Journey School Stories

I admitted to my homeschooled daughters a particular weakness in my own research skills. For good or bad, I tend to be obsessive in my investigation until I have found atleast one respected source that agrees with me. In my defense, all facts and opinions get fair consideration in the final analysis - I'm just not satisfied until part of the sampling of other opinions includes one that looks like mine.

Very often, this other source has been able to articulate my thoughts and feelings far better than I had, bringing clarity and expansion as well as familiarity. Such is the case with Dmitry Orlov's latest post on Club Orlov. If you've not read much of his work, time spent cruising around his blog will be well worth it. Mr. Orlov brings the task of Journey School Stories right into your lap with this excerpt:

But there is also an alternative: compose your own fiction instead of accepting anyone else's, then go ahead and turn it into reality. A good first step might be to write a short story. It can be very short, and it doesn't even have to be particularly interesting. Something as trivial as this might do for starters: “The next morning she woke up and, instead of having a bagel with cream cheese and a cup of coffee for breakfast, she fasted until sundown.” And then, the next morning, she woke up, and something curious happened: this short story came to life, and so it came to pass. Next came other stories, each a bit longer than the previous one, bridging the present and the future in new ways, and eventually spanning decades. And as these decades rolled by, these stories too came to life.

This, as I see it, is the best way forward in a depressed and increasingly demented and accident-prone country that is heading straight for collapse, where the present (reality, what people think is going on, common notions of the state of things) is degenerating into useless noise—the clamor of clueless but self-important people desperately begging you to continue giving them your attention, so that they can stuff your head with more “B”-rated trash. But if you ignore them long enough, they will go away. Don't hope, don't wish, don't dream, but do write your own fiction and use it to create a present that works for you. Invent places for yourself and for those you care about in your stories about the future, and then go ahead and live in them.

Towards this goal, we will begin posting excerpts from our own Journey School Character Development program. While we'd love to have you as full-fledged participants complete with your own character and seasonal gifts, this task is too important to each of us, to all of us, to make it solely contingent on the exchange of money. Each week, we'll post a bit of the Assignment for free, offer the purchase of a full PDF of the single Assignment for $10, or of course, the entire 26 Assignment program with Character and gifts for $300. Our family has been working through this program for personal healing and character development in our own fiction for quite some time. So, we'll also share our responses here on the blog and hosted on our website www.luckyfarm.us in character specific collections.

See you next week for the beginning of your unique story!