Lore

I didn’t realize I wanted to design and build a zero-pollution city until after serving in the military.  They say the military amplifies who you already are, and it certainly did here; before, I liked to listen to music, sing, learn instruments, sketch, draw, and design beautiful creations such as custom homes.  I liked a variety of things, and was fairly good at them.  After?  I had so many ideas in all those fields and more, and liked trying so many additional things, I had to spend all my free time just keeping up with them, and it was a Herculean task getting them all recorded, digitized, edited, polished up, and uploaded for others to learn about, too.  What was once just a few random hobbies had turned into a lifelong passion and serious set of goals.  My lone, initial, fairly-commonplace dreamhouse idea from junior high… had blossomed into a massive flagship community blueprint full of more innovations than most people ever hear of.  Woh…

If you’d asked me back in previous years about the lore behind my dream-community, I would have laughed and not known what you were talking about.  I’d only ever heard of ‘lore’ in major video and computer games, such as World of Warcraft; the lore was a collection of quest backstories and general fictional historical information about the overall plot through the expansion packs.  Professional writers came up with it, and most players didn’t bother to read even the brief pop-ups that gave glimpses into that richly detailed bigger picture.  Why on Earth would a nobody like me come up with lore for a fantasy city that hadn’t even been formally proposed?

But now Inisfree does have its own lore; it has traditions and knowledge, some of which are very powerful and esoteric.  That lore is held by a particular group within that amazing construct, and they do, just as the definition says, typically pass it on to other people by word of mouth.  Inisfreean lore goes back eons, as well as forward that long.  It combines and ties together virtually endless information from almost countless sources.  It may be the best and biggest collection of lore from around the planet.  It rivals even that of my greatest idols.

And it all started when my own life’s lore was taking shape; years ago, before I realized any of this was happening, my own knowledge and traditions, and the traditions and knowledge used by the rare people who got to know me back then, were forming into a critical mass and momentum all their own.  Here is the path of baby-steps that my lore, and the lore of Inisfree, took until they were surpassing milestones:

1. ON: A single normal two-story house sketched out for my high-school sweetheart gets made, copied once or twice, and left to the back of my mind.  It would one day, more than a decade later, start to resurface, first as my frustration at not being able to find the original or its copies, and later as the basis for Inisfree’s current and permanent, much more massive, private estate of the founder; the Governor’s Mansion.

2. OFF: Lost during a half-decade emotional rollercoaster ending with my enlistment, that first dreamhouse sketch seemed gone forever, its beloved details still barely anchored in the recesses of my mind.  All art stopped during this time; only a very emotionally-painful journal full of romantic hopes and dark venting remained.

3. ON: Scattered ideas jotted down hurriedly on scraps of paper, then hidden in MRE trash and smuggled home from the heart of the Middle East, across oceans and skies, continents and secret bases, were the embers of my truest self stoked and returned to raging flames by the many Hells I found myself stuck in at various times during the Corps and deployments around the world.  The more I faced death, the more unstoppable my urge to get out (and protect) all my good ideas became.  Every moment became precious, every idea valuable, every potential threat to my work taken very seriously.

4. OFF: Stuck in storage in a stack of boxes and crates, with bullets and artillery shells, all the art, writing, books, and other wonders I’d started to amass during my time in the military… seemed to be building up to the point of bursting through the garage-style pull-down metal door.  I had no time, freedom, or peace & quiet to finish any of those many things I’d been pushed to start and hide, though, so there they sat… as the months ticked on… into years.

5. ON: Thinking of a one-room shanty –which became the Jam Shanty now in the greenbelt outside that Governor’s Mansion– I made a couple brainstorming sketches to see how compact I could really make my likely, hyper-efficient, bare-bones living-space.  The idea was to drop ‘off the grid’ after exiting the Corps; I would cut all contact with the bizarre civilization and people I had at that time had more than enough of, and this would allow me to focus on my music and other art again; the military had indeed amplified that pre-military urge in me, and now I was more committed to it than ever.  The shanty had only two rooms; a bathroom in the corner, and a main room wrapped around it which was subdivided into an office space, and a small stage for musical instruments arranged how my future band members would stand.  It was a ‘tiny house’ before I even knew the term –and before that movement had even caught on.

6. OFF: Forgot about it during my rave years; desperate to feel alive, normal, and youthful again, I dove into the party scene, trying bars, clubs, and raves –including all the underground and illegal ones, such as those outdoors at street races.  This gave me some inspiration, and a few decent flings with dancers and other girls, but ultimately led to my urge bubbling back up and boiling over, leaving me with crippling panic attacks that nothing helped with –until I made time to refocus on my art.

