![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saxbrightwellToday I feel like talking about the atheist sentiments in Secrets of Sleipnir. Unsurprisingly, I put those sentiments in because I'm an atheist, it's my sandbox, and I want them there. It's probably hopelessly naive to imagine a people looking down the barrel of losing ALL their technology and deciding to: 1. cling like hell to every scrap of scientific knowledge they could collectively remember and write down; and 2. pre-emptively stomp on religion as a source of political power to the absolute best of their ability. But again, it's my sandbox. If I want dystopia I can just scroll the news.
I think I was about 12 when I conducted an experiment. I went down to the pasture one beautiful summer day and said aloud, with only the horses and cattle to hear me, "There is no God." Absolutely nothing happened. It took me a long time to admit, but I was just pretending at theism from that point on.
These days I consider it an act of deliberate optimism to believe in the NONexistence of the Abrahamic God, because if you think it through, such a being would be the enemy of humanity and we would have to fight Him, and I just don't have time for that. (This is why I feel no kinship with reddit-flavoured atheists, who spend a suspicious amount of energy hating something they claim they don't believe exists.)
I've also worked too long in healthcare to believe any part of a person survives the death of the brain. If I'm wrong and some scrap of consciousness does persist, I think it's like a raindrop falling on the ocean. This does not leave a lot of room in my worldview for alternative types of supernatural entities, and truth be told, I like it that way. It's all hogwash, and that is such a relief.
I think I felt like sharing this because of the newest thing distracting me from writing: the movie Project Hail Mary. I missed it in theatres but heard enough about it to know I would absolutely love it, so I bought it on disc. And I absolutely loved it. I've watched it multiple times. I probably read over a million words of fanfiction before running aground on the rocks of 1. there being a limited number of plot beats to explore with a single book/movie's worth of canon; and 2. my lack of interest in shipping the main characters romantically or sexually. I was joking to my friends that I have been treated to a microcosm of the asexual experience, between all the horny takes smushing Ryan Gosling up against a rock-spider-crab in increasingly improbable ways, and random crossovers smushing Ryan Gosling up against other pathetic wet cat men I don't care about and don't want to get to know. I've even run into stories of the first type that were good enough in other ways I put up with and skimmed the smushing. Who have I become. What is happening.
It's probably good for me. Like Hannibal fandom was good for me, inoculating me against the idea of fandom moral superiority. It's good for me to have the experience of loving a world-changing friendship between two characters without wanting them to fuck at all. It's not like I've never had that experience before, but... it's been a while.
Enough with the navel-gazing, I hear you say! Make with the writing update! The update is that I'm rereading my draft of book 5, which is still sitting at Almost Done but also at Needs Strong Editing In Several Places. It's sat long enough that some of my "go back and fix this" notes to myself read like notes from another person, which is probably good for objectivity, but does mean I sometimes have to work out backwards what exactly bothered me so much about a section, and also that sometimes I second-guess my own second-guessing as to whether a section needs fixing at all. But it's progress of a sort that when I wander off from these problems it's only as far as another vibes-heavy science fiction universe. Hopefully.
I think I was about 12 when I conducted an experiment. I went down to the pasture one beautiful summer day and said aloud, with only the horses and cattle to hear me, "There is no God." Absolutely nothing happened. It took me a long time to admit, but I was just pretending at theism from that point on.
These days I consider it an act of deliberate optimism to believe in the NONexistence of the Abrahamic God, because if you think it through, such a being would be the enemy of humanity and we would have to fight Him, and I just don't have time for that. (This is why I feel no kinship with reddit-flavoured atheists, who spend a suspicious amount of energy hating something they claim they don't believe exists.)
I've also worked too long in healthcare to believe any part of a person survives the death of the brain. If I'm wrong and some scrap of consciousness does persist, I think it's like a raindrop falling on the ocean. This does not leave a lot of room in my worldview for alternative types of supernatural entities, and truth be told, I like it that way. It's all hogwash, and that is such a relief.
I think I felt like sharing this because of the newest thing distracting me from writing: the movie Project Hail Mary. I missed it in theatres but heard enough about it to know I would absolutely love it, so I bought it on disc. And I absolutely loved it. I've watched it multiple times. I probably read over a million words of fanfiction before running aground on the rocks of 1. there being a limited number of plot beats to explore with a single book/movie's worth of canon; and 2. my lack of interest in shipping the main characters romantically or sexually. I was joking to my friends that I have been treated to a microcosm of the asexual experience, between all the horny takes smushing Ryan Gosling up against a rock-spider-crab in increasingly improbable ways, and random crossovers smushing Ryan Gosling up against other pathetic wet cat men I don't care about and don't want to get to know. I've even run into stories of the first type that were good enough in other ways I put up with and skimmed the smushing. Who have I become. What is happening.
It's probably good for me. Like Hannibal fandom was good for me, inoculating me against the idea of fandom moral superiority. It's good for me to have the experience of loving a world-changing friendship between two characters without wanting them to fuck at all. It's not like I've never had that experience before, but... it's been a while.
Enough with the navel-gazing, I hear you say! Make with the writing update! The update is that I'm rereading my draft of book 5, which is still sitting at Almost Done but also at Needs Strong Editing In Several Places. It's sat long enough that some of my "go back and fix this" notes to myself read like notes from another person, which is probably good for objectivity, but does mean I sometimes have to work out backwards what exactly bothered me so much about a section, and also that sometimes I second-guess my own second-guessing as to whether a section needs fixing at all. But it's progress of a sort that when I wander off from these problems it's only as far as another vibes-heavy science fiction universe. Hopefully.
