a prelude for november

And so we bid a fond farewell to October, and welcome in November, ever the herald of winter and darkness--here in Seattle, it's a month of bleak rain, a month of storms, a month where all of autumn's bright colors begin to fade and we are left with the endless grey. It's hard to be fond of November, but winter has its place, I suppose.

I think I've mentioned that I've been more interested in reading history recently; this interest started with reading Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, which draws a lot of very deliberate inspiration from the Enlightenment, and my realization that I knew almost nothing about the Enlightenment, despite the fact that so many of America's foundational ideals come from there. And with everything that's happened over the past five or six years, I found myself drawn to that. We can learn a lot about who we are by studying where we came from.

Of course, if you study the Enlightenment, you quickly learn that they built on the works of authors like Locke and Hobbes who came before as well as on the works of the Renaissance and, of course, the classics; and then reading about the Renaissance is fascinating in its own right (starting with what is a revelation to many people who haven't studied it that it was actually kind of a shitty time to be alive, even slash especially in Italy, the place where it all happened), and . . . I have a lot I want to read.

I mention this because the story slash world I'm working on (and have been for years, yes) feels like it should take some notes from all of this history, all of these ideas that change society. Because what interests me most about history, apart from the wacky stories and things that sound straight up made up (Venice and Florence both have some really buck wild aspects about them that I really want to delve into), is how ideas shift and change.

Part of it is that I've been trying to build up this world's history, at least partly so I can have some wanderers from its future walk through its ruins and try to piece it together. I know those two characters well, even if I don't yet know what their story looks like. (That wasn't quite the original story; there was always a Princess who, in her hubris, drowns a city with a Spire, and the world falls apart with it. Exploring the ruins, though, has always fascinated me.)

There's still not much to be said about the ongoing pandemic, our boring apocalypse. There's a new vaccine mandate locally; and maybe the vaccine numbers will go up as a result; the daily cases have been very, very slowly trickling downwards. Downtown feels more or less back to normal now. I doubt that there will be anything interesting to report on this front for some time, though I suspect I'll get a cold at some point, which has transformed from an unfortunate occurrence to an exciting development.

So, time to pull our coats tight and march onward into winter. Winter seldom gives us much choice.