Archaios: A World 17 Years in the Making
Let me tell you a little about the history of Archaios, the project that has come to be the center of my creative life. I began writing it way back in 2007. I was 29 years old. I had only been married a couple of years, and I had a one-year-old kid crawling around. I had just completed my MA at St. John’s College in Santa Fe and moved back to my home state in Missouri. And I wasn’t really sure what I was doing in life.
I was half-heartedly applying to a few different graduate programs, but I didn’t really have a solid direction in life. I was also still mentally adjusting to the responsibilities that came from having a young wife and child. To be honest, I wasn’t quite prepared for that responsibility. 2007 was a sort of dark time in my life. I kind of felt like a failure. I had a BA in English and an MA in Liberal Arts, and well, those are dreamer degrees, not ones that come with ready jobs. I wanted to get work but also I didn’t want to get completely sucked into a career that I hated. I ended up working in the trades as a painter, and spent my evenings looking at graduate programs.
My work was seasonal, so when winter came, my work dried up. I barely scrapped by on savings. My wife worked part time. It was in the midst of this that Archaios was born.
Looking back now, I think that there were a couple of things going on.
One, of course, is the deep desire that I have always had to write and to create, even though I was very crude in my work back then. I was not a professional writer, and had way too much emotion wrapped up in what other people thought about every word I wrote.
The other part of it, I think, was the real desire to do something worthwhile. I felt like a failure, I felt like I should have been more ready to support my wife and child, and I think working on a writing project at that moment allowed me to feel like I was at least doing something. And my wife? All I can say is bless her. I can imagine so many women looking at their husband and saying, “what the hell are you even doing? Why don’t you, I don’t know, get a real job or something?” But not my dear girl. She was proud that I was using the winter to write, and thought it was about time I focused seriously on something. She also had no doubt (even though I did) that I would get into a good program and become a professor. Now, it would have been better, of course, to have that confidence myself, to not need to lean on her, but looking back, I can appreciate that she was there for me.
So I wrote. At the time I was obsessed with the classical Greek world, especially events around the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. And at first I was writing essentially a piece of historical fiction set in that time. But then I started getting a bit too creative, and I thought, well, if George R.R. Martin can create a fictional story based on the Wars of the Roses, why can’t I do the same with the Peloponnesian Wars? And I wrote a novel-length work doing just that.
And then I showed some friends.
And they didn’t like it.
So, being an amateur, I decided to try and rewrite the entire thing. I rewrote the first chapter and showed it to someone else. They didn’t like it either. I saved my files, turned off my computer, and never touched it after. My confidence had been shaken.
I eventually found the most reliable career path and was soon accepted into an English program and was given a teaching position so I could at least take care of my family (barely). And I was so busy with my studies that I never had time to write afterwards.
In small spaces, every few years, I would get a few weeks off from academic work, and I would go through depression and always end up creating some fictional world, set long ago, with huge mythologies and characters. And of course, maps. I went through this cycle several times.
Then I became a professor and came back to my own writing, and as a result of that, I wrote the Philosophical Narratives: The Iron Way, The Babel Project, and Lilacs from the Dead Land. I am very proud of those works. I understand they are not everyone’s cup of tea, and they are challenging to read, but I stand by them. But even as I was working on them, I knew there was something underneath, something… As the narrator of Lilacs repeats over and over, “what was it I was looking for? What was it that I lost? There was something!”
After Lilacs I started writing this random story about some Vikings, and it included some things that I began to feel like I had written before. This lead me to crack open my truly massive collection of unpublished writing. Leaving aside the endless essays, the postmodern novel, and the 2 philosophical books I had written and never published, there was all this imaginative, mythic writing. And I began pulling all of it out. Hundreds of pages, hundreds of characters, wars, gods, folk tales, etc. And it hit me like a freight train. It was all Archaios. And the Viking story was Archaios. I had subconsciously been creating a secondary world in bits and pieces for about 17 years. I cannot quite express how shocking this was to me. It was like finding someone else’s work. Some of the original Archaios material was so old that It was completely unfamiliar to me.
Ever since then, I have been working on bringing together all of my Archaios material. That Viking story got completely rewritten and fully incorporated, and is now The Bjornlinga Saga.
This is a serialized saga, and the first book has just been released!
In the wake of The Reckoning, a time of darkness and ruin has fallen across the lands. Eight hundred years later, the Gotharan tribe known as the Bjornlingas embark on a perilous journey, guided by the cryptic visions of a Prophet. Led by Jarl Bjorn, the Bjornlingas set sail to claim a new land across the ocean, a land where their destiny—tala—awaits.
But the land they reach is a frozen wasteland, teeming with dangers both natural and supernatural. As the men struggle to survive in this harsh new world, Uhtric Wayfarer—a cunning outsider—sows discord, challenging the Prophet’s authority and setting the Bjornlingas on a path of bloodshed and betrayal.
Amidst ancient horrors and dark omens, the Bjornlingas must fight not only for survival but for the very soul of their people.
Enter the mythic world of Archaios, where fate, faith, and power collide.
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I have also been working on a number of other things since my last newsletter, including:
· H.P. Lovecraft guide: Maybe you've heard of Lovecraft or Cthulhu but aren't sure what it's all about. Lovecraft's blend of cosmic horror and gothic elements has deeply influenced literature and pop culture.
Check out my Classic Book Guides for more resources, or download the Lovecraft guide directly here.
· Old English Elegies guide: a shorter form of Old English poetry, these beautiful poems often focus on somber tones of loneliness and loss. Even those these poems are quite old, we can still very much relate to the very human feeling of loss, and these works form a connection between us and these figures from the past.
Again, you can visit my Classic Book Guides to see my various guides, or see the elegies directly here.
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As always, thank you for your readership and support.
Alright, that’s all for this one!
