urban fantasy alternate reality what if's breathing our world into being

"He believes in respecting forms already established for the novel. I believe in a form which is constantly mutating." - Anaïs Nin

Don't want to say too much more this minute. Let it unfold. But my semi-fictional character, Awen M. Currie, has a new blog, http://revelocean.blogspot.com. (Yes, nevermind linear storytelling, like most blogs it's reverse chronological which still isn't very sensical in a nonlinear reality.) And he's been twittering away at twitter.com/awen8.

I'm experimenting with new ways of playing What If. Visioneering.

"Your weakness is due to your conviction that you were born into the world. In reality the world is ever recreated in you and by you. See everything as emanating from the light which is the source of your own being." - Nisargadatta

The inspiration series was enlightening. The imagination series was fun. Yet there's something richer, more immersive about memoir and fiction that pulls you square and center into the picture in a way that self-helpy non-fiction and expository blog rants can't.

Check out World Without Oil (weekly story index here) if you've a few minutes. Rather than preaching and lecturing (yawn, if you ask me) on a post-carbon peak oil possible future, they've posed relevant scenarios.

You're asked to imagine this is happening. So you've just walked into this global storyline, suspending disbelief, how do you react? Discuss on the porch, over tea, at the water cooler, via blogs and phoned-in calls. Act as if. Live it. For instance, their Week 1 began:

Supply uncertainty drives prices higher    

"Fuel prices jumped this week, led by gasoline which gained over a dollar a gallon on average. Oil distributors pointed to several "renegotiated" delivery contracts as proof that a long-rumored shortfall in the supply of U.S. oil has finally arrived. Oil producers were tight-lipped about the adjusted contracts, and as I write this it's still unclear how extensive the shortfall will turn out to be."

Weave us into a possible future, let us picture ourselves in the middle of a plotline, rather than just spout out more statistics in a news item. I like.

"If we see it from the scientific, intellectual point of view, we see it as almost impossible. If we see it from a magic point of view, we can feel that yes, we can make a difference." - Mayan priest Gerardo Barrios Kaanek

p.s. Jane McGonigal is one of the creators of World Without Oil.

(Psssst, it's no secret, I'm a utopian.) Thus what-if possible futures I'll throw out look radically different. I'm a believer in: Whatever we can conceive of, we can build. Although, the challenge is our collective imagination muscles have been weakened by centuries of defeatism, centuries of utter rationality. Build it, and they will come.

Art I just finished reading The Magician's Nephew, and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Tres immersive storytelling. Dreaming of Narnia, by Sarah Carter. What I'd like to call the Wood Between the Worlds, photo via Tamo-Do: The Academy of Sound Healing, Color Therapy and Chi Movement. ("You could almost feel the trees drinking the water up with their roots. This wood was very much alive. When he tried to describe it afterward Digory always said, "It was a rich place: as rich as plumcake." - The Magician's Nephew, C.S. Lewis)

Comments

[keith ray]

"If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats." -- Richard Bach

[Peter]

Gandhi said "We need to be the change we wish to see in the world." maybe he forgot to mention that we are not only change but catalyst for change too.

You're not utopian, you're a realist being the change.

[Gala_Teah]

Yay for you, Evelyn (and you too, Awen) - and thanks for calling attention to the potential that people, fictional or not, have to change their world.

[nittaina]

Hi,
I love that drawing, it's BEAUTIFUL!!!
I just started a new creative writing blog. Can I link to yours?

Take care and keep imagining!