Good morning, Readers!
This gorgeous piece by deviantart.com user DanielPillaArt is eerily similar to an image in my current WIP. Anyway, I think it's beautiful. Click the image to see more of the artist's brilliant work.
If you cannot tell from the image and the title today, I have an obsession with a particular image. It shows up over and over again in many of my works. If you've read a lot of my stuff, you may have noticed this image that repeats over and over. The image is this:
A lone masculine figure upon a stone throne.
It's there in Sky Road Walker, when we first meet the Seeker. It's in The Dying God, the eponymous short story in my anthology The Dying God and Other Stories It's the final image in the story. It's in Soldier. It's in my current WIP... for two different characters. This image is in a lot of my works, and it's in my mind a great deal. Like, a weirdly obsessive amount.
Putting aside the theory that there is some lonely being on a throne, who may or may not be as much made of stone as the throne upon which he sits, trying to reach out, I would really like to know why this image is so prominent in my mind. I wonder what it is about it that makes it such a compelling motif for me.
In most iterations of this figure, it's always the same masculine figure; either wearing a stag skull helm, or possessing actual antlers. That's not the case in Sky Road Walker, or Soldier and one of the characters in my current WIP, but in every other iteration, and most often in my imagination, it's some variant of the antlered man.
Now, I know where the antlered man comes from. That's clearly derived from the pan-Celtic god Cernunnos. I've been obsessed with Cernunnos since I began studying bronze and iron aged Celtic culture (in the academic sense). I just find him one of the most interesting of the Celtic gods that we are aware of. It's for the same reason I enjoy Samhain more than any other Celtic holiday we know of.
But the image of the lonely figure on the stone throne (usually in the dark, in a cavernous space) is a weird obsession I have that I have no provenance for. Still, it's everywhere in my writing. I wish I knew where it came from, and why I am so obsessed with that image.
But there we have it. I am.
Fellow writers, are there any images in you head that repeated reveal themselves in your writing, like a strange motif that identifies a story as very much yours? Readers, have you noticed something like that in other writers? I'm really curious about it. Let me know in the comments.
For now, however, I have a book to finish.
Ciao!
A lone masculine figure upon a stone throne.
It's there in Sky Road Walker, when we first meet the Seeker. It's in The Dying God, the eponymous short story in my anthology The Dying God and Other Stories It's the final image in the story. It's in Soldier. It's in my current WIP... for two different characters. This image is in a lot of my works, and it's in my mind a great deal. Like, a weirdly obsessive amount.
Putting aside the theory that there is some lonely being on a throne, who may or may not be as much made of stone as the throne upon which he sits, trying to reach out, I would really like to know why this image is so prominent in my mind. I wonder what it is about it that makes it such a compelling motif for me.
In most iterations of this figure, it's always the same masculine figure; either wearing a stag skull helm, or possessing actual antlers. That's not the case in Sky Road Walker, or Soldier and one of the characters in my current WIP, but in every other iteration, and most often in my imagination, it's some variant of the antlered man.
Now, I know where the antlered man comes from. That's clearly derived from the pan-Celtic god Cernunnos. I've been obsessed with Cernunnos since I began studying bronze and iron aged Celtic culture (in the academic sense). I just find him one of the most interesting of the Celtic gods that we are aware of. It's for the same reason I enjoy Samhain more than any other Celtic holiday we know of.
But the image of the lonely figure on the stone throne (usually in the dark, in a cavernous space) is a weird obsession I have that I have no provenance for. Still, it's everywhere in my writing. I wish I knew where it came from, and why I am so obsessed with that image.
But there we have it. I am.
Fellow writers, are there any images in you head that repeated reveal themselves in your writing, like a strange motif that identifies a story as very much yours? Readers, have you noticed something like that in other writers? I'm really curious about it. Let me know in the comments.
For now, however, I have a book to finish.
Ciao!
RSS Feed