30%, And Beyond

Thanks to some generous donations in recent days, including one backer who snapped up the "Leader of the Pantheon" reward, Mythic Hero has now crossed the 30% line toward full funding. That's statistically significant, since Kickstarter claims that projects which reach 30% at any time during their run are 90% likely to succeed in the end.

However, 30% isn't a guarantee of success by any means, and I'd definitely prefer to avoid falling into that unfortunate 10% that end up not making it. So please tell your friends and anyone else you think might be interested -- MH can definitely use all the support it can get!

On other fronts, I'm continuing to acquire new books on mythology for purposes of researching MH. Some of my recent purchases have involved some of the more unusual or obscure mythologies and may allow me to expand MH's coverage. They include:

—Persian mythology (or if you prefer, Iranian mythology). I don't want to delve full-force into the rich, complex religions of the region, but I think I have enough useful information now to give proper coverage to Persian myth.

—Australian Aborigine mythology. I shied away from this initially because it's not only complicated in its own way, but damn strange to the Western mind. But if the books I got recently live up to their promise, I think I've found the right sources to let me include an Aborigine mythology chapter in MH.

—Scythian mythology. I'm not sure we know enough about this subject to merit a whole chapter (and what we do have may be too filtered through the perceptions of Herodotus to be truly useful). But at the very least it should make a nice entry in the "Miscellaneous" section. ;)

—Bantu mythology. Depending on how my research pans out, I'm thinking that I may end up doing an "African Mythologies" chapter that's similar to the American Indian Mythologies chapter I've already written, in that it would cover major cultural groups within a larger framework. Aside from the Yoruba, I'm not sure any one tribe has enough mythology (or at least enough readily available to me in English) to merit a chapter of its own... but I'd be quite happy to be proven wrong, if the research pans out.

—Baltic mythology. This is part of Slavic/Russian (it's basically "western Slavic"), but it's good to have more sources for that chapter. I think the book I acquired also has some info on Finnish myth, and more sources on that are also welcome.

So keep those pledges and messages of support coming in! It's gonna be a great book. :)