PaganCentric

Some of you may have stumbled across this web site by following The Watch over here. Many of you have no idea what I’m talking about.

Long story short, The Watch has been my personal project for ages, and largely exists to keep tabs on the nutjobs on the Right. It was originally intended to keep an eye upon the Religious Right, and report items of interest to the Pagan community (or at least that segment of the Pagan community that was more concerned with potential dangers than with looking scary). In the years that followed, the Religious Right has all but taken control of the Republican Party and, by extension, the United States Government. They are only being kept in check by the fact that some of their more extreme desires are at odds with some of the business interests of their unholy allies, the Neo-Conservatives. Yes, Virginia. Right now all that’s keeping us from a de-facto theocracy is the Neo-Conservatives (but not for the right reasons).

Anyway, The Watch never seemed to fit on my personal web page, so I decided to move it here. It had Pagan beginnings, and this just felt … right.

I’ve created a bit of a problem for myself.

The PaganCentric web site was intended to support and enhance the characters from a work of fiction. So Claire and Agnon are not real (you should know that by now), and this web site was meant to support the eventual telling of their story. That story is set twenty years or so in the future, and involves their organization, PaganCentric. Much of the background of the story is that Claire and Agnon live in a United States in which the Neo-Cons have receded in their influence (possibly because of disasters such as the Iraq War), while the Religious Right have finally come to the forefront and are running the show. Anyone care to live in an America where a nutjob like Pat Robertson would be the most trusted spiritual adviser of the president?

Now that I’ve moved The Watch over here, obvious problems have arisen. In a thematic sense, The Watch fits over here nicely. But in an obvious way, it’s at odds with everything else. For one thing, no matter how some of us might wish it, the stories and articles that are featured on The Watch and on the Watch Alert mailing list are not works of fiction. They’re all too real. The Religious Right is real. Neo-Conservatives are real. George W. Bush is too real.

So how do I blend the fictional elements of this web site with the real ones? Or should I mix them at all? Can Claire and Agnon have their side of the web site, while The Watch has its own? And what about the people who come here and can’t grasp the difference; that one part is fiction and one is not? Should I remove Claire and Agnon? Should I remove The Watch?

You can see my dilemma. Right now I don’t know what the answers are. But I’ll be working on them. Please bear with me as I figure this out. In the meantime, keep in mind that however unreal the issues reported upon it may seem, The Watch is the only part of this web site that is not fiction.