Want to see realtime changelogs that show exactly what's changed, and when? Visit the Github repository and check my commit history. Better, less-techy systems coming in the future, for now that's what I got! https://github.com/amunrarara/gondolla
This week has been indescribably empowering for my feeling of self worth. What an absolute treasure of my own making, right beneath my nose, for so many years. I have known the personal value of my works, the subjective beauty in their chaos, unkempt and delicious with treasures of mind spread on paper across a decade of activity (and more to come from my earlier works, as I discover them).
But, to recover them en-masse, and finally properly digitize them, that has been a magnamous feeling, for me.
As of today, I have recovered what I believe to be about 1,000 total pages of writing, drawings, maps, and much, much more. I have several works contained in my journals, with a very large measure of my work devoted to Gondōlla, which will be published and available steadily through the coming weeks.
In addition to Gondōllan works, there are many-numbered examples of my Asemic writing script, which I have called by many names. There are snippets of ideas, outpourings of creativity in various channels of thought, calligraphy in Asemic, English, and Elvish (Quenya, Sindarin, and English-mode Tengwar), Dungeons and Dragons session notes and campaign materials... It's really all there.
It just shows me more deeply how damn enriching my life has been up until this point, and beyond. I sit upon a goldmine of my own creation. I see its roughness, its raw Spirit, and look to whom I have become in these years, and I feel proud for myself and my inner accomplishments. It is easy to lose track of one's own greatness... Not in the sense of "I'm greater than everyone else", because Lord knows that's an illusion, but a greatness of Self, that only I can answer to, that allows me to day, "each day, I am Acea, and each day, I transform; at times, I will be better than who I was yesterday; at times, I will be worse. But always, I will be Acea, and I shall love myself all the while."
It came to my attention that some of my journal entries from 2023-11-14 were migrated out of an old Evernote vault (proprietary crap, never trust your vault to a third-party completely), so that puts their original date of writing closer to late-2018, early-2019. Annotating these notes as necessary. Most of the notes I migrated over were properly dated, but a fair number of them were not. Some of them I'm adding as entries with approximate dates that are pretty close-enough to the truth.
git blame is quite a helpful command, I tell ya, but doesn't always hold the whole story...
Whew, I just finished quite a migration this round. I've had a big chunk of old Evernote notes sitting in my primary writing vault, waiting to be categorized and placed in the right locations.
This vault here has already been shaken somewhat at its foundations; my intent is to allow this vault to mature as a complete codex of everything Gondōlla. But owing to the nature of my mind, it is spilling out to become something far more multiplexed and varied, since many of my stories, ideas, poems, etc. have borders connecting with one another, and Gondōlla often meets each quite closely.
None the less, for now, I will accept this. As I went through my Evernote, I came into contact with many other works which wouldn't necessary belong here in this vault, but has inspired me to go ahead and publish all my works of writing, even if they are simply in the seminal form of journal entries, for now.
There are two opposing concerns that have gripped me, these long years, which play one upon the other in painful ways. One is that my work, if released but not "complete", will be stolen and crafted into new art which I will not be credited for. The other, is that my life will be filled with partial attempts at releasing completed work which never see the light of day. These both have given rise to a new understanding: my craft is perennial, transforming, and daily grows. Having these works published in their messiest, but applying this new creative endeavor of "edit as I go, everything is released" is a new approach that I hope to bring into creative works, in general. We do not always need our work to be an absolutely complete masterpiece; the masterpiece may also be the fruits of our precious human lifetime, of which each moment, one cast unto Life Herself, is another spot of ink on the endless canvas.
All that is left now, is to keep doing exactly what I've been doing, but in a more publicly-available space. I hope my work is enjoyable, albeit long-winded :-)
I've gone ahead and decided to publish my non-Gondōllan works in this vault as well, for the time being, while I get my publishing universe in-order.
There will be multiple vaults, and I will connect them together at my personal website, https://aceaspades.com. Going there will give access to my various spaces of thought, of which Gondōlla will be a chief. But, there are other entire corpuses of my work that must be represented. Soon to come.
Already there is need to update my previous Welcome message.
