The Travail of Passion

College Freshers' week is going well. I've only ::laughs:: joined four societies so far - climbing, rifle club, historical and athletics - and my timetable looks like it's going to be manageable. And the libraries.

::drools::

I have library love. Trinity has a copy - supposedly - of every book published in the UK and Ireland.

::tongue hanging out of mouth::
::Gollum voice::

Boookssss Yes, precious, bookses. Lots and lots of bookses (and no nasty hobbitses to ask us to pay for them).

Progress notes Tuesday October 04


"Dreamdark"

13,633 / 150,000 (9.0%)

Words today 1017
Words total 13,633


Warning. Pure waffle follows:

Horror. Evil plot intrigues are growing tentacles like some kind of Hydra-octopus.

I think I have a way to deal with the lack of information directly available to my protagonists (the intercepted letter, oh my), and I have a handle on the conflict I need to throw my third POV character into (I'm going to throw her to the wolves, and let well-meaning but deluded priests gnaw on her carcase), but ye gods and little fishes, this is an awkward draft. I'm writing absolute crap - not plot-crap, I don't think, but characterisation crap and description crap.

I do have one sentence I like. Well, one part-sentence.
Against whitewashed cottages in the dying, cloud-scattered sun...

And it's utterly inappropriate for what I want it to do.

Oh, well. At least I have a good idea where I'm going (Map! road!map! outline framework!), and I'm not wrestling with private demons screaming in my ear Does! Not! Make! Sense! I don't know if it does make sense, but hey, maybe it does.

I don't know how to write a novel. But I'm learning.

The Travail of Passion

College Freshers' week is going well. I've only ::laughs:: joined four societies so far - climbing, rifle club, historical and athletics - and my timetable looks like it's going to be manageable. And the libraries.

::drools::

I have library love. Trinity has a copy - supposedly - of every book published in the UK and Ireland.

::tongue hanging out of mouth::
::Gollum voice::

Boookssss Yes, precious, bookses. Lots and lots of bookses (and no nasty hobbitses to ask us to pay for them).

Progress notes Tuesday October 04


"Dreamdark"

13,633 / 150,000 (9.0%)

Words today 1017
Words total 13,633


Warning. Pure waffle follows:

Horror. Evil plot intrigues are growing tentacles like some kind of Hydra-octopus.

I think I have a way to deal with the lack of information directly available to my protagonists (the intercepted letter, oh my), and I have a handle on the conflict I need to throw my third POV character into (I'm going to throw her to the wolves, and let well-meaning but deluded priests gnaw on her carcase), but ye gods and little fishes, this is an awkward draft. I'm writing absolute crap - not plot-crap, I don't think, but characterisation crap and description crap.

I do have one sentence I like. Well, one part-sentence.
Against whitewashed cottages in the dying, cloud-scattered sun...

And it's utterly inappropriate for what I want it to do.

Oh, well. At least I have a good idea where I'm going (Map! road!map! outline framework!), and I'm not wrestling with private demons screaming in my ear Does! Not! Make! Sense! I don't know if it does make sense, but hey, maybe it does.

I don't know how to write a novel. But I'm learning.

The Folly of Being Comforted

I've been thinking (yes, that is burning you can smell, why do you ask?) about faith and the nature of belief. And particularly about why, after being brought up nominally Catholic and attending a convent school (Loreto sisters, if anyone's interested, and a lovelier bunch of old ladies you couldn't meet, even if they were all too old to teach and left that to secular young ones. The famous words of their spiritual founder [in the 1500s] were "Women in the future will do great things" - radical for its times), you can now find my religion on file under Other, undefined.

I am unlearned. But I haven't been able to believe in organised religion since I was twelve. (Disorganised religion, fine.)

Catholicism is a hybrid construct, a mish-mash agglomeration of different doctrines that did that fatal thing, made sense at the time. The time they were added to the canon, without much regard for what came before. It started, I have to suppose, when some enterprising early chruch organiser lifted the Mithraic ceremonies for their Christian mass, and developed further when it became the effective state religion of Rome and Constantinople. The relationship between the church leaders and early Christian monarchs lead further to the use of religion as a tool of state policy (anyone who denies that religion was a tool of state policy in Europe up until the last century has not been reading their history).

I can't swallow the idea of submission to the will of God (which, it seems to me, all the major monotheistic religions advocate as doctrine). Any divinity with a bit of guts shouldn't care about submission. It should want its followers to question, to learn, to be everything they can be. Even if that means not submitting. Submission to the will of God as doctrine is dangerous: it becomes too easily submission to the will of those who interpret God.

And that is where Catholicism presents its biggest hurdle to belief. Quite aside from its issues with women and gender orientation, the doctrine of Papal Infallibility is the one piece of dogma I'm not interested in integrating.

