Publishing delays remind me of Joseph Campbell

OK, firstly:

REEEEEEEALLY sorry.

Second book shoulda been published by now. But things... happened.

The cover artist was off doing important research for his degree. I was recovering from health problems and also went off shaping the minds of a generation to my own villainous whims under the guise of Scripture Union activities. The publisher's been looking at other projects and doing, y'know, efficient publisher things, and couldn't get in contact with the other of two of us for a while.

But, good news: we've got it together now.

Seriously, literally in the earliest possible hours of this morning (or last night, depending which way you look at it) we managed to get all the pieces together and in the right place on the publisher's computery systems.

We ARE going to make the August publication date I promised. Just... later than planned.

So, please, don't give up now. We're so close to this thing that if it was a person it could justifiably hit us with a harassment lawsuit at this point.

On an entirely less relevant topic, though, the trials of getting this book published seemed oddly fitting in a meta kind of way when I recently considered my own work in the light of the Campbellian Monomyth (yeah, I do this kind of thing sometimes. It's very sad.)

The Campbellian Monomyth, less pretentiously (and more awesomely) called The Hero's Journey is arguably the oldest story in the world, from every culture simultaneously, because the idea is basically that there is one story - one sequence of events that satisfies the inherent desire for self-contained narrative which is a part of being human - on which every story about any hero ever is, with greater or lesser degrees of variation and subversion, based.

There's a hero, or a person who will become a hero. He (it's more often a he, but not always) recieves a call to adventure, which he doesn't want to leave his existing life for but one way or another has to. Some external source of help provides him with something he will need in order to complete the adventure ahead of him. He consciously crosses a threshold into the unknown. In his first true experience of the unknown world outside his comfort zone, he is overcome and forced to look inward, learning more about himself, his culture or his goals than he probably wanted. This gives him the ability to start fighting back, setting off down a narrative path where he mist overcome various trials. On the way, he comes to know true love and true temptation. Eventually he confronts the narrative's local symbol of power, and in doing so is able to atone, overcome his own ego and remove the last obstacles between himself and the goal of his quest. In a symbolic death and rebirth sequence, the hero's character development is completed and, in the climatic culmination of all that has gone before, the goal is finally acquired. His quest completed, the hero eventually decides or is compelled to return to his comfort zone (though that zone is inevitably slightly different now than it once was), bringing with him all that he has acquired on his quest for the betterment of himself and his peers, finding for himself a place in life where he feels he now belongs and implicitly living a content and enriched life from that point on.

That's a HUGE compression and generalisation of the full thing. Anyone who's actually read Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" is probably really irritated by my oversimplification, but the basic points still stand.

If I think about it for any length of time, pretty much everything I've ever written can be viewed and explored through the lens of the Hero's Journey. I mean, that seems obvious, the whole point of the thing is that, if you make a satisfying story, it will probably end up looking a bit like the Hero's Journey, because that's the kind of story people find satisfying. But I find it kinda interesting to apply it to the Mediochre series, because from that point of view the series is serving a dual function: it details the Hero's Journey of Charlotte pretty-much from start to finish (except maybe without the reluctance to heed the call bit... and arguments could be made about how straight I'm playing some of the others), but at the same time it provides a very zoomed-in look at the Hero's Journey of Mediochre. As the series goes on I will be bringing in some more information about the start of Mediochre's journey and things will start to develop to bring him gradually closer to the end, but really the entire book series from Mediochre's point of view is set in that middle bit. The Road of Trials. Even more specifically, it really all deals with the experience of temptation. When we first meet him, Mediochre's seemingly already been through everything before that bit, having become an established and capable hero already, and these books are, from his point of view, the story of the obstacles he has to overcome in order to reach the point where he can complete his character development and, in a sense, go home.

I was only vaguely familiar with Campbell's work until recently, so I didn't notice all this until pretty-much yesterday. So it's kinda fitting that it was also yesterday that we as a publisher/author/artist team were able to finally overcome the current most immediate trial on OUR road to the end goal of finishing the series.

I don't doubt that, somewhere, God is nodding appreciatively at the fractality of his creation. Because God is totally a Joseph Campbell fan.

WOW, that's a geeky and rambling bunch of words I just dropped on you all.

TL;DR:

Second book published real soon, I PROMISE. In the meantime, go read The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

Peace Out,

Calum P Cameron

Author With a Thousand Remarkably Similar Faces