Today marks the last full moon of the decade, and as that ten-year comes to a close, while on the one hand it feels as if it’s just flown by… on retrospect a whole lot has happened in the past few years…
For my disclosure on this or any of my posts or pages… please visit my Disclosure page.
It’s now been over seven years since I began to take my study of the occult “seriously” (and over four since starting this blog) and while the thought of recapping highlights from the past year (let alone the last decade) seems absolutely laborious to me, at least I can say that I feel like I’ve pretty successfully quit tobacco, and at this point even the thought of smoking a cigarette makes me feel a little queasy…
Go magick!
So with the full moon at its zenith at 12:12 (despite it being Void of Course most of the day) today I gave our monthly Abundance ritual my earnest attention, with maybe a slightly above average amount of energy work done previous and post operation…
The past year also marked the doubling of my YouTube Channel subscribers to the coveted 1000 mark (and still growing) bringing it into the real of actual monetization… which even though the past few weeks worth have only accrued a handful of extra dollars for me… emphasis is on “extra” though…
This week also marks us trying to get things back on track with Adventure Hook. Aaron can start recording episodes next week, which gives me almost zero turnaround time to edit a yet-to-be-recorded Episode 37 (our Holiday show) and have it ready for iTunes in time for the week of Christmas. It’s doable, and if we’ve been Nice, we may even have another special guest that episode to boot.
And so, we’re finally releasing the last finished episode (Episode 36: The Melting) on Patreon this week and iTunes Monday, and I tweaked the promo to coincide. Hopefully we can get back into the swing of things soon.
On the Blackspire front, this week marked the release of two more Patreon episodes, Limping Home Victorious for the lower tier listener and Salutations at the Cult of the Machine God for the higher tier, each with their over levels of secrets revealed. This week also had another new Season 2 teaser to whet one’s whistle for “news” from the continuing campaign… while still tempting the listener to want to learn more…
This week we had our first gathering in a while of (most of) the White Hydra Mercenary crew, and I ran the game for a few hours worth of what was basically an elaborate juggling session to get (and then keep) their party together so I could finally set the stage for the follow up adventure for next time… the outcome of that will then influence the Solina side session to come afterwards. Should be fun when we get there.
We’ve already got that next game scheduled for January, and while I’ve already done a bunch of prep work on my “random city street generator” dice matrix thingy, I’ve still got plenty more preparations to make before I’m truly ready to run that scenario (and make it exciting).
And this week we also got the chance to play out another side session with Jenny and Jen (as their characters Claerydia and Akihoshi) as we continued to flesh out their relationship with one another, as well as start to unravel the wider mystery I’ve laid down to start to weave the wider story together. We made some progress, but hit a point that Jenny insisted needed to be resolved in a private side session, so we’ll be sure to play (and record) all that out and more before we have another episode of “Fox & Serpent” (haha)…
I’d also been putting my thinking cap on in regards to my thinking about various forms of “currency” in the Realm of Faerie as it may become quite important at certain points in the foreseeable future of that story. I’ve just been jotting notes in my journal to try to get my head around the wider conceptual patterns within this type of folklore (I’m getting there at any rate) but as luck would have it, I may end up using them on other projects than just gaming…
For, as it turns out, while (through no fault of mine) unfortunately it would seem my Yule Lads story won’t actually be appearing in the publication I’d first been promised it’d been green-lit for, I’ve been told that all the periodical’s editors did want my work included in their (very) pending “Fantasy” edition, and asked me to pitch them a few story ideas that centered around the concepts of none other than… (you guessed it)… Fairies and Folkore (as their anthology was short on that particular flavor of fantasy).
That edition is fast approaching, and so time being of the essence I was quite proud of myself that in the span of about an hour I managed to conceptualize (as well as write up) three different, but decently solid story ideas for the editors to discuss in that day’s meeting:
Getting to the Church on Time: the morning of her church wedding a beautiful young bride finds herself lured by a devilishly jealous fairy into the realm of the fey. Desperate to return to the human realm, our protagonist finds herself violating one fairy taboo after another, and suffering the eerie consequences that accompany breaking fey laws… the worst (for her) will be eating food from the other world. After many trials, tribulations, and soul-wrenching sacrifices demanded by her “fairy suitor” finally the bride is able to win her return to the mortal realm… only to discover (because she ate something in the fairy realm) over 100 years have passed and the church has long since fallen into ruin…
Fey Market: while visiting a curious antique store (and despite the shopkeeper’s warning to the contrary) a pair of young siblings wander away from their parents and somehow find themselves in the mysteriously twisting (and impossibly long) isles at the “back” of the shop which sport all manner of fantastical items. Among them is discovered a strange old lantern and imprisoned within is some manner of glowing winged fairy girl… whom the children promptly free and then wind up chasing the fleeing figure even deeper into the shop until finally stumbling out onto the streets of some kind of strange fairy marketplace town. The colorful barkers, the allure of magical trinkets, and the promises of wishes and dreams made manifest prove to be too much of a temptation for the children to resist… though sadly this market doesn’t trade in typical currency… instead they deal in payments like “the last year of your life”, “your first happy memory”, or just “oaths of service”… by the time the children are finally reunited with their worried parents they should appear somehow subtly, but eerily changed… though also perhaps deliriously happy (in an unsettling kind of way) as they covetously clasp their new valuable trinkets. The parents certainly protest the purchase of such weird artifacts, but with a twinkle in his eye the shopkeeper insists that the children have “already paid for them”…
Faerie-well Party: Somewhere/when in Victorian England, various different people (who all secretly share some sort of fey ancestry) have each received a mysterious invitation to a fancy masquerade party at an ancient (and seemingly abandoned) castle. Further exploration of the ruins reveals a doorway to the fantastical fey version of this same structure, where our guests discover a raucous party hosted by none other than Queen Titania and Prince Oberon themselves. They claim the prophesied “Age of Iron” has finally come, and the Seelie Court has decided they will be cutting their connection with the mortal realm entirely (including the doorway our guests just passed through). Our guests each learn of their unique ties to the Realm of Faerie, and are given until sunrise to decide which side of that door they each want to be on when it finally closes forever. Who chooses what and why is the real crux of the story (especially if it ends up dividing a family).
I certainly won’t tell you which pitch they wound up picking (or the artist they’d like to pair the project on) but the clock is now ticking to turn one of these three ideas into the final script that the comic book artist will work from to create the eight page story I now get to write and see someone else bring it alive in one of my favorite magazines of all time… I know that sounds vague, but until I see it in print with my own two eyes, it just seems totally premature to mention artists or which periodical will actually be publishing my story… just know the adolescent boy in me is giddy at the prospect of being included in it.
Chances are I’ll be talking about it here in detail in the next couple of months, but first things first, I have to actually write the thing… not that the wheels are already turning…
And in another bit of good news that has nothing to do with me, Jenny’s new Instagram site continues to attract interest as she shares more and more of her finished work on her profile. For instance, this cross-stitch quote by the late, great Kurt Vonnegut was picked up and shared by none other than the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library.
This was a huge deal for Jenny, as he’s definitely one of her all time favorite authors (and I’m no small fan of myself)…
And so the increased interest she’s seen thanks to the museum’s attention means she’s already gotten more traction on her one post than probably any bit of social media I’ve done for any of my projects… ever…
Leave it to Jenny to be such a natural at something I have always had such a struggle with. Just wait until she gets going…
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Thursday 12/12/19-
Sun: Sagittarius–
Moon: Cancer (Full)
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.
