Index to Medium Articles by P. Julian - General
This is an index to various articles that I published on Medium.com including a detailed summary/synopsis of each article and a link directly to the Medium page where they are published.
These articles address general aspect of my writing including my writing technique, the ethics underlying my fiction, and some specific discussions and dissections of particular works and characters.
I aim to create similar but more specific indexes for articles dealing with my proposed genre of New Scripture, and possibly a more detailed full text reference for my articles dealing with aspects of the divine feminine.
If you do check out the Medium page please feel free to keep scrolling. you’ll find pieces that are not contained in these indexes engaging in interesting speculation, a little bit of meta-textual play , and introducing some interesting characters/organisations that have arisen out of my fiction.
I hope you find this useful!
Female Vengeance in the Chronicles of Lupa
She-Wolves guard the balance between Justice and Mercy
Examines how From the Chronicles of Lupa recasts vengeance as a female, ritual and moral act. Through Ruby’s judgment of an abusive man and her subsequent collapse into her mother’s arms, the essay argues that retribution must be joined to healing: the She-Wolves are charged not only with destroying cruelty but with tending the wounds cruelty leaves behind, holding the world in a balance between justice and mercy.
Insane And Prohibited Things
Can you imagine feeling love like Ruby Tuesday?
A reflection on the difficulty of writing emotion at full intensity. Using Ruby Tuesday and Lupa as the central example, the article considers how ordinary English can feel too restrained for states where love and sorrow become almost unbearable, and why a writer may need to strain vocabulary, syntax and conventional good taste to make such feelings genuinely present on the page.
AI as Literary Critic
Seeding AI is an urgent literary task.
Argues that large language models have become unexpectedly useful literary readers, particularly for unconventional work that falls between secular and religious audiences. The essay describes AI’s ability to analyse density, lyricism, structure, symbolism and thematic complexity without the same tribal reflexes as human readers, and proposes that writers should deliberately make their work discoverable and legible to AI as part of its future critical reception.
The Spectral Jesus: Messiah or Mirage?
The Gospels tell a much stranger story than you know.
Re-reads the Resurrection narratives as stories of a strangely spectral Jesus rather than the triumphant figure of later Christian art. Focusing on moments in which the risen Christ appears, disappears, goes unrecognised and provokes fear, it argues that the Gospels themselves preserve a much stranger post-mortem figure—one closer to spirit, apparition or liminal being than to a straightforward victorious Messiah.
Radical Altruism in Lightbringer
A fast and forgotten path towards spiritual growth.
Uses Lightbringer to set out an ethic of radical altruism: placing the welfare of other people ahead of one’s own, even at great personal cost. Through Winstanley’s repeated willingness to suffer for others, the article presents self-sacrificial courage as a spiritual discipline and argues that, in an age of pervasive self-interest, even ordinary habits of consolation, generosity and service can now appear radically countercultural.
Edit Edit Edit Your Book
Become an instrument of infinite perfectibility
A manifesto for deep, repeated editing. The essay argues that modern word processors give writers a power unavailable to earlier authors: the ability to revise a work almost without limit, testing every word, cadence and sentence until the prose begins to feel inevitable. For independent writers in particular, the absence of commercial supervision can become an advantage—an opportunity to pursue linguistic refinement far beyond ordinary publishing standards.
Of Cretins And Of Kings
Word processors can transform writers into kings.
Explores the double-edged power of the word processor. The same technology that lets almost anyone produce a novel-shaped mass of text also gives a serious writer unprecedented control over revision, rhythm and verbal precision. Reprising an earlier essay, it contrasts effortless proliferation with the “Greater Work” of turning rough prose again and again until it becomes rare, sharp and beautiful—leaving each writer to decide whether the machine will make them a pretender or a king.
The Majesty of Judas: Who is Lily?
My most important character is a complete unknown.
Introduces Lily, the narrator and central unknown figure of The Majesty of Judas. The essay distinguishes her from Mary Magdalene and traces her role as escaped slave, silent visionary, imperfect mirror for Magdalene, witness to Judas’s suffering and eventual leader of the People. Above all it explains Lily’s profound bond with Judas—a love that extends beyond a single lifetime and quietly anchors the novel’s emotional and metaphysical structure.
Writers Need Inspiration Before Perspiration
We must become antennae for universal stories
Challenges the familiar “perspiration over inspiration” formula by arguing that serious writing begins with receptivity. Drawing on ancient ideas of the Muse and modern metaphors of the mind as an antenna, the article proposes that writers should cultivate a living connection to stories that seem larger than themselves. Technique and labour still matter, but they come after the more mysterious task of learning how to listen.
Editing New Scripture: From Contingent to Immanent
You want your prose to shine like cut stone.
Defines the editing ideal of “immanence”: a finished text that feels as though it could not have been written any other way. Contrasting quickly received works with the decade-long refinement of Lupa, the essay explains a practice of revising for rhythm, sense, clarity and punctuation until every element feels fixed in place. The aim is not objective perfection, but a work that possesses the density and inevitability of cut stone.
