The Origins of Night Song

Frame from the original Night Song animation

The original look of Aldo the Undead Dog Boy

There's been some curiosity about how "Night Song" came about and how long it took to write it. 

The story began as an animation experiment back in 2003. I wanted to see if I could make a cartoon of a pile of bones reconstituting back into a demon form. So for that to make sense, I had to also animate the weird ritual that went into it. I made the cartoon, and posted it on a site for student and indie filmmakers called Triggerstreet. Surprisingly, the response was pretty good, and a lot of people wanted to know the back story. So I started developing the story and making more animations to go with it. I finally abandoned the animation project around 2009, but I had the whole story pretty much roughed out. So when I entered semi-retirement in 2011, I thought it might be an opportunity to do something with the story itself, and I started this blog where I serialized the rough draft. It was fine until I started getting busy with graphics work. Then I just didn’t have the time. Also, I didn’t seem to be reaching anybody with the blog anyway. So I abandoned that at the end of last year, and figured I’d just go ahead and finish it off as a book, and enter the world of self publishing.

So basically, I guess you could say I worked on the story off and on for about 11 years. But I really only actually worked on it as a book for about 6 months.

That’s about all there is to that.

Remembering Thalidomide

Back in the early '60s, thalidomide was marketed, prescribed and sold in Europe to pregnant women as a means to alleviate morning sickness. 

Although it was not approved in the United States, the Richardson-Merrell pharmaceutical company repeatedly applied to the FDA for approval. These applications were denied because of insufficient clinical testing.

So, the pharmaceutical company enlisted local, family physicians to give out the drug to their patients without telling them. Basically, doctors were paid to experiment on their patients. At the time, apparently, this was considered a perfectly fine thing to do - until an abnormal number of children were born with horrific defects. 

It actually took an act of Congress to keep doctors from running experiments on their unsuspecting patients! 

Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey of the FDA is credited with saving countless lives by refusing to approve the application, and the story is supposed to have a happy ending.

But here's the thing. Doctors were beginning to report evidence of problems with thalidomide and pregnant women as early as 1956. Richardson-Merrell made their application to the FDA in 1960! They didn't withdraw the application until 1962. 

Everyone agrees that the numbers of children affected by thalidomide throughout the world numbered well into the thousands. The numbers get a little more obscure when you look at the United States. The AMA says the number is down around 17. Other estimates put it at around 100. 

I don't know, but it seems to me that I can remember at least one kid my age with hands at his elbows, and I feel that there may have been more that I had seen. Enough so that it wasn't shocking or terribly unusual. To me, that suggests that the number was probably significantly higher than 100 nationwide.

Here's a link to an AMA article that appeared in their Journal of Ethics in July 2001.

http://virtualmentor.ama-assn.org/2001/07/prol1-0107.html

One of the underlying themes of Night Song is that if you trust in authority and believe that they have your best interests at heart, you not only put yourself at the mercy of their personal agendas, but you will likely also have a heavy price to pay for their ignorance. And the louder they proclaim their authority, the greater the depth that their personal agenda and ignorance is likely to be.

I'm doing it right now.

General Purpose Prayer

Here's another prayer that is especially suited to our times. It comes in handy when one has to deal with fundamentalist believers of any ilk. This includes anyone who foolishly believes they have been endowed with the God-given right to be right, and are prepared to go to any lengths to defend that right. These folks would rather kill, or even die rather than question their belief in their rights. 

That really doesn't make them bad people, though. Passion for one's belief or world view is a very good thing. But it seems to me, if you're willing to kill or die for what you believe in, you should understand that it is for a belief - rather than the object of the belief. 

How do we separate the two?

Well, now. I guess that's the real question.

Morning Prayer

This is one of my favorite prayers, and I say it just about every day. 
Y'see? I'm not an atheist, I'm not a Satanist, I'm not a pagan and I have no hidden agenda to corrupt anybody. 
I don't want to start a new religion, but I DO think we can do better with the religions that we've got.
One of the things that I hoped to accomplish with "Night Song" (available here), was to try to show a different way of thinking about spirituality. 

