This Week in Normality — Things Change, Things Remain the Same…

Greetings Faithful Normalinauts,

Consider this week an unofficial/official/unofficial again reboot…sort of. Some time ago we (read: I) decided to start posting content at the beginning of the week to afford the weekend time to write stuff and, theoretically, allow for us (read: me) to write more for the site. Most of my weekday hours are devoted to bookmines duty, teaching, grading, bathing and feeding the kids, etc. After all that, I don’t have the time and/or energy to write anything else.  As it is, I’m lucky to get more than 3 hours of sleep a night during the week.

So what the hell does this have to do with this?

This week’s theme, “Things Change, Things Remain the Same…,” is a fairly esoteric one and can be molded to fit any topic, I think, but is particularly appropriate when considering the history of this site.  By that I mean, we’ve always gone through stretches of relative silence and stretches of frenzied activity.  No doubt this state of affairs will continue until I win the lottery or in some other way become independently wealthy.  So while we’ve undergone a lot of changes in the last six months, as always, we remain Normality Restored.

There are some more changes up ahead, not the least of which will involve a lot of begging on my part…but more on that later…  Regardless of the changes, or the down time, I want to assure the few of you that have been consistent visitors to this site that it remains a priority for me…even if the kids and jobs must take precedence at times.  I ask all Normalinauts out there in cyberspace not to lose hope, for as long as I have breath in my lungs (and the ability to pay the hosting fees) you will always have this little corner of the interwebz to call your own.

Now, I’d like to say that the above impassioned plea/apology/rant was the actual inspiration for this week’s theme, but it was not.  In fact, this theme came to me as I pondered, some months ago, the release of The Gathering Storm, the most recent release in The Wheel of Time series that has now been taken over by Brandon Sanderson. 

I would go into it in more detail here but that’s actually the focus of one of my articles.

D. Composition illuminates for us a re-discovery from our collective childhoods and a story from his past that was particularly special to him.

Lastly, I consider what it means to re-imagine both a foundation of fantasy literature as we know it…and the most popular contemporary fantasy story…all in the same book.