in this world. That’s where the old stuff came from.”-Terri Windling
“The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.”-Albert Einstein
“Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.”-Terry Pratchett
“The best fantasy does not offer an answer to our lives, it is an offering that acknowledges enough of the truth to resonate and add to the understanding about the human condition.”-Isobelle Carmody
Hello and welcome to a new and hopefully charming experience that I invite you to share with me. The more I’ve gotten into tabletop role playing games, the more I’ve realized how much I love the games that are either silly, cozy, mysterious (but not too scary,) or a combination of all three. In fact, my most recent friend game was run by my lovely brother and featured 3 of my friends and I playing as racoons in a trench coat trying to be a person to do peopley things. (Look. It was wonderful! We saved the world by accidently stealing some kind of nuclear waste, giving it back, and got an unlimited buffet of trash. Racoon heaven!)
None of this is surprising to me, by the way. I have always been fascinated by fantasy stories and mythology. I’m a bit of a dreamer. In fact, in elementary school, I got in trouble for staring at my much more interesting pencil than actually doing math and don’t think I stopped even after they gave me plain boring yellow pencils. After cutting my fantasy teeth on Anderson’s Fairy Tales, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, the thought of magical places where talking animals roam and life is idyllic and charming seems like utopia.
It’s hard to get friends together regularly though and not everyone wants to be a cute talking animal doing Hobbity things. Or racoon things, or badger things.. You get the idea. So when I found a solo RPG journaling adventured titled Fox Curio’s Floating Bookshop: A Year Upon The River, it was in my online cart before I finished reading the blurb about it. I’ve never tried a solo game before so I wasn’t sure how it would work, but it seems relatively easy. The game is written by Ella Lim and is available here through The Lost Ways Club if you want to follow along with your own floating bookshop. There are also a few more that look fun as well. Here is the website: https://www.lostwaysclub.com/shop
The idea behind a solo journaling RPG is that you use dice and cards to help give you a prompt for what happens during the day/night/time of the game. In multiplayer tabletop games you would have a game master who gives the players those prompts instead, but sometimes you maybe just want to take a little journey on your own!
So for the next few weeks, I’m going to try to post a weekly excerpt of my journey along the river, possibly asking for prompts from you as I go along. My world setting will be something like Narnia, Wind in the Willows, or Redwall. Lots of fun pastural scenes with different animals, wacky interactions with customers, cozy days reading in the rain on my houseboat bookshop. I will at some point, adopt a pet, but who knows what it will be? Maybe a butterfly or a tiny lizard? The possibilities are endless!
Don’t worry, if the storytelling isn’t your thing, I’m still going to try to get some updates about the garden and Piggy’s tomato stealing ways, life in general, and other fun things happening in my life. I have still been sewing and doing some cooking, although lately not so much with the cooking. The Husband and I got Covid after 4 years of narrowly avoiding it. Luckily it’s mild, but it’s made cooking extremely tiring and I was already been in a slump anyway.
For now though, I’ve left some music to inspire you to join me on my river journey.
I don’t normally choose to read a lot of non-fiction books as I don’t generally find them as engaging, but these next few books won me over.
Non-Fiction:
101 World Building Prompts by MD Presley: I enjoyed reading this book of tips for making new worlds. The author was really good with helping you think of new ideas and other things to consider. It was an easy and thoughtful read. I am currently writing a world for games based on a Nano idea and it’s been really fun to incorporate some techniques from the book and clarify my process. I can use this book for both personal use and for work stuff. Best part? I got it for free on Stuff Your Kindle day!
Disability Visibility Edited by Alice Wong: This was a book of short essays about disabilities and the ways they impact people who are just trying to live in the world not set up for them. I appreciated the new perspectives, the straight talk, and the reminders of things to do to help support others in general.
The Dressmakers of Auschwitz by Lucy Adlington: This book had a profound effect on me. I hadn’t known that a dress salon existed at Auschwitz or that it was an important point of resistance for the prisoners who were held there. The idea that clothes are something more than just fashion and body coverings, especially in a place where clothes could be the difference between life and death, is something I feel I should consider more as a sewist myself. My joke about sewing being a sought after skill during the zombie apocalypse feels a little flat after reading a book about women who were literally sewing for their lives. The history seen through the eyes of these ladies and the pictures and interviews with some of them in the book were amazing. The trauma and horror of war isn’t glossed over and has just enough of a statement of fact to drive home the facts of what these women suffered. I would highly recommend this book, just be prepared that it is not a light read.
Work Related:
Little Wizards by Antoine Bauza: This is a delightful first step into tabletop role playing games for both kids and parents who haven’t played before. It offers three stories with varying levels of instruction or suggestions for the Storyteller. They are all kid friendly and offer lots of different choices for how to investigate the mystery. I’m currently in the middle of the first one with a kid who is highly enjoying the novelty of solving the mystery. I really like the illustrations too- they are all adorable! Character customization is easy and you only need two 6 sided (regular cube) dice for it, so no special dice are needed. I would recommend this for probably 6-9ish? Maybe 10 if you added questing options or side quests. Check it out if you need something fun to do!
Kids on Bikes by Jon Gilmore and Doug Levandowski is a super cute and highly customizable tabletop role playing game system that is similar to Buffy the Vampire Slayer or more currently- Stranger Things. The general outline is that you are kids in a small town in a time before readily available google and cell phones and you have to solve a mystery that’s happening in your small town. Perhaps it’s aliens? Or maybe space monkies? Who knows? All you really know when you start the game is some rumors that you might start hearing about from the other players. This uses fancy dice, but is really open ended with just a few prompts and hooks to get you into the story. Then after that, the game master and players really take it away.
