This weekend, I marathon-wrote most of the open access primer that I have been working on — I actually did all of chapters 5-7. I worked off of many blog posts I have written on KALLISTI, far beyond just the ones on the New to Polytheism? page, with some new content to weave all of it together coherently. I am also avoiding the term polytheism and trying to make the entire thing more generic. Many Gods is the it term. 😉
What remains to be done is to let this extremely rough draft sit for a week so I can come back to it with fresh eyes at the beginning of March. I need to weave citations into passages that I wrote stream-of-consciousness (and evaluate those passages for accuracy), ensure that the vocabulary and scaffolding are appropriate for people just starting out, and figure out how to pull the markdown pages I have created into some open access book formatting tools. (Ambitiously, I also want to ensure I am quoting from Iamblichus everywhere I want to, but that could be overmuch — Iamblichus is always relevant.) There are many occasions when I had to interpolate and synthesize blog posts I wrote years apart, and stepping away gives me a chance to ensure the result makes sense on read-through. Everything is all on my private GitHub, and once I go through this checklist, the preliminary version will go public. It’s currently about 40,000 words.
I worked about seven hours yesterday and eight hours today while listening to various Dead Can Dance albums. The project has been my creative priority, and I’m excited to get back into poetry this week before I dive back in. I’ve been quiet on KALLISTI because I have been redirecting my attention to the project every time I think of a blog topic.
May Apollon and Aletheia guide me in fashioning this into something that is useful and actionable.
KALLISTI 