Fantasy/Scifi and Real Life Commentary.

It has always annoyed me when people say that Harry Potter is just a children's series. Maybe I'm being a bit of a fangirl here, but there is SO much real life stuff hidden in the pages! (FYI, this is a post mostly for scifi/fantasy writers, though maybe other genres can benefit, too?) I'm using mostly HP and Doctor Who as examples of real life found in fantasy/scifi.

HP either is anti or has metaphors representing:

1. Torture.
2. Genocide.
3. Prejudice.
4. Bullying.
5. Alcoholism/addiction (Winky)
6. AIDS (Lupin being a werewolf is supposed to be a metaphor for a person with AIDS.)
7. Date rape. (Think poor Tom Sr.)
8. Newspapers that print lies.
9. Crappy political leaders.

DW has commentary on:

1. Plastic surgery. (Cassandra.)
2. Suicide.(Van Gogh)
3. Family. (Rose and her parents.)
4. Confidence. (Donna)
5. Change and repentance (think of when Rose wanted to show the Dalek mercy.)
6. Genocide.
7. Being forced to be a parent. (When Ten had his DNA used without consent to make Jenny could be seen as a metaphor for surprise parenthood.)
8. PTS (Nine and the Time War. One of my favorite bits of character development on Doctor Who ever was watching Nine fight his PTS over the war and what he did. *sigh* I miss Nine.)
9. Love, and gaining it and losing it. (Rose! And River! And the Ponds!)
10. Knowing when to walk away from a bad relationship. (Martha.)

And my own work in progress so far has a metaphor for cloning. So, fantasy/scifi writers, you want to make your book more real? Pick up a newspaper and ask yourself what you could do to make metaphors of real life. :)

PS

Yes, I realize that this isn't a Myers-Briggs post. Next Sunday. ;) And yes, I know that today isn't Sunday, but my time it's only 44 minutes to Sunday, so I think it counts!

What Not Writing can Teach you about Writing

Biggest contradiction ever, right? Well, not writing can teach you plenty about writing. Let me tell you a little about my writing life for the past eleven months.

• I get into writing so much I pretty much lived and breathed it.
• Hardly take a break or think about anything else for nine months.
• Finally take a break in September/October this year. Read some books. Watched a lot of Doctor Who:

Source as far back as I can trace it. Including this because blog posts without pictures are weird, and Doctor/Rose is a great pairing. :)

• Start writing again in tiny bits.Marvel at the improval in my writing because of the break.

Okay, first. Making my life writingwritingwriting was kind of unhealthy. Well, okay, not just kind of, more like a lot. It caused me to put so much pressure on myself that I started to hate writing. (Not to mention, my prose sounded really repetitive.)

And hating writing's not right, because I love writing. 

Anyway, I took a break for a month and half and, as I said above, doing stuff like reading books and watching TV had really helped my prose. For starters, watching TV gave me a good idea how people react to stuff in ways other than "she smiled" "he laughed"  etc. And reading? It's given me even more ways to fix up that stale prose. Like, I forgot that when describing something, you could compare something to something else. Like "Professor McGonagall gave Harry a hawk-like look." (Not a quote from HP that I am aware, I just made it up on the spot, lol. If there is a quote like that in HP, then my subconscious is channeling Jo, apparently.) Rather than my usual description of a stern gaze, which is "She narrowed her eyes." Saying that a gaze is hawk-like is far more interesting.

Anyway, hope you guys liked the post! Soon I may do a post on Myers-Briggs tests and writing. Also, I just noticed that I have 29 followers. That feels like a huge milestone. Thanks guys!
Also, I don't like making commits for fear of breaking things, but I want to at least try to update this once a week. We'll see if that happens. What do you guys think of me updating the blog every Sunday?