Expose'

I finally completed the 1st draft of my new story due on the 18th. It is 25 pages long exactly. As I wrote it I was thinking, "Wow this is fun" and then I got to page 21 and I thought, "This sucks. No body will like this. I am wasting my time and energy. I am so stupid." and then after I finished it I was like, "Hey this is pretty cool." I think those worthless feelings are normal and should be embraced because it means I am putting myself on the line, writing honestly. If I never get that feeling I think it means I am lying to myself.

I like honest writing even if its weird or offensive or "meaningless".

One of friends wrote this really easy-reading story about a librarian (that turned out to be her in actuality) about a trite comment a lady made to her that she thought was a little thing that bothered her for weeks until the lady came back a month later and apologized. It was so honest and fun. I loved it. (I think I read it when I was on pg 21 of writing my own story)

but anyway my story: I did a month of hardcore research to get as much info as I could to make this story...well not "true" per se but...accurate! Accurate is a much better word. Anyway, I had an idea that started it all from a logical process of inductive reasoning: Either something is true or it is false, if you have many things explaining something there is a greater chance for them all being true or all being false rather than one of them being true, proving the other wrong. So the thought went like this: What if all the myths and religions across history (Norse, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Korean, Egyptian, Middle East, Russian, British, Aztec, et al.) were real, or the opposite of what I believe. Just to try that on for a moment. What if...

What if it was ALL real? What would that mean? What if all the Gods and Goddesses shared the planet? How would that work on a pantheistic scale?

There is this notion people have had since forever: The more believers a God has the more strength he has. Many religions have laws that talk of converting people and not worshiping other gods and so on in an attempt to gather more worshipers. If I had followed this notion the Muslim Pantheon would be the top dog because Islam has the most worshipers unless you roll Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican all together. In that case it has almost twice the number of adherents (2,116,909,552 vs. 1,282,780,149). But if I did that I would have to break all the other religions down into their little groups and the ones I am most interested in (Mythology: Norse, Egyptian, Slavic, Japanese) would be very insignificant because very few people still believe those old ways.

So I came up with my own idea: What if the power of a God would be tied to it's physical link in this world, based on time? Like Stonehenge, the Pyramids in Egypt, the Pyramids in Mexico/central america/ south america etc.? Those places were built by people for religious reasons often for the Gods. In this case the Egyptians would be strongest because they have the grandest, oldest physical "tie-in" to this world. But this would mean that the Christian religion would be rather insignificant because they have no Pyramids, no Stonehenge but fancy cathedrals built less than a thousand years ago (in some cases 1/4 of the age of Stonehenge). I wasn't happy with this notion so I tried one more and it was the hardest.

The power of myth. Each myth explains the world and the power of the Gods. In Ancient Greek Mythology Zeus hurls thundrbolts as his main method of attack, on top of his incredible strength (he can lift mountains and hurl them at his enemies). But Thor has armor and a sword and makes ligtningbolts ON ACCIDENT while he works his forge. He is the greatest warrior and his armor makes him impervious to lightning bolts. Thor trumps Zeus in this example and could stomp many other gods like the christian one (who at times is rather peacful, but can be wrathful and sends plagues and floods etc.). I had to do a lot of reaseach with this idea to find who was the top dog so to speak. In so doing I found the Villain of the universe: Typhon/Seth (god of chaos and dischord) who is featured in many religious traditions as a shapshifting Draconic badass that tries to kill the king of gods and take his throne (Egyptian, Greek, Norse, Asian). So in this process I learned that the egyptian god of Death Ap-uat has arrows "more powerful than the gods" which the Greek Goddess Artemis (bow and arrows) is mentioned as highly accurate with her bowshots but she does not have arrows more powerful than the gods, so if these two fought Ap-uat would surely win with his arrows of god slaying, a dangerous dude indeed. But some of the claims are incredibly strange and weird and seperated gods into categories of "creation" and "patrons of" so the christian god is a creator, more like a force that can't be directly asaulted, as is Ra and many others. I didn't want to limit myself so I found this idea (complex and time consuming) missing something.

So what I did was take all those ideas and meld them together to get my story, which seems the only way to do it. So the Christians dominate the world, but many pantheons still hold power because of their physical ties (stonehenge, Pyramids, etc.). And the mythic strength allows for a hierarcy of strength/power so to speak. So when the Egyptian Goddess Ammut (devine retribution) meets Archangel Michael, He doesn't attack it because she is a goddess and he is a powerful messenger/general.

I think accuracy is important, so I did tons of research to make sure my descriptions/representations were accurate and true, and that the character is captured. The Archangels were the hardest because they are described as having no emotion, because humans have emotion and that is why they are weaker. So there were times when a really angry Archangel Michael would have been really cool, but he would never show emotion, not for real anyway, and that is a cornerstone of that mythology, angels without emotion, so it was hard. Also the research I did countered my preconcieved notions about the gods which was good but required my original story to be altered drastically, thus Ap-uat was added because Anpu was like a patron saint of the lost (souls, orphans etc) and described as both cold and generous. I had a lot of fun and I sent it out to my Cadre for thoughts and opinions on my 1st draft. I get those back soon. I hope they like it. And I wonder what the Advanced Fiction Workshop will think about it... I'll tell you how that goes.