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When I was that age, the pending apocalypses were the bomb, and population explosion. The conflicts that were about to turn into world wars were in Cuba and Vietnam. The politically correct responses to racial divides were integration and color-blindness. The pronoun fight was over the generic use of "he". Stagflation promised economic collapse. The Sci-Fi apocalypse was alien invasion. The schools were teaching trendy nonsense.

The trendy nonsense the schools are teaching now is way worse than the trendy nonsense they were teach then, but not much else has changed. College students were shouting and throwing stones then; they are shouting and throwing stones now. Second verse, same as the first. Tweak the lyrics, but the tune's the same.

To most kids, this stuff is just background noise. It's the stuff of TV news, but their real experience is that they are well housed, well dressed, well fed, well cared for, and more or less well loved, and each new birthday brings new wealth and new liberty. They are happy enough.

Their imaginations are preparing them to do battle with monsters, because that is what the imagination of children does. There are monsters to be fought, after all, but the kids are, for the most part, confident in their ability to fight them. They are still too blithe and ill informed to know that the monsters are old and wiry and difficult to grapple with. (You can see this in the childish idiocy of over-coddled and under-educated protest mobs.)

40 is the anxious age, not 14. At 40, one has had a bruising or two from the monsters, and you have people who depend on you to be anxious for as well. You project your anxieties onto them. They still feel invincible, if they have been properly cared for.

By 65, the anxiety begins to wane. You have seen the monsters beaten back to their caves enough times to feel that, despite the shambolic way it was done, it will be done again and again and again.

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Thank you so much for highlighting the book, Simon! It's wonderful to share the same accomplishment with you and does create a sense of comradery that I enjoy and is encouraging. I'm hoping we both get to publish many more in the near future!

Your workshop sounds fascinating. I don't think there is anything different today about kids processing dark themes and starting to understand death and the temporal nature of our time on Earth. I'm a few years older than you, and in the mid to late 80s as kids we had our fair share of problems. I do believe the way in which we instruct kids to tackle those problems is far different today, but it would require an entire book to write on that subject 😁

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Jan 25, 2023·edited Jan 25, 2023Liked by Simon K Jones

I think kids that age have always been interested in horror. When I was that age, I used to watch the television show called Sir Graves Ghastly, that showed horror movies every week. Frankenstein, Dracula, etc. Or as we called them, scary movies. As I got older, I grew less attracted to the horror genre. I rarely watch horror movies anymore. Especially after they became mainly gory slasher movies. But Stephen King showed that horror sells.

Maybe it is a way for children to deal with the horrors they’re exposed to in the media and social networks every day. Or maybe it’s just a normal phase of life. They like to be scared (safely.)

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Thank you for this piece, Simon. I have young kids (7 and 10) and I think what scares me most for them is how readily available the horrors are for them to witness. The internet and media in general have made the worst of things more accessible. Sometimes you don't even have to choose to access them. They're just there. In your face every day. When I was a kid (80s/90s) the most I knew about what was happening in the world was through listening to NPR on the way to piano lessons. And most of it went over my head. I remember in junior high school, our music teacher was very vocal about all the injustices happening in the world. I know all the lyrics to Billy Joel's "We didn't start the fire" to this day, because we sang it in 5th grade chorus. Acid rain. That was something we worried about then. The AIDs crisis. The Gulf War. The Exxon Valdez oil spill. The war on Drugs. These ones stick out as being in the back of our developing minds. I was an artsy kid. I wrote a lot of poetry growing up. And I always made music. And read. I agree with you that those outlets are really important for kids. To help them process things. The kids in your class were fortunate to have the opportunity to work with you. It sounds like you're a natural with that age group. And it's a tough one to connect with. Probably more so now than ever.

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I teach the same age group. I've taught from 9-13, now I'm teaching middle school, and I see the same patterns. Kids that age tend to be dark. It fascinates them. As a dark speculative writer myself, I am happy to lean into it!

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I didn't know what "LitRPG" is, either, and the Wikipedia article isn't wonderfully illuminating. Perhaps I'm being annoyed about the Wiki because it defines "LitRPG" as relating to COMPUTER RPGs, then cites Andre Norton's "Quag Keep" series (players sucked into a D&D tabletop game - and the first RPG related, inspired novel, ever... But not Norton's best. Or even good. It's pretty terrible) and Niven/Barnes/Pournelle's "Dream Park" series, which is about LARP before LARP was a thing (the first LARP society licensed their name from the "Dream Park" books).

Oh, carriage returns on mobile today! Nope, that literally just stopped working. Sigh. Anyways, "what keeps you up at night" may be the best description of "Theme" ever. Well done! You're 42, I'm 50. You missed the continuing panic of late stage Cold War, I think. Or the UK wasn't as worried as the US. We didn't do "duck and cover" drills, but we were trained about what to do if the nukes flew. We had films like Red Dawn. Those who "came of age" in the 1990's (here defined as "formed strong childhood memories") had that nice, anomalous decade between the Cold War and 9/11 where "things were looking up." At least in the "West." As long as you weren't in a former Soviet Republic. Even then, civil wars and local conflicts... Those suck, but they weren't world enders like Global Thermonuclear War ("Would. You. Like. To. Play. A. Gane?"). Climate Change? We weren't talking about that. Nope, today is very stressful for the young. They have the never-ending specter of post 9/11 nationalism and xenophobia (Brexit and Trump have long roots), and Climate Change to worry about, and the brand new joys of Covid. Covid is a whole different level than AIDS or SARS or Ebola. Still. Gotta have hope for the kids and hope they don't repeat the mistakes of the older.

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