By the Book

I love books; I love reading them, writing them, and having them.

In the Taiwanese school system, we had to memorize Chinese classics of history, philosophy, and poetry. When children inevitably complained, teachers and parents would admonish us to remember the purges of the Qin dynasty (秦, ca. 200 BCE, not to be confused with the 清 dynasty, romanized 'Qing'; I will leave the angry Pin-Yin rant for another day).

Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, accomplished many great deeds--'great' as in 'large', not as in 'good'. He unified China, standardized the Chinese script, and connected fortifications built by various warlords into what we know as the Great Wall. Like many 'great' rulers, he was also a mass-murdering, megalomaniacal tyrant.

Aside from killing pretty much anyone suspected of disagreeing with him, Qin Shi Huang also ordered books that might be used to question his regime burned, and those who studied them buried alive. Scholars risked their lives protecting the proscribed texts--carrying them into exile, hiding them, or committing them to memory.

Thus, our elders argued, we should cherish the freedom of our time, but always remember that tyrants exist in every age.  If we studied hard, we could, make it impossible for the next tyrant to destroy the knowledge of our ancestors. As a child, I took their words at face value and dutifully memorized the classics. The idea of becoming a sort of living library appealed to my young imagination.

As soon as I had any disposable income, I became a hoarder of books. From the very start, I knew this would cause problems. I never seemed to have enough shelf space or money to feed my hunger for books. I made concerted efforts to avoid book stores, to little avail.

Discovering the intersection of ebooks and the public domain saved both my wallet and the sanity of my housemates. I got the original Amazon Kindle, and used it constantly despite all of its flaws. Since the Kindle went the way of all hardware, I do a great deal of reading on my Android phone, and avoid paper books unless I have no digital recourse.

I have forgotten much of what I memorized in primary school, but not the lessons on censorship I learned from Qin Shi Huang. Moreover, I know now that digitization and open distribution of books has far greater potential for protecting knowledge than storing information 'in the meat'.

Over the next few months, I intend to clean up some novels and short stories I have written and put them in the public domain. I could wax philosophical about intellectual property and all that, but in the end this was largely an emotional decision.

I love books; I love reading them, writing them, and sharing them.

Storyteller

As a child, my exposure to English came exclusively from my father. At the age of five, I went to live with my Chinese grandmother and only saw my parents on the weekends. If I did all of my homework on time, however, I was allowed to call my father for bedtime stories.

Major Farrington was a fine storyteller, and gave me to understand that it was an Irish gift I would surely inherit. He told me twisted fairy tales, his own takes on classical literature, Loony Tunes-inspired dinosaur hijinks, and probably more than anyone should tell a small child about the Korean and Vietnam Wars. I could not get enough, and from an early age started reading everything in sight and weaving clumsy imitations in my mind.

I loved playing make-believe, casting myself and my friends into the roles of favorite anime characters. When I discovered Dungeons & Dragons as a teenager, I ended up playing Dungeon Master a lot (for those not familiar with tabletop roleplaying, the 'Dungeon Master' or 'Game Master' narrates the adventure for the other players).

I wrote my first sci-fi story at age ten (trust me, it was awful) and my first fantasy novel eight years later (also awful). My primary consideration when seeking employment is how it will impact my writing and gaming. Those two activities now consume the vast majority of my spare time.

When you think about it, the whole idea of a story is really quite remarkable. A storyteller creates entire worlds with his mind and then transmits it through language to other people. In collaborative storytelling endeavors (such as make-believe or roleplaying games), each participant modifies the constructed reality, bringing to it his own knowledge and imagination.

Whether the work of a lone soul or a massive group, though, stories unite people. They link minds together across vast gulfs of space and time. They create common experience in their own dimensions, where we can explore strange, dangerous, or improbable ideas in relative safety.

The human experience contains plenty of other fascinating endeavors. I find many of them interesting, but I could take them or leave them if it suited me. Whether or not it has anything to do my Irish blood, I have a need to tell stories. So, I tell stories.