I have intended for this Vault to contain a great sum of my writing, but not the whole of it. The materials that belong to the corpus known as Gondōlla, but contain also some historical Earth-based fiction, as well. That is a characteristic of my writing process, that I oft write tales which attempt either to anchor on this Earth, or anchor in Gondōlla, which (at the time I do not know for certain) may or may not contain our Earth, be it even the galaxy we now inhabit. Gondōlla holds at time to a chronology that marks it as the first galaxy, a proto-realm wherein the first mingling of Shaddáh and Ádmata birth the many phenomena of the universe experienced by the Beings of the galaxy. So, some tales, such as [[Tales of the Galaxy/The Account of The Great Scribe Seshatu]] will contain reference to Ancient Egypt Herself, which is a very important anchorpoint in my inner imaginative soup.
Since also there are multiple modes of expression which my tales wish to take, changing seamlessly (sometimes laboriously) one unto the other, the Reader (that's you) will find interspersed with fiction, often ideas for games, primarily virtual / videogames, but oft breaking into spatial games, too.
Since this Vault is meant to evolve with time, I will do my best to keep a changelog of tales which allow any given story to be re-read in its earlier versions, as I anticipate the whole of this Vault, someday, to contain a sort of self-answering, self-referencing codex to the tales woven unto Gondōlla Herself.
You'll find the absolute bulk of my work is currently contained in my Journals folder. Take my word on it: this currently represents about 30% of my total writing regarding Gondōlla and associated tales. There are written works of paper, drawings, audio recordings of me speaking, and other digital files which still must be collected for the set to be considered complete. It's a feat in its own right, collecting these things together.
Date: Wednesday, February 28th, 2024 Time: 6:28pm PST
An introduction is in order.
My name is Acea Spades.
The writing contained within this Vault consists of a part of my life's work, early in stage yet mature in age, a collection of stories which interconnect in sometimes-unforeseen ways.
The work is called Gondōlla: A Spiritual Galactic Mythology.
It is a nerve-bending thing, to be releasing work that is so dear to my soul, so early in its gestation. JRR Tolkien, one of my chief mentors, inspirations, and heroes, allowed The Silmarillion more than seventy years to blossom, propagate its seeds in the garden of his mind, and the many fruits within his lifetime which sprung for it were a fascination of his for his entire lifetime.
I, a man of currently 32 years, have long-ago embarked on a creative journey of my own; terrifying, exhilirating, oft-frustrating, yet always fruitful in its own right. My interests draw me across a veritable night-sky worth of different pursuits; I call the many-passioned projects and arts that have filled my time, my "Constellation of Interests". Let me assure you, now, that this work has been a chief among them.
I will save the more long-winded discussions of this work, its gestation, early seeds, blossoms and blooms, for perhaps a later time. I intend to release this Vault somewhat episodically, so to speak, but not in a traditional sense, as in clean chapters, short stories, or releases of fully-completed works in this manner.
Instead, I hope to represent a bit of my own Spirit in this work; not only in its completed parts, which today you read, but in the journey of its making, too. Let me explain.
You see, I am a Programmer. A Coder. A Scribe. I write instructions that are executed on computers. The Craft is a unique expression of our late-and-present millenniums, and with it bears its own characters and characteristics, unique unto it as a medium of art, and expression. In creating written works to-be-read by computers, we utilize a system of file-saving called simply version control, of which Git is the currently most popular.
The popular service, Github, is one of the more-powerful tools available to software developers. Among its features is the ability to perform automatic program execution based on certain parameters of things saved into its service. With it, I can save my written work, and immediately execute a rebuild of my website. But, not only this, I can also save in-progress versions of my work, which can be retraced at any point in time, to reconstruct a history of creations, revisions, and destructions, within the Vault that you now read.
Thus, I implore you, enjoy this work, and check back often, as it is an ever-evolving system. If you wish to see an earlier version, you may do so by visiting my Github. I will soon implement a system on this website for version-hopping between different saves, mark my words.
Many of the tales contained have been part of many of my 'constellations of interest'; you may find reference to videogames, comics, written works, audio tales, and the like; these works are meant, in course of my lifetime, to be part of a greater corpus, which spans through many modes of media.