A personal mythology

Kyriakos

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Recently i asked some person i meet from time to time what she thought of the possibility that i link my story work with a few tales which connect it all into a mythos.
Surprisingly to me she replied that it was already connected. Part of the mythos is that i forgot why i did not ask her what she meant ;) (well, i trust it happened due to mundane reasons, such as someone walking into the discussion).

Apart from the Dunsanian and Cthulhu Mythos, and of course the ancient Greek mythology, i have come into little which, on the surface, can be termed a personal mythology.
One could stretch the meaning of it to include just every bit of consistent work ever produced, but i think that this happens unconsciously anyway, whereas i am looking for organized and deliberate mythopoiesis (myth-making).

Up to now i have some recurring elements in a lot of the stories. Most take place at either Thessalonike, London, both, and the rest at some unnamed metropolis. Also there are streets which appear again and again in my work, or places, such as Hyde Park.
Other than that there is a name, "Ioannes" (the apostle of the apocalypse; John) which is found on at least four surviving stories, including my biggest ever published work (35 pages). Ioannes can be said to be one person, but in reality i plan to make it more evident that he is not really a separate person, but a projection of the narrators of those stories. He is elusive, passionate (something on the surface i am not, and hence neither are the narrators) and mostly runs in danger of various kind and degree, or brings danger onto other people.

So, tl dr: what is your view of personal mythologies? Do you find them potentially interesting, or are they something you are not fond of?

Worth to note that if i decide to create one it will be a loose connection of dots, and not an overarching mythos with canonic elements of the manner (for example) of a necronomicon. But i am thinking of providing some stories where the split between narrator and Ioannes happened for the first time, thus redifining in a sense the other interconnected stories.
 
If I understood you correctly... Those mythologies should either be done in a very skillful and clever way or take as little of reader's attention as possible. Either way they should be consistent with the story they are in, independently of the other stories they are connected to.
 
I get the impression that most of the fiction authors who end up creating one do so accidentally, because they like some character and keep using it. And well, readers and authors usually like explanations and dislike contradictions, so a mythology is eventually kind of emerges from it. Fans might sometimes even track it better than the author!
 
I get the impression that most of the fiction authors who end up creating one do so accidentally, because they like some character and keep using it. And well, readers and authors usually like explanations and dislike contradictions, so a mythology is eventually kind of emerges from it. Fans might sometimes even track it better than the author!

You may be right about that. Sometimes I suspect that the author only adopts what his fans created based on his work.
 
Best known example here would be FFH2, I guess :)
 
The readers, after all, inevitably re-create the work in their own mind, and sometimes elements which the author was not conscious of will be picked up by them (i had that happen to me).

"It is most important of all,to not look like your neighbor", as claimed Flaubert in a letter to Baudelaire, meaning that an author must have a clearly different work than the next author.
I am thinking of a doppelganger-sort entity, which exists in many of the stories, or is even evoked in other ones. Currently i have no set plans to enrich the mythology with other elements, such as books or imaginary ever-present occurrences.

I sometimes place the work in a historic time, often in Thessalonike of the current economic depression. But as of yet i did not try to have something persistent, out of the ordinary, and imaginary pass from one tale to the next.
 
I'm a sucker for world-building.
 
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