Darswords

1. “The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real … for a moment at least … that long magic moment before we wake.”

2. “The most important thing for any aspiring writer, I think, is to read! And not just the sort of thing you’re trying to write, be that fantasy, SF, comic books, whatever. You need to read everything. Read fiction, non-fiction, magazines, newspapers. Read history, historical fiction, biography. Read mystery novels, fantasy, SF, horror, mainstream, literary classics, erotica, adventure, satire. Every writer has something to teach you, for good or ill. (And yes, you can learn from bad books as well as good ones — what not to do).

And write. Write every day, even if it is only a page or two. The more you write, the better you’ll get. But don’t write…

Series fiction is popular. That’s not news to anyone. But why is it so crazily consumed these days? What aspects of series fiction attract us? What can a series accomplish that a standalone work cannot?

I am a huge sitcom fan. Most of my favorite sitcoms ran for over 7 or 8 years, so they are long and established series.

I got to thinking today about how I wrote a trilogy, which is its own kind of series, though in a different medium than sitcoms.

That led to me thinking about why I love to consume as well as produce series. What is it about a series that makes us want to keep going beyond one installment? (Beside cliffhangers. I don’t like cliffhangers. I’ve written before about why I don’t end my series novels with cliffhangers.)

I’m not saying series fiction and television are better than “one and done”…

While talking on the phone one day, I picked up a pen and began messing around with a pattern. I was paying more attention to the conversation than to what my pen was doing but when the phone call ended and I looked at the pattern, I thought there might be something there that I could work into a tangle. So I played with it off and on for a few weeks and finally polished it to this:

It is the tangle that goes diagonally across the tile, flanked by ‘Nzeppel in the upper left corner and Flux with Tipple in the lower corner. I call it Por Fin (which is Spanish for ‘at last’) because it has taken so long to accomplish this goal which began after the Zentangle certification seminar in October of 2011.

Here are the step- outs for recreating it followed by some of the variations…