Monday, May 9, 2016

Spirit of Adventure

Seriously, coated in flowers. It used to be a sand dune,
but sand dunes aren't stable enough for memorials, so they
planted stuff to make sturdy enough to build a monument.

Spent a long weekend in the Kitty Hawk area, including a visit to the Wright Brothers National Memorial, which this time of year is coated in flowers.

The "First in Flight" monument is dedicated to the Orville brothers' first successful controlled flights. Which leads me to think about just how cool, how fascinating, how terrifying it must have been. Lots of people died trying out inventions, but so many were so dedicated to things like "humans surely can fly" that they kept trying anyway.

I think that's part of what I like about steampunk stories. It has that can-do spirit, that determination to succeed even if it involves risking your own neck, that high-stakes adventure... and also, since it's fiction, the surety that no one real gets harmed. Yeah, that last part is pretty nice.

The spirit of adventure is one of the driving forces behind my love of fiction. It's also a fundamental plot: the hero sets off in search of adventure! (and also some other driving force, like discovering herself, or finding her real parents, or saving her family from crazy magic).

Do you ever imagine yourself in a steampunk world, on the edge of some amazing discovery? What "crazy" invention would you be working on?

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