Ziklag 3.8

Get Behind Me

What if it’s not the End of it All yet, but only the end of us? What would be the best thing to do with your time then? That’s why I’m building the Hebron Collegium. Join me! A rising tide lifts all ships.

Hebron is a Men’s Spiritual Retreat Center where you or your men’s group can gather to seek solace in the Word of God. In a home built for no phones, for brotherhood, and for devotion to Jesus in Psalms, Proverbs and Bible reading, no one leaves unchanged. Come for a week or come for a weekend. The kitchen co-op whole foods eatery is $10/day. All other cost are covered by generous donations to the cause: raising up godly Christian men of all ages through trust in the name of Jesus Christ and devotion to the power of his Word.

But Don’t Click that Button Yet!

If you did, you know that the site is not working now. Why? Better minds that mine have been on it for over a day. God be praised for you who help lift up my arms! That said, I’m not going to hold this Zixlag all weekend waiting for the gremlins to get exorcised from the web. (If you don’t know, for several weeks the new site could be seen from anywhere in the world, except for northern Illinois, the precise place I most wanted to use it at the time.) As a result, promotion of Hebron remains on a cycle of waiting for the right open doors at the right hand. That said, you can hear Meridth and I discuss the vaunted and secretively clandestinely cooler than cool Listening Room on last nights STWN.

SOS Discipline - Daily Proverb and Red Letter Reader

Lawless men defend lawlessness. Truth seekers overcome. cf Pr. 28:4

Hygiene is humility. cf Mt 6:17

Without the power to elude, the small is but prey for the large. cf Sun Tzu 3.17

From Today’s Stack

Worldbuilding can be a real waste of time. Or, it can be a lot of fun that never has anything to do with any book you ever right. But the fun counts as much as minecraft ever does, so don’t feel bad for drawing maps that never become part of the picture everyone else sees. Writing is not about the final book. It is not about the journey of the character. It is about your journey through this real life in which your confession will be a symbol of your times. Let it be and enjoy what bit of it you get to see today. Then don’t sweat it if it never makes it further than a story you tell your kids at dinner time.

From today’s stack I am doing some worldbuilding as I endeavor to connect all my novels into a singular world along the path of writing them.

Any world that holds together in a story needs Laws. You, the author, must understand the world’s nature. Otherwise, the story may not hold together. Forget your readers! You won’t be satisfied with a hole in your story big enough to port a goblin through.

If you are going to write about the real world, then it can’t have goblins in it.

Or can it?

That’s the question I’ve been mulling over. There are more than a few answers, which leads me to the starting point I’ve dug up and been polishing off today.

What follows is not complete, much less should it be taken as my final theological position on the natural sciences. But it is my effort to harmonize what I know, what I think we know, and what would be cool if we did know, for the sake of some future sci-fi-dystopic-fantasy-epic wins that takes place in the real world before the Return of Christ.

One of my primary goals is to recover our Christian imagination. I want us to remember that we are greater than our current stories say. And, I actually do want to solve quantum physics by writing fiction that gets into the right hands and allows us to change the world for the better again.

If the following doesn’t make any sense to you, then you probably don’t read sci-fi or fantasy. If it does not make total sense to you, then that means I’ve probably got a good hook. If you know that I’m wrong, you will peak my curiosity, so leave a comment. :D

One last note on writing: worldbuilding is the stuff you don’t ever really plan to publish. It’s the writing about the world that will bore your readers to tears, but which your fans will buy up with pretty concept art long after your dead. So, again, it’s a part of the craft not worth losing heart over. It’s for fun of itself, but to build consistency into your story or stories, so that stay the reliable over their course.

This is what I’m work on working with as my starting point for Natural Law, written to be read aloud as notes from a wizened sage/professor (most definitely in a boring classroom) teaching his students in a very humdrum and hohum voice:

First, there is the Aetherverse, that which the ancients called “the waters.”

Second, there is the currency of Light Conduction, which at times is confused with the linear theories of the “Time Line.”

Third, the Firmamentals, who must be believed on and in, but neither trusted nor worshiped. Their emanations are ever to be seen, and, as we have come to find in the age of Visionaries, at last, harnessed. The professor did get excited, and his eyes flared with lust for power. But then he remembered how old and tired he was, and went on.

Fourth, the Quantum Orbs, which were believed to be three, yet were treated according to the the fabric of two, and thus for so long bent inward our quest for a more simple solution to meaning. He took a deep breath after the word meaning, as if to say more, but then did not.

Fifth, the Elementals, or those reliable periodic experientials of material compounding that are both the simplest and the most complex layer of reality to study and comprehend. You know them well by now.

Sixth, the Celestials, the Orbs above, now and again worshiped against there nature, yet so filled with the breath of light and its zealous spirit as to be unavoidably necessary to all life and season as we know it, hence our new Imperial Calandar is the hallmark of our newly founded golden age. For, as is widely recognized, you may study the sky and misinterpret the times, but if you do not study the sky you shall most surely go awry in your calculus. He could be heard tut-tutting under his breath.

Seventh, the Terramentals, those Animalia and Floria which exhibit the gaseous reliance that all true scientists now refer to as “Bios,” or what the ancients called the Ruach, or the “breath of life.”

Eighth, and finally, astride the pinnacle of Terramentality, exhibiting Bios, yet also something more, a Psyche, not unlike a Firmamental in heart, as if a child of heaven, but clearly Animalia in corpus, there walks the mystery that is Man, that is, you, the particular one who think so highly of yourself as to suppose that you can both study and and inhabit all these powers around you as if you had any control over them at all.

👉Support Direct on Subscribestar. https://www.subscribestar.com/revfisk

There is a beautiful tree below this line