I need to finish my current revision by Friday. I have to write a brand new chapter, and completely rework about four others others. Which is why I’m writing this post on a Wednesday and scheduling it for Thursday. it’s because I’m being efficient. Not at all because I’m procrastinating.

Though in my defense, I just sketched out the new chapter and I’m really happy with it. I assume I’ll continue to be happy with it until someone reads it and tells me it still doesn’t work as an opening chapter and I need to give in and adopt a different POV for chapter 1. Until that point, I’m happy with this only half-formed beast.

But that’s so completely not my point.

For many years I had a fascination with movies about ‘special’ children. Not like special needs children, but like children (and adults depending on the movie) who were:

• An offspring of the devil/a demon
• An offspring of an angel or other heavenly being
• Some manner of scion or someone afflicted with stigmata

I can’t say “when I was younger” because it’s something I only lost interest in a few years ago, and every once in a while a movie almost tricks me again.

I don’t think I can put into words what I was looking for, beyond ‘different’. I think ‘Constantine’ and ‘The Ninth Gate’ are the closest I ever found to whatever un-named demon (pun intended) was driving me. I gave up on the genre in general when I realized 99% of the movies out there were either ‘The Omen’ or ‘Prophecy’ revisited.

Oh, and ‘Dogma’ wasn’t bad either.

We watched ‘Immortals’ the other day. I know a lot of people didn’t care for it. Overall, I wasn’t fond of the gore and the pacing was a little slow. BUT the thing I loved about it was the way the story of Theseus was reimagined. That’s also one of the things I like about Thor and Loki in the Avengers series. It’s even one of the things I liked about the movie ‘300’.

Someone dared to take a point in the past that none of us were there to witness, and ask ‘what if it happened a little differently?’

I guess I keep looking for that in these movies about Heaven and Hell. Something that steps outside of the definitions Dante created. Something that asks ‘what if there’s more metaphor and parable here than we realize?’

When it comes right down to it, that’s why I write the stories I do.

What if Actaeon wasn’t a guy Artemis turned into a stag when she caught him spying on her and her nymphs bathing? What if he was the half-human son who got tired of the orgies and just walked out one day?

What if Lucifer never actually fell? What if that was all part of the hype to increase followers? Every story needs a villian, right?

What if Zeus and Odin were the same god, and the different names and pantheons were all about diversifying and drawing in more faith?

I’m not trying to rewrite religion or myth. It’s just…I wasn’t there, I don’t know how it actually happened. What if something got lost in the translation or changed in the retelling over the course of the last several thousand years? Or even if it happened exactly the way we know the stories today, what does it hurt to envision something different?

Where do you draw some of your world building inspiration from?