Literary Architecture 1: NOAH.

Imagine a universe, a plane. It expands infinitely in all directions. Distance has no meaning... there is no 'place' to begin... nowhere to end. A single step covers an infinite number of points of being. There is neither light or dark, no high, no low. It is a place with potential, but no kinetics. There is energy in infinity, but no means to recognize or exploit it.   Then, by the pure magic of creation, there is suddenly a beginning. A mind, an intellect reaches across the expanse, across the infinite distances and yes, across time, a position is chosen. Perhaps it is by intent, accident, or random chance, but there it is. You see it, don't you? A tiny graphite point. The creator has begun the interaction with that potential, energy fairly crackling across the infinite expanse, in all directions. From now, and forever, there is SOMETHING.  The point begins to move across the blankness, a miniscule point becoming a line, a curve, and the plane is forever changed, It isn't important what the moving point makes. A shape. It is defined, it has definition. it IS.   Fifty years later, the creation process isn't "done yet". Maybe this universe was created in six days or four point nine billion years... it isn't really done either, is it? 

The question isn't whether God created the world. The question is, is the creation process ever completed?

When I started this endeavor, it was an escape, a diversion that played to my strengths. I have, from my infancy really, had the capacity to make reality real. The childish adventures I went on, the worlds I visited, all have been fundamentally real to me. There still is a realm of Dinosaurs that lives in a closet in Lake Villa, Illinois. A fortress protected from the Nethyr Horde in Hays, Kansas. Amd then, when I could drive, suddenly there was Nyx, and thereafter, Nycos.  A living, expanding, developing and collapsing world that has grown right here alongside me.    So now to the subject at hand... how does one describe creation, so others can interact with it, make it real for themselves? Cave drawings in ancient times, carvings and heiroglyphs in tombs and temples, indeed language itself was devised expressly to do just that. We do call the process "Spelling' because with a string of five characters that can be replicated over and over, E,H,O,R, and S becomes a HORSE, a SHORE, or even a ROSE H. We literally cast a Spell when we conjure these images in the mind of another. That process, drawing on common learning, means the richest and poorest, the most elevated and most downtrodden, all can share the experience.    So, writers are creators, weaving the words into wonders. So are artists, using the same graphite and plane to convey time and emotion, the sculptors clawing imagies out of any particular media, or the songsmiths, hammering out tunes from sound. But in these experiences, it is one-way. The creator expounds; those experiencing the process are only receptors.   Let's return to that plane, that flat, undefined space. With your mind, draw a spiral from the center of that space, wide and smooth, expanding outward, at a gradually widening arc. Complete the arc when you have made six turns around the center with the pencil, and align the end of the spiral with the top of the page, the central point still in the middle.  If we drew the same image at the same time, we have probably drawn two different images... but we would describe them both in the same way, right?   But wait. Is that a graphite spiral, a concrete arcing line? No. For me, that is Nycos. Congratulations! you are a creator, too... because though we share a singular concept, we are not seeing the same thing. In fact, I can prove it. Roughly a third of the readers of this are left-handed, and naturally drew that spiral counter-clockwise, while most will go with the right-turn idea.  Now, you are probably seeing both images... the right and left curves.  In fact, depending on the width of your spiral the size of your image might be a full page, or only takes an inch or so in the middle. Again, more images of that spiral pour in as we contemplate all the possibilities...   Congratulations again! You now know what 'writer's block' feels like. Does your spiral look like mine, or how much different IS it? Too big? Too small? Left or right curve? Writers simply hit points in the story that leave too many alternatives.  But still more happens, here. Did I use a mechanical pencil with a defined width?  A soft lead, widening as it went, calligraphically widening in the lateral portion and narrowing in the upstroke? A dense one, thin and dusty and gray, or a heavy, dark furrow across the paper? There are even some of those arcs done in red or neon pink, because you didn't take me literally when I said pencil, figuring the graphite was also a metaphor.    Now, here is where the story really starts. I didn't draw a line at all. I drew an arc. a STORY arc. Stories start at a point, and ultimately end, This Nycos arc isn't an inscription on paper. it is an ever-curving arc of time, roughly six years in length, and having a starting point that , when compared with its end, has been elevated. It has, in effect, progressed. The passage of that time has seen rising and falling periods, but throughout the whole, the lines are parallels, and all happen in a playground of the mind.   If any of you know me, you know now why I subtitled this section Noah. To build your own Nycos, your own world, you have to have something to carry you through the storm, from beginning to end. You have to build an arc.