Ziggurat

I mentioned ziggurats in my first chapter. Its existence in my story quite took my by surprise. I certainly hadn’t planned on it. Not sure I planned religion really. At least I knew it would appear in some form, but I thought it wouldn’t be all that important to the story. It remains to been how right I was about that.

In anycase, this is a picture of a ziggurat from Ur. Ur was an ancient Sumerian city in what is now present day Iraq. It was also a coastal city, but it well in-land now. I suppose the weather must have changed.

So . . . ziggurats? Why not a church or temple or something more familiar? Well, I wanted something different. I don’t recall much about Sumerian religion from my class on near eastern religions, beyond a creation story where everything came out of the sea and that all the cities had their gods and anthropomorphic gods. I am not going to use it, I will probably invent some for this world and a creation myth, too, maybe. But I like how the ziggurat looks and it fits with my vision of this city – there are no fluted columns, no arched ceilings, not many domes, but a clear angular beauty.

I might change the name eventually to avoid confusion with the real ziggurats, but I am keeping how it looks.

Quotable Quotes: Ray Bradbury

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

— Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Writing makes writers drunks huh? I suppose it’s better than getting drunk on real stuff. And I suppose that is the whole point – not to let reality drive you to drink. That is to say, not to let reality depress you so much that you have to drink to feel better. Kind of a depressing thought really, that enough writers do that for Ray Bradbury to admonish people not to let reality destroy their dreams. Possibly he was just trying to tell people not to give up. Considering how hard it is to get published, perseverance is important.

Ray Bradbury wrote The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451. The Martian Chronicles read like a bunch of connected short stories and at the time I was disappointed because I expected a novel. I liked his Fahrenheit 451 much better.