The Stories of Eras
The story of land told not by an omnipotent onlooker, but by its own people.
This is something I’ve wanted to do for a very long but largely “trunked” it because I knew it would never sell to a traditional publisher. As much as I lament the ill effects of our digital age, I also must congratulate it. Without a platform like this, Eras may very well have remained “trunked” indefinitely.
As Told by its Own People
The story of this world is not told by continuous narrative from the vantage point of an out of universe writer/reader. Nor is it told through the eyes of single protagonist across ludicrously escalating narratives. It is the world as told by stories of itself. ALL the Stories of Eras are written from an in-universe perspective by a fictional to you (the reader) but real to the world “author”. These stories run the gamut from mythological tales, biographies of “real” people, periodicals, and even their own works of fiction. The true labor of the work lies in the presumed contexts applied by the “authors” to their own works.
TL;DR
The real story is being told in-between the lines.
From the outside perspective of the reader it might appear to be a fantasy world but I assure it is not. The central conceit of the setting is a parallel world to ours that evolved along wildly different evolutionary lines. There are all varieties of creatures you’d see in a tabletop RPG or Tolkien inspired novel, but they are all natural byproducts of their environments, mutations, and sexual selection. “Magic” only exists in the world to a similar degree that the author conceives of it in their world but is believed in universe in the same manner in which most of humanity believed in it for most of our history.
Historicity
There are different ages of Eras and each work should be carefully considered under that knowledge. For example: The Triumph of Arthun Ra is effectively this world’s equivalent to The Illiad and the legends of King Arthur. Does that mean this story about a lion king going on a journey to defeat a crocodile sorcerer proves that “magic” is real in this world?
No.
Does the story having a quasi-historical basis which heavily influences many cultures mean that the characters and events contained within-in have IRL analogues?
Possibly.
Will people’s attitudes towards these stories shift in universe as time marches forward and their material conditions change (much like IRL cultural evolution)?
Those are the lines I leave to you audience, to fill in for yourselves.
What do you want to see?
Every now and again I’ll provide an impromptu poll of sorts to see which story you’d like to see in this every (insert as of yet undesignated length of time).
(Sorry…but it’s hard to keep a consistent schedule when you work full time as you’ve got a novel coming out later this year…while writing its sequel. Mt time tends to vanish like it got Thanos snapped)