{"id":12650,"date":"2009-12-30T09:40:14","date_gmt":"2009-12-30T17:40:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2009\/12\/30\/12650.html"},"modified":"2009-12-30T09:40:14","modified_gmt":"2009-12-30T17:40:14","slug":"the-correct-number","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2009\/12\/30\/the-correct-number\/","title":{"rendered":"The Correct Number"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Started reading Pamela Dean's <cite>The Secret Country<\/cite> last night on the way to sleep. My comment so far: Having five children in a portal fantasy, instead of four, is Just Wrong. Four is obviously the Correct Number.<\/p>\n<p>(I'm mostly joking, but there is some small part of me that keeps trying to get the count of kids to come out to four.)<\/p>\n<p>Still, I like it so far, and it is (as Mary Anne suggested when she mentioned the book) giving me useful ideas and tools for my own portal fantasy, which some day I may even continue writing.<\/p>\n<p>One other thought: in John M. Ford's <cite>Growing Up Weightless<\/cite> (about which I hope some day to write more), I saw the kids as clearly playing a roleplaying game. Whereas even though the prologue of <cite>Secret Country<\/cite> reminded me of bits of <cite>Weightless<\/cite>, here it feels to me (so far, and at a gut level rather than an analytical level) more like \"playing make-believe\" than like an RPG per se. I wonder whether that's a distinction without a difference, whether it has anything to do with my initial misperception of the kids' ages in this book, and whether it has to do with the trappings they use (computer-aided vs pure imagination). And I'm only a few pages into <cite>Secret Country<\/cite>, so my perception may change.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Started reading Pamela Dean&#8217;s The Secret Country last night on the way to sleep. My comment so far: Having five&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,51,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-roleplaying","category-speculative-fiction"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12650\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}