To Write is To Live

Credit goes to @philipp_dice for this lovely image

Hey y’all. I’m past the outline stage fully now! The drafts can resume again! I can’t explain how excited I am. It feels so good to be properly writing again (and with a framework too).

I mentioned a while back how I was re-approaching the current story, and that’s what I’ve been doing. I cut down every single idea, stripped everything down to what it needed to be, and shredded (metaphorically) multiple books-worth in drafts to revive my idea as a cohesive, focused one. :Buckle in! This is a long one.

I started with the basic ideas I was handling:

• The idea of fighting against a seemingly unstoppable force

• The idea that that force is massive, all-encompassing, and choking in it’s reach

• The idea that this force manifests via a religious group that uses and abuses that power for their own gains

• And the idea that this force is intrinsically, inexorably linked to the protagonists of the story

From there I figured out the basics for the setting:

• The setting would be an alternate-history earth, a place where a new religion took root in eastern europe - based on the beliefs and practices of herb-brides and witches, practiced by a town far removed from the rest of the world

• This religion would then be co-opted by the nearby countries, changing its principles and adjusting its beliefs to be suited for their “more refined” world (despite the fact that the people of the steppe were by no means bad or ill-minded)

• This religion, now known as Spirality or The Spiral, would bloom, growing in size and power until it branched across most of northern europe

• The world in the modern day (the current millennium) is now dominated by the modern Spiral belief

After that I mapped out the beliefs of this Spirality and it’s offshoots:

• There was a focus on three, a “trinity” rooted in the beliefs of the steppelands and the people of the small town that solidified this religion

• This religion was monotheistic, a matriarchal system focusing on a single holy “Mother figure” Goddess and a sacrificed (either willingly or by force) human martyr who was unrelated (by blood or tangible power) to the Goddess deity, with three Patron Saints guarding the Martyr

• Offshoots of this Spirality that disagreed or otherwise detested the other branches of the metaphorical tree

• These offshoots would form in their own pockets

  • The Rizen: an evangelical denomination of the Spiral, it’s second largest and second-strongest branch; known by outsiders more as a massive militant cult than an open-armed religion

  • The Trinity Initiative: a smaller group who takes the sacred “rule of three” that the Spiral holds and weaving it into every possible facet of life

  • The Final Revolution Movement: a smaller US-based denomination that runs on it’s own calendar (rather than “adopting” the Gregorian calendar as the other denominations have

With these pieces planned, mapped, and drawn, I then set the stage for the modern day, the biggest change aside from the religion itself; the Great Karsk War:

• The Great War was a massive holy war that took place between the twenties and fifties, primarily in the Spiral homeland - a massive empire known as Verdusk

• This great war would be between Verdusk’s Democratic Republic - or VDsmK;the Unified Dimitrigrad Federation - or UDF (our alt-history Spiral-flavored USSR in a sense); the Catholic Empire of Italy, and the Trinity (a conglomerate of opposing factions including those from the US, UK, and various other non-Spiral factions)

• This war would terminate in a day known as The Catastrophe - the day everything in and around Verdusk was annihilated and all people regardless of stance or side were purged by an “impossible force”

• This force would be viewed retroactively as the “Martyr” of the Spiral, the “vessel of Goddess Predzkya”, Marianne

• The Catastrophe would be viewed as a blanket punishment for the sins of the war, the Goddess finally raising her hand to cease the death and terrors of the war by wiping it clean

• In the aftermath of the war, a new faction would emerge and seize control of Europe: the Rizen; this group would then go on to spread, entrenching itself in whatever gaps and holes could be found and pushing the idea that Marianne was the '“one true Goddess” and that in order to stop a second catastrophe her soul would need to be “repaired”

• As such, the Rizen would then push for the search of “Saintbloods”, supposed fragments of Mother Marianne’s power

• And this cycles back to our protagonists, three young woman who want as far away from the Spiral as possible

So we have:

• The world

• The beliefs

• The characters

A set of three:

• The war

• The wipe

• The aftermath

A trinity:

• The Goddess

• The messengers

• The outliers

A story about three things:

• Death

• Depression

• Rebirth

With three poor girls who wish to be freed from the unending chaos of life:

• Cheryl

• Marie

• Fiona

And the Goddess who demands what cannot be easily granted with force:

• Healing

• Help

• Peace

The Spiral encompasses all. It’s limbs grasp ever outward and coil ever inward. Marianne’s Will is unknowing yet all-perceiving.

And now, as I put ideas to paper and protagonists to challenge, I can so happily say:

The Spiral is coming.