Real Gods Require Blood

Welcome! Today’s post is about the background of my work so far, and is a part of celebrating not only my latest chapter drop but a FULLY ARTICULATED BOOK COVER by the wonderful artist Liusia Piu over on Tumblr here. Thank you Liusia!

Now, where were we . . .oh, yes. Hello! It’s me, the Dante Alighieri of this strange narrative that you’ve all been generous enough to indulge me on. Today marks about 9 months since I’ve vomited up a mish-mash of Judeo-Christian theories in an attempt to understand “the singularity” of origin stories: God, and The Word. And, as I’ve watched the continual and seemingly inevitable decay of ‘society’ around me, I’m forced to reconcile what’s going on in a way where I must simply adopt a brutal sense of humor so I can wake up and still function on a day-to-day basis.

So let’s start with a story, shall we? Like with any other story, you first got to know what the question is the story needs to ask. When I first started writing, the first thing I thought wasn’t that this series would be about angels or the multiverse, but a post-modern world where all the humans are dead yet managed to preserve their consciousness by digital upload, sort of like this neat, nightmare-fueled example below:

Now, I started out with two characters, Gabriel and Veronica. They were the first to succeed with this experiment in a post-apocalyptic, resource-scarce world; however, they realize this ‘dream’ of theirs was a calculated measure from powers beyond them that forces them to ask the most famous question in the world: is there such a thing as God?

Well, once you start talking shop with God, you become familiar with His assortment of characters. Gabriel and Veronica quickly became Lucifer and Eve, with other characters like Beelzebub and Belphegor ringing in. Once I realized this, I started reading classics like Paradise Lost in an attempt to really get in the mindset that these were living, breathing entities wanting to talk.

And talk they did. What started as a whisper turned into a forest fire; it went from raw science fiction to religious existentialism itself. Once that truth revealed itself to me, then what happened next was an explosive rupture in my once neat little story about cyborgs and Eve and alla that because I can’t write a story about Lucifer without Michael.

A massive rogue gallery of artwork I’ve been getting help with since October 2023. In ‘chronological’ order, it begins with the Archangel Michael from a universe where he managed to kill God, moving on to him with Prime!Lucifer for the cover of the book ‘Still Alive, After Paradise.’ The bottom two are the Primes “avatars,” alternate versions of themselves based on a story they’re telling together. Artists: Camille Case, me, Liuisa-Piu, T-Fizzle

Alright, now a new character has kicked my teeth in and demands some presence. Fine, I give it to him. In fact, that’s for the better: there are a lot of incredible stories out right now (like Angels Before Man and Hazbin Hotel) that do “The Fall” a lot of justice, so my thought for this was to flip the script on its head and see if it made a difference for two characters whose fate always seems sealed. Therefore, the question now becomes not about whether or not God exists but HOW to play God for yourself.

Except it still couldn’t rest there. Even when I accepted this is the story I wanted to tell, I thought it’d be Lucifer in the driver’s seat. I practiced scripture writing by using him as a character to see if I couldn’t articulate for myself how the power of telling a story (like the Bene Gesserit craft in Dune) is the precedent for shaping destiny itself. However, it’s since been to my delight that Michael has booted him out of the way as the main character because I think the guy who everybody assumes is ‘God’s realest one’ would actually be the best person to show us how it works.

And he is showing how it works in ways I didn’t think possible. Even with casual reads of books like Stranger in a Strange Land and The Godfather, two very different books written in two very different times by two very different authors, many people manage to say the same damn thing by using Michael as a ‘case study’ for Godhood.

Don’t believe? Watch this, starting with Robert Heinlein’s famous thought:

[The Archangel] Michael grinned with unashamed cheerfulness. “I am God. You are God. And any bastard I kill is God, too. Jubal, it is said God notes each sparrow that falls, and He does. But [what you fail to realize] is that God cannot help but notice the sparrow because the Sparrow is God. Just like the cat stalking the sparrow is God, too, for all things are God carrying out His thoughts.”

Classic quote, we love Heinlein. Now, watch as this second author, Mario Puzo, says more or less the same thing:

Michael says: “Tom, don’t let anybody kid you. It’s all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it’s personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That’s what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes? Right? And you know something? Accidents don’t happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.”

You don’t get any of this on accident. Hell, just living day to day as I listen to a song I like or glance over a wall of donors at a nonprofit, the frequency with which I hear ‘Michael’ feels too high to be coincidental. That name is an art store, many artists (Jackson, Meyers), many athletes (Jordan, Tyson). Some dude name Michael owns a dealership around where I live and I more or less can’t escape seeing at least one ‘Michael’s, Toyota of Bellevue‘ plastered on the damn license plate when I’m driving. Then, just when I thought I was done or that it WAS a coincidence, how funny, a random conversation in passing slides me a name of a man I should network with and guess who it is?

Okay, okay, well fuck me, now the book’s all about Michael and his attempt to explain God to everybody. Not too hard with the amount of cosmic intelligence he’s got stored up in that mind, so how about I add another layer of role reversal and make him the ‘bad’ guy to see if that doesn’t ramp interest in him up? After all, I feel he gets a reputation at times for either being ‘a boring good guy’ or a super schemer who lives to make Lucifer miserable, so I had Michael kill God the way Kratos killed Zeus: as an angry, vindictive son who tires of his father’s tyranny over his life.

But that didn’t work either once the deed was done! After all that plotting and the return of Lucifer to Heaven, it turns out Michael’s real goal all along is not to destroy us ‘flesh wraps,’ but to save us by showing us how it’s done. And, unlike his predecessors, Michael doesn’t hide how the sausage gets made – you ask a question like ‘why do people abuse their power’ and guess what, Michael will proceed to abuse his power just to show us it’s that easy and it won’t change just because we get more ‘sophisticated.’

How that may save us you ask, well, I’m not 100% sure it will. People are people are people. However, I hope at least maybe this gets a few of you to see what’s happening as not a cruel inevitability (that’s already been established by now),

But to see it as an opportunity to think, engage, and even challenge the world around us by taking what we know about power and using it to build healthy coalitions that sustain us. In the words of a wise man:

“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?

Michel Foucault

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