Goodbye WordPress, Hello Squarespace (& Other Big-Ass Updates)

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it finally happened. My new Squarespace website is finally up and running. Well, kind of. While I did complete the process to publish the website, it’s still processing the change in the domain name of prestonposits.com.

So far, it’s been everything I hoped it would be. It’s much more navigable than WordPress turned out to be, and I don’t have to worry about adding plugins that I need to pay for or playing Russian roulette with backend software mechanics that I barely understand.

That said, I won’t shut down the WordPress site just yet. I still need to copy all the posts I made (aside from update posts) and repost them on the Squarespace site. That’s going to take some time. On the bright side, though, it means I can focus more of my creative energies on the new two-part Divine Conspiracy story I’ve been meaning to write.

The premise is still the same as the one I explained in the Halloween update, but for those who need a refresher: The first part involves the Banks family traveling to Ireland to take down a resurrected Fomorian that threatens to bring massive death and destruction to the countryside. However, during that story, Finvarra and Oonagh (the king and queen of fae beings and Ricky’s adoptive parents) are kidnapped by Serpent People and taken to the lair of the eldritch gods Yig and Tsathoggua, which lies deep under the catacombs of Paris. Thus, the second part follows Peter Banks and his team as they enter the catacombs and recruit the services of a friendly commune of vampires, ghouls, and werewolves who live under the city to help rescue them.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve struggled a bit with starting the story. One of the big reasons why is that I was having trouble figuring out where in Ireland the story should start. After all the research I’ve conducted, however, I’ve decided to start it in County Meath, just north of Dublin. This is partly because of the several religious landmarks, both pagan and Christian, that lay within its borders (e.g., the Hill of Tara, Newgrange, and the Abbey of Kells). Of course, there’s a good chance the story could travel to other parts of the Emerald Isle. For instance, the Poisoned Glen in County Donegal is often reputed to be where the terrible Fomorian general Balor was slain by his grandson Lugh of the Tuatha de Danann. Maybe the Banks’ Fomorian is going there to accomplish some goal?

I’m feeling pretty good about this story idea. However, the first part is heavily inspired by the short story “Rawhead Rex” by Clive Barker, so I’d better be careful not to plagiarize his plot points. Of course, the second part owes a lot to Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, and their works are well within the public domain, so who cares if I rip them off?!

But in all seriousness, folks, it’s been fun on WordPress while it lasted, but I’ve got to move on to greener pastures now. I hope you’ll join me on the new and improved Preston Posits website in the future. I hope to see you soon!

P.S. I should also mention before I go that I’m considering expanding my social media presence in case that Space Karen emerald mine nepo-baby Elon Musk ends up finally fucking Twitter up beyond repair. So if you see a Tumblr or Reddit link on my Squarespace or DeviantArt pages sometime in the near future, know that I warned you in advance.

An Update for the Spooky Season

Happy Halloween, beautiful watchers! After a long absence, I decided to stop by again to inform you of some changes that will occur here and on DeviantArt over the next few months.

First of all, as I may have mentioned before, I have a new story idea involving The Divine Conspiracy that comes in two parts. The first involves the Banks family traveling to Ireland to take down a resurrected Fomorian that threatens to bring massive death and destruction to the countryside. However, in the course of that story, Finvarra and Oonagh (the king and queen of fae beings and Ricky’s adoptive parents) are kidnapped by Serpent People and taken to the lair of the eldritch gods Yig and Tsathoggua, which lies deep under the catacombs of Paris. Thus, the Banks’ must recruit the services of a friendly commune of vampires, ghouls, and werewolves who live under the city to help rescue them.

If you’re wondering how the story involving the Wampanoag tribe is going, I deleted it from DeviantArt in the end because I didn’t feel it was up to my usual standards. Also, I felt too much cognitive dissonance in being a white guy writing a story involving a colonized culture I’ve never had any contact with, which didn’t help matters. Therefore, as a person who has Irish ancestry on my mother’s side, I felt it would be a better idea to write a story involving that culture instead.

That being said, though, trying to get started on the Ireland story is proving surprisingly difficult. Maybe the solution is not to jump into a new long-form story so shortly after the last one. I’ve been promising Divine Conspiracy character profiles for a while now, so it might be a good idea to finally get started on those.

Of course, given what I said about quitting WordPress in the last update post, you may wonder how that’s going. Well, I haven’t really done anything much on that front since, but that might change, given my recent change in employment status.

