This site was always meant to be the working table for The Hierophant, the spot where you can watch the world arrive piece by piece. I spent the last day giving that table sturdier legs. I finally have a place to migrate the endless piles of notes, an interactive map to better explore the setting, and this blog to record the progress.

From the start I said the process should be as enjoyable as the book itself, and that promise finally has a home. The blog is alive, wired through Eleventy so I can log the strange detours, lore fragments, and production notes in real time. Running the pipeline feels as ordinary as making tea, and that ritual is what keeps the documentation flowing instead of stalling behind “someday I’ll write about this.”

I have always insisted I don’t need a publisher because I am a marketer by trade, so this stretch of work doubled as a reminder: I can build the entire runway myself. Cleaning the tooling, tuning the watchers, tightening the Netlify deploys, these are the quiet systems that let me ship on my own terms. The layout refinements, from the Ioma-stars image to the non-sticky header and palette-friendly cards, make the whole space feel authored, not borrowed.

The CRM sign-up flow had to match that independence. I designed the form, double opt-in messaging, and stitched together a private broadcast system so every message stays personal and under my control. Testing the send and seeing it land felt like setting up a press of my own: no third-party gatekeepers, just a direct line to the readers who want to follow along.

None of this is flashy work, but it clears the path for curiosity to keep moving. Now the site can keep pace with whatever notes, sketches, or lore pages come next, and I can keep proving that building a world, and sharing how it’s built, belongs as much to the maker as the finished book.

The next content project is with the Atlas. I've completed the naming of five of the twenty regions in my world. That work has involved crafting unique cultural history, ecology, and mythological influences to stub out a proto-language for each. Then I apply that language to the source-meanings of the nations and then their major cities. It's slow work moving from tentative placeholder names I've been using for years, but it also feels like a puzzle piece being slotted perfectly.

Once I've completed the exercise for all the places in the atlas, I need to go back and work on their names for one another. Languages! Yeesh. These aren't my strong-suit, so it's taking a while. I'm determined not to accept boring fantasy names, though.

Keep an eye on that atlas content. I'll send out a dispatch when we hit a completion milestone. Until then, back to the forge.