Travel to the Stars In a Blue Box or Not

The quote I gave you last time from Carl Sagan was, “The sky calls to us; if we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.”

In all the thousands of years humans have been living on this big beautiful world, only one object has captured our fascination, entranced us, more than our home: the night sky. But why in the world would we want to turn skyward when there are so many spectacular places and things to keep us occupied on good old planet Earth? Isn’t living in a world where there are magical animals called the duck-billed platypus enough for people? Apparently not.

As Carl Sagan said, the sky calls to us. We aren’t satisfied with what we’ve got here on Earth. Nothing on Earth, and this is my opinion so you can disagree with me, compares with the beauty and the mystery of the night sky. It’s not always obvious how wonderful it is but in the end it shines brighter than anything else. It’s always up there watching over us; waiting for us. Why does the sky call to us? Simply because it’s there. I think that’s amazing. Space truly is the final frontier. I sincerely hope we can come to the point where we are ready for space travel, but I can’t stress how much we are not ready for it.

Okay, by now you’re probably expecting me to just drop down on one knee and propose to the stars, if I had become a scientist I would definitely be an astronomer, but all this is important for my insight today into what I’ve been working on so bare with me.

Characters are perhaps one of the most important aspects of most stories. They drive the story and give it voice along with the narration. There are oddballs that don’t follow that rule, but they’re just out there, like the dictionary, although ironically that book is full of characters if you think about it. Characters allow readers to connect and relate to the story. From their point of view, the story is told, or better yet shown, to the reader. Pretty important stuff; it doesn’t take too much to imagine if the stories we read didn’t have our favorite characters. Imagine a Lord of the Rings without Frodo, or Harry Potter without Ron. It’s weird, right? Now there are two basic types of characters, for simplicity’s sake, the protagonist and antagonist, unless you are awesome enough to be Severus Snape giving you the ability to be both a protagonist and the antagonist of the novel. The antagonist runs around trying to make the protagonist miserable and the protagonist gets annoyed at the guy/girl making their life miserable and decides to put a stop to it. Basic story structure comes from characters reacting to what happens to them.

We as readers love this. Characters acting logically based on who they are and what happens to them. Every once in a while you get a story where no one acts at all logically, especially the main character, like Twilight and it sells millions, but usually when you see a shirtless heavily muscular werewolf and a pasty sexually confused vampire with a fetish for teenage girls there isn’t really a big decision process here right (threesome)? Any normal person would run and never come back, ever, but Bella does the exact opposite of that. She stays put and gets into a creepy love triangle with a dog monster and a blood sucking fiend who won’t even sleep with her. The horror of it all! Wrongness and other story flaws aside, Bella acts completely illogically to any sane human being who cares about their safety. The implications of Bella’s character for women are mindbogglingly bad: it’s good to yourself a couple of guys and then lead them both on because you “love” both of them but also be completely submissive and allow your man to completely control every single aspect of your life down to who you can spend time with while he stalks your every move. Remember the song by the Police “Every Breath You Take”; yeah not a happy love song but it is Edward’s theme song. Ladies Bella symbolizes that Stephanie Meyer thinks that you are incapable of making decisions without your man telling you what’s right and stalking you 24 hours a day. Let me just say on behalf of the relatively normal guys out there that we don’t want to spend that much time watching everything you do. We may love you, but stalking takes a lot of effort, beyond the depravity that causes it, and we just don’t have the energy for it. We may go for the roleplaying in the bedroom of the dark and sexy vampire taking command of the helpless innocent girl, but that’s it. Sorry for those ladies out there who want their boyfriend/husband to stalk them and sparkle in the sunlight.

In that little rant about Twilight I did two things that every writer must do; create a character and give them a voice. The first person narrator, who apparently doesn’t like Twilight for some reason, and his sarcastic voice. This blog is about presenting myself as a kind of character like I would in an autobiographical piece and giving you insight into my world, my voice.

Some stories even combine the stars with characters. The best of these have a giant blue box in them and a really weird alien inside, but more on him in another post.

But on to my story: Today I’m going to tell you a little bit about one of my favorite characters so far in my story, Isaree. She’s a stargazer, she’s philosophical, and she’s a Valkyrie.

Now back to my Avatar: The Last Airbender marathon, but not before I give you a quote to think about. It’s from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”: “All the world’s a stage,/And all the men and women merely players;/They have their exits and their entrances,/And one man in his time plays many parts,/His acts being seven ages.”

Also I think I’m going to have lower my post count to at least once a week, especially since school will be starting soon. Until next time have fun and as always keep reading and thinking!