7. ON: Colored pencils brought the expanded square plane of community ideas to new life, and pyramids with biotecture were drawn in.  I pulled out my old drafting table from junior high, and used it in my first post-military apartment to expand the old ideas for a normal house, a normal shanty, and a normal walled outpost/compound… into a much more beautiful, flowing, and nature-adorned complex promising to be as big as a town.  It was still just for ‘people’, though; whichever humans might want to live and vacation there with me –and still just a hobby or a fun daydream, not taken seriously, and not even seeming possible, even by me… but it made me happy, and I started paying attention to that fact.

8. OFF: Again, I put the growing ‘pipe-dream’ of this grand idea on hold, thinking it just a hobby to pass the time and get out my artsy side.  Wives and more trips across the continent and overseas came and went, but my art urges and big idea always remained.  It had staying power.  It kept tugging at the corners of my mind.  And I kept listening, spellbound by its wisdom –and unable to deny that it, more than anything and everything else combined, had been restoring my health and strength compromised by so many things.  I could not keep putting it on hold like I’d been, thinking other things had to take priority; they did not; this did.

9. ON: Clay model time; I even made the clay from scratch with a cool recipe at home, and all my writing and invention ideas started coming together in a perfect massive timeline.  The model was a few feet wide on all four sides of its base, and half a foot tall.  It was heavy and awkward to move around, and I had to cover it in Styrofoam packing peanuts when sliding it into the cardboard box I’d found that didn’t really fit.  I was immensely proud of it, though, and happy as can be that my dream had finally taken shape in three dimensions, no longer limited to just the two of my many papers and computer screen.  This was the first actual physical build of Inisfree, and I hauled it around with me across the continent for years, pulling it out to show those few people way back then that expressed interest.

10. OFF: Had to toss the heavy scale model, clay and all, in the trash.  Times were hard, and I didn’t have any way to afford carrying or otherwise transporting it around with me.  It was piled atop my laundry and other bags in the back of my Jeep for a time, and had become a huge and arguably useless pain in the ass.  I had taken many pictures and videos of it from all angles, though, and those now sat in my latest storage, brewing until their own time to resurface and explode into great new things would come…

11. ON: I built, overhauled, debugged, abandoned, and rebuilt from scratch a business website and then a much more streamlined one, and got my first book edited and published, with another nine or ten lined up, all material staged in order for them.  Inisfree was now more online and public than ever, and the books were starting to tell its whole story; all the lore that would ever be was added to those books.  The first one focused entirely on me; my life story, true as can be, giving every reader more than 1,400 pages of start-up lore if they really wanted to know that much.  The webpages took care of the rest; all details of my life’s work and greatest art project were now global and live.

12. OFF: At last, I went out to the arctic to try my new farming wizardry in the coldest and most remote of places, unable even to work on my books.  All my time was spent applying what I’d studied at a dozen universities and training programs, as well as just surviving.  The simplest things, such as cleaning and making fires, were serious undertakings that required planning, safe execution, patience, and time.  Distractions were nearly constant, and it was a good uphill-battle training experience that would serve as my intended and foretold latest stepping-stone toward life and work near the South Pole.  (That was where Inisfree would be.)

13. ON: Traveling out to the intended construction area to complete the site survey and begin moving the supplies into place was next.  Everything had come together for this project.  There was nowhere else to go, and I knew that every day and moment I second-guessed or hesitated… would be another day and moment my crippling panic attacks might come back; my heart and whole system simply wouldn’t put up with me delaying or diverting my course in any way from this specific purpose and art.  Inisfree was going to get made, here and now, in the flesh.  There could be no other way.  …And you know what?  I was glad.

That’s a lot of ups and downs –and more than three decades of them!  I guess I should have seen it coming; it was pretty obvious at many points along that way that a deep and interesting lore was coming into play.  Now?  It feels like it is complete, and all that is left is for me to tell it if anyone wants to hear.

One of my friends has said that old drafting table of mine (which had first been used to build Lego bases not all that different from the base-like Inisfree design it would later support), and the apartments across the nation where I worked on each breakthrough of Inisfree, will one day be preserved as historical sites where tourists can visit and see the homes of the ‘future Walt Disney’ –or that they might turn the whole area around each place I’ve worked on this project into a temple.  I don’t know if the lore of Inisfree and myself will ever be that popular, but the thought did make me laugh and smile.  Who knows?  Maybe.

You can find all the lore about me in my first book, and all the lore about Inisfree on the webpages linked from the City Design tab here on this website.  Detailed information about Inisfree’s design history, construction schedule, traffic, culture, and more are all there.  Main characters and key figures in the development and ongoing operations of this perfected city of mine are there.  You can even find their individual likes, dislikes, and loves.  For some of their time-honored traditions, you can see the Temples Directory, Inisfreean Olympic Games page, or the Welcoming Square where the bulk of Inisfree’s fleet homecomings take place.  I have also published the city’s Omni-calendar, listing hundreds of holidays, festivals, and birthdays.  For everything else, there are a dozen sub-pages of timeline information, as well as timelines for different ships and regions of Space featured in my series of novels; enough lore to satisfy any devoted fan and game buff.

Yay; lore!