I spent a large part of last week working on what I hope to be my next release. It's called Magnus Opum and it's a kind of epic fantasy, but definitely as seen through a dag-lit filter. I like to refer to it as Tolkein meets Dr Seuss.
While I was working on basically cleaning up the text in preparation for getting it out to readers and then editors, I couldn't help noticing some strange synchronicities between the supposedly fanciful stuff I was writing and what is currently happening to me in my all too real (at least as far as I can tell) life.
The basic theme of Magnus Opum is perception. How the various characters see each other is pretty much the main thing that drives the story. And different chapters look at different ways that characters understand (and misunderstand) each other based on their perceptions and then act accordingly.
What really struck me as I was going through the text was how much these ideas resonate in real life. We really are driven by our perceptions. And quite often we make all sorts of assumptions and react in fairly illogical ways based on them. Reading a chapter in which two characters have a completely different understanding of what seem like a fairly simple set of instructions, I couldn't help thinking about some recent situations where I'd been given a set of instructions, I'd thought I was following them, then discovered not only that I wasn't but that the person who'd instructed me thought that I was quite deliberately choosing to get them wrong. This person had a fixed perception of me and couldn't see past the assumptions they'd made based on that perception. And this perception was so strong that I was not in any way able to convince the person otherwise (unlike the characters in my book who actually do sort it out - I really love a happy ending).
It's funny because Magnus Opum was never intended as something quite so serious and deep. It's really a fun story, a bit of a romp if I can paraphrase a review from one of my previous releases. But I feel like I've hit on something quite rich and I'm confident that it gives the story quite a bit of strength.
I'm really looking forward to getting it out.
While I was working on basically cleaning up the text in preparation for getting it out to readers and then editors, I couldn't help noticing some strange synchronicities between the supposedly fanciful stuff I was writing and what is currently happening to me in my all too real (at least as far as I can tell) life.
The basic theme of Magnus Opum is perception. How the various characters see each other is pretty much the main thing that drives the story. And different chapters look at different ways that characters understand (and misunderstand) each other based on their perceptions and then act accordingly.
What really struck me as I was going through the text was how much these ideas resonate in real life. We really are driven by our perceptions. And quite often we make all sorts of assumptions and react in fairly illogical ways based on them. Reading a chapter in which two characters have a completely different understanding of what seem like a fairly simple set of instructions, I couldn't help thinking about some recent situations where I'd been given a set of instructions, I'd thought I was following them, then discovered not only that I wasn't but that the person who'd instructed me thought that I was quite deliberately choosing to get them wrong. This person had a fixed perception of me and couldn't see past the assumptions they'd made based on that perception. And this perception was so strong that I was not in any way able to convince the person otherwise (unlike the characters in my book who actually do sort it out - I really love a happy ending).
It's funny because Magnus Opum was never intended as something quite so serious and deep. It's really a fun story, a bit of a romp if I can paraphrase a review from one of my previous releases. But I feel like I've hit on something quite rich and I'm confident that it gives the story quite a bit of strength.
I'm really looking forward to getting it out.