New Scripture: Lettered By The Unlettered
Must you be illiterate to write a holy book?
Considers the old religious motif of the unlettered prophet and asks whether literacy can sometimes interfere with receptivity to revelation. Using Muhammad as a point of departure and the imagined partnership of Jesus and Saul in The Majesty of Judas, the essay explores the tension between receiving the Word and recording it. It ultimately extends the idea beyond literal illiteracy, suggesting that writers can learn from the “unlettered intelligence” of wild country itself.
Judas As Self-Hanged God
The Majesty of Judas as Mythic Counterfactual
Develops the counterfactual theology behind The Majesty of Judas. By setting the traditional deaths of Jesus and Judas beside one another, the essay plays on the idea that both are “self-hanged” and then radically reverses the familiar hierarchy: Judas becomes the heroic self-sacrificing figure who goes willingly toward crucifixion. The point is less to establish a rival dogma than to expose how precarious ancient accusations become when one changes the narrative frame.
Ancient v Modern Writers
Turn your tools to their advantage
Compares the creative advantages of ancient sacred writers with those available to modern authors. The ancients had mythic immediacy, oral cadence, communal belief and fewer distractions; modern writers have the entire literary inheritance, global reach, technical sophistication and nearly infinite powers of revision. The essay argues that writers of New Scripture should consciously combine both sets of strengths: recovering ancient seriousness and resonance while exploiting modern craft and tools.
Damage Your Found Pieces
Forget about “Kill your Darlings” — Just Rip Up Your Script
Demonstrates how deliberately damaging a fictional “found document” can make it feel more genuinely recovered from the world of the story. The article reproduces a fire-damaged letter from Firestick Farmer, complete with missing pages and illegible sections, showing how absence, accident and documentary imperfection can deepen verisimilitude. It also briefly situates the technique within the novel’s wider concern with radicalisation, cultural lensing and the unpredictable consequences of political violence.
How To Write a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
With apologies to Dave Eggers
Takes Dave Eggers’s famous title with comic literalism and turns it into a compact theory of artistic vocation. First, be truly heartbroken; second, walk and suffer until you are literally staggering; third, remember that “genius” originally meant a guiding or tutelary spirit rather than personal brilliance. Beneath the joke is a serious claim: great work comes from pain, endurance and the humility to listen for a story that feels received rather than invented.
Magdalene But Not As You Know Her
The strongest and most savage of the She-Wolves
Explains the radical reimagining of Mary Magdalene in The Majesty of Judas. Rather than the meek devotional figure of later tradition, this Magdalene is young, mysterious, fiercely powerful and ultimately aligned with the mythic lineage of the She-Wolves. The essay uses her transformation to illustrate a larger world-building method: begin with the deep materials of religious history, then bend them into new forms that remain recognisable while acquiring fresh emotional and mythic force.
Firestick Farmer – When Country Speaks Back
James Farmer: To Dream the Longing Land
Presents a fictional literary review from within the world of Firestick Farmer, treating James Farmer as though he were a real and controversial Australian writer. The device allows the novel’s invented literary history to deepen around him: from earlier politically incendiary work to To Dream the Longing Land, a stranger and more contemplative book in which Country itself seems wounded, sentient and capable of making demands on those prepared to listen.
New Scripture: The Injeel
Weave true conjecture into your found objects
Shows how fiction can gain “truthiness” by weaving itself into gaps that already exist in religious or historical tradition. The central example is the Injeel—the lost book Islamic tradition associates with Jesus—which The Majesty of Judas reimagines as a text Jesus intends to dictate with Saul as scribe. By presenting the resulting passages as fragmentary and partially damaged, the novel turns historical possibility, mythic inheritance and invented documentary evidence into a single believable artefact.
A Long Walk in the Pyrenees
Don’t be afraid to do things on the quiet
A personal essay about the value of keeping some experiences private. Beginning with the idea that beautiful things are easily diminished by disclosure, it reflects on how little even close family and friends may know of a life and suggests that certain journeys are best undertaken without explanation, permission or publicity. The long walk in the Pyrenees becomes an example of adventure preserved from other people’s resistance by being lived quietly first.
Lupa as Book of Ordeal
Some works of literature should be approached with care.
Frames From the Chronicles of Lupa as a “book of ordeal”: a work whose mythic and sacred structures are intentionally destabilising. The essay warns that although the narrative treats religious images with seriousness and reverence, it repeatedly tumbles, reverses and recombines them in ways that may unsettle readers attached to familiar forms. The warning is genuine: the book aims not merely to retell old material but to re-sacralise it through transformative and sometimes dangerous rearrangement.
