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@obrian-of-the-surface-world Glad to hear you’re so driven! Three or so ago I tried to start a blog-story like you’re doing (scarily, with an almost identical premise) but then dropped it when I found out it would disqualify the story from later traditional publication. Now I don’t care at all about trad publishing, so it kind of makes me laugh to look back on it!

BTW, if you want to see a member’s profile, you need to click on their avatar and then select the “profile” tab from the page you’re sent to. I can see yours that way.

> at some point, I stopped and thought I was putting away childish things
I mean, I don’t need to quote Lewis at you on this =P

I have a pretty boring motivation for writing. It’s just the only thing I think I could stand doing as a day job. I’d like to become a great enough writer I can write things that glorify the Christian worldview through their awesomeness, but I think I’m decades of life experience away from that yet. I prefer reading and writing in darker branches of fantasy and horror, at least at the moment! That might change as I get older and wiser.

> One of the main things I have seen in reading, movies, TV Shows and writing is a gradual shift of genres towards either hopelessness, brutality with no moral offset, and a separation of human beings from connecting with fellow humans.
Honestly? This is where fantasy came from. Outside of Christian circles, this is where the “nerds and geeks” subcultures have resided for literally decades. Before Tolkien and Lewis, we had MacDonald, but he was almost a shining beacon of Christianity (and even he was a universalist!) in the darkness of the newly-birthed genre that would eventually become fantasy.

Caroll, Eddison, Howard, Morris (who influenced both Lewis and Tolkien heavily!), Shelley, Kuttner, Wilde, Lovecraft, Leiber, Poe were all extremely influential to both the genre and to communities that have come later.

I work in a comic store. Most of the people I’ve come to know over the past few years are satanists, pagans, anti-Christians, people who grew up with the darker aspects of seminal modern fantasy resonant with them. The people who grew up in the Satanic Panic and with Christianity providing a vapid, infantile alternative to what felt like truth in the things they read.

Now these people are the ones consuming and creating media. Conservative evangelical Christianity is currently trying to push doctrine stripping mysticism, grandeur, and religion from Christianity, making it an even less meaningful institution than it was decades ago.

At least the darker, grimmer fantasies provide awe-ful representation of the divine. They at least portray “something bigger than ourselves.” In a culture where worldliness emphasizes carnal pleasure and freedom and liberty for all, and grim fantasy provides philosophy and something close to religion, what exactly does Christianity claim to offer for the here and now? Can we blame people for rejecting the vapid body of Christian fiction and authors?
If you’re changing that, then hats off to you! I hope some day I can do the same.