It's been a glorious day here in (not usually) sunny Yorkshire. The sun has blazed down, skin has reddened, souls been revitalised. After yesterday's trip first to Emsley Farm where we fed sheep, goats, pigs and chickens and then to Yeadon Tarn, where we spent several more happy hours wandering around with the kids (four adults and seven girls aged 9 months to 10 years) today has been only a little less busy. Today we had two adults and six kids (aged 5 to 10 years) and we all trooped off to see Coraline, a film much awaited round our house.
Coraline is a film by Neil Gaiman about a little girl who crawls through a small door in the living room of her new house and finds herself in another version of her life. It was dark, and gloriously Gaiman, and obviously a little too scary for the youngest of our party, who spent the second half of the film sat on his Mum's knee. I thought it was a fabulous film, filled with weirdness and oddness and those sort of jangling elements that tell you that something is not right, not right at all . And it has dancing mice and flying dogs. You really can't ask any more of a film. Much recommended for those slightly older than five.
So, more plotbunnies. The Summer Of Fantasy is upon us and I ought to be world-building. It would help if I had settled on a concrete idea. Yesterday's idea of The Isle Of The Moon In The Summer Sky has not disappeared but been joined by two others.
Firstly a sort of post-apocalypticish world, technology stripped back to its basics, the world scraping a living in the wreckage of its former glory. Not sure what the story would be there but it's a possibility.
The second is more Tolkeinesque. It's about dwarves (dwarfs?), and to be more precise, the female of the species. I don't buy into the theory that even dwarf ladies sport beards and most of dwarf courtship is determining which genitals lay underneath all that armour - but it's rather amusing to read stories with that basis, thanks Mr.Pratchett . I think a society where the men outnumber the ladies by a considerable ratio would be an interesting concept to explore. Thanks again Mr. Pratchett, you did a fabulous job with the Mac Feegles, who I think are much closer to how a dwarf society might function. The trouble with this idea is that it's not only strolling into Mac Feegle territory, it's possibly laying itself wide open to getting itself waylaid by Rob Anybody and ending up being fanfiction with the title 'A Kelda's Story'.
Perhaps then with the most nebulous of today's ideas, although again, it's an idea that has been floating around my conciousness for years. I think Vampires are the misbegotten half-breeds of two similar but very different Elf races: Dark Elves that live underground, and Winged Elves, that live high in the canopy way above the normal tree villages of your common or garden Elf. Somewhere in this house I have a notebook that has pages of stuff on this. I may just have to dig it out.
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