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).