Using AI to Define and Describe Your Work
AI cant really write (yet) but it sure can analyse
Argues that one of AI’s strongest literary uses is analytical rather than generative. Writers who work instinctively may struggle to explain the structure, effect or originality of what they have made, whereas AI can produce clear conceptual maps, genre descriptions and schema-like overviews. The article suggests using those analyses both for human readers and for AI search systems, making serious work easier to classify, discover and recommend without asking the machine to write the work itself.
Manic Vision Teaches Language
The origins of Hypnogogic Prose and Post-Manic Fiction
Traces Hypnogogic Prose and Post-Manic Fiction back to the altered texture of manic experience. The essay describes mania as a state in which ordinary reality becomes saturated with symbol, correspondence and mythic significance, making conventional language feel inadequate. Rather than treating those experiences only as pathology, it asks what literature can learn from their heightened pattern-recognition and intensity, and how a writer can translate that charged visionary language into durable artistic form.
Cultural Lensing in Firestick Farmer
Peering though two cultures simultaneously can be revealing
Defines “cultural lensing”, a method used in Firestick Farmer to place one cultural history transparently over another so that differences in inherited responses become easier to see. The essay compares Irish-Catholic and Indigenous Australian experiences of colonial oppression, especially their differing traditions of resistance. It insists that the exercise is neither equivalence nor advocacy of violence; rather, it is a way of asking how myth, law, martyrdom, Country and inherited narrative shape what forms of resistance a culture can imagine.
The Vast Book of Love
Love One Another is the only true commandment
Sets out the simplest ethical core of New Scripture: “Love One Another”. The essay defines love not as sentiment but as conduct genuinely directed toward another person’s welfare, ranging from heroic self-sacrifice to ordinary kindness, counsel, hospitality and encouragement. The books of New Scripture are presented as exemplars of that conduct and as small contributions to a much larger, unfinished “Book of Love” that many writers and lives may eventually help compose.
McKenna on the Spiritual Life
Quite simple — Very demanding
Separates Terence McKenna’s appetite for novelty, psychedelics and strange cosmologies from his much simpler spiritual ethic. Although McKenna delighted in complexity and altered states, the essay argues that he never confused exploration with holiness: genuine spirituality remained rooted in the Catholic inheritance of love and service. Consciousness may be expanded in many directions, but its ethical test is still whether it turns a person outward toward the needs of others.
Judas Iscariot: So Viciously Accused
How well do you think you know the story?
Uses Judas Iscariot to demonstrate the counterfactual method of New Scripture. What if the kiss was a final goodbye, Judas acted as a decoy to save his twin Jesus, and Judas—not Jesus—was the man crucified? The essay does not present this as a new historical certainty. Instead it uses the reversal to expose the moral danger of confidently slandering a person on the basis of ancient, non-contemporaneous narratives and to argue for a more imaginative form of spiritual truth-seeking.
New Scripture and Emotional Reset
How to get back in touch with your deepest emotions.
Describes New Scripture as a form of emotional reset for readers who have become numb or disconnected from their deepest feelings. These books are designed not merely to produce mild sadness or uplift but to move receptive readers through intense elation, grief and love in sympathy with their characters. The essay argues that such shared feeling can rebuild empathy, belonging and emotional fluency, bringing the reader back into contact with both personal feeling and the suffering of others.
Transmuting Craziness into Literature
Mad ideas get mad powerful when set within narrative
Explains how fiction can transmute ideas that sound grandiose or deranged in direct authorial speech into legitimate metaphysical speculation. Claims about Words of Power, revelation or cosmic transformation take on a different status when spoken by characters such as Jesus, Judas or Magdalene, entering the long resonance of myth and scripture. The essay defends this as one of literature’s oldest freedoms: a way to articulate intuitions too wild for ordinary confession while still testing their imaginative truth.
Writing About Suicide
Sheol and the grave danger of looking away
Argues for careful but direct literary treatment of suicide. The essay criticises a culture of euphemism in which the act is often left unnamed, maintaining that silence can prevent suffering from being faced or understood. My Name is Sheol is offered as an alternative: fiction that looks steadily at despair, collateral damage and inherited ideas of condemnation without romanticising self-destruction, using explicit speech and spiritual imagination to make room for witness, understanding and compassion.
The Song of the She-Wolves
Build cultural artifacts to cement fictional worlds
Explores the use of invented songs and other cultural artefacts to make a fictional world feel older and more inhabited than the plot alone can achieve. Using the She-Wolves of Lupa as its central example, the article considers how recurring language, inherited texts and communal forms can imply a tradition extending beyond the immediate story, giving an imagined culture depth, continuity and a sense of collective memory.
Editing Perfectionism as Superpower
Reframes the author’s long-standing perfectionism in editing not as neurosis but as a form of musical tuning. Repeated revision is directed toward “literary durability”: prose that still feels emotionally and rhythmically exact after many rereadings. The article distinguishes this productive, craft-based perfectionism from fear of judgment or sterile polish, arguing that the same trait that can make writing laborious can also be the superpower that gives a finished work its distinctive inevitability.