January 2014

Longleat Maze by Flickr user: ant.photos (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

#questread

We are back for another year with read watch play #rwpchat.

Join the discussion this month about #questread.  We will be focusing on all things to do with quests in this discussion (and it will be great to see what ideas people include).

January is an excellent time to explore quests.  It is the start of a new year, with lots of new possibilities.  Is the actual act of reading a questread as you discover where each work will take you.

You might be questing with Patrick Rothfus’ The Kingkiller chronicles or Raymond Feist’s Magician, Faerie Tale, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and The Graveyard Book, George R R Martin’s Game of Throne, Eddings’ Belgariad, Malorean, Elenium and The Redemption of Althalus, C S Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia and Cosmic Trilogy, Garth Nix and Sean Williams’ Troubletwisters, Seanan McGuire’s October Daye Adventures, Sara Douglass’ Darkglass Mountain and Keri Arthur’s Dark Angel series. You could be questing for dragons at any age from Bruce Whately’s Hunting for Dragons and Peter Bentley’s King Jack and the Dragon, to Cressida Cresswell’s How to Train Your Dragon, Emily Rodda’ Deltora Quests to Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series.

Each film you watch or game you play may be a questread – as you seek a challenge, or quest for comfort, or seek a happy ending.  Quests can be large and complex or be inner explorations. Whether it is a quest for the ring of power to save Middle Earth, questing for survival in Panem or questing for Red October.

It might be a time to set a quest for how you will live the year, will you be adding more exercise as a quest, or have you set a quest about learning new skills (dry stone fence construction, animal husbandry, baking, joinery…). It might be a quest to finding yourself, motivating yourself  and pursuing your goals be they for your career, in sporting achievements or in discovering more about the world.

Are you questing for new information and knowledge?  Will your #questread be watching QI or reading Scientific American? Discovering your national libraries or searching through museum collections?

Do you like reading about travel?  Is reading about travel a #questread, or do you have to be travelling for it to be a #questread. Are you mapping your current travels, taking part in geocaching  or indulging in cartography from centuries past?

While you are reading, playing or watching your #questread, you might like to tweet about it using #questread #rwpchat so that other people can have a conversation with you about your #questread.  You can add to the discussion on Pinterest too.  You might like to post your photographs to Instagram or Flickr and use #questread #rwpchat so others can share in your reading, watching and playing.

There will be a twitter discussion on 28 January starting at 8.00pm Australian Eastern Summer Time.   9.00pm New Zealand  Time, 6.00pm Singapore Standard Time, 12.00 noon Central European Time.  Note : this is a staggered start to the discussion.
Use the tags #questread and #rwpchat as you discuss the reading, watching playing that is your experience of questread, so others can join in the conversation too.