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The poet always remains true. He endures in the cycle of nature. The philosopher changes within the eternally enduring. The eternally enduring can only be represented in what is changeable. The eternally changeable only in the lasting, whole, present moment. The images of nature are before and after. It alone is reality.

Novalis, Last Fragments

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I just wrote an ask and I think my page did not send it, so if this looks like a repeat please forgive me :)

I was curious if you have any thoughts on how philosophy bleeds into your writing process, and if that's at all a conscious decision for you.

By philosophy, I don't really mean theme, or moral - perhaps more like metaphysics? I'm a longtime fan of the Hamalki from the Wounded Sky, with their creative physics letting them interact with (or invoke) physics, not just obey physical laws. The Speech seems to be a similar way of accessing (and editing) the rule book...Even Spock's World, with Surak and the spear in the Other's heart, seems to play around with how literally reality will change around one's subjective engagement with the world. I gather some philosophers debate over all this stuff, which is why I'm potentially referring to it as metaphysics, but I'm not an expert by any means.

I suppose my question for you is how you arrive at some of these frameworks and whether philosophy is part of your interests or background. Philosophy would frame it as an intellectual exercise, I suppose. But I'm also sure there are a million different paths to arrive at some of the questions that philosophy just so happens to tackle! And I would be shocked to hear that these premises are completely coincidental, because they just seem so important in their respective books :)

Many thanks for the stories!!

Hey, it did come through, so don't sweat it. :)

Philosophy has been an interest for me since nursing school, which is where I started reading it with an eye to finding out why these people kept coming up in my other reading (comparative mythology, comparative religion, the analysis of folktales, etc etc). I started with Plato and the Greeks and then sort of gradually worked my way forward into the 1800s, until (a couple of years after I graduated nursing school) life started to get complicated, and I sort of drifted away from the subject and more into writing than reading. (Or more accurately, my reading got a lot more science-oriented at that point, though that was situational. The six weeks I spent in the science library at Cal State Northridge reading physics journals while researching stuff for The Wounded Sky were, uh, memorable.)

Yet every now and then I still do dip into philosophical texts to scratch an itch or refresh my memory while trying to find an answer to a train of thought that suggests it needs broader examination. After that I turn my attention back to work. It seems to me that most everything I've read in that discipline has sunk pretty deep into the foundations (or the sub-basement) of my workflow, and expresses itself exclusively through the prose work. ...Though you won't find me doing anything like what Eddison did in A Fish Dinner In Memison, where the characters suddenly come over all Oh Let Us [Stop The Plot And] Discuss Divine Philosophy for a chapter. (The only reason that even remotely worked in that book was that God was sitting at the head of the table in one of his avatars, and the Goddess was sitting a few seats down, trolling him so hard over his own take on his omnipotence that it's frankly amazing it didn't set off seismographs in this universe.)

...Do I have a fave philosopher? ...Probably, due to his paired precision of thought and wild (personality-based) contradictions, Spinoza. I think he and K'(s')t'lk would've got along famously. (Once she'd bitten him in the leg a few times, anyway...) 😏

Hope this helps! And thanks for the question.

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One of the recurring philosophical questions is:

"Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when there is no one to hear?"

Which says something about the nature of philosophers, because there is always someone in a forest. It may only be a badger, wondering what that cracking noise was, or a squirrel a bit puzzled by all the scenery going upwards, but someone. At the very least, if it was deep enough in the forest, millions of small gods would have heard it.

Things just happen, one after another. They don't care who knows. But history...ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it's not history. It's just...well, things happening one after another.

Terry Pratchett, Small Gods