My Brain is Full

I had the kind of weekend you need a weekend to recover from, and then there was the 5 a.m. thunderstorm. So I got a very late and slow start on the day.

The one-day university thing was interesting. I came away with a lot of potential ideas. Fortunately, no new plots or worlds, just things that I might be able to use in the future or that would make interesting additions to the current plots. I also got to hold a Pulitzer Prize. There was a lunchtime session in which the photographers from the local newspaper who won the photography prize in 2006 did a slide show and talked about how they covered the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (what they won for). I'm not sure if the event would be worth the full price, and I was definitely not in the main demographic for the event, but it was really interesting and I came away with a lot of stuff I want to read more about.

The session on the psychology of good and evil wasn't quite what I expected, but it gave me a lot of great material I might be able to use in creating heroes and villains, especially if I'm showing the rise of a hero or the slide into villainy. The lecturer wasn't looking so much at what creates the Hitlers, Stalins or Idi Amins so much as she was looking at how enough people come to support those kinds of people that they can come to power and hold power. When you think about it, if everyone around them thought they were dangerous crackpots and ignored them or dealt with them, they wouldn't have power. It takes a lot of ordinary people going along with them for them to have any power because they have to have someone carrying out their orders in order to be any kind of threat. So the lecture was about how people can come to go along with that kind of thing.

Now my brain is full, though, and I have a lot to do before next week's trip.