I’ve used it at work for one of my game groups and it went over pretty well. My players did the exact opposite of what I thought they were going to do most of the time, but that just kept me on my toes! It was fun to play and fairly easy to design characters and teach. I’m definitely keeping this in my work rotation.
Creative Therapy in the Sand by Roger and Christine Day is a sandtray therapy book with some general information and then some directive prompts to use in therapy sessions. Sandtray, while it is a little bit magical, can sometimes be hard to explain to people and this book does a good job of explaining the basics. I’m a big fan of sandtray and have used it myself to help me understand some of my more difficult things in life. I am always looking for more directives for sessions, so this was a good book to help prompt me with that. It’s definitely a small book though, so I wouldn’t recommend clinicians just use this with no other training.
I did read more non-fiction last year, but these were my favorite ones. This year, I hope to read some more of the books I keep buying for work and then not actually reading. Wish me luck!
“Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.”-Terry Pratchett
“Researching real history has taught me to be bolder and more imaginative in building fantasy worlds and writing fantasy characters, to seek out the margins of history and the forgotten tales that illuminate the whole, complex truth of our flawed yet wondrous nature as a species.”-Ken Liu
“My idea of a good fantasy is something that’s absolutely grounded in reality. And there’s a little element that doesn’t belong there – and that’s the fantasy element – that you have to react to and deal with in a completely real way.”-Melissa Mathison
“When you’re older, you want to be scared because you understand more where the boundaries between fantasy and reality are, and I suppose they are more blurred the younger you are.”-David Tennant
“This was not a fairy-tale castle and there was no such thing as a fairy-tale ending, but sometimes you could threaten to kick the handsome prince in the ham-and-eggs.” ― Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
“In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.”
“Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.” ― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
Everyone thinks of them in terms of poisoned apples and glass coffins, and forgets that they represent girls who walked into dark forests and remade them into their own reflections.” ― Seanan McGuire, Indexing
“Would you say that you’re a good man, Harry?” He had to think about that. “No,” he finally said. “In the fairy tale you mentioned last night, I would probably be the villain. But it’s possible the villain would probably treat you far better than the prince would have.” ― Lisa Kleypas, Tempt Me at Twilight
“We are all anthologies. We are each thousands of pages long, filled with fairy tales and poetry, mysteries and tragedy, forgotten stories in the back no one will ever read.” ― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake
“I’ll tell you a secret about storytelling. Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty… were not perfect in the beginning. It’s only a happy ending on the last page, right? If the princess had everything from the beginning, there wouldn’t be a story. Anyone who is imperfect or incomplete can become the main character in the story.” ― PEACH－PIT, Shugo Chara!, Vol. 2: Friends in Need
“Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be embarrassingly good at it…” ― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic
“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.”-Lloyd Alexander
“Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
“You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable,” she pleaded. “Something beautiful and full of monsters.” “Beautiful and full of monsters?” “All the best stories are.” ― Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer
“I love to perform not only music, but to make performances extremely visual, and create almost a magical fantasy. It’s really an uplifting style of art that combines visuals and music in very dreamlike ways.”-Lindsey Stirling
“If something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn’t there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That’s why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.” ― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Here are some quotes from books I’ve enjoyed recently. A lot of them are fantasy. Actually, I think all but First Frost is and even that one has magic of a sort. I’m pretty predictable when it seems to reading: romance, dragons, humor, puns, or fairy tales.
“We are all dealt a hand at birth. A good hand can ultimately lose – just as a poor hand can win – but we must all play the cards the fate deals. The choices we face may not be the choices we want, but they are choices nonetheless.”― Brigid Kemmerer, A Curse So Dark and Lonely (Retelling of Beauty and the Beast made into a fantasy series. Some urban fantasy.)
Reluctantly, I pulled out my necklace and showed it to them. Samuel frowned. The little figure was stylized; I suppose he couldn’t tell what it was at first.” A dog?” asked Zee, staring at my necklace. “A lamb,” I said defensively, tucking it safely back under my shirt. “Because one of Christ’s names is ‘The Lamb of God.'” Samuel’s shoulders shook slightly. “I can see it now, Mercy holding a roomful of vampire at bay with her glowing sheep.” I gave his shoulder a hard push, aware of the heat climbing to my cheeks, but it didn’t help. He sang in a soft taunting voice, “Mercy had a little lamb…”― Patricia Briggs, Moon Called (Fantasy)
“A happily-ever-after is never the real ending to a story. It’s where the real story begins.”― Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost (Mostly normal, but her books are all gorgeous, lush, and thought provoking stories.)
“Fear is a tool, like anything else. The trick is learning to use it without it turning on you.”― Matt Wallace, Idle Ingredients (Urban Fantasy)
“To dream of something more is the greatest gift one owns. Without them, there is nothing to strive for. No reason to continue breathing. We might as well become the rock and stone beneath our feet.”― Bec McMaster, Heart of Fire (Steampunk Romance)
“No, I would not want to live in a world without dragons, as I would not want to live in a world without magic, for that is a world without mystery, and that is a world without faith.”- R.A. Salvatore, Streams of Silver
“You haven’t been bit till a dragon does it.”-Tamora Pierce, Emperor Mage
“But yes. Come, faulty dragon people. Follow us.”-Rick Riordan, The Lost Hero
“Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”- Dr. Seuss
“All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.”- Carl Jung
“I think you’re a fairy tale. I think you’re magical, and brave, and exquisite. And I hope you’ll let me be in your story.” ― Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer
“Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.”-Terry Pratchett
“The more we’re governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible. Or, what’s impossible? What’s a fantasy?”- Alan Rickman
“I took classes taught by an elderly woman who wrote children’s stories. She was polite about the science fiction and fantasy that I kept handing in, but she finally asked in exasperation, ‘Can’t you write anything normal?’”- Octavia E. Butler
