I go through bouts of doubt and despair in my writing, largely because, well, I’m a writer, and we seem to be programmed for for such things. I swear, just about every job I’ve been in has, as one person so aptly put it, had the largest number of unmedicated personalities I’ve seen. …
Well folks, since I’ve gone to WordPress, I can add some more flexibility for those who want to support my writing but can’t afford an ongoing subscription like Patreon. I get that. So instead I’m offering premium content right here online. And it’s easy on your pockets, PLUS you get access to all the content during the timeline you choose. Let me explain.
I have two modes for premium content. One is Patreon, which is offsite. The other is the premium subscription service on this site. This site’s subscription service enables you to read all my premium posts for a given length of time. I set it up so that you can purchase a day, month, or three month subscription. There is also a freebie login that will get you put on the Rational Heathen’s newsletter, restricted older posts, and any other content I might want to restrict to my subscribers. (Some of you folks have already discovered the freebie side of things.) Anyway, I’ll be putting some of my very old posts as premium only and some you must simply be a subscriber to.
The subscription costs are very affordable. A Daily Pass costs 99 cents USD. A monthly subscription is $9.99 USD, and a three month subscription is $24.99. When you purchase a subscription, you can read all the Rational Heathen premium content. No limit except the time. Once the subscription is up, you go back to being a free login. Simple and direct.
You may wonder why I chose to do this, other than being the money-grubbing weasel that I am. Well, the reality is that I want to offer my readers more choices than just Patreon for supporting my works. I get that a lot of people don’t want to be constantly billed for something they won’t use enough to justify, so I created the Daily Pass, which allows you to read anything you want for a day. Makes a lot of sense.
You know, I’d love to give everything away, but I like to eat, pay for my Internet service, and pay for this nifty-disco site I developed on my own. I make my living as a writer, and although you may not think that I spend a lot of time on The Rational Heathen, I do. So, I need some sort of compensation, even if it’s $1 from you every so often. And I appreciate that you read my work and think it interesting enough to share, talk about, and enjoy.
When you subscribe to The Rational Heathen, you get subscribed to my newsletter, which if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to put out once a month. If I really get my shit together, I might be able to get it out as often as once a week, but seriously, no. It will, however, tell you when there is a new post and give you a preview for it, which I suspect you’d want to know instead of trusting Facebook to notify you. So, you will get alerts for new content and maybe an actual honest-to-gods newsletter occasionally.
As for your personal information, none of it will be sold or misused. Period. I hate spam, so I know you do too. You don’t have to worry about tons of crap being directed at you. And as for my readers, any data about you is anonymized for Google analytics and you are just a number to show me how I get my readership. In other words, I may know that I had 20 people in Costa Rica reading my blog, but beyond that, I have no clue, unless you tell me.
So, if you have any questions about the premium content onsite and how they work, ask away in the comments section. I’ll be sure to answer them to the best of my ability.
Sometimes I’m at a total lost when it comes to what I should write for the Rational Heathen. I look over my past writings, peruse the pagan blogs, then the Christian and atheist blogs, and then end up playing Age of Empires. See? I really do work on this.
The past several days I was beating my head against the proverbial writing wall, so I just gave up and worked on some other things. Then, in the morning when I was waking up, I heard a god…
“I think I might have problems with wights,” I told one wight expert about issues at my barn. Never mind that I’m strongly agnostic about wights, and never mind that I don’t believe in magic. I was at wit’s end when it came to my goats getting sick and dying. I had one necropsy performed on a dead kid which proved nothing except that I had a very healthy, dead kid. The expert recommended that I perform a salt purification ritual to rid the barn of negative influences.
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After another exhausting day of handling baby goats, I’ve decided that any Heathen who gets goats isn’t right in the head (including myself). For this reason, I submit the Five Reasons Why Heathens Should Not Own Goats. Ready? Let’s begin… [Read More of this Premium Content, and Unlock All My Premium Content, for Just $1]
I have a snippet of the last post that didn’t really fit in with the rest of the post, being its own subject. I looked at it and realized that I should probably expand the piece further, so I figured it belonged in a premium piece. This is the snippet in question:
“Medieval people put a lot of stock on good = beautiful and evil = ugly. So, when Loki’s children are born from Angrboda, they’re automatically considered evil because they are arguably terrifying/ugly. Hel has rotting flesh on half of her body, Fenrir is considered terrifying because he’s a gigantic wolf, and Jormandr is, of course, the world serpent.”
Wow, that’s a lot to talk about in one post. Read this premium post and all my other premium posts for just $1.
I was reading a Christian blog on Patheos (yeah, I read what other religions think) and ran into this piece by the Progressive Christian. I rolled my eyes and snickered over such ludicrous hand-wringing over The Apotheosis of Washington because apparently some people take the image literally and not symbolically.
I vaguely remember seeing this when I visited the Capitol building many moons ago as a child/teenager, and I recall my own emotions over it, but I think I leave that to a little later while I discuss the piece.
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| Image of Hel by Tara Ryzebol . Used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license and the GNU Free Documentation License |
I read an interesting post about the dark deities recently and it got me thinking about why the darker gods and goddesses have become more popular in recent years. Rokkatru with its many members is a viable part of Heathenry and Loki has grown in popularity, certainly in part due to the popularity of the Marvel character and the actor who plays him. Even I am technically honoring a Jotunn when I honor Skadi. And yeah, Loki does come by from time to time to annoy me, if nothing.
That being said, one pagan witch (yeah, I read Wiccan blogs, get over it) thinks that the popularity of the dark ones seem to coincide with the times we live in and something big and tranformative coming up. I can’t say anything of that magnitude, but I do have some thoughts and theories…
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People have been asking about my insights into the Heathen life on board the Facebook page, so I’d like to give you some ideas how I celebrate, or don’t celebrate. Taking a breath here…
My last premium post seemed to open up a can of worms — at least for me. As I was writing about
the Rokkatru, I realized that historians may have it all wrong when it comes to the gods. The Aesir, Vanir, and Jotunn aren’t different races. They’re different clans. Which means that how they treat each other has implications for how we should treat each other.
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