I think I may be getting about ready to reboot a story I started writing about eight years ago. After listening to the discussion between Vox Day and Stefan Molyneux, it helped give me some confidence that there may be publishers out there that might give me a shot. Vox Day talked about his publishing house Castalia House, and how he claims being on the conservative side of things, as well as interested in classic science fiction and fantasy. Even more promising were the references to J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton regarding the style of books they are interested in publishing. The general theme of the books that I have as works in progress - The Duet, Burning Embers, and Harmakhis - line up quite a bit to that.
Why does Vox Day and Castalia House intrigue me? Mainly because they are counter to what has become the status quo in the publishing industry. There was a time when Tolkien, Chesterton, and Lewis could be published as essentially mainstream, even though modernism and secularism did ridicule them at the time. One could say there used to be something like a fair play during those days, not to mention more room for intellectual thought and discourse. Sure, there was a real presence of racism, and WWII showed us the ugly side of Socialism. Yet, seeing these things did not stop politics from taking advantage of such things, not to mention the evolving culture utilizing them to pave the way to our current modern age. As this happened, so too came about various shifts in the culture. I'm not going to go into great detail about them here, other than to say that the more current stream of these shifts led me to wonder what point there was to me writing. Could I seriously have a chance of being published when all I hear about are the quotas for sex scenes, the need to have a LBGTQ+ character (and especially one portrayed in a good light), and various other ways in which the publishers want to push their social engineering and restructuring narrative and agenda on authors and, subsequently, their readers? Seeing how groups I was participating in, and the various submission sites they advised going to were influenced by these things, even to the point that it was deemed valid criticism to be against God, that polite language and characters using formal speech and language were considered stilted, and others talking about how old fashioned my writing and stories were. I frankly got sick of the uphill battle. Sure, most were relatively kind and polite, with only a few showing bewilderment on why I would hold a theology in my writing of God being a 'He' and not a 'She', or why I had a traditional family as the model for some of my writings, or otherwise tried to show how broken people might be in a non-traditional or divorced family. It was pretty obvious that these sorts of themes were not of interest. Seeing this, it eventually caught on, and I got frustrated and disappointed with the whole thing. It seemed like no one was interested, and so I lost interest myself and moved on with life.
What I like to believe, after listening to Vox Day and looking through Castalia House, is that maybe, just maybe there's a paradigm shift happening. People may be getting tired of the so-called 'new normal'. It's hard to tell what may come from this shift, and how much of a dent it may have in the prevailing culture and narrative. But I can say, just as there was a Reformation, there was also a Counter Reformation that sought to correct the abuses and issues that came about from the reformers. Maybe we might see those tired of Obama's changes, and the similar push for progressive modernist invasions being countered by people that want change away from the changes that we've had to live with these past eight years. We've had angry liberals shouting at us for nearly a decade, shaming us for not wanting to be a part of their decadence, and, not soon enough, we may have the chance to counter them and maybe return to some semblance of sanity that has not been around since all this 'new normal' nonsense has been going on.
But really, I want to feel like I have my own liberty, and, in particular, my own liberty to write as I see fit to, and not have to be coerced into following a sociopolitical narrative that I do not believe in. While I don't mind guidance and critique on my writing, I would rather it be something genuine that could help me become a better writer, and not have it be rejected because it doesn't fit the agenda of those trying to manipulate the culture and politics to their whimsical wills. It's not that I don't understand that we're all biased to a certain extent, it's more or less I'm tired of how bias and identity is used as a weapon or matter of gate keeping. Sure, I too block out the voices I don't want to hear. On a certain level, it is necessary. On the other hand, one still has to keep open to valid and constructive criticism as well. It's difficult in these time to really know who is trying to give such criticism and those that want to deconstruct in order to reform you in a way that you do not want to go, especially when you believe or know the path they try to push on you is wrong.
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