Day 83: Retrospective 2

I read back several of my posts from day 20 to day 40, and I think I like most of what I wrote. I had some reviews, some thoughts on different aspects of writing, and some general ideas about how I want to progress. A couple of the reviews were a little rough, but hey I'm working on it. Most interesting to compare were the posts about dystopian fiction (day 30), and my thoughts on Brave New World (day 32). Personally, I didn't particularly enjoy that novel, and I think the reason being is that I was going in with some preconceptions about dystopian fiction that don't really line up with Brave New World. It was a great big warning sign more than anything, a series of very sad events caused by society taking a wrong turn somewhere along the line meant to show people how bad things could be. It's not like most other dystopian fiction, which I believe is ironically some of the most optimistic fiction there is. On that note I said the following. I've never quoted myself before, but here goes:

"Humanity at its lowest overcoming the great power of an evil ruling elite is an extremely compelling, and even optimistic take on the base nature of humanity,"

I also made a Jurassic park reference that is now on the front of my brain.

"Those corrupt few might try to control us, but life uh, finds a way."

Anyway, my point was that I read dystopian fiction because I like the idea that society is never too far gone for good people to exist, but Brave New World doesn't align with that philosophy. I despised pretty much every character in the novel, but I'm pretty sure I was supposed to. Even the characters that felt like they were attempting some sort of redemption for their past, or resistance to the norm, were so mired in society's evils that they couldn't overcome them. This succeeds as a warning to Huxley's contemporaries, but gives the people living in the future no hope whatsoever, and that's the part that bothered me most about the book.

Besides declaring my hater status for a well renowned book, I also talked about my thoughts on humor in fiction, and how I like to conceive of jokes. I like my thought process here, but I don't think the conclusions are very accurate, and the posts themselves are kinda ramble-y. Ok, a lot of the posts are ramble-y. The point of a blog is to ramble though, IMO, so I digress.

For the humor posts, and one other post on early writing tools, I included pictures to help delineate my thoughts, and I want to get into the habit of doing that when applicable. I think a visual aid can break up a giant wall of text into something a little more palatable for most people, myself included. I'd also like to do another more research heavy post some time soon like I did with early writing tools, but I'm not sure what I would research. I'll have to come up with some topics that could be fun.

Well, I got about all I could from reviewing these posts. I have some improvements to make and some old goodies I left behind to bring back into my writing. I'm glad I've been able to keep up with the blog, even though it feels really weird writing or reading it sometimes. Looking back, it's nice to have a big string of things I can say I did.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley