Mythquake is a book I’ve been trying to write for well over a decade, and I guess it’s time I accepted that I probably never will: I’ve kinda moved on from there onto other things, and my heart just isn’t in it any more.
Yet the underlying ideas seem, if anything, to be even more urgent today than they were back then. So it seems worthwhile to summarise those ideas in a short blog-series – will be either 11 or 12 posts in all, including this one. (I’ll add cross-references between the posts when they’re all up on this site.)
A quick bit of history first, then back to the core theme.
Way back in the late-1980s, I was asked by one of my publishers to write a book for the then very-active self-development field: the exact brief was “we want a book for the self-help market that doesn’t insult the intelligence”. The end-result was Positively Wyrd, which used the old Nordic concept of wyrd to explore the core theme of “there’s always a choice, but there’s always a twist”. It even sold quite well, for a while, and still has a fair spread of fans – all of them happily wyrd, of course. 
That book focussed on the personal layer; there was a sequel – Wyrd Allies – which came out in the early 1990s and which explored the interpersonal layer; and there was supposed to be a third in the series, called Wyrd World, which should have looked at the transpersonal layer, but courtesy of the usual life-chaos I never did get round to writing it.
One very good friend, Linda Moore Gentile, continued to badger me for years about this gap in the trilogy, until I literally woke up one morning with the word mythquake ringing through my mind.
There’s a direct analogy between what happens physically when the earth moves beneath our feet, and what happens socially when the fabric of stories that underlies our society and milieu undergoes any kind of change. Hence the metaphor of a mythquake, as a personal or societal equivalent of an earthquake.
The idea worked well, but the writing didn’t, and each time I tried to make it work, I quickly found that I was writing myself into a corner. Trying to force-fit one new idea with an older one probably didn’t help, either. I’ve probably made half a dozen attempts to get restarted, but it’s time to accept that it ain’t gonna happen. I can’t write it: but perhaps someone else can. That’s my hope here, anyway.
So here it is.
(I wrote this particular version of the text to line up with the Wyrd series, so in part it’s still somewhat written for that market, with direct questions and the like – but that’s just detail. I’d much prefer you to look at the ideas behind the surface text, because I believe they’ll be very useful as we head into what are clearly going to be turbulent times.)
The current chapters are as follows:
The following is the full content of the first chapter, which introduces the idea of ‘mythquakes’. The subsequent posts in the series will describe or summarise some example sources of mythquakes, each of increasing intensity; the final post will discuss the need and the options for ‘mythquake preparedness’.
More after the ‘Read more…’ link here, anyway: the text starts with the ‘Fractured stories’ heading.
Read more…