Nancy's Musings

We sang a hymn up to speed today, and it was one of my favorite hymns. "How Firm a Foundation" has words that seem to mean very little after a while. It was a street-preach song when I lived in Germany, which means I sang it several times a week.  But it has a few verses that caught my spirit up today. I'm reproducing them here with absolutely no permissions whatsoever. "When through the deep waters I call thee to go, the rivers of sorrow shall not thee o'erflow. For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless and sanctify to thee thy deepest distress." I'm not sure if my distress is at its deepest, but I feel overwhelmed. I taught my students today about having the strength to ask for forgiveness, and I was threatened again with despair. Perhaps I will be forgiven, but how will I survive the consequences? What kind of wreck will I be when I emerge from the other side? I would never have done otherwise than confess and apologize. I did wrongly, and I ha...

Today's entry again winds downward on the Fantasy vein of Science Fiction Fandom. I am going to expound briefly on the topic of wannabe epics, which were my main literary diet as a young teen. A real epic spans generations, and generally involves some sort of hegemonic quest in man's struggle against a god-like evil. A Wannabe will also do this, except the characters will all resemble your local chess club (wearing elf-ears, naturally), which is why they will never have been filmed. Also, they're generally written on a fifth-grade level, but marketed for late teens, which seems to be the average age (unless he's younger) of the main character as he begins. The questing character is invariably male. David Eddings wrote two seperate wannabe epics which (I think?) take place in the same universe (ie. they follow the same magical rules), but involve totally different sets of characters. The first set follows a budding young sorcerer and his guardians, Polgara and Belgar...