This week kept my focus bouncing in multiple directions, but the goal was always to get certain things done to free up larger blocks of time to work. For as the old adage goes: “the dog who chases two rabbits catches neither.”
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First things first, the Adventure Hook month-long hiatus is over and Episode 36 is now live on iTunes. This hook was originally provided by our good friend Hjalmar Nordén of Red Moon Roleplaying, and we used it to compare Lovecraftian horror with the realities of climate change, which then became the springboard to discuss the concepts of Solarpunk (as well as the magickal Holy Hexagram).
It was a pretty decent episode and I look forward to doing some more, even if it’s looking like we may have to scale back to releasing only one episode a month for a while…
Additionally, the next Blackspire teaser is also live, and does truly tease some tasty tidbits of tabletop tribulation…
Also… one more bit of good news is Aaron has finished up his first three-issue run on Hellblazer and so before receiving the script for #4 he had some time, so we finally recorded the Adventure Hook episode for the week of Christmas.
I know, I know… cutting it close right? Aaron actually agreed to do the edits on that one which are already up on Patreon. I knew I needed to give my attention to other things in the coming week, but I did at least mock up the promo art for the episode…
Seems fairy simple and to the point, but hopefully mysterious and intriguing enough to draw new potential listeners in. And it was definitely fun to fully develop one of Jenny’s ideas as our hook:
A seamstress once sewed with such passion that her enchanted works became heirlooms that passed down their blessings (or curses) to the people who inherit them. Many covet them.
Jenny Randle
We took this concept and ended up using the idea of an enchanted Advent Calendar to tie it into the idea of making it a holiday themed story you could run as an RPG. We ended up marrying all our ideas, plus a number of choice bits of fairy lore I’d come across recently in my research for the next writing gig I’m working on (more on that later) but it seems we’ll be going back to Fairyland once more, as the #newadventurehook we rolled for Episode 38 was:
The strange folk who live in a mirror realm under the pond have been trying to coax surface-dwellers to visit. Every visitor has returned so far, but some return changed.
Varnished Truths @varnished_truth
Seems perhaps the fair folk may want quite a few more of their stories told… I’d best proceed with respectful caution…
And to that end, all this week I’ve been doing research into fairy lore and absorbing everything I can through the prisms of Literature, Folklore, and Magick. From reviewing sources like Alice in Wonderland and A Midsummer Night’s Dream to researching historical anecdotes and even the views of Wiccan practitioners who still work with spirits we’d call faeries…
To that end in particular I found the YouTube channel of author and lecturer Morgan Daimler who is a great source on this topic, and in particular I appreciate the historical perspective she takes when approaching these esoteric ideas in a living/modern sense…
I’ve since managed to absorb the lion’s share of her video material and I think I’m finally getting to the point where I’ve started to gain a similar sort of perspective that I had when working on my Yule Lads project, and I hope to take into my next one. If you look back to my last post, you can probably infer from those pitches which story was green-lit, though at this point I’m pretty sure I’m going to re-title the story “A Faerie Tale Wedding”.
At the risk of spoiling anything, I’m mostly interested in myths that include details of mortal dalliances in Fairyland, and specifically the recurring folktale of the Taken Bride. I hope to adapt a number of these concepts into my little sequential art short story script, and staying true to the more “un-corrupted” pre-Victorian view of the fair folk, while still somehow including that contrasting perspective through a protagonist of that period.
I want to write something challenging and perhaps a little provocative (it’s the right sort of publication for that sort of thing) while still staying as true as I can to the ancestral spirit of the fairy lore that does still continue on in living traditions. I want it to sound like it could be yet another piece of folklore, but also make it about Love as well as including an empowered female protagonist who will be depicted in a more nuanced (read: imperfect) way that hopefully won’t seem like some pandering exercise of “grrrl power” writing. There should be a sliver of tragedy running through the heart of this hero’s journey, that I hope to punctuate quite devastatingly by the end of the short tale.
I’ve probably overthought it all too much already, but with the artist they’re pairing my story too, I can also write very heavily towards striking visual storytelling queues as well… which honestly is the whole point of the graphic novel art form in the first place.
But with that now demanding my full attention, but the pending holiday week demanding a fair portion of it (to say nothing of the fact Jenny and I will be traveling with family for it), this will end up being my last real blog entry for the year.
2019 has been a ride, and as we come up to the end of the year…
Foresight is 2020.
There… am I the first to say that, or did some cheesy news anchorman somewhere beat me to it? I wouldn’t be surprised…
So anyways… Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Glenðig Jól, et al. to all!
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Wednesday 12/18/19-
Sun: Sagittarius–
Moon: Virgo (50% Waning)
If you’d like to start from the “beginning” of all this… you can read from my first blog post.
For my disclosure on this or any of my posts or pages… please visit my Disclosure page.
