If you follow me on social media then you probably already know my main current event:
Retelling The Bible as Epic Poetry
I am participating in “Camp NaNoWriMo” (short for National Novel Writing Month) this month for July. I have set myself an ambitious goal of 50,000 words by the end of the month. To make my job that much more complicated, I decided at the last minute to write the whole thing as an epic poem. Oh, and my subject matter is a retelling of The Bible. Yes, that Bible.
This will be the fifth book I have written in my mythology reimagining and retellings series (although after I edit and hopefully eventually publish them it will probably be the third one in the sequence). I have superimposed a sort of alternate reality superstory on top of the familiar myths to make them all fit together in some semblance of a quasi-coherent story. It’s a little complicated but, anyways, I am referencing the Bible a lot while I write, as well as John Milton’s Paradise Lost; and I have been listening to Dante’s Divine Comedy trilogy as audiobooks. Another influential source is William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which I highly recommend to even the most casual philosopher.
Other Writing Projects
So, but in order to embark on this project I had to put some others on hold.
Norse Mythology
I called the first draft of my Norse mythology reimagining project “good enough for now” on June 22 at a word count of 88,630 words: a little later but also a little longer than I had anticipated. It is still badly in need of major editing; but my plan seems to be to draft the entire series and then edit afterwards to eliminate continuity errors, or at least that’s what I tell myself.
Science Fiction
I am hopefully nearing completion of my science fiction novella based on a short story I wrote more than 20 years ago. I have rewritten large sections, including the ending and a pivotal scene in the middle, and added new action and character development and “world building.” It remains very silly in a Douglas Adams sort of way. I intend to self-publish it in the vague future.
Poetry
I am still writing daily poems, separate from my Biblical epic. I had thought July would focus largely on American history but instead I seem to be mostly writing about Ovid, the famous exile poet. I doubt there’s much commercial market for poetry-as-book-report, but I am no Robert Frost, and there’s no point pretending that I might suddenly become someone else, lol. I have been reading Frost, too, lately, and I love his work; but temperamentally and stylistically, I personally have more in common with Ovid and, let’s face it, Catullus. Not in terms of epigrammatic technique specifically but in terms of raw pathos more generally.
Anyhoo, if you’re a writer, keep on writing, and if you’re not, keep on doing what you do!
