My projects just explode on me, all the freaking time

And by "explode" I mean that they get bigger, and bigger, and bigger...

So I've got this little project on the side, right?

I think "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if there were a PDF that gave writers tools and building blocks to create religions and mythological cycles out of? It could be fifty pages long. Maybe even as long as sixty pages!"

It would do things like tell you that religions with multiple death deities tend to arrange them into a bureaucracy, and when you have a set of divine twins one of them is exceptional in a way that the other is not (is magical, is the progenitor of the race, etc).

Now the only thing that's going to keep it from qualifying as a small textbook on comparative mythology is the lack of footnotes, and it'll also be able to serve as a passable introduction to Jungian psychology and certain varieties of anthropology and archaeology. I have 500 pages of notes to collate and then there's going to be the follow-up research, the collation that will be necessary after that, and then final polishing.

I plan to have this done by the end of January. Here's hoping I can manage it.

It's going to have appendices. Appendices. One of them is going to be so big that I'm going to spin it into its own (hopefully smaller) book.

Here are a couple of sample entries as they stand right now.

Occulting demons are responsible for eclipses, generally by devouring the celestial body in question. This is only temporary, unless it causes the end of the world. There are often two of them, each responsible for either solar or lunar eclipses. Examples include Apep (Egyptian) and Rahu and Ketu (Hindu). Skoll and Hati (Norse) are foretold to be examples when they eat the sun and the moon at Ragnarok. See MISSING SUN.

White horses are significant in mythology. They may be associated with solar chariots or heroes (especially end of time saviors) and/or be related to fertility (regardless of sex). Both white and grey horses may qualify as “white horses” in this context. They often have multiple heads or limbs. They may have bear warning of danger or tragedy. As the hero’s steed it has a ceremonial status and represents triumph over negative forces. It is often born from the sea or other liquid (such as blood or milk), from a lightning bolt, or in some other fantastic manner.

Patreon

Patreon is now one of my most favorite websites.

And I didn't even know about it half an hour ago (turns out that randomly surfing the internet can lead to Good Things).

In summary Patreon is a place where creators can say "Hello! This is what I'm making! Do you like it?"

And people can say in response, "Not on your life!" Or, better yet, "Yes!"

And then small donations (paid regularly, based on what we could call "triggers," like "every month" or "every two songs") can be made to support said creator. Donations as small as a dollar. Creators can offer specific content or services to individuals who give specified amounts every time that a trigger is hit or to the fanbase as a whole when the total amount donations reaches a certain level.

Shortly before I went to Utah I had been converted to the idea of 1,000 True Fans, which points out that that if you have only thousand people who can be counted on to spend $100 on you every year then that translates into $100,000 for you. Every year.

The goal isn't getting millions of readers. It is, in my situation, finding one thousand people who are each willing to buy ten $10 books. I figured that I would jury-rig Kickstarter in order to get this going and put up stories at projects to be funded like Greg Stolze does.

Patreon streamlines the process that I was going to try to build. Even better, it makes any income that I have more consistent. I don't have to worry about taking a $10,000 hit if one of my ten books doesn't fly because it's too something or another.

Even better, I can set my stories in the context of all of my creative work. This blog, the Idea Bank, any number of more gonzo ideas that are rattling in my head, and on and on forever. I look at what I have planned, and I can see forever.

And now that I've found Patreon, I can see how it's all going to come together.

Lovecraft and the Triumph Over Nothing

What Lovecraft teaches us, oddly enough, is that the universe is okay. Things are gonna be alright, if you take the broader view that embraces not only humankind but all mindkind. The Elder Things may have looked utterly monstrous but we are assured by the narrator of At the Mountains of Madness that "whatever they were, they were men." Nathaniel Peaslee's Yithian impersonator in The Shadow Out of Time did an alright job of insinuating itself into human society, encountering only the difficulties that any human time traveler would encounter in going to a completely different era, and Peaselee himself found it not impossible to similarly understand the Yithians (not to mention all the time-displaced representatives of other species that were there with him).

Individual civilizations rise and fall as species do, but we rejoice in the overall triumphs of humanity. In the same way we are privileged to be a chapter in that story which is the flourishing of all mindkind, each segment of it given its own era. Before us were the Elder Things, Yithians, mi-go, "arachnid denizens," serpent-people of Valusia, flying polyps, and "black-snouted, winged creatures," among others. Some still survive into our day, and after us are the coleopterans, and then even later other races that will burrow close to the core as temperatures become abominably low. The myths of K'n-yan say that humans came from some other world but even if this is untrue (or if we are the only extant branch of humanity) we are guaranteed to survive into the year AD 16,000, if not beyond. And surely some might reach past even that far-off era, preserved in brain cylinders as fellowservants with the mi-go, whose own civilization is millions of years old in that year and extends into other dimensions but who were, even in their own eldritch age, preceded by yet other civilizations. 

And when or if all human life should be made extinct, there is still no cause to despair, for we are told in The Shadow Out of Time that we will not be forgotten. Our history and cultures, our most bitter failures and most glorious accomplishments, all that we ever loved, feared, and hoped for- every inch of the human experience- will survive eternally among the Great Race of Yith, whose time travel capabilities give their own civilization immortality, as every disaster is foreseen and escaped. Moreover, the Great Race do not only record but take the best of what humanity and ever other species has to offer and make it their own. What was most noble about us will surely not perish but will become the treasured inheritance of a blazing-bright culture whose domain extends through all eternity. 

