What's In a Name

I got asked recently, “Where did The Books of 500 and One Names come from? How did you come up with it? What does it mean? What was its origin?”

It is a fair set of questions that have their root in the pandemic, seemingly like everything else these days. The slowing down and isolation. The fear and concern. Out of it my life changed.

See, I used to be a consultant. I traveled a lot, worked long hours, and so my artistic outputs came in spits and bursts. I would work a little on weekends and occasionally be able to bring things on the road with me to keep my juices flowing, but I wasn’t happy, and my job wasn’t giving me the juice either.

The pandemic hits, which I feel like should start being capitalized like we do other big events… Anyway, it hits, I am locked down at home, and suddenly have way more time on my hands. I am playing D&D with my kids and processing ideas that have been swirling in my head with no easy outlet.

I was also depressed. For a long time, I had wrapped my sense of worth in my work. It was creative work, but still work.

That suddenly disappeared. I got laid off and started a new job that I wasn’t sure of and I was in the sweet spot for midlife crisis bullshit.

Some men buy sports cars and get Rogain at this age. The classic American midlife crisis was never going to be for me though. Instead opted to burden myself with a mission rather than unburden myself with my current life.

Which is why I decided I needed to finally write a book

I had a few drafts of different ideas, all ranging about 30,000 words. I started playing with those drafts. Again, running face-to-face with my discontented shadow self1, I was terribly unhappy with all of them.

The work reflected the me from before. The version of me that used my creative energies to help sell other people’s products. The version of me that was too tired to put too much energy into my words and art. The me who was just trying to write to get things out, not try to create something.

I probably didn’t fully realize it with everything going on at the time, but I was becoming a different version of myself. Evolving into something, shockingly enough, closer to the version of myself I actually liked.

I think I read somewhere once that some artists create to escape who they are. That kind of self-hatred, I think, was my underlying motivator since my twenties. It is why I was never really happy with anything I made.

But, in those days and nights when we didn’t know how many millions would die… When we all wondered if we would make it out of this… When fear gripped us, I think I was finally unafraid.

Luke Crane recently wrote, “I could not fight me and win.” This resonated with me because in that moment of crisis a few years ago, I just stopped fighting myself. Took me a long time, but I stopped balling my fists, stopped demanding I be something or someone else. I just stopped.

And then I started up again. The result, after several years of writing, print making, painting, and sewing, was Testament. It is a five part prose poem that I created as a singular work of art, following in the footsteps of William Blake.

There is a lot of influences that make up this book… this attempt to create my own mythology to draw from… There is probably a series of introspective essays I could write about it. But in order to avoid that rabbit hole now, let me tackle the question I was asked at the beginning. What is the origin story of The Book of Five Hundred and One Names?

Like most things, it is an amalgam of influences that led to the idea. Some are obvious and some less so. I’ve tried to wrack my brain and look at my notes to answer the question, and here is what I came up with:

• Blasphemous fictitious books like the Necronomicon and The King in Yellow
• The way monsters were handled in the rpgs Earthdawn and Birthright
• The Shadow Campaigns series by Django Wexler
• The malign influence of Donald Trump upon society
• The video recording of events on the Event Horizon in the movie Event Horizon
• Greek, Norse, and Persian mythology
• The spirit in the movie Fallen
• The Spanish TV show 30 Coins

There are likely a host of other influences I am not even aware of. Books I read from which I snagged a seed of an idea and planted it in my brain for a while. Together they create a lovely soup which became The Book of Five Hundred and One Names.