Tag Archives: writing with courage

Resist Through the Way You Exist

One thing that’s emerging from discussion about the New Green Deal is that to act ecologically, to believe that climate change is real and that we must all work together to avert the worst of it, is now considered by some a radical leftist notion.

It is a given that the corporations must change their ways, must stop polluting and destroying the commons – the natural resources that belong to us all as citizens of this planet. The government must stop rolling back environmental protections — and put back the ones it’s stripped away while also stopping the flow of those resources to profiteers. But at the same time we as individuals can live in ways that help move us evolve into a society that places less strain on our planet.

You can #resist through the way you exist, and particularly the ways you spend money.
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Hopepunk Thoughts Plus A Reading List

Last year, I came up with a new class, “Punk U: The Whys and Wherefores of Writing -punk Fiction”, which attempted to explore some of the -punk subgenres, starting with cyberpunk and progressing through steampunk, dieselpunk, nanopunk, solarpunk, and a dozen others. Of all of them, the most fascinating to me — and the one that’s had the greatest influence on my recent fiction, is hopepunk.

What is hopepunk? The term was first coined by Alexandra Rowland as the antithesis of “grimdark,” a speculative genre featuring fatalistic nihilism and a tooth vs. claw environment.
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More About That Comfort Zone Thing

I was thinking more about the idea of writing outside your comfort zone, and found something that’s happened recently pretty applicable.

I have never been a good swimmer. It’s quite possible I never will be. When I was a kid, my parents kept enrolling me in swimming lessons, and I kept being a terrible swimmer who refused to put my head under water. Part of it was that I’d learned by then that if I got water in my ears, an ear infection wouldn’t be far behind, so every lesson was a silent battle to avoid putting my head underwater. It wasn’t till high school, when several friends decided I would learn to swim (bless you, Ann, Ann, Anne, and Maureen), that I actually got to the point where I could float long enough to survive a (fairly brief) period if I ever fell off a boat. Couple that with an illness that made me extremely self-conscious in a swimsuit for a long time, and you can see why I just don’t get in the water very much.

So here we are in Costa Rica, with a swimming pool right outside our balcony, and a temperature that makes that pool pretty darn inviting.
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