We all need a little flashback to our childhood when life was a little magical and whole lot innocent.
As long as I could remember, I was always ambivalent about religion. I do believe there is a higher power of some kind, and I do believe in the concepts of Heaven, Hell, Limbo and Purgatory.
But I was always inquisitive about those concepts, to the point where I would often search out books and articles, both hard copy and digital, about those very concepts. I think I spent the better part of a decade researching those concepts until my curiosity was (mostly) satiated.
Fast forward to the tail end of the '00s. I watched an old movie that basically changed the way I viewed concepts and cultures as it applied to my writing. The movie in question was Defending Your Life, starring Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep, who plays a man defending his life in the AfterLife so that he can be reincarnated.
That movie inspired me to re-imagine how I wrote about certain concepts and cultures: basically, I turned them into small conglomos/business entities.
While I made a good solid attempt at turning the few religious concepts mentioned above into conglomos that were deeply intertwined with each other in a novel that ultimately fizzled, I spent the next decade or so refining and adjusting that particular concept into something that once could consider to be commonplace.
Fast forward to 2022.
I'm two years into a happy retirement and I'm starting the fourth of five writing projects that I had originally set up for myself in the spring of 2021: this fantasy series.
I had decided early on in the story that I was going to turn the Aztecs into a modern day crime family , thus they have their fingers/hands in all kinds of illegal pies. And just like a modern day crime family , they are judge, jury and executioner, all of which ties in perfectly with their real world application of human sacrifices.
The other modern day reality: during my belated research, I was not able to definitively ascertain what the Aztec's cultural views were on homosexuality, either through the real world or their mythology. So I decided to have them implement the infamous (in some quarters) "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy of the US military in the 1990s. I won't bore you with the gruesome details of the policy, but I did apply a vicious little twist to the policy that would satisfy even the most ardent opponent of the policy.
The olden day reality: Now if you take into account, and you really should, because if you know anything about common sense, you should never apply today's often warped societal mores. So because we are dealing with a world where certain customs were just done until modern times, we decided that although the Aztecs did believe in the concept of marriage, they did not believe in the concept of divorce. But they did believe in a concept called 'unmarriage', which I would venture to guess (which is odd, because...yeah) it would be similar to what an annulment is.
Another olden day reality that I touch upon is slavery. For those of you who believe that slavery was just a White European Thing, then you deserve the ridicule for how you voted in the last three presidential elections. Slavery was a worldwide multi-millennia hardcore economic realty (and in some places, still exists). Slavery is what the victors do to the vanquished after war/reading parties.
This is also touched upon in a very realistic way, as I drew upon my knowledge of world history and U.S. history, in order to create a very real background for one of my main characters. Which is something I'm very proud of because if you're going to write about a particular culture, you need to showcase everything, warts and all.
Thus ends part one of this two part post. Tune in next week when we cover how I chose to work in the concepts of Hell, Purgatory and Limbo into my fantasy series.
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