Caldryn Parliament

Card Decks – Beyond Fortune-telling

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Jenny Schwartz

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painting of many fortune cards featuring flowers and planets

I had no idea that card decks had become a thing beyond fortune-telling, but Jane Friedman reported on them being a new product market in publishing.

I have no time, and therefore, no plans, to create a card deck, but I can imagine how simple it would be to feed something like The Lord of the Rings series into an AI, set specific prompts, and have it spit out quotations for themed cards.

A little bit of me is wistful. I’d love to have the time and energy to create fortune cards for the website and some sort of widget that randomly gifted you all a fortune cookie when you clicked Giddy’s paw.

Yes, authors’ dreams of what they’d do if they won the lottery are a bit different to other people’s. More time to write! Yay! But also more time to do side projects. Yay!!

Side projects like finally—finally!—getting my ebooks into paperback and maybe even hardback.

I was fascinated to read about the success of book subscription services where they curate the box of books they send their customers. And now, that curation is going to expand to include publishing.

The wheel goes round and reinvents itself.

Short stories for raconteurs are another example of the old being reinvented.

I’ve long been a proponent of the idea that if you want to learn pacing and how to tell a story, practice retelling jokes and anecdotes. I know, it’ll probably bore your cat silly listening to you recount Joe Bloggs from the watercooler’s fish-that-got-away story, but you’ll become familiar with the rhythm of a story; its high points, tension, what you can leave out (oh yeah, a large part of story telling is removing the deadweight).

Ratika Deshpande has some suggestions at Reactor for short stories suited to retelling around a campfire. I’d never considered choosing the short stories I read for their retelling value, but I guess it’s a natural extension of relating news and gossip from social media.

We’re all storytellers.

In what I’ve been reading news…

Mariana Zapata has a new book out, The Things We Water. Although she started out as a contemporary romance author, The Things We Water is a paranormal romance. What I love about her style is that she takes her time to tell a story and while she doesn’t wallow in emotion, she doesn’t shy away from it either. Her heroines are often Cinderellas. They struggle, but they are always kind.

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Comments

6 responses to “Card Decks – Beyond Fortune-telling”

  1. carriebeanbfe7fd85b0 Avatar
    carriebeanbfe7fd85b0

    I just finished reading Zapata’s The Things We Water … and I adored it so much I happy-sighed when I read what you said about it. It’s one of those bright moments of connection, like you talked about in a different post.

    I haven’t heard of the card deck trend, but it sounds fun. I’m a pagan, so I have a ridiculous number of fortune telling / oracle cards. Sometimes because I like the artwork, sometimes because the symbolism speaks to me. I feel like creating one that was just a fun piece of art with quotes wouldn’t be “difficult” (time consuming, but relatively straightforward, as you indicate), but creating one that speaks to people in a way they could use for readings would be more challenging. The deck has to have a coherency … as if each card is a word that builds into a story via the whole deck. There’s a flow to it. There are so many beautiful decks, but very few of them flow together into a language that will speak to an oracle reader. It would be an awesome project, though. I think that it would be like taking the magic system from a series and detailing it out to an extreme degree. Like, in this series, wardens could be the earth symbolism. Though how the characters use it feels more like water to me, or maybe air. Maybe because the main character is a warder, you make the deck all about that, and break the branches up based on the kind of wards. Like, wards of land (like around her home), earth. Wards for gates and transportation, air. Maybe those ward siphons could be fire. See, complicated, but fascinating and fun! I love to nerd out about stuff like this. 😀

    Reply
    1. Jenny Schwartz Avatar
      Jenny Schwartz

      I’m so glad to meet someone else squeeing about Mariana’s latest book. It launched me into a re-read frenzy. So good.

      Your idea for cards is awesome. One of the things I loathe about AI is how it takes these wonderful opportunities and diminishes them to a messed up, hollowed out mockery of what could be. Sadly, I’m bracing myself for a lot of that.

      Reply
      1. carriebeanbfe7fd85b0 Avatar
        carriebeanbfe7fd85b0

        Me too!!! I finished Wait For It last night, and am starting The Wall of Winnipeg tonight.

        I haven’t poked at AI at all, so I’m not sure I’m qualified to comment on it – I’ve only seen images created by AI, not tried to create anything myself. But they always seem soulless to me, just a mashup of existing elements. Like the equivalent of a B on an essay. Maybe I’m spoiled because I work with artists all day (I work in animation), but I feel like the thing that makes you go “oh WOW” when you see a beautiful piece of art just isn’t there on the AI art I’ve scene. Sort of like a fortune telling deck that isn’t coming together to tell a fluid story, I guess, but is just a buckshot blast of unconnected symbols.

        Reply
        1. Jenny Schwartz Avatar
          Jenny Schwartz

          The Wall of Winnipeg was my intro to Mariana Zapata. Happy memories! And wishing you an even happier re-read!! I just finished From Lukov with Love.

          As for AI. I’m trying to wrap my head around it. Listening to podcasts. Reading stuff. Just trying to work out how the world is changing – and my place as an author in it. Even when it absolutely fails to deliver on its hype I don’t think we’ll go back to how things were. It feels to me that as with big corporations and government departments taking it up, AI is a way to remove discretion and choice, the very human right to exercise judgement in how we communicate and connect with others.

          Um. Sorry. Jumps off soapbox.

          Reply
          1. carriebeanbfe7fd85b0 Avatar
            carriebeanbfe7fd85b0

            Happy re-read to you too! That’s a good one, it hits my The Cutting Edge squee marks.

            In terms of AI, I think it has some potential as a tool, like a personal assistant. I also saw an article about how much more reliable it is at reading scans – x-rays, MRIs, CT scans – than the human eye, leading to more reliable early cancer diagnoses, which is amazing. But I don’t think it belongs in the domain of art – art is how humanity describes the mystery of life, imo, and it’s not a conversation something non-living is capable of having. But no, I don’t think we’ll go back either. Society is like a big cauldron of soup that never comes off the stove – we just keep dumping ingredients in and stirring, trying to keep it tasting decent. But once an ingredient is in the pot, it never really comes back out again. The best we can do is minimize the amount it disrupts the soup.

            Reply
            1. Jenny Schwartz Avatar
              Jenny Schwartz

              I love the soup metaphor! I’m sitting here early Friday morning, coffee still to kick in, giggling at it. All right…cackling! I very much appreciate the cauldron visual 🙂

              Reply

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