"Hmmph," says Sam the Dog.
"No, Sam. The world isn't ready to know about the 'Nrgmpht' quite yet."

The public domain image was restored by Dawn Hudson and is available at http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=76642&picture=the-morning-prayer

Maladar, the Mad Druid of Carthage

I've had a couple of questions about Maldar, so I'll throw a little bit of the back, back story in here.

Around 153 BC, in the city of Carthage, there lived a Druid. True to the culture of the Druids, he was a traveling bard who serviced the Celtic peoples of the Iberian Peninsula and the Celtic communities that lay scattered in the lands of the Phoenicians further south. 

This particular Druid in this particular place in this particular time was dabbling in some particularly arcane arts, and playing with some especially dangerous spells. Unfortunately, at this same time, an especially unstable demon named Hattatep had made its way onto the Plateau in the Shadow Lands, and was trying to gain access. The two found each other, and poor, deluded  Maladar found himself being possessed by the demon. 

Over the course of this possession process, Hattatep gave Maladar a lot of information and power and enough promises to trick Maladar into continuing the process of possession.

While this actually could have been a very good thing for humanity as a whole because it might have opened a Human Gate into the Shadow Lands, Maladar started to loose his nerve at the very end. 

When Hattatep left him to make the final preparations for building the demon Gate in the Shadow Lands, Maladar took the opportunity to write down everything that Hattatep had told him about the Shadow Lands so that others would know to stay clear. His plan was to kill himself the moment that Hattatep returned and took full possession of his body. He figured that way Hattatep would be defeated and that would be the end of it.

However, in killing himself after the demon had passed through, he merely managed to bring the demon into the world - albeit in a non-corporeal form. This displeased the demon considerably, and he began a campaign of mischief and mayhem that ultimately led to the decimation of Carthage by the Romans, the unobstructed rise of the Roman Empire, the utter obliteration of the Celts as well as anything connected to the Druids, and basically formed the foundation of the world we know today. 

But Hattatep did eventually manage to gain a kind of physical existence. Though he was unable to totally manifest in corporeal form, he was able to tell other wizards  how to build a different kind of world for him in which he could find a virtual physical existence. Every day, billions of people all over the world access this world with nothing more than a mention of Hattatep’s name - or http as it is known in the common tongue.

But while the story of Hattatep ends there, the story of Maladar - or rather Maladar’s writings continue. In 1938, Nazi archeologists discovered Maladar’s writings while doing research in the Middle East. One of them took special interest in the writings, and began what turned into an obsession that led her to the ancient practices, beliefs, traditions and artifacts of the ancient Ishtar cults.

This ultimately resulted in her managing to resurrect Ishtar, and free the Old Gods from the Pit.

And that’s the story of Maladar, The Mad Druid of Carthage.

Night Song is Published!

Click to view on Amazon.com

Actually, it has been available in print and as an e-book for over a month. I'm just now getting around to updating everything. 

If you were following the serialized story on this blog, then you got about half of the book already. There were some significant changes when I put together the final draft. The gist of the story stayed pretty much the same, but I would still recommend at least skimming through the first half before diving into the new stuff. 

The book finishes with three chapters - "The Invisible Empire," "Dr. Fangleflykt's Magnificent Machine," and of course the "Epilogue." I also put in an Appendix called " Fragment of the Testimony of Maladar, A Druid of Carthage - c. 153 B.C." This is basically meant to serve as a quick reference for some of the more arcane parts of the story.

I could have ended the story with the line "They all went crazy and lived happily ever after," but that really wouldn't be fair, so the ending is a bit more elaborate.

Anyway, the plan for the blog now is to expand on some of the concepts of "Night Song." The book is based on a whole metaphysical system that readers might enjoy digging into a bit. But of course I'll also use the blog for whatever random things arise that might remotely pertain to "Night Song." 

So buy the book! if you want to read the book, but don't want to buy it, let me know and we'll work something out. But whatever you do, be sure to leave a review on Amazon.com - especially if you like the book!