Salutations Shadow Chasers and Dust Makers.
Yes, I know the witch Serafina Pekkala said we must all act as though we are not subject to the fates lest we die of despair, but this could conceivably seem pretty fated.
After a year of reading and researching on and off, I finally began writing my much hinted at scholarly book based on His Dark Materials yesterday. In point of fact, I wrote the entire ten page preface by hand, though I am going to have to do some editing and amending today. While my schedule is still up in the air and I plan on writing the entire first part before formally submitting it anywhere, that was a solid start, to be sure.
The fated part didn't hit me until I briefly checked Instagram after midnight, only to find the Official Philip Pullman page celebrating the 26th anniversary of Northern Lights. Apparently it was first published in the UK on July 9, 1995, and the rest is literary. history. While beginning work on my own book on the 25th anniversary would have been pretty sweet, I do have to stand back and kind of appreciate the completely poetic synchronicity of the whole event nonetheless. Dust indeed works in mysterious ways ...
Though much of my book is loosely mapped out, I'm not saying much about it here, as there is an incomprehensibly long way to go. However, here is a treat. Straight out of Joseph Campbell's classic The Power of Myth, and it was just too good to not use as an epigram to kick my whole thesis off.
So here's the quote the whole thing opens with -
"It's whether you're going to say 'no' to the serpent or
'yes' to the serpent, as easy as that."
Mary Malone much?
And as Always
Stay Dusty My Friends
#HisDarkMaterials #TheBookOfDust #PhilipPullman
#BuildingTheRepublic #PullmanStudies #JordanScholarship
#InDustWeTrust #DownAndDusty #TheGreatProject