You see, the hardware store where I work has been experiencing an upheaval recently as my boss is in the process of transitioning away from one distributor and moving to another. With the financial shockwaves this has produced, the boss has decided to temporarily lay me off, as she can no longer afford to pay me.

Of course, this gives me plenty of free time to shop around other website builders to find out which one best suits my needs. I’ve been increasingly keeping my eye on Squarespace as of late, and many of their blogging templates look very appealing, so don’t be surprised if I make a new update post announcing a new website sometime between now and Thanksgiving.

There’s not much else to talk about, so I’ll leave it here for now. I’ll keep you posted in case any other changes come about. Until next time, friends!

I’m Thinking About Quitting WordPress

Hello, beautiful watchers! I’m sure I caught some of you by surprise last month when I suddenly came out of my break to launch into a bitter rant about how Warner Bros. was stripping HBO Max for parts to try to pull off what basically amounts to a tax fraud scheme. But yeah, I guess I’m back now, but not entirely.

For one thing, the Divine Conspiracy story I’m writing for DeviantArt is only half written so far. I’ve been struggling with this one, honestly. I think that mainly has to do with the fact that it is based on the mythology of the indigenous Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts. I’m aware that Native Americans do not tend to take kindly to white people writing about their cultures in their fiction, for entirely understandable reasons. Indeed, the Wampanoag were among the first tribes in the continental U.S. to suffer at the hands of European settler-colonialists in the early 17th century. To be sure, I have done a lot of research to at least try not to get the stories wrong, and, barring a strongly worded letter from an actual Wampanoag tribesperson, I still intend to finish the story. Still, I think I’ll avoid involving indigenous Americans in my silly little fantasy stories in the future to prevent this kind of anxiety.

Another reason I’ve been posting less on this site recently is because I’m starting to think it may have been a mistake to set up my blog on this website in the first place. One of my biggest problems with this site is that it doesn’t feel very user-friendly to me. When you go to the blog’s main page, where it shows my most recent posts, it shows the entirety of the article instead of just a preview like on other blogs. This is a big problem since my articles can get pretty long, especially when it’s a topic I’m incredibly passionate about, like leftist politics and paranormal triangles and Watership Down.

Maybe it would help to share how I created this site in the first place. When my parents were gifting me books and blog posts on how to make money blogging, the one that really caught my eye was The Sassy Way to Starting a Successful Blog When You Have No Clue! by Gundi Gabrielle. I liked how it gave me a step-by-step method for creating a blog and introduced me to names like Namecheap and Inmotion Hosting, which was helpful for someone as indecisive as myself.

After almost three years, however, it doesn’t seem like PrestonPosits is going anywhere. In all that time, I think I’ve only gotten one comment that wasn’t blocked by my spam filter. Growth seems to be going at a snail’s pace if it’s even growing at all. And, as I said earlier, the site doesn’t feel very user-friendly. So what is this poor boy to do?

First of all, I should probably clarify that I am not interested in making money through blogging anymore. It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s more that I don’t think I have a realistic chance in our hyper-stratified late-stage capitalist economy. That is unless I take the Gary Vaynerchuk route and spend the next ten years of my life working 15 hours a day, which… I’d honestly rather hang myself.

The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery- Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness, 1932

As for where I might move PrestonPosits if I do decide to quit WordPress, I’ve been browsing around other website builders like Wix and Squarespace. Several content creators I follow on YouTube have talked a lot about Squarespace in particular in sponsorship segments, including Dominic Noble, Quinton Reviews, and Schafrillas Productions. True, they’re being paid to say all that stuff, but they still make the site sound intriguing, and they even built websites of their own on Squarespace, so it’s got to be good for something, right?

But what do you guys think? Am I jumping the gun on this one? Is there a way for me to improve this blog without moving it to a different site entirely? Are Wix or Squarespace or Bluehost any good? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

As always, stay safe and keep vaccinated, beautiful watchers, and stay tuned to my DeviantArt page to keep up with the latest Divine Conspiracy stories. Until next time!

Taking Another Break

Is it weird to write another update post so soon after the last one? Whatever! It’s my website, and I can do what I want with it!

But yeah, much like last summer, I’m going to be taking a break from the blog for a while to concentrate on writing Divine Conspiracy material on DeviantArt. I’m not planning to make this a yearly tradition; that’s just how the cookie crumbled both this year and last.

I don’t know how long I’ll be away working on the piece. Much like the “pilot” I released last year, this story focuses on the Banks family getting embroiled in a supernatural mystery, except this one involves them going out into the field alongside their fellow Templar knights. Specifically, they head to Massachusetts and team up with the local Wampanoag tribe to determine what’s behind the recent spike in activity surrounding the so-called “Bridgewater Triangle” and soon discover that it may have something to do with the long-buried mythology of the local indigenous tribes.

Writing this story is likely to take longer than the pilot, mainly because I’m writing this new story from scratch, unlike the pilot where I had an extensive rough draft to work off of. As such, I needed to take some time to do research, especially by reading the book Spirit of the New England Tribes by anthropologist William S. Simmons. Simmons’ book proved especially helpful in informing me of the truth of the folktales the Wampanoag and their neighbors used to tell (or at least as much truth as can be ascertained given how fiercely the Puritans tried to stamp them out).

As for the blog, I’ll still check in regularly to empty the spam filter and update plugins whenever needed. I’m also hoping I might be able to squeeze in time to write another P.J.’s Ultimate Playlist or Complete Noob’s Guide to the Left entry while I’m at it. I’m also pretty eager to start that series on esoteric spirituality that I’ve been promising you guys for a while now. We’ll see how that turns out!

Also, if you’re wondering what’s going on medically, given how much I discussed that in the last update post, things are going just fine. That bad case of the flu is long past, and while it’s clear by this point that I definitely have hemochromatosis, we managed to catch it at the right time where I only needed three phlebotomies to get my iron back down to healthy levels, so no worries there! That’s all for now. Stay healthy, beautiful watchers!

A Very, Very Sick Update Post

Hello, everyone. You may have noticed that my upload schedule has recently become a lot slower on the blog. There are a few big reasons for this.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I’ve wanted to devote more energy to The Divine Conspiracy on DeviantArt. That is certainly true, as I have been writing a new story centering on the Bridgewater Triangle and how the urban legend intersects with indigenous Wampanoag mythology. Progress has been slow, mostly because I’ve been reading the book Spirit of the New England Tribes to understand their spiritual traditions better.

But that’s far from the only reason progress has been slow. For one thing, I recently decided to have myself tested for hemochromatosis, or iron overload in the bloodstream. My Dad has the disorder, and with all the tests I’ve been subjecting myself to (blood tests, MRIs), it’s increasingly likely that he passed it down to me. Fortunately, the disorder is easy enough to treat. Dad takes care of his by frequently donating blood. A doctor also informed me that eating red meat also contributes to iron buildup, so I’ve been wondering lately if going on a mostly vegetarian diet would help at all (I say “mostly” because, while I don’t have much of an appetite for most meat products these days, I’m not sure I’m ready to give up cheeseburgers or meat lover’s pizza).

On top of that, I also came down with a nasty cold this week that has left me more exhausted than I have ever felt in recent memory. Mom and I believe it is influenza, mostly because it is definitely a lot worse than most colds I’ve had even though a COVID test I took yesterday came out negative. Either way, yesterday morning was an absolute slog. I got up to eat breakfast, only got halfway through because my appetite just wasn’t there, and went back to bed for the next five hours. You can imagine that I didn’t have the energy to stand up, let alone write anything.

The good news is that I’m pretty sure Thursday morning was rock bottom for me, and now there’s no way to go but up. You can likely expect a new post on the blog sometime next week or the week after. There won’t be a big birthday retrospective like the one I did for Watership Down last year, and it won’t be about that TV series I hinted at in previous update posts.

For those who are curious, I was referring to The Shannara Chronicles, based on the Shannara series by Terry Brooks. I remember seeing the first season of the show back when it first aired on MTV and being profoundly disappointed in the choices the series creators made. However, I couldn’t find any streaming services that offered it for free. I especially did not want to pay $17.99 to watch it on Amazon Prime and end up lining that vampire Bezos’ pockets.

Seriously, he should be paying me to watch his streaming service with all that money he’s making!

Instead, this year’s mini-retrospective will be about a very underrated heavy metal band that is almost as near and dear to my heart as Terry Brooks’ books are. I won’t say which one just yet. Just keep a lookout for it in the near future.

And that’s everything I wanted to discuss with you guys today. Remember to wash your hands and keep your masks on because we may be done with COVID, but COVID sure as hell isn’t done with us! Until next time, friends.

Another Update Post!

Hello again, beautiful watchers! I figured that since I have ended a somewhat ongoing series on this blog recently, it was time that I give some more updates on what’s going on on this site in the future.

First of all, many of the future blog ideas I mentioned in my New Year’s update post are still things I’m interested in. The first one I tend to tackle is the next “Noob’s Guide to the Left” entry, where I plan to compare and contrast Stalinism and Trotskyism to better understand their place in both Russian and communist history. I’m also still interested in examining myths surrounding the 2020 election and the Capitol insurrection (as well as “ancient aliens” myths), and I’ve also got some new ideas for “P.J.’s Ultimate Playlist.”

As for the desire to talk more about animation, I still haven’t decided how to tackle that subject on this blog. I do have some ideas, but I think I’d prefer to sleep on them a bit more before I fully commit to them. I also want to expand upon some spiritual traditions I mentioned in the post I wrote a while back about my religious beliefs, particularly ones involved in Western esotericism, as that is one of the special interests that my autistic brain is focused on at the moment and also because of the significant influence they have on The Divine Conspiracy.

Speaking of which, that is another significant change that will occur on this blog. You see, with all of the nonfiction writing I’ve been doing on PrestonPosits, I’ve found I have very little time for my fiction writing endeavors on DeviantArt, including The Divine Conspiracy. I won’t deny that my insecurities as a writer have played a part in that as well. However, I figured it was time to commit to the project much more concretely. And so I’ve decided that from now on, I’ve decided that I will be devoting every other writing day solely to DeviantArt.

This is undoubtedly going to affect my upload rate on PrestonPosits. My upload rate is already slow because I’m working three out of every seven days of the week, and I never have the energy to write after I get home every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On the other hand, I often go months without uploading on DeviantArt, which I imagine must be immensely annoying for my watchers on that site. Unfortunately, this is the best compromise I can come up with at the moment. This means that I’ll be working on the next Divine Conspiracy story this Thursday, then PrestonPosits on Saturday, Divine Conspiracy on Sunday, then PrestonPosits next Tuesday, and so on.

This likely means that I won’t be doing a large birthday retrospective this May like the one I did last year on Watership Down. I do have an idea for a smaller retrospective on a T.V. series that adapted a certain book series I’m a huge fan of (rather poorly, in my opinion), but I’d prefer to keep that a secret for now.

My biggest focus for the near future is seeing what happens when the Banks family decides to go toe-to-toe with the supernatural forces of the Bridgewater Triangle. Makes sure to tune in to my DeviantArt account to see how that turns out! I hope you’ll see me there, friends!

New Year, New Updates!

It’s a new year, beautiful watchers, and it’s coming upon almost two years since I started this blog. Incidentally, it was actually one of my 2020 New Years’ resolutions to start this blog. Now, in 2022, I’ve three more. In order of the most to least likely I’m am to actually accomplishing it, they are:

  • Start doing sit-ups everyday. I feel like I should be doing a little more exercise considering that I’m usually spending 70% of my days off sitting down, either in front of a computer or reading a book. Besides, I’m kind of curious to see how far the number I can do in one sitting goes up by the end of the year.
  • Get a drivers’ license. I flunked the first driving course I took when I was in high school, and another one I took during college ended up getting cut short because of what I assume was a bureaucratic foul-up. This isn’t to say that I’m not totally blameless: I tend to get easily distracted, which certainly isn’t an ideal quality in a potential driver. However, I feel like I would be less of a burden on my parents if I was able to drive myself to wherever I needed to go.
  • Learn how to play the guitar. It feels kind of weird being as obsessed with music as I am and yet not being able to play an instrument. The problem is that the instruments I have available to play on hand are… less than satisfactory. One is a classical guitar made by Hohner that has a body so big that I can barely get my arms around it. The other is a much smaller children’s beginner guitar made by First Act that is much easier to handle but is missing its lower E string. Of course, assuming that I manage to surmount those obstacles, there’s still the matter of whether or not I have the patience to actually master the riffs. Still, there’s plenty of easy ones to start with. Pantera’s “Walk” might be a good place to start.

But you probably don’t care about all that. You’re probably more interested in what I have planned for writing on the blog (and possibly also DeviantArt). To be honest, however, I’m kind of low on ideas at the moment. True, I still have ongoing series like “P.J.’s Ultimate Playlist” and “The Complete Noob’s Guide to the Left” to keep me occupied. But beyond that, I’m having trouble coming up with new ideas beyond direct follow-ups to subjects I’ve already written about. Indeed, beyond the series I mentioned above, I have two main concrete ideas right now:

  • The first is a follow-up to the one I wrote about ten common climate change denial myths. I’ve come to believe that the original top ten list didn’t cover enough myths, especially because I’ve since learned about major ones that I missed, like the idea that volcanoes emit more carbon than humans. I’ve also heard new ones from Dad or other relatives (like one involving a 27,000 year solar cycle that’s causing the Earth to start moving away from the Sun, thus causing a period of cooling… maybe. I don’t remember the details). You can probably expect that one sometime later this month.
  • The next are two more ideas for posts relating to the subject of paranormal triangles, which I think may come out sometime next month (which is fitting, since my first paranormal triangles article came out on February of last year). The first is going to look at ten of the most infamous disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle to determine whether or not more mundane factors might have led to their vanishing. The second is going to look at Ivan T. Sanderson’s concept of “vile vortices”, of which the Bermuda Triangle is a part, to determine whether or not these places really are as dangerous as Sanderson claimed they were.

I’ve also been considering making lists debunking myths relating to the 2020 presidential election and myths relating to the January 6th insurrection. I’ll also definitely be continuing my look into offshoots of Marxist-Leninist philosophy in my “Noob’s Guide” series in my never-ending quest to prove that there is an alternative to the neoliberal capitalist system that made the Capitol insurrection happen in the first place.

But beyond all that, there is something else that has been bugging me. I’ve mentioned before that I am a huge animation buff. But I feel that hasn’t been reflected that well in my work on this site. Aside from the article I wrote on the “animation age ghetto” and the reviews I wrote of Watership Down’s three animated adaptations so far, I haven’t done much in that arena. I still need a bit of time to figure out how I might remedy that, although the best idea I have right now is maybe going through each year going backward from 2021 and seeing which films and T.V. series were the best of each year. Maybe. We’ll see.

On top of all that, I want to focus more attention this year on The Divine Conspiracy on DeviantArt. I find it hard to muster up the courage to actually work on my “magnum opus,” though, mainly because I find the amount of ambition that I’ve invested into the concept intimidating. I have so many things that I want this series to be. I want to explore ideas from the esoteric sides of religion and spirituality that I barely even understand. I want to convincingly show the weight of the cosmic horror elements pressing down on the Banks family. I want it to be an accurate portrait of the world as I see it, with the dark supernatural forces battling the Banks’ constantly exacerbating reactionary and regressive forces that are tearing both America and the world apart. I want to be sure I can make my characters actual characters and not just one note stereotypes and stock archetypes. Above all else, though, I want it to be a good fantasy series that makes people laugh, cry, grip their seats in terror, and hits the same emotions as any of the great fantasy epics of our time.

But I’ll deal with those struggles as they come, and my PrestonPosits watchers can expect a further short update regarding my activities on DeviantArt in the near future. For now, though, let’s hope this New Year is better than the last two. I look forward to what I can accomplish in the year to come, and I hope you’ll stick with me for the ride. Until next time, beautiful watchers!

It’s Good to Be Back!

Hi there, blog watchers! I just wanted to let you know that I’ve finished the Divine Conspiracy project on DeviantArt and am ready to return to PrestonPosits. I just started on the 9/11 Truther conspiracy list I promised all the way back in July. My plan is for that to come out on Saturday the 11th, exactly twenty years to the day after the tragedy. My plans to revisit paranormal triangles in October are also still on the table, as are other potential supernatural subjects that I won’t spoil here.

I also mentioned something involving a list of anarchist philosophies that I wanted to do sometime in the future. I have given that subject some more thought, and I think a project like that might be better accomplished as an individual examination of each philosophy rather than a comparative list. Anarcho-primitivism would get its own articles, as would Proudhonian mutualism, egoist anarchism, collectivist anarchism, etc. I’d also be willing to examine some leftist philosophies that don’t fall under the anarchist umbrella, like Marxist-Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Luxemburgism, etc.

But that’s all for me to figure out once the 9/11 article is finished. I hope you’ll stay tuned for that. Otherwise, this is Preston, signing off.

Taking a Break

So, my big retrospective on Watership Down is finally complete. You may ask, “Preston, what’s next as far as writing on the blog goes?” And my answer to that would be…

Yeah, I think I deserve to have a break from this blog after completing such a big project.

Don’t get me wrong; this doesn’t mean I won’t be doing anything with the blog for the next several weeks. I still need to check up on it regularly to see if any of the plugins need updating. Plus, there are a few more modifications I’d like to do on the technical side. For example, I need to figure out why the address bar still says this site is “not secure,” even though I know I have SSL certification. I also need to decide which of my articles on here I want to enshrine as “cornerstone content.” Maybe there are some other things I’ve forgotten about, but for now, let’s discuss what I’ll be doing in the interim.

I won’t be taking a break from writing altogether during this period. I’ve been neglecting my DeviantArt profile for a while now because of how this retrospective has consumed my spare time for the last two months. Indeed, I haven’t posted any of my writing there for the last five months, despite constantly promising my watchers that I would have the first part of my Divine Conspiracy pilot out by the end of the month. I wish to remedy that sometime between now and September, and The Divine Conspiracy is what I will be primarily working on during that period.

So, yeah. The remainder of July and the whole of August is how long this break will last. I will still be writing throughout that break (barring a week-long family camping trip the last week of July), just not on Preston Posits. I may still find some room to slip a smaller, less work-intensive article here or there. I’ve particularly been interested in doing a “P.J.’s Ultimate Playlist” post on a Joy Division song I heard not too long ago, so you may expect something like that in August.

As for when the longer articles return in September, you might expect that essay I proposed at the end of May, where I compare different anarchist philosophies to see which ones I like best. I was originally going to do it as a ranked list similar to my “Problem of Evil” article, but I decided against formatting it that way because I don’t want to contribute to leftist infighting. Also, aside from anarcho-primitivism to a certain extent, I don’t really have any moral objections to any anarchist philosophy, because they basically all want the same thing I do; death to all unjust hierarchical systems, be they centralized governments, multinational corporations, and unjust law enforcement apparatuses.

I also want to make a top ten list like my one about climate change myths, this time debunking 9/11 Truther conspiracies, as the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attack comes upon us, so probably expect that one first. Of course, October is not that far off either, so maybe you can expect me to make a continuation of my paranormal triangles list, as well as other spooooooky subjects.

But yeah, the long and short of it is, don’t expect to see me much on this blog before the end of August. But maybe stick around my DeviantArt page to finally get a taste of what The Divine Conspiracy has to offer. Here’s a link to follow for those who are interested: https://www.deviantart.com/pjdominy.

That’s all for now, beautiful watchers. Until next time, take care.

Announcing the May Retrospective

So, for a while on this website, I’ve been teasing a retrospective for the month of May since my birthday falls on that month, and I want to do a series of essays talking about a fictional work that had a big impact on me during my formative years. I’ve mentioned before on my blog entry about The Divine Conspiracy that I was a bit slow to discover the wonders of fictional literature. There were plenty of novels assigned to me by my English classes that I thoroughly enjoyed (The Outsiders, The Hobbit, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Fahrenheit 451, and probably some others that escape me now).

Especially as I got into my high school years, I began to seek out novels on my own time, like The Hunger Games trilogy, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Stephen King’s The Shining, and Terry Brooks’ Shannara series. But out of all the books I discovered during that period, there is but one that I can honest to God say actually changed my life. That book was written by a humble British civil servant named Richard Adams, and its name was Watership Down.

Cover of the Scribner 2005 trade paperback edition, which I own a copy of

I mentioned in the “Animation Age Ghetto” essay I did a while back that I watched the 1978 film adaptation when I was around 8-10 years old after Mom rented it from a video store. I rediscovered it on YouTube during high school, and it (along with Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away) woke me up to the fact that animation was more than a genre of children’s entertainment, which I had been deluding myself into thinking for most of my teenage years. From there, I purchased the novel on my Amazon Kindle, as well as some of Richard Adams’ other novels, like Shardik and The Plague Dogs. And it shortly grew into a life-changing rabbit hole (no pun intended) that led me on a journey that ended with me deciding to become a writer myself when I attended college just a few short years later.

There are five works from the franchise that I will be covering for this retrospective:

  • The original novel, as well as the 1996 sequel Tales from Watership Down
  • The 1978 film adaptation
  • The 1999 children’s television series
  • The discography of the British punk/metal band Fall of Efrafa, whose Warren of the Snares trilogy is loosely based on the Lapine mythology presented in the books
  • The 2018 Netflix miniseries

So yeah, I’ve got a pretty busy month ahead of me as far as writing goes. I’ve also got that essay on my relationship with autism spectrum disorder that I still have to finish. I also want to get the first part of my Divine Conspiracy pilot uploaded on DeviantArt before the end of the month, come hell or high water. The Watership Down franchise is something I am very passionate about, however, so it should be relatively easy for me.

Things are gonna get pretty busy over the next month, beautiful watchers. I hope you’re ready to come along for the ride!