I started my “2025 Commitment” just last Sunday, and today I completed the rough draft of my first short story for the year, “Christmas in Telos”. Telos, of course, being one of the mystical communities existing beneath Mount Shasta, along with Lemuria. Or maybe they’re the same. Or maybe Lemuria is another name for Atlantis, the Atlanteans having fled that fabled city-state when it sank in the sea way back when to live under Mount Shasta. Or something. To be honest, these New Age myths never made much sense to me, and since I know the legend of Atlantis was first invented by the philosopher Plato (or Socrates — no one really knows, since Socrates never wrote down anything and Plato never spoke anything) to demonstrate the problem of hubris before the gods, I can’t really take these modern-day legends that seriously.

Still, it’s not the first time I’ve played with New Age mythologies in my writing. In my unpublished novel Code Monkey! A Love Story with Occasional Monsters, I had a couple of Bigfoot creatures named Ingrid and Rupert (yes, after our cats), for example, and I’m pretty sure I’ve used Atlantis before. And just about every one of Lovecraft’s creations appeared in another of my unpublished novels, The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster. The point is, it’s fun to play with these ideas and notions. They’re fluid, like vampires, and every writer is free to re-invent them and use them to their own purposes. This is why I never begrudged Stephanie Meyers and her “sparkling vampires”. Vampires are so fluid in their mythology that they can sparkle if Meyers wants them to.

But also so far this year — just the other day, in fact — I had surgery to repair an umbilical hernia. Hernias hurt, especially if you leave them unfixed for years and years like I did. Post-surgery isn’t as painful as I was expecting but it’s amazing how many activities I had taken for granted — coughing, for example — use core muscles and are therefore painful post-hernia-surgery. It’ll get better in a couple of weeks, so it’s not as bad as it could have been.

I also had a birthday recently: number 57. Funny, I don’t feel old. I guess I must feel middle-aged at this point, though. I do feel like I ought to Get My Shit Together at this point, though, and start working on those novels and short stories in earnest. So here I am. For gifts, I got plenty of books (yay books!), as well as a 3D model which I started building today, but which I will probably not finish today since hernia recovery, while not as bad as other surgical recoveries, still makes one sleepy. I took several naps.

Writing-wise, tomorrow I draw another prompt from The Story Engine and begin a new story. Tonight, I’m working on Padma, a novel of life, love, and the end of the cosmos. It involves Hindu mythology (hence the image of the Brahma above this entry), cosmology, and quantum eschatology. I wrote the first draft of this novel for National Novel Writing Month (of blessed memory) back in 2017, and it’s now time to give it a heavy revision and start aiming toward publication.

That’s all I got for this evening.

(Quantum eschatology… Can’t believe I really wrote that phrase. I’m keeping it, though. It’s cool.)