Life arises everywhere. On Mercury, on Earth, on Neptune, on Pluto, and on many other planets, from their surfaces to their fiery cores, and the Great Race of Yith knows and loves it all. What Lovecraft tells us is that, despite Cthulhu, despite Azathoth and other horrors, life wins. Mind wins. 

Far from telling us that there is no hope, Lovecraft tells us to laugh in the dark and know that dawn is always right around the corner (and for the children of Yith, dawn is eternal, for what threat can night hold to those that have mastered time and skip from daylight to daylight like stones on the surface of a lake?). 

Snakes, Oh My!

Lately I've been working on writing stories, of course, but other things that I've been working on are these two blogs, sorting years of bookmarks and pictures, collecting submissions information for publishing companies and magazines, and writing the last few articles that will run on a feature at RPG.net called The Culture Column. The column provides cultures that creators, including gamers, can drop into their worlds as-is or modify to suit their purposes.

Just before I started to write this blog post I was working on the initial "research and brainstorming" step, which I'd normally just call "research" except that, when it's going how it should, the information that I'm collecting starts putting itself together in new and fascinating patterns until these patterns are so large that they look at me and ask "Can you look something up for me?" Instead of growing the patterns like corn they suddenly develop teeth, uproot themselves, and go on the hunt for new shiny things to incorporate into their structures.

The latest incident of this happening started while I was on my mission, when I started drafting a pre-outline for a story tentatively titled Sands Over the City, a Lovecraftian noir set during the time of most ancient Mesopotamia. I began with the ideas that Lovecraft and a few others presented regarding the prehuman Serpent People and began to wrack my brain for additional links until their scaly digits were everywhere.*

Then, a week ago, I started working on a Genre Splash that interpreted the stories of the Brothers Grimm through a Lovecraftian lens. I looked at the story Godfather Death and, like a good little pareidoliac, I immediately saw it as a history of man's relationship with the Serpent People and the explanation for why they mentored humankind only to turn hostile in later generations.

Anyway, I was in the "research and brainstorming" step for the Culture Column, and one of the cultures that I was working on just so happened to be the fabled city Irem of the Pillars. With access to more information I'm able to spread my sights further. Lo and behold, what do I discover? As I've found so many times before, everything seems to click just like a shoggoth's mandibles when you turn it upside down and view it through glasses of an eldritch shade.

Between Sands Over the City, Godfather Death, and Irem of the Pillars, I am most eager to reveal to you what I've been putting together. And show you, in a handful of dust, the rise of mankind and the fall of its first great civilization.

*My work on Lovecraftian stories, and my lack of regular and full access to anything but scriptures during my missiono, has certainly contributed to the religious, Christian, and LDS focus that I have on the Mythos (not how these things are right despite the Mythos or how they modify the Mythos in a Derlethian fashion, but how they are modified and interpreted by the Mythos).

Home is

I don't remember ever having trouble moving to new places, permanently or temporarily. For as long as I can remember having an opinion on the matter, home was the place where you were resting your head. And a couch was as good as a bed was as good as the bench of a car.

Moved around a little bit, and saw some other places a little bit more. Spent the past two years moving from place to place every time that I was transferred. And it was just moving to a new place. Having a new place to set my head for a little while, up until the next time that I would have to move.

To be honest, I had grown pretty well adjusted to this mindset. So it's kind of disorienting- not unpleasant, just disorienting- to lose it. Or at least lose part of it. I should like to think that I will still move from place to place as easily as I did before but there is no battling the idea that as soon as I arrived at the house which my family moved to while I was on my mission, as soon as I arrived it felt very peculiar.

So this is what people must mean when they say that a certain place, and no other, feels like home.

It is probably no coincidence that this house is reminiscent of the one which my mother's parents have lived in for my whole life. Everyone else has moved at least once, even my father's parents, but not them. So it should come as no surprise that this familiarity and sense of stability- the one thing that hasn't changed, in a life full of shifting scenes- should combine, with the intellectual knowledge that this is where my immediate family is living, into the feeling that this is home.

All things holy

See also: Shakespeare's Beam

I was in the car the other day watching buildings pass by, when it struck me, as it had many times before, that the act of creation is something holy. Something that partakes of the divine nature and mimics, in its own small way, the myriad acts of creation performed by God.

Immediately after this realization, however, there came to me the thought of my time working at McDonald's and Jack in the Box. Making many hundreds of cheap hamburger patties of the lowest quality that the customer would tolerate was surely not a sacred act.

When I see a contradiction like this there a few possibilities. The first is that I don't have enough information at hand and that there isn't a contradiction at all. In this conflict there didn't seem to be that situation. Besides that, though, it could be that the original premise was wrong. Or, finally, that the premise is so right that it forces me to reconsider other ideas that I held.

It was the third possibility that was proven in this situation, immediately after I relinquished my hold on the original premise. Creative acts were something holy, and making cheap hamburger patties was a creative act. And any paradox that I saw here, I realized, was purely my own invention.

Perhaps it seems frivolous. Perhaps it often is. But those hamburgers fed people. They relieved hunger. They sated appetites. For some who couldn't get anything more expensive, those hamburgers were as good as ambrosia.

It's such a little thing, but it still did something. Maybe it wasn't as much of a waste of my time as I first thought.