In the 1870s (or was it? corrections accepted gladly, but I believe I have the jist of the matter), the pope (I believe he was an Urban at the time, although my memory is foggy) declared that lo! when he sits in Peter's Chair (and don't get me started on the piece of doctrine that says when he sits on his papal throne he somehow becomes Peter) and proclaims the doctrine of the Church, he cannot be wrong.

As I understand it, this was an inspired piece of political maneuvering in response to the climate of European politics (in particular Germany and Bismarck) of the time. But...

The flaws of humanity are the joy of divinity. They must be, or else (if we did not arise by main chance) we would not have so very many.

Quite aside from the fact that in all the centuries until then, the pope was never infallible -

- he said, in effect, I am no longer merely a man. I am no longer flawed and human. When I speak thus, I speak as the Voice of God.

And you know, I don't really think choirs of angels came down to tell him that that was so. He was a man, and he declared that his voice was as that of the divine.

Not one of his successors has had the guts to say he was wrong. That the men the college of cardinals elect to the supreme pontiff's seat are only men, and human, and flawed, and fallible. And can admit that they are wrong.

This rant brought to you courtesy of exposure to organised religion, and too-long train journeys in which to think about it. *g*

PS: Anyone who wants to correct me on the facts, please do. I admit my grasp of history is hardly all-encompassing (how could it be?), and I've probably gotten at least some things mixed up. And if you want to argue my interpretation of theology, too, fine, come ahead.

(But it's still my interpretation, and I reserve the right to tell anyone who tries to change my mind to go stuff themselves *g*)

The Folly of Being Comforted

I've been thinking (yes, that is burning you can smell, why do you ask?) about faith and the nature of belief. And particularly about why, after being brought up nominally Catholic and attending a convent school (Loreto sisters, if anyone's interested, and a lovelier bunch of old ladies you couldn't meet, even if they were all too old to teach and left that to secular young ones. The famous words of their spiritual founder [in the 1500s] were "Women in the future will do great things" - radical for its times), you can now find my religion on file under Other, undefined.

I am unlearned. But I haven't been able to believe in organised religion since I was twelve. (Disorganised religion, fine.)

Catholicism is a hybrid construct, a mish-mash agglomeration of different doctrines that did that fatal thing, made sense at the time. The time they were added to the canon, without much regard for what came before. It started, I have to suppose, when some enterprising early chruch organiser lifted the Mithraic ceremonies for their Christian mass, and developed further when it became the effective state religion of Rome and Constantinople. The relationship between the church leaders and early Christian monarchs lead further to the use of religion as a tool of state policy (anyone who denies that religion was a tool of state policy in Europe up until the last century has not been reading their history).

I can't swallow the idea of submission to the will of God (which, it seems to me, all the major monotheistic religions advocate as doctrine). Any divinity with a bit of guts shouldn't care about submission. It should want its followers to question, to learn, to be everything they can be. Even if that means not submitting. Submission to the will of God as doctrine is dangerous: it becomes too easily submission to the will of those who interpret God.

And that is where Catholicism presents its biggest hurdle to belief. Quite aside from its issues with women and gender orientation, the doctrine of Papal Infallibility is the one piece of dogma I'm not interested in integrating.

In the 1870s (or was it? corrections accepted gladly, but I believe I have the jist of the matter), the pope (I believe he was an Urban at the time, although my memory is foggy) declared that lo! when he sits in Peter's Chair (and don't get me started on the piece of doctrine that says when he sits on his papal throne he somehow becomes Peter) and proclaims the doctrine of the Church, he cannot be wrong.

As I understand it, this was an inspired piece of political maneuvering in response to the climate of European politics (in particular Germany and Bismarck) of the time. But...

The flaws of humanity are the joy of divinity. They must be, or else (if we did not arise by main chance) we would not have so very many.

Quite aside from the fact that in all the centuries until then, the pope was never infallible -

- he said, in effect, I am no longer merely a man. I am no longer flawed and human. When I speak thus, I speak as the Voice of God.

And you know, I don't really think choirs of angels came down to tell him that that was so. He was a man, and he declared that his voice was as that of the divine.

Not one of his successors has had the guts to say he was wrong. That the men the college of cardinals elect to the supreme pontiff's seat are only men, and human, and flawed, and fallible. And can admit that they are wrong.

This rant brought to you courtesy of exposure to organised religion, and too-long train journeys in which to think about it. *g*

PS: Anyone who wants to correct me on the facts, please do. I admit my grasp of history is hardly all-encompassing (how could it be?), and I've probably gotten at least some things mixed up. And if you want to argue my interpretation of theology, too, fine, come ahead.

(But it's still my interpretation, and I reserve the right to tell anyone who tries to change my mind to go stuff themselves *g*)